00 💎 Application

[supposedtochange]

User Name/Nick: Naomi
User DW: n/a
E-mail: asyndeta @ gmail dot com
Other Characters: Credence Barebone, Hilda Spellman, Elijah Kamski, Lesley May

Character Name: Rose Quartz (prev. Pink Diamond)
Series: Steven Universe
Age: Uhhh. Rose Quartz's identity is around 6000 years old; Pink Diamond could easily have lived five times that long. Let’s just go with ‘old enough and then some’.
From When?: At the point of her death, where she gives up her physical form and consciousness so that her son could be born.

Inmate: Rose is a borderline case in a lot of ways. She seems to want to be a good person and create a better world. Ultimately, though, her sense of momentum led her to act in ways that were so selfish and shortsighted that it’s hard to imagine that she could help an inmate until she’s done a lot of soul-searching of her own.
Arrival: Rose will arrive against her will and in a state of extreme confusion because dying was voluntary!!

Abilities/Powers: Too many to list in detail; it can be assumed she has the abilities of both Rose and Pink. In terms of nerfing:

Gone: Phytokinesis, the ability to manifest her sword and shield, ridiculous superhuman strength, resurrection, shapeshifting into any form other than Rose and Pink, the ability to create sentient pebbles (yeah it's a whole thing), bubbling or fusion with other Gems (unlikely to come up anyway)

Kept: Slow falling and healing tears. Besides this, as a Gem, Rose is a being made of light projected from her Gem: she doesn't need to eat, sleep, breathe, can survive in deep space or underwater, etc etc. She can also take a lot more damage than a human. A potentially killing blow would in most cases 'poof' her body, which her Gem will regenerate within an hour or so without Warden intervention. If her Gem is shattered - a 'real' death by Gem standards - a Warden would need to intervene and she would Death Toll as normal.

Otherwise, Rose retains the physical strength and speed that a human would have if they too were eight feet tall and an experienced soldier. She also retains skills such as swordsmanship.

Personality:

Rose is initially presented as an idealistic and brave hero - which she is. She presents as curious, optimistic, and endlessly delighted by novelty. In conflict she is strong willed and uncompromising, determined to a fault to see her plans come to fruition; in battle, she takes a degree of pleasure in the fight but does have some awareness of when to back down (i.e. when dangerously outnumbered). Towards friends she is affectionate and generous with praise. She acted towards the Crystal Gems as a mentor as well as a leader, actively and repeatedly encouraging the traits that Homeworld would have stamped out as ‘incorrect’. She nurtured their difference and that of her boyfriend, Greg, who most of the rest of the world had dismissed as a loser. Such was her love of humanity that she surrendered her own life, knowingly, so that she could bear a child who was half human.

This belies a long previous history as Pink Diamond, who was entitled, whiny and demanding, with a mischievous streak that likely arose out of a desperate need for attention from the other three Diamonds. She had an unhealthy mother-daughter relationship with White Diamond, who seemed very fond of her but not in a way that was imbued with any sense of respect. Yellow and Blue, the two beneath her, were emotionally abusive: patronising, condescending and sometimes aggressive. Moreover, Pink was often locked away for causing trouble and embarrassing the other Diamonds, one of the highest forms of disobedience in a society obsessed with acting according to one's position.

Unfortunately, some of this was behaviour Pink allayed into her new persona as Rose. It took thousands of years for her to be challenged for using the same diminishing language to describe a human she cared for that Yellow and Blue had used to talk about her. Little, cute, silly, funny. While she seems to have curbed this behaviour around Greg, he was not her first human partner and obviously a pretty special case, since she chose him to be the father of her child. Greg made it explicit that this is not the kind of language you use to talk to someone you respect, which must have been a heavy blow in the context of her relationship with the other Diamonds, but after millennia it’s hard to imagine that being a once-and-done fix. Or that she’ll see it as transferable to any other life form.

There’s also something toxic about Rose’s adoration for humanity (and organic life in general) in how it’s twisted how she feels about fellow Gems. At first, admiring the production of new Gems in the Kindergarten, Pink is excited: “We’re creating life from nothing!” When she sees up close that the living Earth is being drained for this, she changes her tune: “We’re taking life, and leaving nothing behind.” This basically dismisses the existence of the new Gems populating the Earth. Pearl, Rose’s right-hand woman, was clearly devastated by the corruption of the remaining Homeworld Gems that ended the war. It's uncertain how Rose felt, although it's hard to imagine that she didn't know Homeworld had a 'nuclear option', and eventually she gave up on trying to heal the corrupted Gems.

The largest of Pink/Rose’s issues, though, is that not once has she stuck around to face the music for a single one of her actions. Not mature enough for your own colony? Beg and stomp until you get one anyway. Not prepared to follow through on destroying a planet? Plead with the other Diamonds to lay off. They don’t listen (and one of them just goes ahead and kidnaps a bunch of humans to establish a breeding colony in space)? Take a new form and declare a thousand-year war, telling none of your recruits the truth about your identity. One of your new soldiers creates a weapon that you find morally repellent? Capture her in a bubble and leave her there for millennia without ever making any attempt to reconcile, then tell everyone she died. War not working out? Fake your original identity's death and try to disengage completely. This does continue into the modern age. Screw up by letting a toddler climb a Ferris wheel? Let your boyfriend put himself into mortal danger by climbing up to get him, only intervening after you’ve screwed up badly enough to endanger both their lives.

