silveradept | Sunshine Challenge 2022 #5: It's Not Easy Being A Green Stone

sunshine_challenge had a fifth prompt, and unlike the bonus stone from the fourth prompt, this one actually is named bloodstone, rather than "blood-stone."

Typically dark green with red inclusions, Bloodstone is often used to increase one’s courage, motivation, and creative energy. It’s also beneficial for endurance and physical strength. The Ancient Greeks held the Bloodstone as a gem with glorious powers and referred to it as Heliotrope, which directly translates to Sunstone. If your birthday lies in the month of March (or if you are an Aries), you can count Bloodstone as one of your birthstones as a means of action and vitality.

Well, that's interesting. Because Welcome to Night Vale regularly mentions bloodstone circles and the like, and I guess I was envisioning hematite, more in line with "color of blood" to fit the theme of being somewhere that generally partakes in things that would be horrifying to us, but it's pretty normal to them. On the accompanying picture to the prompt, the red in the stone is appropriately dark red blood, but it's also accompanied by a striking green that undermines the whole thing, unless in Night Vale, there's actual blood in the bloodstones and you have to crack them like eggs or something to get all the red out for your ritual purposes. Which would be entirely in line with Night Vale and its somewhat orthogonal reality to ours. (The Other Wiki says that the red in a bloodstone is, in fact, hematite, and so I'm much closer to home than I originally thought with that idea.)

At the same time, I'm curious about why the Greeks called it sunstone, given that neither green nor red are common colors of the Sun at its peak energy. The Other Wiki says it's because the stone reflects sunlight extremely well, and Pliny the Elder said that you could combine heliotrope the stone and heliotrope the plant and, with the correct ritual, render yourself invisible. Given what we know about metamaterials, reflection, and refraction, it would make sense that a stone with powerful light reflection might be a component for an invisibility spell. Bend the light around you properly and nobody will know you're there. Or what else might be hiding in a hall of mirrors. (Or, for that matter, how you get closer to the center of the Labyrinth, Sarah.)

Heliotrope, for me, most commonly turns up as a rare-ish attack associated with only a few characters and their weapons in the Nippon Ichi video game Phantom Brave. (Phantom Brave, incidentally, is one of the kindest NIS stat-RPGs in how much grind you have to go through to defeat the final superboss stage, the Pringer Sentai. You can still expect to spend a long time in the postgame grinding the random dungeons, but because of the fusion system, it goes a lot faster than, say, Disgaea.) Normally, Heliotrope is the sword and the name of the associated special attack of Raphael, one of the Nine Swords of Ivoire, but by stealing the weapon off of him in various encounters (or by recruiting him to your party through the Another Marona gaiden story), other characters can also use the attack by transferring it to a different weapon through the fusion system. Which is actually recommended, as the sword itself, as a unique weapon, can't collect titles on it and therefore can't take advantage of the means of swiftly increasing all the stats on the weapon through the fusion system.

In the postgame maps, we find out that Raphael has not been the only wielder of the sacred blade, and through a time portal that's the direct result of the main antagonist, the protagonist party travels back in time to help the legendary hero Scarlet the Brave avoid becoming too corrupted by the evil that she's been fighting for so long. The heroes can steal Heliotrope from her and then take it back to the main character's home so it, too, can have the skill transferred to another weapon. Admittedly, at this point, unless you've been leveling Heliotrope as an attack, it's flashy, but there are other attacks that do more damage and provide more battlefield control than that one. Getting the sword off Scarlet does make her stage easier to complete, but having a character that can transport the item home probably means you're overleveled at that point anyway.

If you like your RPGs more classic than the PlayStation 2 era, then Sunstone reminds me of the Sun Stone quest in Chrono Trigger. In the second part of the game, when the party is no longer required to follow a single path, but instead can choose to take on various missions and quests from Gaspar, the Guru of Time, one of the quests involves collecting a Moon Stone and then placing it in the Sun Shrine so that it can recharge itself fully into a Sun Stone. This being Chrono Trigger, of course, it's not nearly as simple as placing the Moon Stone in the prehistoric era and collecting it, fully charged, in the futuristic era. There's a battle to be had, after all, with the Son of Sun, which is a battle that the party can remove most of the danger from, so long as all of them are equipped with gear that either absorbs or nullifies fire damage, and there's also a part where the stone is stolen in the middle of its charge cycle and the party has to manipulate the mental state of someone's ancestor by showing them kindness so they teach their descendants to behave properly and not be greedy. Having messed with the timeline for our own purposes, the stone can complete its charge cycle, at which point we harvest power from it to create an ultimate weapon and an ultimate armor piece.

It's interesting this stone is also closely related, in the energies summary above, with courage, creativity, physical strength, action and vitality, all things that would be associated with being hot-blooded (except, perhaps, the creativity, although there are several characters we have who are creative and good at solving problems when they're not riding the fire of passion over the cliff.) Much like how cool kyanite was meant for the kind, bloodstone, by name and association, is meant for the body. (Red Oni, Blue Oni.) The red-blue body-mind distinction really does show up everywhere, from the domains of the chakras to the magical associations of various gems and stones. The U.S. and its culture is generally running on a lot of very old color theory (as are other cultures, such as Japan). Most of what I wanted to say about that, though, is in the previous challenge entry.

