![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptTo the sixth prompt for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_challenge, we have a really fascinating stone! (And also, a really fascinating Steven Universe character.)
Okay, so amethyst isn't a bezoar, which is the other big purification object, and also it's not quite as biological in origin as the bezoar. The reason, however, that I know about amethyst's protective properties against drunkenness is because I grew up in a household that bought and played most of the disk and CD collections of Sierra On-Line, one of the juggernauts of adventure games (and more than a few other genres) during the 1980s and 1990s. (Also the initial publisher of a game from a studio called Valve called Half-Life.) Many of their flagship products are available through storefronts like Steam and GOG, but also, there's a fair amount of them being preserved by the Internet Archive and provided in an emulated environment. The marque itself no longer really has anything behind it, as the founders sold the company when it stopped being about fun and programming and making games and too much about managing a business and keeping the divisions running. The adventure game style has fallen out of popularity in the AAA environment for the most part, but it does thrive in in independent and amateur development.
One of the lesser series of Sierra's was a duology that started with Conquests of Camelot, where the player assumes the role of King Arthur looking for the Grail and for the knights that also went looking for the Grail and did not return. The only other game from the series was Conquests of the Longbow, where the player is Robin Hood,, outlaw extraordinare, who has to guide his outlaws successfully through the foiling of the plots of the Sheriff of Nottingham and raising sufficient ransom to win back King Richard from his capture. The game itself offers multiple paths or solutions to the various puzzles that will happen during the game, and the highest-scoring settings are the ones that require the player to pull off daring heists, rescue common folk from the clutches of the Sheriff and his allies, and otherwise be the legendary character (and yes, also to win the hand of Maid Marian, although on the path to the Golden Ending, she's no longer a maiden by the time she's promised to an ennobled Robin.) During the rescue puzzle, where Robin needs to infiltrate a hostile abbey and retrieve three boys who have been captured on the suspicion of assisting Robin and his men, there's a spot where Robin, disguised as a churchman, needs to drink the Abbot under the table. The problem is, the Abbot, like many churchmen, is fond of very strong alcoholic drinks and has a tolerance for the same. Trying to match him drink for drink will result in Robin passing out, being discovered, and killed. Earlier in the game, Robin acquired a chunk of amethyst, and if you read the appropriate parts of the lore, like what's put up as the prompt text, you'll know the solution is to drop the amethyst into your alcohol cup while the Abbot is distracted, and then you will be able to drink without getting drunk until the Abbot goes down. Then you have to distract the guards with some coin so that they go to the pub and get some drinks of their own, which gives you long enough to get in, rescue the boys and disguise them, and get out.
What? It's a gem lore story in an environment where that gem lore is applied and treated as fact. (And, really, I would love to hear other people's adventure game era stories, either of having played them on disk and disc, discovering them later on, or playing stellar examples of the genre in indie games today, whether they follow the Sierra way of The Many Deaths of You and the ease in which a game can be made unwinnable or the more forgiving SCUMM/LucasArts way that didn't cause permanent deaths but could be just as hilarious.)
The bonus gem, Aquamarine, is another blue stone (blue seems to be a favored color of stones for this challenge set), but the gemstone's interesting power is that it changes color when heat is applied. So the name is "seawater," and it does follow that seawater appears to change colors in the heat (although it's really more about many other things that cause a seawater color change. Not all of them are good. Which makes it a little funny that an Aquamarine in Steven Universe is given the charge to collect humans for the Human Zoo. The Topazes from earlier are her primary means of acquiring humans for the Zoo, since they can fuse together and trap whatever is supposed to be caitiff between them. Of course, the question of "Why is there a Human Zoo I'm the first place?" is pretty important. So, it turns out that when Pink Diamond wanted to preserve life on Earth, the other Diamonds assumed that meant she wanted to keep some of them as pets, it as one might put wild animals in a zoo. Since the other Diamonds can't exactly ask her what she really meant at this point (for that story, go see the Rose Quartz entry), Blue and Yellow Diamond created the zoo in memory of her missing Diamond, where they have humans they take care of in much the same way humans take care of animals. Aquamarine maintains a haughty attitude toward everyone she sees as beneath her. She just wants to get in, grab the list of possible human species as relayed to her by a Peridot (who, in turn, had mistaken what Steven meant when he accidentally contacted the Peridot (yep, that Peridot, the one in the previous entry, the entire plot line is a brick joke, and so is Steven Universe as a whole. Everything in Steven Universe is foreshadowing, but it may be a long time before the brick joke resolves.) and get out. But, if course, since her list is flawed, she captures many of Steven's friends and family, and so they have to do a rescue mission, one that prominently features…Amethyst! (It all loops back in to where we started.)
Amethyst, the Crystal Gem, came out of her Gem forming process delayed, and it meant she had a different appearance than all the other Amethysts in her Kindergarten, and she got left behind. How is Amethyst different? Well, she's shorter than the other Amethysts in her default form, and she's rounder than them, as well. It's worth noting at this point that Homeworld Gems are almost uniformly drawn with rigid lines, angles, and corners, to mimic faceted cuts and the appearance of strength and rigidity that those straight lines carry with them. Crystal Gems and humans, in contrast, are almost all curved lines, round shapes, and many of them are drawn a little bit pudgy or fat. (Except Pearl, but Pearl holds herself so taut that she risks being snapped in two by a force that runs perpendicular to her strength, and Peridot, who has her own troubles with rigid ways of thinking.) So Amethyst, much like Steven, is generally drawn very round, even more round than Steven is.
In a Freudian Trio, Amethyst is all the way id, to balance out Pearl's superego, and is equally as slacker as Pearl is rigid and perfectionistic. This leads to accusations of laziness, but like most, if not all, accusations of laziness, it's misplaced. If she has a neuroatypicality hat (since all the Gems are supposed to read off from human), it's ADHD. Amethyst is ridonkulously strong, as befits being a Quartz, but things that don't capture Amethyst's interest, or other emotional states, generally don't get her effort. She'll kick your ass if you call her a runt or a defect, but she has a really high bar for what counts as properly aggravating her outside of those two Berserk Buttons. She's also a prankster, a jokester, she really likes changing her visible shape into all sorts of other things, and she really enjoys doing things that aren't strictly necessary for Gem biology, like eating food. (Which gives Amethyst all sorts of new sensations and experiences and would feed an ADHD-like brain with novel stimulations for the dopamine hits.)
Amethyst's shapeshifting skills turn out to be very useful for one of the missions the Crystal Gems go on in a later season. Because she can hold another form for a few hours before the exhaustion gets to her, compared to other Gems trying to do the same, when the Crystal Gems have to go to rescue humans like Greg from a human zoo, it turns out that the Zoo is guarded by Amethysts, so Crystal Gem Amethyst dons the form of the guards and infiltrates them, looking for a good time to spring loose all the humans. Nothing goes according to plan, of course, but the Crystal Gems are still able to do the rescue and get away with it, no small thanks for to the Amethyst guards themselves joining in the spiting of Holly Blue Agate, the Zoo's supervisor, at Amethyst's urging. (Holy Blue Agate is a terrible supervisor and manager of others, so this doesn't actually require all that much urging.) It turns out that the guards assigned to the Human Zoo are from the same Kindergarten as the Crystal Gem Amethyst was from on Earth, and they immediately accept her as one of their own, even in her non-shifted body image. The Famethyst know she's one of theirs, and they don't care about how she looks. (Yet another way that Steven Universe manages to use space rocks to talk about all sorts of very human concerns. And that's before we discover that Amethyst has been the inspiration and model for someone's paintings.) So the Famethyst enthusiastically helps free the Beach City humans from the Human Zoo and eventually get everyone, human and Crystal Gem, away from Holly Blue Agate, and Amethyst gets a really heartwarming moment of having a peer group that loves and accepts her the way that she is. And that will join her in being prankish and insubordinate and otherwise not giving a rip about the work ethic that Homeworld Gems are apparently supposed to have, so maybe Amethyst's traits are common to all Amethysts, rather than just her. Yet another point in favor of Amethyst not being weird or strange or even unique in that sense, but an entity that sees the world differently that will thrive in a supportive and understanding environment.
Would that we all had supportive environments for ourselves, from the beginning of our existence to our last days as elders.
sunshine_challenge, we have a really fascinating stone! (And also, a really fascinating Steven Universe character.)In the ancient world, Amethysts were believed to hold the power to purify the body, especially from drunkenness. It was also thought that they could help cure disease, and so Amethysts were used to draw any illness out. They have been associated with royalty, nobility and spirituality because of their purple colour. In modern times, they’re used as popular semi-precious stones and are either cut into faceted gems or carved. Amethysts are also the birthstone for February.
