Rose’s Character Growth

Ok I absolutely loved We Need To Talk. Because we get to learn, after thinking for so long that Rose is this absolutely flawless and perfect being, that she actually did have a bunch of flaws and needed to grow and learn about others.

This also finally explains that one very weird line in “Story for Steven.”

Many people theorized that maybe she meant “play” in the musical sense, but it’s clear now that she meant it literally: that having only viewed human life from afar, she viewed it as fascinating, but trivial and game-like.

In We Need to Talk, she demonstrates her views of humanity, and how uncomfortable that makes Greg.

She viewed human lives as play, and saw herself, in interacting with Greg, as participating in that simple, lighthearted existence. Having come from a background of magic and war and horror, she had assumed that humans, with such a different culture and short lives devoid of interplanetary war, had never experienced the things that Gems did: pain, loss, need for respect.

She hadn’t realized that despite having such short lives and such different life experiences, humans, too, experienced emotional pain and complexity just like she did.

When Greg says, “I’m starting to wonder if you… respect me,” Rose laughs, telling him he’s hilarious. She hadn’t considered previously that humans would experience such emotions. She loved and cared about humans, but had deeply misunderstood them.

However, when Greg demands that she talk to him “like a real person,” she realizes that there was a serious gap between what she understands about humans and how humans actually feel.

She thought that she had been treating Greg how he wanted to be treated, that this was how human relationships worked. For the first time, Rose realizes that she was wrong.

Finally, we see that she actually did mature. In “Lion 3: Straight To Video,” she delivers a message to Steven that demonstrates how differently she now views humanity.

“Isn’t it remarkable, Steven? This world is full of so many possibilities. Each living thing has an entirely unique experience. The sights they see, the sounds they hear. The lives they live are so complicated… a-and so simple. I can’t wait for you to join them. … Every moment you love being yourself, that’s me, loving you and loving being you. Because you’re going to be something extraordinary. You’re going to be a human being.”



Over the course of her years with Greg, Rose managed to overcome her misconceptions about humans, replacing a flawed, distant fascination with a deep and passionate respect.