You know, I always found Rose’s design fascinating. Even when other gems are mimicing her, there was always something about this look she had. Was it her natural beauty? The way her lips moved? The way her bangs cast shadows over her eyes? Perhaps, but it just hit me what it was.

Her eyes.

They have this look of so much sadness and regret. She was this distant legend, beloved and hated by so many, but her eyes say so much about her as a character.

On the outside, she appeared to be a fun loving, sweet character, and to an extent, this was the case. But on the inside, she had so much self doubt, perhaps even hatred for herself. As Rebecca Sugar put it:

“Rose is the hugest example of these themes of self-destruction. Rose is her own worst enemy — literally, she fought herself. The way she felt about herself caused so much pain for everybody around her, especially the people who loved her and the people she wanted to love. One thing I find really interesting is that the way she idolized everyone around her was very sincere. She thought everyone around her was so much better than she was. So people would be drawn to her, Gems would be drawn to her, and I don’t know if they would necessarily realize that she was worshipping them, which was compounding her own sadness at the feeling that she couldn’t connect with them. It was a tragedy.



Rose wanted to give everybody the kind of environment she didn’t have, but everything about her is about who she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be loving and healing and compassionate and give everybody so much flexibility and freedom to do anything and be anything. She wanted all these things, she wanted to be this person, but she wasn’t necessarily that person because in her mind she only ever wanted these things.”



This is what I mean when I say that Rose is irredeemable. She idealized so much but never believed in her own ability to change. And because of that, she carries around all this loneliness and regret, and at some point decided that she couldn’t live with it and gave her gem and her very life to Steven in the hopes that he would be better than she could be. It’s such a beautiful and poignant tragedy- the fact that she’s the only villain (aside from ambiguously Jasper) who never redeemed herself.