OK so in the new SU promo they have one of Pearl’s lines in the extended theme play over it, saying, “If you could only know/what we really are,” with the line ‘what we really are’ repeating. This already makes you think that we’re going to learn something new about someone, something that contradicts what we’ve learned so far. Considering how Pearl was singing about the Gems, you’d think we’ll be learning about them, and to be honest, there’s plenty of reason to suspect them.
I mean, we’ve only had the Gems say their side of the story, talking about how they protected the Earth from Homeworld. But they’ve been pretty biased when it comes to the past. Just look at how they talked about Rose, how they said she was perfect in every way. Then you see her in flashbacks and realize that the Gems were romanticizing the shit out of her. She wasn’t perfect at all. Maybe nice in general, but she had issues to work out. Point is, the Gems weren’t completely unbiased about her. Can we really say that they wouldn’t romanticize what the Crystal Gems were like?
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Crystal Gems committed some atrocities back in the day, back when they were a much larger rebel army fighting off Homeworld. There are plenty of times when the supposedly-good side in a war does something horrible in order to win (sorry Japan). War isn’t just good vs. evil. Just like everything in life, it’s more grayish than that. And Steven Universe is all about portraying real life, aliens and magic notwithstanding.
Last thing I want to say while on the topic of grayishness is that we should keep Rose in our thoughts. Remember, Greg once said how he barely knew her, and her reply was, “That’s a good thing.” Rose has definitely done bad things in the past. We know she wasn’t as perfect as the Gems made her out to be, but it could go further than that. We could end up seeing who really is, going along with the song lyics again. Something others have pointed out is how in flashbacks, Rose always has shadows over her eyes. The only time where that’s not the case is in her video message to Steven, which could mean that that was a point in her life where she had gotten over her problems and her past. There’s something about Rose that we haven’t learned yet, I guarentee it.
TL;DR Rose and the Crystal Gems seem pretty shady and we might learn ‘what they really are.’
Make fun of it all you want, but the repeated what we really are holds so much meaning and foreshadowing. Steven’s gonna find out some dark shit about the gems he never knew before. He’s going to find out what they really are.
A peek at the disaster 