faelapis:

one idea i’ve seen going around is that jasper is “choosing to be the bad guy”, because she didn’t apologize when stevonnie asked for it. it’s totally fine to think of her as bad, but … that’s… not… how people work? 

peridot didn’t join the crystal gems because she was secretly such a great person. she made an alliance because she didn’t want to die from the cluster, and then she slowly grew attached and realized earth and the crystal gems weren’t what she thought of them.

if steven had asked peridot for an apology in the middle of battle, she wouldn’t have either. peridot was captured, after kidnapping steven and threatening to kill him if he didn’t fix the homeworld warp.

before peridot’s arc of character development, the only reason she cooperated with the crystal gems is because she valued her own life higher than her mission. that’s not “choosing to be good”, it’s survival instinct.

i will never understand this idea that character development can just come from nowhere. you need a reason. you don’t fight your enemy for one second to be singing about how much you love earth the next. in order to do realistic storytelling, you have to look at the characters’ motivations.

jasper isn’t gonna apologize anytime soon. not because she’s “evil”, but because she doesn’t think what she’s doing is wrong. jasper still thinks she’s fulfilling her purpose by fighting the crystal gems. 

if everyone could just instinctively know what’s “right” and still decide against it - yes, maybe that would have been an argument. but it’s not. stevonnie didn’t give jasper a reason to regret her actions, so of course she doesn’t. she wasn’t “given a chance she didn’t take”. no one’s tried to teach her a single good thing about the earth or the crystal gems, so she’s still stuck with nothing but her own destructive sense of purpose. 

honestly, thank goodness she didn’t apologize! it would have been the cheapest redemption ever, and her character wouldn’t make sense at all. 

to me, writing interesting characters is a lot more important than easy, unrealistic conflict resolutions. no matter how much i want her redeemed, that would have been a horrible way to do it.