Some Thoughts: White Diamond

With all of the new developments in SU, it’s easy to forget old inconsistencies, but these nonetheless have bearing on some of the current events in the show. When the Crystal Gems and the Ruby Squad arrive on the Diamond Base in Back to The Moon and Eyeball begins some dramatic narration.



She says, “Look at this place – frozen in time. An Era-1 base. Her Era-1 base. It was a tragedy, what happened to her.”

And the way this statement was followed up with Navy saying “Who is that anyway?” the answer being Pink Diamond, we’re led to fill in the blanks and assume this was Pink Diamond’s base.

But looking at the base itself, from the outside especially, nothing about its colour scheme or even its texturing resembles anything of Pink Diamond’s aesthetic.

This leads to an interesting question of who built the Diamond Base on the moon, why it was chosen for that location, and what purpose it served, all of which we’ll be covering in this video.

1. Relationships and Roles among Diamonds

Source: Joe Johnston

When we observe how certain places or objects are associated with characters in Steven Universe, colour is a big factor. For instance, we know Rose, Lion, and the Alpha Kindergarten are domains of Pink Diamond because of their dominance of pinks.

The Kindergarten Control Room, the Hand Ship, and even Peridot are all bright green, which would relate to Yellow Diamond and hint at a collaboration with Blue Diamond in the new order of Homeworld.

There is a scene in It Could’ve Been Great in which the camera zooms out and gives us an outsider’s view of the Moon Base. What we find is that the base is predominantly in colours of whites and greys, almost matching the colours of the moon’s surface.

And this would hint at the only other Diamond we have yet to see in the show. White Diamond.



What’s even more intriguing is that White Diamond is never mentioned by name in Steven Universe. We know of her existence primarily because of the Mural in the Moon Base and her presence in both reincarnations of the Great Diamond Authority logos, as well as the large white bust of her image on Homeworld. But the Diamonds don’t say anything about her, and she hasn’t involved herself in historically important events, such as the Trial of Rose Quartz.

In her depictions, there is a white shape who takes the position at the top of the logos. This would hearken back to White Diamond’s gem placement, which is on her forehead. The same white diamond shape is on the old Diamond Authority logo. Later on, the Diamonds are depicted not from the top view, but from the side, giving rise to the new emblem with three triangles.

But something else worth noting is the aesthetic that each of the Diamonds has in the mural, which emphasises the possibility that the Moon Base was White’s.

When we look at the Diamonds side by side in the mural, each Diamond is shown with the number of colonies and satellites under them.

There is more information than that.

For instance, looking at Pink Diamond, the other apparent object in her mural is the cluster of quartz stones at her feet, which are very similar to the ones we see in Lion’s pocket dimension.

One other thing is that the quartz clusters are coming from the ground, growing upwards.

Earth is Pink Diamond’s first colony. There might not have been reason for the military leader of Homeworld to hold a planet of her own at first. Eyeball says that Earth’s soil was very conducive to growing Quartzes. That means planets could be assigned by the kind of gems that could grow on them.

Additionally, it could be that previously, there wasn’t as much need to expand Homeworld’s military. Given the way gems exhaust the resources of a host planet in the growing process, Pink might not have been very high priority in allotting colonies because prior to Earth, there may not have been huge wars that required the use of soldiers to take planets.

That would mean Pink is a little more inexperienced in dealing with colonies, but isn’t necessarily the temporal youngest. She’s growing upward because she’s still gaining experience and skills in terms of managing planets. On the other hand, White Diamond’s additional details are emanating outwards and downwards from her figure.

White has the most number of colonies. Also, white diamonds are the archetypal diamond. That is, the word diamond is often associated with a white diamond by default.

That could hint at the dynamic between the diamonds. Even though they were four rulers of the gem empire, when it came to questions and concerns, White may have been the face of the Great Diamond Authority, not necessarily the leader, but someone who serves as their face in public.

We can find the same sort of parallels in the other Diamonds.

For instance, Yellow Diamond’s upper torso appears to be rising from clouds, like a sun poking through. The sun imagery is also seen in the Yellow Diamond of the Serious Steven mural. In her hands are not only planets, but also two stars with their own satellites.

Yellow is known as the rational Diamond. That’s how Peridot describes what made her special. She would always be objective and practical. She always listened to reason and she seemed to espouse that as a leader.

That she was likely in charge of research and technology could be akin to enlightening or illuminating things that were previously unknown.

Her complement could have been Blue Diamond, which is why they have the same number of planet colonies.

Blue’s territory is the Lunar Sea Spire, which Bismuth says is “for thinkers to think in.” And that would give the impression that it housed philosophers and other practitioners of the discipline we’ve come to label as the humanities.

They would complement and balance the sheer “rationality” that Yellow’s faction cultivated. If a new technology were developed, should it be used and why? These are the questions that might have been asked.

This is also possibly why Blue Diamond was sent on the diplomatic mission in The Answer even though the rebels were from Pink Diamond’s colony, and why Rebecca Sugar associates blue gems with diplomats. The Answer took place in the budding days of the Rebellion, and taking back Earth without a fight was still a viable option. This implies that Pink Diamond was still present then, since Blue Zircon puts PD’s shattering at a time when Rose and the CGs were already well-known and established. Yet Blue was sent on the mission to capture the rebels.

So these points reinforce why the Diamonds occupy certain positions on the mural. These refer to their roles and not their personalities. It’s also clearer to see now the kind of stress a gem experiences when the role given to her doesn’t match up very well with her personality.

Given this understanding of the Diamond’s relationships, it seems odd that Pink Diamond’s base would be far away from her own planet, a place where the warps could not reach.

From the imagery in the mural, it seemed unlike her to rule from a point of distance and height. Rather, we’re given the indicators that Pink tried very hard to rule close to her constituents, which is why gems like Jasper feel a personal closeness to her.

It contrasts sharply with the awe that Peridot felt for Yellow Diamond. The latter feels a lot like someone talking about a celebrity; the former sounded like Jasper knew her Diamond personally even if we’re given the indication she didn’t.

If we combine that knowledge with the colour scheme and patterns on the base, even the inside of the base is white rather than pink. The Base looks more like something of White Diamond’s. It would then be a question of why something of White Diamond’s domain was so close to Earth.

2. White Diamond connected colonies

One more thing to note from the Diamond mural is how White Diamond holds a sphere in her hands. All the other Diamonds are doing the same, and w’er led to assume that these circles represent planets, but this planet is heavily featured because of its massive size relative to the other representations of planets.



This planet is likely Homeworld itself.

I wouldn’t assert that White Diamond held agency over all the other Diamonds, and that was why Homeworld was designated as hers.

Rather, it’s possible that as the empire was expanding, and more colonies were being assimilated, Homeworld had to be entrusted to one Diamond to be treated as another territory, albeit a special one. After all, after the society was already established, there would be little need for the roles of the other three Diamonds.

That leads us to question what White Diamond’s role was.

And there is another gem structure on Earth that might hold the answer: The Communication Hub.

Its aesthetic is also white and with clean-cut triangles, like the Moon Base. Extending this aesthetic further, we can also draw up the Warp Pads, which cut across different associated areas of the Diamonds and connect the colonies to each other and Homeworld.

The Moon Base Control Room looks like that of Yellow Diamond’s control room workspace. The top is an observatory and shows the outside. There is a large chair and a communicator.

From this, we can infer that White Diamond oversaw communication on Homeworld.

And it makes sense. All the other Diamonds served very different purposes, and they would have quickly fallen into chaos without a mediator among them. Also, with so many colonies under different leaders, it would hardly be called a cohesive gem empire.

It’s because of this that White’s role was crucial, but also subtle, perhaps more than that of the other Diamonds.

If everything was working fine, no one would notice White’s absence. But if things were going wrong and falling through, White would be missed.

Because of this, we can assume that White Diamond had these bases built for all the colonies. It would not only be a sign of uniformity and unity, but also serve as a place where the Diamonds would remember to communicate with one another.

And White’s attention to communication could come precisely from being the Diamond nominally in charge of Homeworld.

She would have the clearest perspective of everything that was going around amid the expansion of their empire. In her gaze and care would be the planet that started it all, a reminder of what they were doing all this for.

3. The fate of White Diamond

It’s worth asking what happened to a gem whose influence tied all the colonies together and back to Homeworld. It’s also worth asking why we haven’t seen or heard about White Diamond from any of the characters at all yet, even her fellow Diamonds, when Yellow and Blue have very candidly talked about Pink Diamond.

