Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25365147-20150419000436/@comment-26357198-20150430062831

I kind of like the idea that the Kindergarden mass-produced gems are just imperfect enough to skew to corruption over time; as if the mass-produced formula has a flaw that's unrecoverable if the gem is stranded on earth. (Supposition: Jasper is from an Earth kindergarden?) It's interesting.

That said, I have a theory that's a bit dark and I can get wordy, so bear with me. Also, I can over-think things and reach a bit in my suppositions, so this may just be a bit too conspiracy-ish.

The battle was 5000 years ago, and the gems had been on Earth presumably a thousand years before that. The Kindergarden had been running for some time prior to the battle, and with the damage it was doing to the planet (carefully hinted visually in On the Run in addition to the comments of the others throughout the series) it became one of the points Rose turned on when she decided to fight. That much at least seems to jive with the story.

Further, Rose laid out the options to Pearl plainly: fight and lose returning to the homeworld or die trying. Rose is far from unintelligent -- she had at least a few hundred years to see all this coming down, see what was happening and decide what to do. She was a leader; not just of her faction, but plausibly of a large number of Earth-side gems prior to changing her colors. She's not going to fight a war 3-on-thousands, so she took that time to plan. She gathered consensus, she quietly planned defenses, arguments -- she worked the system from within and when that door was shut she chose to take up the sword and banner.

(Aside: based on Jasper's response to Garnet, what Ruby and Sapphire represented is and may have been frowned upon for some time as strange -- but Rose is someone who accepts others for themselves, so even if she wasn't just gathering allies Garnet has the opportunity to be Garnet in perpetuity -- so Garnet is all-in for this fight to be herself in addition to her other reasons.  *extra supposition: If height or even volume is an indicator of power, then Ruby and Sapphire (and by extension Amethyst) might have been considered lesser gems for their weakness and in the case of Garnet gauche for their constant state of fusion.)

But there's a limit as to how much she can do. She can't guarantee her revolution will succeed. She can break the galaxy warp pads to stop quick and easy reinforcements, but she's still going to deal with human conscripts used as fodder, cookie-cutter loyalists from the Kindergarden, and those from the homeworld leading them and still committed to the plan. So she has a backup. Riffing on Maltese Tigress' comment, what if there is a flaw in the kindergarden process... And what if it can be exploited?

My apologies, but here's where I go into deeper into the rabbit hole. What if she had a weapon that caused some kind of blanket resonance effect on a planetary scale? It affected all gems, but hit the kindergarden gems the hardest? The battle was so intense that three gems (plus Amethyst) survived.

How big was her bubble now?

What if Rose's forces were up against insurmountable odds? And she kicked off the weapon because a thousand dead gems (even her allies) was worth the life of the planet? What would that get her? Maybe it did destroy all of the kindergarden gems. Maybe it also so severely injured the remaining gems that for the first time gems became corrupted, taking on more primal forms. Save the gems unlucky enough to have been injured before the weapon. (Lapis, perhaps?)

So, following the rabbit hole a bit further... Aside from the four, all the gems on Earth are dead, broken, or corrupted. All the Wailing Stones go silent. Rose's team has no reason to respond, so the line goes dead. Homeworld writes off the planet as having no gem life due to an unsolvable 'contagion' or other catastrophic event anathema to Gemkind...

(supposition: They could have sent a ship thousands of years ago to fix the warp unless they assumed that any gem setting foot on Earth would risk some kind of undefendable danger.  The Red Eye and later the Flask robonoids are disposable based on Peridot's actions, and could communicate if they came across a danger after fixing the warp gate...  Or maybe Earth was written off and Peridot's actions are one of a researcher on a limited budget, dusting off this inexplicably forgotten world and only getting the option to come directly once she had proof of safe viability to fuel the plans of the homeworld.)

And Rose, Pearl and Garnet have five thousand years to count their tears.

The wailing stones are rounded up (stated in the show), as they can obviously transmit messages at an interstellar range. Can't have some human coming across one of those and unknowingly giving homeworld an all-clear... Weapons, artifacts, and other tools are gathered up in order of danger for the same reasons... And they find Amethyst! The only good thing to come of the Gems' designs on Earth. Perhaps she was still "baking" when the signal went off, or maybe the cause of her odd (by Kindergarden standards) formation made her immune, but it's the one point of joy they've gotten so far.

And then there's the corrupted gems. Rose tries and tries and tries to cleanse them, to fix them, to heal them. Her tears aren't enough, the fountain isn't enough, and nothing hints at a real path. So the handful they can find over the millennia are bubbled and kept in the burning room in the quiet yet desperate hope for a cure. They travel from installation to installation to installation, looking in the ruins for a possible cure. The Glass of Time might have done it, but they weren't able to find it until after Steven came...

But after thousands of years, how far would you go? Knowing that you're functionally immortal, knowing that the homeworld will eventually come knocking once more and knowing that the Universe has sped on by you and your companions in all that time while you kept running in circles, unable to heal your greatest regrets?

Rose is omnipresent in this series, even as hints or images from the past. Greg's feelings gave her the idea she'd been missing all this time. Rose is banking on Steven -- on his potential abilities, on the innocence of a child to find a route her long, long experience closed down as a matter of course. She's put helper after helper in his path to keep him going -- Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, Greg, Lion, her own gem. And Steven's gotten farther than she ever did; fearlessly encouraging with the innocence of a child without even using his powers.

Now imagine what he can do when he adds his powers to the inborn talents he's shown.

Boom.

TL;DR: Rose's war caused the corruption and thus the Gem monsters. She's spent millennia trying to fix them, but Steven's her trump card, using that simple, bright-eyed, fearless innocence with his own take on what she hopes is his variation on her healing powers.