Garnet's World was also a pretty significant animation departure

Yeah. He's not evil, he's just a weird kind of creepy kid

Nah totally disagree, this is the natural evolution of her character. That kind of angsty "toughness" is how she used to be, even through much of S1. Now she's mellowing out and actually growing

Onion is probably what, maybe only five years old? Steven certainly isn't older than 12 and he towers over Onion

I mean, that was never going to be the case. That's just not the type of show SU is interested in being. Onion is just a weird kid

Also this is really all carried by the brilliant decisions they made around Amethyst this episode. Without Amethyst's stuff it really is just an episode about Pearl Doing a Bad Thing. But Amethyst's complicated reaction (not quite scared, not quite angry) makes it pretty clear: in different circumstances she might…

I'm not saying Garnet should have been fusing with Pearl to help with her emotional insecurities or anything like that, but I am saying that a lack of less, hm, dramatic emotional intimacy among them (again not talking about fusion but just general friendship) might contribute to Pearl's slow descent that we've been…

I think its mostly that they just hold her in a kind of awe. She's the closest thing any of them have to Rose now

On reflection while Pearl screwed up and deeply betrayed Garnet's trust and she's absolutely right to be upset, Amethyst's perspective is very interesting: she and Pearl are lonely in a way that Garnet is not. Garnet cannot understand their loneliness and maybe because of that she doesn't understand what Amethyst and…

On reflection Garnet being the least selfish of the gems makes sense: she already has everything she wants, she gets to be the embodiment of love.

Now that its clear that the show's creators are very smart about creating flawed and selfish characters even among the heroes Garnet's "togetherness" becomes striking with every episode. She's never seemed as enamored with Rose as the others, even if they respected each other, and yeah she never really acts selfishly…

Now that I think about it, if she was one of the four diamonds and has a lot of regrets and guilt in her life, becoming Steven might have been her ultimate act of trying to give something good back to the world

When has Garnet been quasi-villainous? Racking my brain trying to recall

Its a fantastic episode, but it still leaves a lot of their relationship to flesh out. I hope we get at least one more episode (and I'm sure we will) showing the two of them by the point where Rose and Greg are so deeply in love that she's willing to give up her life to have a son

This was pretty creepy, but its no Mirror Gem. Mirror Gem was amazing with its slow escalation of "something is really wrong here"

I don't think its entirely a new tone, if only because of how *fantastically* creepy Mirror Gem was. The slow escalation of "something is really wrong here" throughout that episode was masterful. They don't do it often though

"The light configurations of the hybrid fusion monster are pretty fascinating. Are there any fan theories about Gems being really advanced computers, or anything like that?"
I've been thinking something like that for a while. Their bodies certainly seem like hard-light holograms, albeit more advanced (advanced enough…