I’d written about this theory before, but it’s worth a revisit. It is of my belief that White Diamond has corrupted.

There are two main pillars to the foundation of this theory. The first is that corrupted gems are never referred to by their real gem names. Even Centipeetle is only called that and not the name of her gemstone.

Gems can tell what another gem’s stone is just by looking at them, though, especially if they’ve encountered them before.

So there’s something about gems corrupting that makes them perceived as not the individuals they used to be anymore. And that would explain why White is never mentioned by name.

In the same way Garnet makes it clear that many of the gems in their search-recovery-bubble missions were former Crystal Gems. She was always keeping track, but she didn’t see them as exactly the individuals they used to be, and we don’t hear them referred by their original names.

The second is the idea that even in the absence of White Diamond the individual, White Diamond the larger-than-life figurehead can still go on.

In It Could’ve Been Great, Peridot cycles through all the gem buildings that have already been built on Earth and she says explicitly that the Moon Base was used for Diamonds to plan their colonies.

But there’s one building that isn’t there. The Ziggurat. And it’s in the Ziggurat that we see the new Diamond Authority logo.

The same logo from the Hand Ship that comes from modern Homeworld.

All the other Earth gem-structures, like the Cloud Arena, feature the old Diamond Authority logo, with the four Diamonds.

This leads to the idea that the Ziggurat wasn’t a planned building and that it was built after Pink Diamond was shattered, which we know was sometime in the heat of the war.

The aesthetic matches as well. Prior to Steven’s pulling out the gem that powered the pyramid, the dominant colour scheme was a dark grey-brown colour. But after the gem expresses relief, the colours turn much brighter and it’s white.

The obelisk in which the gemstone is embedded matches White’s hand position, and the gem inside also matches the cut of a Diamond. That her gem is in the place where Homeworld was, indicates how close to her heart her Home was.

That it was already war time but Homeworld chose to devote time and resources on building an extravagant and complicated structure indicates the gem entombed inside was no ordinary gem.

That the gem was powerful enough to work the machinations of the entire ziggurat, even allowing things to levitate, also speaks of its power.

Speaking of levitating things, looking again at the obelisk, the floating pyramids surround it in two circles. And this is the imagery of the Moon Base Mural. White Diamond’s colonies were arranged as a circle around her.

And the gem of this structure, the cut of a typical diamond gemstone, was confirmed by the Crewniverse to be corrupted.

Additionally, the forehead gem of the obelisk is represented as a triangle, the new way to represent the Diamonds in Homeworld’s emblem after PD was shattered. It matches with the mural of White Diamond from the Era 1 Moon Base.

4. White Diamond isn’t “present” anymore

This opens up the question of why Yellow and Blue don’t mourn White Diamond the way they do Pink Diamond, and why she’s kept in the Ziggurat instead of on Homeworld.

At this point, it wouldn’t make much sense for her to have been “exiled” there because YD and BD believed White was behind Pink Diamond’s shattering. There were too many things they didn’t understand during The Trial, and in that episode it was evident they were hanging on to the narrative that Rose Quartz was responsible. So we can establish that YD and BD did not believe White shattered Pink Diamond.

This leaves the ideas of White willingly sacrificing herself or White being defeated some other way, and they may not be mutually exclusive. Here enters the theory of how White Diamond may have been instrumental in the Light Bomb or Diamond Bomb.

Looking at the Diamond Light Bomb, the light we see in Same Old World is ringed with yellow, blue, and white, showing it was fired after PD’s shattering.

At this point, I hesitate to continue saying the Light Bomb is a conventional weapon. Some things clear about it are that it affects gems in particular, and that aside from the light, there is also a sound component. Steven refers to it as “a song” when he tries to interpret Centi in Monster Reunion.

We have seen something similar recently. In The Trial, Blue Diamond’s use of her gem ability, that of pushing waves of feeling onto others in a forced-empathy sort of way, was accompanied by the sound of reverberation and a change in colour.

The same colour change is evident when Yellow Diamond later lashes out at the Zircons. What we might have seen was a use of Diamond gem ability, amplified and on overload.

What is at the very centre of the Light Bomb is a bright white light. And in another rendition of the Light Bomb, the one Centipeetle draws in Monster Reunion, the image fades to specifically white.

