What did we learn from Reformed?

Well Reformed definitely answered some questions, and you don’t get any points for guessing what we learned about. Still, in the interests of keeping most spoilers off of the main page, you’re just going to have to read more if you want to be sure that your guess was correct.

She’s really taking her time with this one

Steven the Sword Fighter introduced us to the concept of a Gem being forced to release their physical form then eventually reforming. It also gave us a rather poor baseline for the time a reformation would take: Pearl took two weeks to reform, but it was remarked up on being slow. Even considering that caveat it seems that we were still left with too high an estimation for time, considering what we’ve seen to be possible.

We learned a lot about reformation (it’s a little obvious), but most obviously we learned that the time it takes to reform is widely variable, both between Gems and for an individual Gem. Amethyst was capable of rushing her reformation within seconds, though doing so had a negative impact on her form, but her last reformation took her four hours to accomplish.

Of course that four hours was the longest Amethyst had ever taken to reform, just as Pearl’s two-week reformation was considered a long one for her. Assuming they were roughly the same in how divergent they were from their normal times (say Amethyst normally takes two hours and Pearl normally takes a week), that still puts Amethyst’s time to reform at about 1.2% of Pearl’s.

Countless gems were broken here

As we already mentioned, Amethyst was able to reform within seconds. Because she couldn’t resume her old form correctly with a bit over thirty seconds to work on it we don’t want to overstate how useful this would be in a battle, but it’s certainly something Gems fighting against other Gems would have to worry about if the fight continued for any length of time—even after reforming almost immediately Amethyst had a form she could still fight at least somewhat effectively with.

We see the Crystal Gems bubbling monster gems all of the time, and while they might be able to do that when there’s many of them and just one enemy, what if they were fighting in a large battle? Either both sides are in formation, in which case a defeated Gem’s gem can probably be protected, or they’re in a disorganized mess of a battle where stopping to bend over and bubble a gem is incredibly dangerous. But that gem has to be dealt with, or within minutes the enemy can get right back up and start fighting again. That means it needs to be broken, either during the initial attack or quickly after it falls to the ground.

This form isn’t sustainable

There’s also one more big thing we learned about reformation: a Gem can attempt to make their form stronger. When Amethyst attempted this she was only able to squeeze the extra power into one arm and one leg, and Garnet’s warning of it not being sustainable proved to be true when her arm shriveled after a short burst of combat.

So this does seem to confirm that a Gem’s gem only has so much power to go around. To continue with the computer metaphor for Gems, Amethyst tried to overclock her form but found that she would overheat too quickly, forcing a drastic reduction in clock speed.

It’s very interesting to see that Gems do have that level of control: if they want to try to optimize their forms for battle, they have the opportunity.