I'd be surprised if the show did any kind of Alternate Reality Episode again, even one bound by a framing device like "Garnet's Universe".
Not in details but it has come up that Rose had other lovers before Greg.
Forever liveblogging the AvengersBut seriously, I do think those pink "legs" are actually the fingers of a handship/armship. The impression of a body may be symbolic of something (I'll get to one idea later), but that's the literal meaning I see.
edited 8th May '17 6:19:30 PM by thatother1dude
Well, he already got one 5 episodes in...
He has no more hang-ups.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Well, if people ever needed a real-life version...there it is.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.(Re)watching "Lion 4" makes me reconsider my basic assumptions about what Lion is—or rather, who he is, and what are his motives. I'm almost suspicious, even. He clearly knows things about Rose, but did Rose ever know him?
Here's my observations:
- If Lion could spit up things stored in his body, he could probably store them by swallowing them. The lizard thing he spit up may have been the same one he was eating in "Lion 2".
- Rose's storage dump was in the desert where the Crystal Gems found Lion. Was Lion born there? That would explain symbolism of the landscape that looks like a woman's lower half—it's a woman giving birth. Alternate theory: it was a cage keeping Lion in that the Desert Glass broke open.
- Rose definitely wanted Steven to get the tape, probably wanted him to get the sword, but probably didn't want Steven (or anyone else) to find Bismuth. Why would she put them all in the same place, then?
It's long been the theory that Lion was on a mission from Rose to guide Steven's life. But the whole point of the episode is that Rose didn't have an elaborate plan. Giving all this stuff to Lion seems to make things much more complicated, and needlessly so. Maybe Rose didn't put this stuff in Lion's—maybe he took them, possibly after Steven was born:
- The video tape: The one with the right name was inside Lion and the other one inside the dump. Rose never knew if her child would be a boy or girl, so how could she have moved the right one? Lion had to have moved at least one of them himself, and probably knew which one to keep—thus he did so after Steven was born.
- Rose's Sword: Pearl said it was supposed to be in her armory. Lion knows where the armory is. If he could work the controls, or opened a portal into its container, he could have taken it.
- Bismuth: Before most of the walls broke down, the building in the desert would have been a good place to put Bismuth before Lion was around.
- The rest: Lion was eating Steven's shirt at the beginning of "Bismuth", which was next to a framed picture and button. The same may have happened to Rose's shirt from Greg's concert, the framed picture of Rose and Greg, and the Crystal Gem battle flag.
My theory on Lion is that he (well, in this theory, she) is a corrupted gem that maintains enough of her previous sense of self that she's able to be an ally for Steven. Kind of like Centipeedle, but much more closely resembling a single real animal. The various abilities Lion has are the abilities she had when she was still a regular gem, that she doesn't quite have control over (which is why Steven can just dive into Lion's Hammerspace mane).
That's probably one of my wilder theories, so grain-of-salt on that one.
For "Lion 4" - I got what was happening once the videotape started up. Also, given where it was, I take it to mean that Greg and Rose did not want a surprise; if they did, the other tape probably would have been closer at hand (because Rose wouldn't have had time to drop it off somewhere far away). Unless, of course, Rose handed it off to Pearl, in full salt mode, who just threw it in a junk pile in the desert in frustration.
I thought that those pink pillars looked like legs (also, the imagery and theme of him re-entering his mother's womb was very heavy in that scene)... but now that it's been brought up, yeah, it could very well be a Pink Diamond handship, with those being fingers. It would probably look a bit tweaked compared to the ones we've seen for YD and BD (just as cars today look similar in Broad Strokes but rather different in details from the Model T and the Model A). But still the same general recognizeable shape.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

Maybe the show will pull a Fionna & Cake and have an episode in the alternate universe where Rose became Nora instead of Steven. But if they did, i doubt it would be a total gender-swap episode.
"The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't." -Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw