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sunshine_challenge!
I was ready to go about Jasper, the relentless Steven Universe antagonist with single-minded zeal to destroy the Gem that shattered Pink Diamond, so much so that she makes some really bad decisions in her life, but reading the description sounds like I might have some other things to talk about as well. First, though, Jasper. Because of how strong she is compared to the Crystal Gems, one way of stopping her is for Lapis Lazuli (the power of unbounded emotions) to create a hostile fusion with Jasper, where Lapis' goal is to suppress Jasper as much as possible and keep her in the fusion. It's not glorified, romanticized, or sanitized that much, where it's fairly clear to anyone close enough to an account of the relevant experience that Malachite, the hostile fusion, is supposed to represent an abusive and controlling relationship. It's not good for either participant, as Lapis carries a lot of trauma from being the one trying to control Jasper and keep her down, as well as to modulate the latter's anger and desires to control and conquer and Jasper seeks to use fusion and other coercive methods to grow stronger, including fusing with a corrupted gem in her desire for power. (It works exactly as well as you would think, but the corrupted Gem is able to break and flee from the fusion, leaving Jasper both alone and corrupted herself as a result of chasing her obsession post the point of self-preservation. Eventually the Happier is healed of the corruption along with all the other corrupted Gems, but she remains aloof and combative with Steven, still on her quest to become stronger.
The bonus stone is Opal, one of the fusions of the main Crystal Gems, combining Pearl's precision with Amethyst's raw strength, firing a bow as her Gem weapon, but because of the distance Pearl's need for precision and Amethyst's general lack of it, the two of them can defuse fairly easily if they are not in accord with each other. In gemstone lore, a fairly common superstition is that opals are considered an unlucky stone to wear if you aren't born in the month where an opal is your birthstone, which appears to be cobbled together from various stories about opals appearing for events like deaths, from a story about a mood opal that discolors when touched by holy water that apparently indicated the wearer could be demonic, and the possibility that diamond merchants were worried about opals being a popular enough stone that there wouldn't be enough diamond sales. (Thanks, Howstuffworks.) Opals are really colorful, though, so they have had plenty of other associations over time than the negative ones that are most commonly repeated in our time. (Although there's probably some sort of funny thing you could manage in Steven Universe about Diamonds being hostile to an Opal, either as a trial or because of the Homeworld discouragement of cross-caste fusions.)
Circling back to the original stone, it's interesting that it's marked as an agate, not a jasper, because to scientists and others invested in a taxonomy, words have discrete meanings and categorizations. The Great Cladistics Shake-up made several of the words that were used to use to describe creatures based on observation less accurate or acknowledged that groups like "fish" include multiple clades without the ability to separate them out and declare a "true fish" clade, for example, and a lot of rocks have non-indicative names once you can get them under a microscope and test them in various ways, as well. That one of the names is Bumblebee Jasper (and at least one of the rocks has black and yellow striping on it, so as to make it pretty clear where the name comes from) lets me talk about one of the non-official ships of the RWBY fandom. From what I have seen in venturing or into other people's fandom spaces regarding RWBY ships, most of the major ships of the fandom don't use portmanteaus of the characters' names (Arkos, the Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos ship is one of the few exceptions, and even then, it's their surnames that form the portmanteau, not their given ones), but instead terms to describe some aspect of the relationship itself. Ruby and Penny, for example, is usually classified "Nuts and Dolts," (a play on the magazine title Nuts and Volts) which I think is increasingly inaccurate, as neither Ruby or Penny is stupid, but sometimes their innocence leads them in pathways the other characters might avoid. That, however, is a piece for another situation. The commonly accepted name for the pairing between Blake (cat woman, space used with intent, primary color scheme and association is black) and Yang (human woman, primary color scheme and association is yellow) is "Bumblebee." There's plenty of information available to a watcher of RWBY who is up on their fairy tales and mythologies so they can determine which story a character comes from, and sometimes that extends to ship names as well, but I'm this case, it's much more the yellow and black striping and the nature of the bumblebee.
It's worth noting that this is not a canonical ship - there are actually fairly few canonical ships in RWBY. Blake, for example, has only one confirmed ex-boyfriend, Adam (bull, shit-stirrer, abusive fuckweasel, secondary antagonist) and a possible interest in Sun (monkey, practical joker, hero in his own mind). She's also gotten a romantic confession from Ilia (chameleon woman, childhood friend, tertiary antagonish), but it's not reciprocated. When Arryn Zech (Blake's voice actress) revealed her bisexuality, there was intense fan speculation about whether that meant Blake was, as well, but again, there's not much confirmed anything about Blake. (Given the Trauma Conga Line that Blake goes through, she may not really have any desire at all for a romantic relationship with anyone. Possibly ever.)
Yang has no confirmed relationships, even though her character is often the first one to remark about wanting to go see the eye candy in several of the early volumes (Usually boys as the eye candy, but there's also no canonical stance that Yang wouldn't also appreciate a strong woman in the same way. We've just never seen her do it.) Since she's also been through a Trauma Conga Line before the series starts and through much of the series, it's entirely possible that while she maintains a player attitude and dresses and acts the most overly sexually provacatively of all of her team, it's basically a front of bravado and she's not interested in anyone. Or that she might be interested in someone, but she can't bring herself to say it or to indicate it in any kind of way. (Because, like her mother, she's not very good at being vulnerable at all.)
While everyone on Team RWBY has had a traumatic past, there's a lot of shared moments of empathy and protectiveness between Blake and Yang that leads itself to a shippy lens, because Blake's avoidance of direct conflict (her special magical ability is to create a clone of herself that disappears on contact, sometimes infused with the powers of Dust to imbue extra properties to it) contrasts with Yang's hair-trigger temper and extreme willingness to mix it up with anyone (Yang's special ability is to absorb the damage that she receives and transform it into strength, so long as the attack itself doesn't overwhelm her defenses and the attack is direct enough that she can tank it.) Yang had already been in a protective role for Ruby much of her life, and as Ruby continues to succeed and thrive, Yang expands her protective nature to everyone on the team, even as Blake learns to trust her teammates will support her when needed. There's a fair amount of spoilers involved as to why the combined emotional arcs of Blake and Yang lead themselves to shipping goggles, but the two of them are often facing down the ghosts of each others' pasts together and they come out stronger, both of them, for doing so. Which also makes them the two who are most likely to comfort reach other in the aftermath of those encounters, and many of those scenes are extremely intimate and clearly show the bond between the two of them, even though there's never any suggestion overtly that either Blake or Yang is interested in each other.
This isn't a case of creators not being willing to go there, however, as Saphron Arc and Terra Cotta-Arc are very definitely married to each other and have a child. I feel like this is going to be one of those stories where after saving the world (or after something powerful enough to wrench the confession free) we're going to see a lot more relationship attempts, but for the moment, honestly, it feels like the Rooster Teeth folks are concentrating more on telling the story of trying to save the world, rather than trying to find their own small amount of peace in it. (Ren and Nora are the exception to that, as there's already been the confession by the time we get to where I am, but they're also putting things aside, for the most part, to save the world first.) And the longer Rooster Teeth delays, the more fic and the more ship combinations there will be. Like Bumblebee. (Because Blake is worth punching someone out over.)
If you're going to step into RWBY new, I recommend starting with volume 4, so that you get some sense of the story instead of being distracted by the fact that the first couple of volumes were done in one program before getting an upgrade to a newer one. The trailers, then 4-6, then, if you're still invested, go back and do at least 2-3, possibly 1-3, then charge ahead into 7 and beyond.
That's it for this sunshine offering. I hope you have enjoyed this journey through a lot of Steven Universe and a few other places when it made sense to go there. Stay tuned next for more links, and a summary post once the anonymity period ends for the last work that needs to be identified as such.
sunshine_challenge!A stone with a banded appearance, Sunshine Jasper is often used to keep negative energies at bay and keep your outlook positive so you can realize your dreams. It's also called Bumblebee Jasper and is often a warm sunshine yellow. Interestingly, it's an agate and not a jasper as the name implies. It is a new stone, first discovered in an Indonesian volcano in the 1990's. As it has not yet been found anywhere else in the world, the consensus is that this rare stone helps to attempt the impossible.
