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AdamWithers — Binding Lapis
#lapis #lapislazuli #rose #rosequartz #crystalgems #stevenuniverse
Published: 2015-11-19 14:44:05 +0000 UTC; Views: 2408; Favourites: 107; Downloads: 0
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Commission from New York Comic Con 2015; Copic marker, ink, white paint pen, charcoal pencil.The moment right before Rose puts Lapis into the mirror. Presuming it was Rose who did that, but it seems possible. I did the layout for this and finishes on Rose, did the finishes on Lapis. The challenge was making Rose look menacing when she's just so round and soft and sweet. Always fun to do anything Steven Universe related.
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Comments: 20
Love the angle here. I am genuinely curious about the backstory of Lapis. Moral right and wrong becomes complicated in any war and while I'm not convinced of the "Rose was evil" theories, as a leader on the battlefield she likely would have made some harsh decisions.
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Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of the CGems being evil. The goal of the HGems was explicitly evil, but we don't necessarily know about the motivations of any individual person, so it's possible that both Rose and Lapis were good people stuck in impossible situations.
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I think the goal of Homeworld was explicitly evil to us from the only perspective we can look at it as humans, because it was our planet and our species they were harming. But from their point of view, Earth was probably a valuable resource and we don't know the details of why they chose it in particular. In any case, it's pretty clear that Rose's rebellion wound up leading to death and destruction both sides and she likely harmed the Gem society to some degree by choosing to protect our human one. I think everyone in the series has some moral depth to them.
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There is no perspective from which genocide is anything but evil. Doesn't matter what resources Earth had or how badly they needed them, killing all humans to get them is evil. It'd be like killing everyone in the Middle East because "Hey, we need their oil, and aren't they all kind of backward and primitive anyway? The world won't miss 'em." That's evil stuff, right there. But yes, responding by killing so many of their own people wasn't exactly better. It was doing evil to prevent evil. But, then, we don't know if they really killed anyone, or just imprisoned all their gems, so there's some ambiguity there.
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That's what I mean by a human perspective. It's not even a matter of backward and primitive, they see humans as just another alien species, kind of akin to the way we see most animals. I suspect this is not the first or only planet containing sentient life they tried to use as a resource, and Rose herself may have been involved directly or indirectly with that before coming to Earth. I don't think they went out of their way to specifically kill all humans either; they probably didn't care one way or the other (at least in their initial plan before the Cluster became a thing). People dying was more a side effect of them using the resources organic life needed to live for Gem production, a bit like how human settlement and the progression of our lifestyles has led to the extinction of a lot of other species on our planet.
That doesn't mean their actions weren't evil per se, but for Rose, it was definitely a matter of choosing one evil or another. On a brighter note, that is probably where her eventual decision to create Steven came in. With the acknowledgment that she can never erase or undermine her past actions, he is Rose's way of starting over and may be the one to bridge the gap between humans and Gems in a more peaceful way and have some influence on Gemkind without starting another war. (At least that is my hope given Steven's mindset and the morals in the series so far.)
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This picture just goes to show what amazing things you two can do together~~ <3
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And we'll just keep on doin' amazing stuff. Hard to stop now after all these years.
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Oh the humanity! 
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It's very strange to see Rose Quartz as a bad character... considering Steven's gentleness
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Well from what I have scene, Lapis can go too far which may cause Rose to do something regrettable. Odd thing the way she was contained Rose assign Lapis as way of being another hidden assistant and being rehabilitated. Well try to at least. Rose could heal have healed her physically, but Lapis is damaged in other ways.
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I think it's more complicated than just her being bad. I mean, those homeworld gems were pretty awful. It seems certain that at least most of them wanted to destroy/take over Earth and commit genocide against all humans. Maybe Lapis wasn't like that, but it's unclear. At the same time, rendering all the HWG's down to just their gem-states and trapping them in inanimate objects is pretty cold shiz for a prison sentence and precludes anything like rehabilitation. Not that modern prisons are much better, but it's the ideal we're supposed to be striving for.
So, yeah... complicated. It's part of what makes the show so great.
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