Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26808654-20150516082728/@comment-26274291-20150525020800

Okay, this might take a while.

Let’s start with Evitini200’s original thesys, one by one:

1. I don’t think much more is required to be said. Steven does get character development, though sometimes it is just thrown by the window for the sake of some punctual episode or joke.

2. Yeah, that scene in Ocean Gem really bothers me. Not to mention how water in itself would handle that situation, we must remind ourselves that the water clones were creations of Lapis, so she either programmed each of them individually to copy each of its adversaries, what would make Greg right about calling her a Water Witch, or Lapis was controlling each of the clones, fighting four battles simultaneously while still working in her Water Tower, what would make Lapis’ mind a supercomputer.

But still, Ocean Gem is filled with nonsense, mainly concerning the Water Tower. First, if someone became the Water Grinch and decided to steal the ocean overnight, the effects would be much more severe than “oh, the ocean’s gone. Now we don’t have a beach”. Second, it is highly doubtful that Lapis truly used all the ocean. You see, Lapis actually didn’t go very far: as she and Steven were able to talk, they were somewhere that still had some gas concentration, and, judging from the Earth view we get, they were, at most, around mesosphere (in a side note, Season 1 Ed, Edd and Eddy already did better, going to the Moon). That’s about 50 Km to 100 Km, and, considering how cold it is up there, they probably didn’t even were at the top of that. So, the Water Tower was about 50 Km tall. The Water Tower has a quite narrow base, say about ten time the base of Greg’s Van, so it’s volume is about 50 Km times 10 times Greg’s Van’s area. Now, the average depth of the ocean is about 4 Km, what we will round up to 5 Km, and the ocean occupies some 7/10 of Earth’s surface. Not going in some deep math, we can tell this isn’t equal to that. Moving on, Connie describes it as a “giant aquarium”; how is that? Independent of the actual height of the tower, it is high enough to create an amazing pressure unto the ground, so great a pressure that would certainly kill the seen species. No, most of the sea creatures would be next to the top of it. Now, consider: to get to a pressure that allow them to live, most of those species would have to live around the same height, but the volume related to that height has reduced dramatically, so, not only most of the creatures would just fall for the lack of space, but we would have one of the worst ambiental crisis of all times (if the missing ocean wouldn’t do it already), since every prey and predator imaginable would be literally right next to each other.

Don’t get me wrong, the image of the Water Tower is just beautiful, but it is an offense to anyway who dedicate him/herself to physics in high school.

But I digress. About the characters’ abilities: we must understand that often conflicts are like a jo-ken-po  game, with a certain contestant outmatching a second and losing to a third, independent of the classification of the contestant as strong or weak. It’s like a master of Kung Fu fighting a QB. If given enough space, it seems obvious that the Kung Fu master will be the winner; however, if the QB simply tackle the opponent down and subdue him/her on the ground, the QB will be the winner.

We also must consider the idiosyncrasy of every fight and, of course, the chaos factor. For instance, Pearl beating Sugilite was a matter of luck. Even if she did planned the wrecking-ball-whip-thingy falling over Sugilite, she couldn’t be sure that it would happen. She lucked out. It’s actually extremely common with athletes. They must train very hard to get the proper physical development for the sport they play, but it is only a part of what must happen for them to break world records, as most of them happen by occasional optimal condition for that one athlete.

(This deserves further study, but for now let’s leave it like that).

3. Yeah, I agree with most of that. In “Beach Party”, all that amazing plan to defeat the pufferfish monster could be abbreviated by Amethyst shapeshifting into a crystal, maybe even a giant screw. However, it is understandable. Making a character’s powers proportional to its character role in the plot is one of the most common literary devices, actually as old as literature itself. Even so, it can be understood as a real world device. In arguments, I usually pull my most powerful punches, as I know I must keep them for when they are most needed, and not just go around wasting my rockets hunting a deer to just have a handknife left to fight a war.

4. On Steven’s human limitations: again, we will probably meet some of that “you get the best of both species” thing. And again, it can be explained within the show. One of the creators mentioned that Rose developed a womb and DNA so that Steven could be born, and we know from “Lion 3: Straight to Video” that Rose already knew that she would have to give up her physical form to give birth. We can speculate that Rose did more than simply code DNA to match Greg’s and allow Steven to be born as a fairly healthy, ordinary kid. Maybe Rose also managed to code a way to Steven’s body to behave similarly to a Gem body, thus making it possible for him to also have Gem powers and a human physiology (what may turn out to be extremely useful for fighting modern Homeworld Gems, as the Fandom’s been speculating).

To be continued…