White’s role can be better identified by returning to the Ziggurat. Given the way the Ziggurat is presented at first, an upside-down pyramid, and then later flipped over, we can identify White’s location in the structure. The end of the episode shows that White was underneath everyone’s feet, because Garnet breaks the floor so Steven can get to her.

That means in its original form, White Diamond was at the top of the pyramid, in a way, controlling it.

We’re talking about a gem whose specialty was communicating over long and impossible distances. The Communication Hub could disrupt signals of television sets from miles away. Warps can travel insurmountable distances, as in the underwater structure where the Hourglass is.

If the Light Bomb did function like a song, the way Steven hypothesised in Monster Reunion, the gem who was best at transmission would have taken up the responsibility.

Previously, I talked about Jasper’s corruption may have occurred. Even though she wasn’t exposed to the Light Bomb, the psychological state she was in could have been exaggerated by the mental and emotional strain faced by the corrupted quartz. We see a milder version of this in Reformed, when Amethyst has difficulty maintaining a stable regeneration because of the pressure she feels from the senior Crystal Gems. What this establishes is gems can corrupt on their own in times of extreme stress and extreme cognitive dissonance.

It’s not that the Light Bomb is a particular power move that the Diamonds produce in order to corrupt gems. Rather, it’s highly likely that White Diamond was corrupting, and the uncontrollable wave of energy from her gem ability that she sent out caused gems around her to corrupt as well.

This leads to the second idea, that the loss of White Diamond was treated very differently from the loss of Pink Diamond. Pink is mourned years later because she was taken from what was the equivalent of her Diamond Squad.

On the other hand, with White corrupting, Blue and Yellow Diamond would have had to move her away from Homeworld forces immediately, lest they be destroyed or corrupted by her empathy beam as well. At the same time, a corrupted gem feels defensive and lashes out easily. A gem as powerful as a Diamond would have decimated the already weakened Homeworld forces.

What might have happened was that White willingly let herself be destabilised or poofed, while the rest of Homeworld did the only thing they could and dropped her on Earth. Corruption isn’t an instant process, and we saw that certain thoughts could trigger a faster-paced corruption, as seen in Jasper in Earthlings. As a more powerful gem used to having to hold her own emotions in check, there may have been time to plan the deployment of the Light Bomb.

While the other Diamonds are grieving over the loss of White Diamond, there is not only an unspoken rule that corrupted gems aren’t mentioned by name, but also a sense of closure and respect, knowing what happened to White Diamond, why, and where she currently is. In this possibility, White Diamond chose to do what she did to end the war.

Pearl talks about the Strawberry Fields’ being the location of a huge battle. It’s highly likely that’s why it was the chosen location for the Light Bomb to be deployed, because that’s where the most Crystal Gems would be fighting, celebrating, or even just regrouping.

There’s a chance she didn’t tell the others, and there’s a chance that she did, but the point is, after her decision was made, an order was released to evacuate all the Homeworld soldiers left on Earth. The Light Bomb was a deliberate decision made by the upper echelons of Homeworld.

Then White Diamond deployed herself and used the Ziggurat as her base of operations. Her sacrifice is probably what allows her to remain on the logo even though her name can’t be mentioned.

For some reason, Pink was taken out of the logo and most mentions in history, such that Leggy wouldn’t know about her, and Doc, the head of the mission, wasn’t aware of the Moon Base, though I’ll be bringing this up in the next post on PD’s shattering.

But it also implies what the problem at Homeworld’s top tier currently is right now: There is a sore lack of communication going on, and the lack of information going down to the common gem is showing.

There is a clear absence of a mediator, where one used to be. White Diamond’s role was crucial, and as the linchpin that held together all the chaos we see between Blue and Yellow Diamond now, we get a glimpse of the stress that caused her to corrupt.

This post was edited and updated based on an script I’d originally written for a CU video, and I really thought I’d already posted to Tumblr. Before writing the theory of PD’s shattering, I’d realised that there were a lot of premises that needed to be discussed first.

I feel that in the absence of a named culprit, a lot of people have taken to accusing White Diamond for PD’s shattering. I tried not to address it in this post because I wanted first to describe what role she played on Homeworld and how it was central to her character.

The next post will be my own take on PD’s shattering, updated now given the details learned in The Trial. As always, ask me anything!