Which brings us to our bonus stone, and that means we're back on the Steven Universe bandwagon. We first meet Peridot when Steven accidentally re-establishes contact with Homeworld and then realizes what he's done and tries to play it off so that there isn't investigations conducted. Steven fails at that, but the Peridot that gets sent to handle things is routinely host by her own petard and the skills of the Crystal Gems to beat both her and the Jasper she's attached to. Eventually, she joins up with the Crystal Gems and helps them find a way to defeat a superweapon that was left behind as a time bomb to destroy the Earth. At which point she's introduced to and becomes familiar with Lapis Lazuli. While Peridot is green-colored, she's absolutely Red Oni to Lapis's Blue Oni. Not that she would admit to that immediately, or without prodding or prompting, because Peridot believes she represents the power of unbounded logic and rationality in comparison to everybody else in the Crystal Gems. She tries to approach everything she encounters with the spirit of scientific inquiry, and she has really good technical skills to be able to fix or MacGuyver something together, but she's also the kind of entity that will say something that's socially offensive and then defend it by saying she's only speaking the truth. And worse, she might be telling the truth, if "truth" is calibrated to mean the official policies and prohibitions of Homeworld and it's rigid caste society.

Some of Peridot's expanding emotional intelligence comes from watching tapes of a serial drama and complaining at Lapis about how the characters don't act logically, some if it is saying something offensive, being checked, and having it explained which parts of her mental model are wrong and need updating, and some of it, I think, is because she develops a relationship with Lapis that inspires Peridot to create art ("meep-morps," they're called.) While the canon never goes quite so far as to say Lapis and Peridot are in love with each other, they do a lot of things together than otherwise would not be expected of housemates, and Peridot and Lapis both do a lot of moderating their behavior around the other one to avoid offending them (even as Peridot will blunder through offending a different Gem because she still has trouble adjusting to seeing the Crystal Gems through an Earth lens rather than a Homeworld one.) Peridot is later confirmed to be aroace according to Word of St. Peter, by the end of the sequel series, but they're Gems, so they don't do things in exactly the same way as humans do. There's still plenty of space for a queerplatonic relationship between them without insisting there has to be fusion involved.

There's an argument to make about Peridot as a being that humans would classify as autistic, with obsessions and the lack of ability to understand social cues, difficulty with situations changing, and the blunt speech and a fair amount of possible stimming behavior. Word of God says all the Gems should read neuroatypical to humans (they're aliens, Harold), so while it's not confirmed, it's not a bad headcanon to have. She's initially cast more in the techbro mold and learns how to read the room better and to get more in tune with her emotional side. (More in tune, she's still a perpetual work in progress.)
I feel a little adjacent-to when talking about this, though, as in "if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person," and I've seen a fair amount of words and ink put together about neuroatypicality representation on the screen in recent programs, from unhappiness at the way that Sheldon Cooper and many of the Big Bang Theory nerds reinforce stereotypes for the purposes of making jokes, less good things about the way that Entrapta was portrayed in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and so on. It brings to mind the way that in my professional life, there's a big discussion going on about representation in both the works available for checkout and the people who are working in the locations. For many of us, we're still stuck on the question of whether there's enough representation of people on the shelves, because we're stuck at the whims of the publishing industry and Hollywood casting and approving various stories she then deciding which ones are still going to go out on analog media and printed books enough that they'll be available to our audiences to borrow. And then, to get people in our locations who look like and have the same kind of backgrounds as the people who come in the door, that requires picking from a pool of people who have often had to go through a fairly significant wringer just to get there, and with even more obstacles in the way for them if they want to go past being desk clerks and become the type of the people who get to make decisions about what gets bought and promoted on the shelves and in the programs.

If we could manage to get past the problem of the general lack of representation for so many cultures and people in the collections and the spaces, we could go forward to figuring out whether the representation that's present is actually any good. Not that everything that's representative has to be perfect—In fact, part of the drive for having lots of representation is the idea that some of that representation can then be allowed to be less than perfect, or even possibly to suck, just like works that have characters from a majority are allowed to do. But there's a tendency to take only the very best from the people who are part of a community and to only take a limited amount of that best while allowing a lot more mediocre material from people who are not part of the community who are going outside of their lane, or promoting material that's definitely neither from someone who is part of the community nor from someone who took the time to do even the basics of research with regard to the community they're representing on the page or the screen. (The problem, of course, is that sometimes the stuff that's terrible is the stuff that's profitable, because that's what the audience says they want to have.)

In the fic and the amateur realms the debate seems to be moving around whether doing the research on various things takes away from the joy and the fun that writing is supposed to be, especially, after all, for amateurs that are doing it mostly for love (and possibly as a side gig from more renumerative purposes) or whether there should be a baseline of understanding so as to stop uncritically replicating the faults of a source medium or stop replicating the faults or lies of the society making or receiving the work. The reality is likely always going to be that both kinds of things come into existence, and the reader needs tools to be able to sort the good from the less good.

All the same, I'd love to see more good representation on the screen, with more jobs going to people who actually are the thing the character is supposed to be. Tangent over, entry over.