What could Too Far mean?

Do you ever wonder if all of the stuff we’re learning about the Gem homeworld is building up to anything? There’s a lot of season two remaining, after all, but we’ve already learned so much about the homeworld.

It’s just a thought—something to consider. Let’s wonder a bit about some stuff from Too Far, shall we?

The function of Rubies

We’ve already wondered what Rubies are like on the homeworld. At the time, based on Ruby’s aggression we concluded that Rubies are probably light soldiers meant to disrupt the enemy while the heavier soldiers like the Jaspers did all of the real work (and got all of the glory).

It’s still a reasonable hypothesis, but now we’ve seen two examples of soldier Gems who seem to set the standard for the entire gem quartz type: very large soldiers two to two-and-a-half times Ruby’s height. We don’t know enough about Jaspers or properly cooked Amethysts to be able to tell whether there are any significant differences between them, or whether they are functionally interchangeable.

Heck, we don’t even know if all Jaspers use helmets and all Amethysts use whips or if Gems of the same type have different weapons. We know that Gems are quite comfortable with wielding weapons other than their own innate weapons, so even randomized weapons wouldn’t stop them from being used interchangeably, but we still have so much to learn about Gems.

The more interchangeable quartz-types are, the more likely it is that Rubies are soldiers. The bigger question really comes when you consider Sapphire: plenty of people highlighted Amethyst’s similarity to Jasper, as well as them both of their gems being types of quartz, and plenty of people also highlight that rubies and sapphires are simply types of corundum. That means that we would expect them both to have the same job, based on the example of the quartzes.

Ruby is no seer (even complaining about her lack of future vision when not part of Garnet), but she shares strong elemental powers with Sapphire. If they are meant for combat, then perhaps their magic is how they fight. The crew has said that some Gems have magic as their “weapon”, so Ruby’s glove from Keystone Motel would seem to make this unlikely. We did see a zap of lightning, a power Garnet has, poof Pearl in Garnet’s flashback sequence in Sworn to the Sword though, so we’ll just mark this as a “maybe” until we learn more.

Era-one drills

Plenty of people were confused when Peridot called the Kindergarten injectors “Era-One drills”. When you think about it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: by the time the Kindergarten was built the Gems had already spread out across the universe. If the drills were from some first era though, that necessarily implies that they are from the very beginning. How can this be?

Peridot quickly follows up her labeling the Kindergerten drill as being from Era One with a criticism of its finish. She hasn’t been shy about criticizing archaic technology in the past, but all she has to say about the old injectors is that they don’t look as good as the new ones. Gem computer interfaces, automatons, interstellar ships, and personal weaponry have all experienced great leaps in the time since the rebellion, but the only change to the injectors that we have been made aware of is cosmetic.

If only the appearance has changed, and even then just the finish on the machine and not any more intricate alterations, then injectors must have been perfected before the end of Era One. This era could have lasted a long time: the term “era” is quite open-ended after all, and is basically used to denote time periods significant to the user in any way they wish. Era One is presumably the first chunk of time by which Gemkind reckons its history, so could have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years during which Kindergarten technology was conceived, developed, implemented, and iteratively improved as it was used on countless worlds.

That leaves us trying to figure out, with incredibly limited information about Gem history, what the homeworld would base the switch from Era One to Era Two on. We know it happened after the Crystal Gem rebellion, but anything else is guesswork.

There is, however, a very strong guess we can make: in the Pink Diamond Theory, we cover an interesting change in the emblem that the homeworld uses to represent the “Diamond Authority”—the name the fans use to refer to its highest leaders. Before the rebellion the emblem recognizes four rulers, and afterwards only three. Could this be what triggered the end of an era?

Humanity reckons historical eras by dynasty plenty, and since Gems resemble humans in so many other ways it would be reasonable for them to mark their shifting from a quadrumvirate to a triumvirate as moving to a new era.

If Rose leaving the Diamond Authority was really the cause of the shift between eras, and not the wave of rebellions that might have rocked the Gem empire at the same time as the Crystal Gem rebellion (though the two may have been inextricably linked), then that would mean she was part of the authority from the very beginning. The longer Gem history is, the greater the implications for the truth of this idea are. It’s really a lot to consider.