Okay, so amethyst isn't a bezoar, which is the other big purification object, and also it's not quite as biological in origin as the bezoar. The reason, however, that I know about amethyst's protective properties against drunkenness is because I grew up in a household that bought and played most of the disk and CD collections of Sierra On-Line, one of the juggernauts of adventure games (and more than a few other genres) during the 1980s and 1990s. (Also the initial publisher of a game from a studio called Valve called Half-Life.) Many of their flagship products are available through storefronts like Steam and GOG, but also, there's a fair amount of them being preserved by the Internet Archive and provided in an emulated environment. The marque itself no longer really has anything behind it, as the founders sold the company when it stopped being about fun and programming and making games and too much about managing a business and keeping the divisions running. The adventure game style has fallen out of popularity in the AAA environment for the most part, but it does thrive in in independent and amateur development.
One of the lesser series of Sierra's was a duology that started with Conquests of Camelot, where the player assumes the role of King Arthur looking for the Grail and for the knights that also went looking for the Grail and did not return. The only other game from the series was Conquests of the Longbow, where the player is Robin Hood,, outlaw extraordinare, who has to guide his outlaws successfully through the foiling of the plots of the Sheriff of Nottingham and raising sufficient ransom to win back King Richard from his capture. The game itself offers multiple paths or solutions to the various puzzles that will happen during the game, and the highest-scoring settings are the ones that require the player to pull off daring heists, rescue common folk from the clutches of the Sheriff and his allies, and otherwise be the legendary character (and yes, also to win the hand of Maid Marian, although on the path to the Golden Ending, she's no longer a maiden by the time she's promised to an ennobled Robin.) During the rescue puzzle, where Robin needs to infiltrate a hostile abbey and retrieve three boys who have been captured on the suspicion of assisting Robin and his men, there's a spot where Robin, disguised as a churchman, needs to drink the Abbot under the table. The problem is, the Abbot, like many churchmen, is fond of very strong alcoholic drinks and has a tolerance for the same. Trying to match him drink for drink will result in Robin passing out, being discovered, and killed. Earlier in the game, Robin acquired a chunk of amethyst, and if you read the appropriate parts of the lore, like what's put up as the prompt text, you'll know the solution is to drop the amethyst into your alcohol cup while the Abbot is distracted, and then you will be able to drink without getting drunk until the Abbot goes down. Then you have to distract the guards with some coin so that they go to the pub and get some drinks of their own, which gives you long enough to get in, rescue the boys and disguise them, and get out.
What? It's a gem lore story in an environment where that gem lore is applied and treated as fact. (And, really, I would love to hear other people's adventure game era stories, either of having played them on disk and disc, discovering them later on, or playing stellar examples of the genre in indie games today, whether they follow the Sierra way of The Many Deaths of You and the ease in which a game can be made unwinnable or the more forgiving SCUMM/LucasArts way that didn't cause permanent deaths but could be just as hilarious.)
The bonus gem, Aquamarine, is another blue stone (blue seems to be a favored color of stones for this challenge set), but the gemstone's interesting power is that it changes color when heat is applied. So the name is "seawater," and it does follow that seawater appears to change colors in the heat (although it's really more about many other things that cause a seawater color change. Not all of them are good. Which makes it a little funny that an Aquamarine in Steven Universe is given the charge to collect humans for the Human Zoo. The Topazes from earlier are her primary means of acquiring humans for the Zoo, since they can fuse together and trap whatever is supposed to be caitiff between them. Of course, the question of "Why is there a Human Zoo I'm the first place?" is pretty important. So, it turns out that when Pink Diamond wanted to preserve life on Earth, the other Diamonds assumed that meant she wanted to keep some of them as pets, it as one might put wild animals in a zoo. Since the other Diamonds can't exactly ask her what she really meant at this point (for that story, go see the Rose Quartz entry), Blue and Yellow Diamond created the zoo in memory of her missing Diamond, where they have humans they take care of in much the same way humans take care of animals. Aquamarine maintains a haughty attitude toward everyone she sees as beneath her. She just wants to get in, grab the list of possible human species as relayed to her by a Peridot (who, in turn, had mistaken what Steven meant when he accidentally contacted the Peridot (yep, that Peridot, the one in the previous entry, the entire plot line is a brick joke, and so is Steven Universe as a whole. Everything in Steven Universe is foreshadowing, but it may be a long time before the brick joke resolves.) and get out. But, if course, since her list is flawed, she captures many of Steven's friends and family, and so they have to do a rescue mission, one that prominently features…Amethyst! (It all loops back in to where we started.)