I was ready to go about Jasper, the relentless Steven Universe antagonist with single-minded zeal to destroy the Gem that shattered Pink Diamond, so much so that she makes some really bad decisions in her life, but reading the description sounds like I might have some other things to talk about as well. First, though, Jasper. Because of how strong she is compared to the Crystal Gems, one way of stopping her is for Lapis Lazuli (the power of unbounded emotions) to create a hostile fusion with Jasper, where Lapis' goal is to suppress Jasper as much as possible and keep her in the fusion. It's not glorified, romanticized, or sanitized that much, where it's fairly clear to anyone close enough to an account of the relevant experience that Malachite, the hostile fusion, is supposed to represent an abusive and controlling relationship. It's not good for either participant, as Lapis carries a lot of trauma from being the one trying to control Jasper and keep her down, as well as to modulate the latter's anger and desires to control and conquer and Jasper seeks to use fusion and other coercive methods to grow stronger, including fusing with a corrupted gem in her desire for power. (It works exactly as well as you would think, but the corrupted Gem is able to break and flee from the fusion, leaving Jasper both alone and corrupted herself as a result of chasing her obsession post the point of self-preservation. Eventually the Happier is healed of the corruption along with all the other corrupted Gems, but she remains aloof and combative with Steven, still on her quest to become stronger.
The bonus stone is Opal, one of the fusions of the main Crystal Gems, combining Pearl's precision with Amethyst's raw strength, firing a bow as her Gem weapon, but because of the distance Pearl's need for precision and Amethyst's general lack of it, the two of them can defuse fairly easily if they are not in accord with each other. In gemstone lore, a fairly common superstition is that opals are considered an unlucky stone to wear if you aren't born in the month where an opal is your birthstone, which appears to be cobbled together from various stories about opals appearing for events like deaths, from a story about a mood opal that discolors when touched by holy water that apparently indicated the wearer could be demonic, and the possibility that diamond merchants were worried about opals being a popular enough stone that there wouldn't be enough diamond sales. (Thanks, Howstuffworks.) Opals are really colorful, though, so they have had plenty of other associations over time than the negative ones that are most commonly repeated in our time. (Although there's probably some sort of funny thing you could manage in Steven Universe about Diamonds being hostile to an Opal, either as a trial or because of the Homeworld discouragement of cross-caste fusions.)
Circling back to the original stone, it's interesting that it's marked as an agate, not a jasper, because to scientists and others invested in a taxonomy, words have discrete meanings and categorizations. The Great Cladistics Shake-up made several of the words that were used to use to describe creatures based on observation less accurate or acknowledged that groups like "fish" include multiple clades without the ability to separate them out and declare a "true fish" clade, for example, and a lot of rocks have non-indicative names once you can get them under a microscope and test them in various ways, as well. That one of the names is Bumblebee Jasper (and at least one of the rocks has black and yellow striping on it, so as to make it pretty clear where the name comes from) lets me talk about one of the non-official ships of the RWBY fandom. From what I have seen in venturing or into other people's fandom spaces regarding RWBY ships, most of the major ships of the fandom don't use portmanteaus of the characters' names (Arkos, the Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos ship is one of the few exceptions, and even then, it's their surnames that form the portmanteau, not their given ones), but instead terms to describe some aspect of the relationship itself. Ruby and Penny, for example, is usually classified "Nuts and Dolts," (a play on the magazine title Nuts and Volts) which I think is increasingly inaccurate, as neither Ruby or Penny is stupid, but sometimes their innocence leads them in pathways the other characters might avoid. That, however, is a piece for another situation. The commonly accepted name for the pairing between Blake (cat woman, space used with intent, primary color scheme and association is black) and Yang (human woman, primary color scheme and association is yellow) is "Bumblebee." There's plenty of information available to a watcher of RWBY who is up on their fairy tales and mythologies so they can determine which story a character comes from, and sometimes that extends to ship names as well, but I'm this case, it's much more the yellow and black striping and the nature of the bumblebee.
It's worth noting that this is not a canonical ship - there are actually fairly few canonical ships in RWBY. Blake, for example, has only one confirmed ex-boyfriend, Adam (bull, shit-stirrer, abusive fuckweasel, secondary antagonist) and a possible interest in Sun (monkey, practical joker, hero in his own mind). She's also gotten a romantic confession from Ilia (chameleon woman, childhood friend, tertiary antagonish), but it's not reciprocated. When Arryn Zech (Blake's voice actress) revealed her bisexuality, there was intense fan speculation about whether that meant Blake was, as well, but again, there's not much confirmed anything about Blake. (Given the Trauma Conga Line that Blake goes through, she may not really have any desire at all for a romantic relationship with anyone. Possibly ever.)
