phantomrose96:

You know, I think it’s important to consider the massive time dissonance the Gems experience.

The war was over 5,000 years ago, and Pearl seems to remember it clearly. She casually remarks to Dewey how humans used to hunt and gather, and asks him “whatever happened to that?” as if Dewey could have even possibly been alive back then. She tries to take Steven out to space for a bit of a test run and reassures Greg that she’ll have him back in 50 years.

This stuff is usually played for laughs until you consider that Rose has been dead for, probably at most, 11 years. To humans, that’s a pretty decent amount of time to grieve, adjust, cope, and move on. Some of us probably don’t even have distinct memories from 11 years ago.

But to Gems, where 5,000 years is nostalgic and 50 years is as casual as babysitting for the weekend, Rose may as well have died yesterday. 11 years is nothing, less than nothing, in Gem memory. And even with all their memories of Rose so raw and recent, the Gems still pretend for Steven’s sake that they’ve already moved on. …I think about this a lot every time one of them breaks down over Rose’s death.