Eye To Eye
‘Fun’, the way that Steven or Amethyst would define it, is not something that comes to Garnet organically. Not really. There are things that she enjoys, of course. She likes the adrenaline that comes from fighting monsters. She feels satisfaction at seeing corrupted gems safely bubbled in the temple where they can’t hurt themselves or others. Taking on missions and completing them, one by one—that’s enjoyable too. However, none of that is ‘fun’ the way that Steven thinks games are fun. When Garnet engages in his or someone else’s silliness, she must deliberately choose to do so. If anyone finds something she says amusing, then it’s in their interpretation of Garnet’s dialogue, not the result of any direct effort to be funny on her part.
That’s probably why she and Amethyst have such a hard time seeing eye to eye.
Well, actually, there are a lot of reasons.
Amethyst is made almost purely of impulse. She moves first, and then retroactively wonders if moving was actually the best thing to do. Her lifestyle is reactionary, fully dependent upon whatever the world has decided to throw at her that day. She feels instead of thinks. Perhaps it’s only natural that Garnet, with her future insights, can’t fully relate to that. She’s typically too even tempered to let her emotions get the best of her, and her knowledge of what might come next is a tool that she uses to guide her actions, perhaps more often than she should.
She just—she doesn’t understand why Amethyst gets so upset with her during the Slinker incident. They have a job to do (find and poof the Slinker, bubble the gem, keep it from getting out again) and Garnet is trying to do it, because that is what has to be done. Keeping corrupted gems under control is one of their responsibilities as Crystal Gems. Amethyst has to know that that should be one of their top priorities; she’s been doing this for over four thousand years now.
While it’s certainly not Garnet’s place to tell Amethyst how she should shape herself, all of her caricatures and literal interpretations of offhand comments are disrespectful and shortsighted. Try telling Amethyst that, though. She takes it like Garnet is insulting her personally. Where is all of this coming from?
And then there’s Steven, encouraging her to do more than Pearl impressions. Steven’s a child, and he doesn’t know any better. At least he has an excuse.
“You wanted me to be stronger. I’m doing it! I’m being what you want!” shouts Amethyst as she slowly loses to the strangling strength of the Slinker.
“I don’t want this!” Not for Amethyst to mutilate the way she presents herself like it’s not something to be proud of, and certainly not to weaken her form to the point where the Slinker has an ever easier time of poofing her.
“Well, what do you want? Just tell me, and I’ll do that.”
“I can’t tell you, Amethyst. You have to figure this out for yourself!”
It isn’t until after Amethyst’s grating sound of frustration and Steven’s epiphany (“She can’t. She doesn’t want to think about herself!”) that Garnet begins to understand why her advice about regeneration is being taken so poorly. By then, Amethyst has been poofed once again, but she stays within her gem this time. Thinking, maybe. Brooding might be more like it, though.
If Amethyst doesn’t want to think about herself, all she has left is what others tell her to be. No wonder she was being so literal about being like Pearl, or being stronger.
Which is why, when Garnet sees Amethyst in a form she has chosen by herself, for herself—using a body that makes her happy and feel at home—she can only smile and say, “It’s perfect.”
“Garnet, master of comedy,” she will say to a chortling Amethyst sometime in the near future. She will be a little incredulous (since when has she ever been funny?) but nonetheless amused by the idea of it being true.
Garnet doesn’t really know how to do ‘fun’ in the traditional sense, and Amethyst doesn’t really understand what it means to own herself and love how that feels, but they’re both working on it. They have a lot of differences, Amethyst and Garnet, but the desire for self-improvement is not one of them, and maybe that’s all the foundation they need to start seeing eye to eye after all.