Yang has no confirmed relationships, even though her character is often the first one to remark about wanting to go see the eye candy in several of the early volumes (Usually boys as the eye candy, but there's also no canonical stance that Yang wouldn't also appreciate a strong woman in the same way. We've just never seen her do it.) Since she's also been through a Trauma Conga Line before the series starts and through much of the series, it's entirely possible that while she maintains a player attitude and dresses and acts the most overly sexually provacatively of all of her team, it's basically a front of bravado and she's not interested in anyone. Or that she might be interested in someone, but she can't bring herself to say it or to indicate it in any kind of way. (Because, like her mother, she's not very good at being vulnerable at all.)
While everyone on Team RWBY has had a traumatic past, there's a lot of shared moments of empathy and protectiveness between Blake and Yang that leads itself to a shippy lens, because Blake's avoidance of direct conflict (her special magical ability is to create a clone of herself that disappears on contact, sometimes infused with the powers of Dust to imbue extra properties to it) contrasts with Yang's hair-trigger temper and extreme willingness to mix it up with anyone (Yang's special ability is to absorb the damage that she receives and transform it into strength, so long as the attack itself doesn't overwhelm her defenses and the attack is direct enough that she can tank it.) Yang had already been in a protective role for Ruby much of her life, and as Ruby continues to succeed and thrive, Yang expands her protective nature to everyone on the team, even as Blake learns to trust her teammates will support her when needed. There's a fair amount of spoilers involved as to why the combined emotional arcs of Blake and Yang lead themselves to shipping goggles, but the two of them are often facing down the ghosts of each others' pasts together and they come out stronger, both of them, for doing so. Which also makes them the two who are most likely to comfort reach other in the aftermath of those encounters, and many of those scenes are extremely intimate and clearly show the bond between the two of them, even though there's never any suggestion overtly that either Blake or Yang is interested in each other.
This isn't a case of creators not being willing to go there, however, as Saphron Arc and Terra Cotta-Arc are very definitely married to each other and have a child. I feel like this is going to be one of those stories where after saving the world (or after something powerful enough to wrench the confession free) we're going to see a lot more relationship attempts, but for the moment, honestly, it feels like the Rooster Teeth folks are concentrating more on telling the story of trying to save the world, rather than trying to find their own small amount of peace in it. (Ren and Nora are the exception to that, as there's already been the confession by the time we get to where I am, but they're also putting things aside, for the most part, to save the world first.) And the longer Rooster Teeth delays, the more fic and the more ship combinations there will be. Like Bumblebee. (Because Blake is worth punching someone out over.)
If you're going to step into RWBY new, I recommend starting with volume 4, so that you get some sense of the story instead of being distracted by the fact that the first couple of volumes were done in one program before getting an upgrade to a newer one. The trailers, then 4-6, then, if you're still invested, go back and do at least 2-3, possibly 1-3, then charge ahead into 7 and beyond.
That's it for this sunshine offering. I hope you have enjoyed this journey through a lot of Steven Universe and a few other places when it made sense to go there. Stay tuned next for more links, and a summary post once the anonymity period ends for the last work that needs to be identified as such.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-26 05:16 am (UTC)This is the kind of info I absolutely love and would never have guessed and feels like it could be useful for a story someday.
I'm not too familiar with RWBY, but I liked reading your thoughts and I'll keep that in mind about volume 4. (^^)
no subject
Date: 2022-07-26 02:45 pm (UTC)If you do go that route with RWBY, let me know. I'm trying to see if it will work as a valid Machete Order, so that people will get invested in the characters and the story so that when they get the backstory they're willing to go through the rougher models that come from the earlier volumes.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-06 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-26 09:56 pm (UTC)I've seen RWBY mentioned around before, but I've never looked into it at all. You do make me interested, though, with the thorough descriptions.
Thank you for all of your thoughtful entries this year. I enjoyed reading them and carrying some of them with me to ponder more.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-26 10:59 pm (UTC)It's really hard to talk about the biggest emotional impacts of RWBY without spoiling something about it, so if you're intrigued, I hope you'll give it a try and see if the recommended order works for you.
I'm glad you found some of these rambles useful and worth another thought.