(Interestingly, in wartime, she's feted as a brilliant tactician - which suggests insight that her behaviour really lacks. However, when told by her boyfriend that he's worried about the future, she tells him to just ask Garnet - who literally has the power of predetermination. With her and Pearl - an excellent logistician - on side, she may have never done much of the tactical heavy lifting herself. Alternatively, she might be more farsighted on the 'macro' level of troop movements etc., and not at all on the 'micro' level of her own actions. Or both!)

Nowhere are the tendencies to diminish Gem existence and shrug off consequences more starkly defined than in the Gem Spinel, a ‘playmate’ for Pink Diamond who was left behind in Pink’s floating garden when she was granted a colony of her own. True, Spinel was - by nature - a childish jester who Pink felt she’d outgrown. You could forgive Rose for letting Spinel sit out the war against the Diamonds. But letting her literally stand perfectly still, for six thousand years, without making any attempt to retrieve or free her or even mentioning her to your closest friends? Yikes. This is especially bleak given Pink’s own history of being confined; she essentially sent Spinel to her room for millennia for nothing more than acting according to her function.

Which was...kind of the problem, really. Rose’s attitude towards other Gems is that those who are somehow new or unique - the imaginative Pearl, the rebel Bismuth, the novel fusion Garnet, the defective Amethyst - are special, important and worthy of protection. Her entire motivation changes during the war; her interest shifts from saving the planet for its own merits, to wanting it as a safe haven for gems who reject Homeworld culture. Humans are still considered important to her, though initially at a lesser-life-form remove that was learned from life with the Diamonds. Everyone else can pretty much go fish. When she leaves a message for her unborn son, she asks him to ‘look after them’, but it probably didn’t even occur to her that he was going to have to clean up so much of her mess. Rose’s selfish point-blank refusal to ever look back means that she barely glances over her shoulder to the damage she left in her wake.

Barge Reactions:

Rose’s initial reaction will be confusion. She got pregnant knowing that was going to be it, but now it’s not, so what’s the deal with that? Still. Get up. Dust herself off, move on. The different peoples on the Barge will be a source of fascination; the roster is an endless parade of the unusual and she’ll look to immerse herself in it.

Events such as floods and breaches will be a point of interest rather than anything more serious. She will possibly assume the Admiral is some kind of previously unknown Gem, maybe more powerful than White, and could turn out to be a bit of an agitator depending on the company she falls into.

Path to Redemption:

Rose’s Warden has two major initial hurdles: firstly, she chose to die and was happy to make that sacrifice, so why keep going? Secondly, why does she need redemption at all? Was protecting the Earth a bad thing?

Then, the main challenge becomes the gargantuan challenge of making her take a long, hard, critical look at her own past and what problems it will have seeded further down the road. This will make her incredibly uncomfortable. Rose is basically quite selfish - her treatment of Bismuth proves that even the Crystal Gems weren’t safe from being turned on - but the main sore point is going to be her son, Steven, who she chose to create without realising what was ultimately going to be piled on him. And if doing it to him was bad, why was it okay to do it to anyone else?

From there, it becomes a task of working out a path for her future. Picking up a little more Basic Respect For Everyone wouldn’t hurt either.

History: Thank God you guys are chill with links tbh.

Sample Journal Entry:

[A large pink fingertip taps at the communicator screen.]

Hello? Hello, is this thing working right-?

[Tap tap tap. Apparently satisfied, an eight-foot-tall woman with a mass of pink hair sits back from the camera. There's a natural warmth to her tone, a lightness.]

Hello, everyone! I'm very excited to be here and to meet you all, and to explore, but...I'm hoping it's going to be temporary. And about that, I have a question, and I'm not sure who I should be asking.

You see, I've looked at how other people have been using these devices, and I'm understanding that people who come here without being asked are...well, dead. And that's - fine, I suppose, I'm sure a lot of people would rather not be.

But...I chose, to stop being myself. I decided not to exist any more, so somebody else could exist instead. I can't be in any world while that other person is, so, I'm not really sure why I'm here!

Could somebody explain?

Sample RP:

Rose becomes an easily noticeable fixture on the Barge, quite quickly - of course she does, she's an eight-foot-tall woman whose volume is doubled by the combined dress/hair efforts. And most of the time, she seems...perfectly benign. Curious, bubbly, asking questions and learning about the other locals as she goes. In most arenas she's exactly the huge pink marshmallow she appears to be,

That's until someone lets her into the Enclosure, and she asks another kind of arena.

The Enclosure also supplies her with a sword.

Here, if you happen to come across her, you'll find a different person: focused, disciplined, as strong as her stature suggests and deceptively quick. She moves between generated enemies with precision and grace, half-smiling her satisfaction as she bisects bodies and hears the gentle clattering of fallen Gems.

Then she hears footsteps from the door, and once again her affect bounces back as her posture loosens.

"Hello! I didn't see you come in."