Amethyst, the Crystal Gem, came out of her Gem forming process delayed, and it meant she had a different appearance than all the other Amethysts in her Kindergarten, and she got left behind. How is Amethyst different? Well, she's shorter than the other Amethysts in her default form, and she's rounder than them, as well. It's worth noting at this point that Homeworld Gems are almost uniformly drawn with rigid lines, angles, and corners, to mimic faceted cuts and the appearance of strength and rigidity that those straight lines carry with them. Crystal Gems and humans, in contrast, are almost all curved lines, round shapes, and many of them are drawn a little bit pudgy or fat. (Except Pearl, but Pearl holds herself so taut that she risks being snapped in two by a force that runs perpendicular to her strength, and Peridot, who has her own troubles with rigid ways of thinking.) So Amethyst, much like Steven, is generally drawn very round, even more round than Steven is.
In a Freudian Trio, Amethyst is all the way id, to balance out Pearl's superego, and is equally as slacker as Pearl is rigid and perfectionistic. This leads to accusations of laziness, but like most, if not all, accusations of laziness, it's misplaced. If she has a neuroatypicality hat (since all the Gems are supposed to read off from human), it's ADHD. Amethyst is ridonkulously strong, as befits being a Quartz, but things that don't capture Amethyst's interest, or other emotional states, generally don't get her effort. She'll kick your ass if you call her a runt or a defect, but she has a really high bar for what counts as properly aggravating her outside of those two Berserk Buttons. She's also a prankster, a jokester, she really likes changing her visible shape into all sorts of other things, and she really enjoys doing things that aren't strictly necessary for Gem biology, like eating food. (Which gives Amethyst all sorts of new sensations and experiences and would feed an ADHD-like brain with novel stimulations for the dopamine hits.)
Amethyst's shapeshifting skills turn out to be very useful for one of the missions the Crystal Gems go on in a later season. Because she can hold another form for a few hours before the exhaustion gets to her, compared to other Gems trying to do the same, when the Crystal Gems have to go to rescue humans like Greg from a human zoo, it turns out that the Zoo is guarded by Amethysts, so Crystal Gem Amethyst dons the form of the guards and infiltrates them, looking for a good time to spring loose all the humans. Nothing goes according to plan, of course, but the Crystal Gems are still able to do the rescue and get away with it, no small thanks for to the Amethyst guards themselves joining in the spiting of Holly Blue Agate, the Zoo's supervisor, at Amethyst's urging. (Holy Blue Agate is a terrible supervisor and manager of others, so this doesn't actually require all that much urging.) It turns out that the guards assigned to the Human Zoo are from the same Kindergarten as the Crystal Gem Amethyst was from on Earth, and they immediately accept her as one of their own, even in her non-shifted body image. The Famethyst know she's one of theirs, and they don't care about how she looks. (Yet another way that Steven Universe manages to use space rocks to talk about all sorts of very human concerns. And that's before we discover that Amethyst has been the inspiration and model for someone's paintings.) So the Famethyst enthusiastically helps free the Beach City humans from the Human Zoo and eventually get everyone, human and Crystal Gem, away from Holly Blue Agate, and Amethyst gets a really heartwarming moment of having a peer group that loves and accepts her the way that she is. And that will join her in being prankish and insubordinate and otherwise not giving a rip about the work ethic that Homeworld Gems are apparently supposed to have, so maybe Amethyst's traits are common to all Amethysts, rather than just her. Yet another point in favor of Amethyst not being weird or strange or even unique in that sense, but an entity that sees the world differently that will thrive in a supportive and understanding environment.
Would that we all had supportive environments for ourselves, from the beginning of our existence to our last days as elders.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-24 01:41 pm (UTC)blue seems to be a favored color of stones for this challenge set
You have NO idea. xD When I asked the mods to list their favorite stones to form a short list/first draft, at least 2/3 of the list were blue stones LOL. I think we did manage to deliver a much more varied final draft, though.
Amethyst was my favorite Gem from the episodes I did watch of the show. ♥
no subject
Date: 2022-07-24 03:07 pm (UTC)Blue is a common gem color, so it's not surprising there were so many of them to choose from.
Amethyst, lone all the other Crystal Gems, goes through a lot over the series, but if a scene needs some sass or goofiness just to lighten it a little, Amethyst is the one to do it.
I'm hoping that someone else talks a little about Imperial Purple and why a dye like that was reserved for people all the way up the power chain. (And even possibly could talk a little about sumptuary laws while they're at it.)