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GC13 and Sophia finish the retro episode discussions by talking about that wonderful kettle of fish: Future Vision.
It’s fun, but boy does the existence of future vision make some things hard to theorize about. We manage though!
Whether you gotta go quickly, or whether you’re still in the Ninja Squad, you can’t deny that future vision is at least a very consequential power. It might even be stronger than drinking coffee for breakfast.
If you ever have the opportunity to get a high-five from Lars though, you better take it—those chances don’t come around often.
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If we’re going to be technical, the Beedrill was a video game reference, like the Lon Lon milk from Zelda, or Steven’s Gamecube with Animal Crossing and Wind Waker.
Have any of you heard of or read the Dune series of science fiction books? It deals with Future Vision, or “Prescience”, in a very abstract yet simultaneously realistic way. Garnet’s description of her vision as a constantly shifting river with pools and waterfalls reminded me of some of the descriptions that the main character has for his “future vision”. One thing to note is that Garnet and Sapphire have said how they knew something would happen, but things either deviated slightly in a way she didn’t expect (Steven Floats) or an unlikely occurrence she had seen but didn’t think would happen happens (Hit the Diamond). This would indicate her vision tends to act more like a probability calculator instead of just looking at things like through a window.
One thing that is an issue, but won’t become relevant until yall come back around to Winter Forecast, is that each of Steven’s subsequent visions shows a Steven that somehow has future knowledge yet only up to the point where his “vision” drops him off. What I wonder is if Steven tried doing those things he does that failed, but this time with the knowledge he had gained.
As I commented after your Winter Forecast post, I think you are worrying to much about Garnet’s future vision. In theory it could be as problematic as you suggest but in application it is obvious that it has any number of limitations. First as you suggested you must know the correct questions to ask. Second if you’re going to use what you see you have to discount low probability outcomes. The third major limitation is the one I suggested during the winter forecast post and that is that it makes use of known information to predict probable outcomes, simply filling in your best guess for any missing information. This can be a very powerful predictive tool, there are any number of estimation techniques that can be ridiculously accurate despite the fact that they boil down to making your best guesses about unknown information. The idea is that small mistakes will cancel each other out as long as they are randomly distributed (there is a very good Deep Space 9 episode that deals with the idea of this kind of prediction). Although explicitly telling us how future vision works might be more immediately satisfying, if you trust that the show does have a logical explanation, it can be a lot of fun to work it out yourself.
O hey, did you know that Garnet is specifically written to never ask questions? Cuz Rose said to never question anything and be confident.
The writers only break this code *once* and this is during Could’ve Been Great during the song, in which Garnet asks “Is there anything that’s worth more?”