yeah!! idk if there was any One Post that brought the idea forward first, or more like, put it into words, but it’s definitely a useful way of describing rose’s character in the show and helping people understand their mixed feelings about her.
i think it’s really cool, what rose’s character has done. we got to know her exclusively through second-hand accounts (excluding her tape, where she talks directly to steven). everything else is skewed by someone else’s personal opinions/views of her (through i think we can assume since greg’s stories about her are in flashback-form, they are more or less trustworthy as factual)
i was thinking about it earlier today, about why a lot of people seem to have grown to vehemently hate rose and/or pink, and i think it’s for that very reason… like, the closest i can think of it is how we can get attached to a Public Figure, or a Content Creator - you think very well of them, they seem super nice, they did a lot of good stuff, you admire them! but then you find out they did shitty things in the past and it puts you in a weird position because the things they did were! bad! and you feel a bit betrayed, even if you never personally knew them and you never saw the ‘real’ them. were they ever genuine? are they only as real as all the bad stuff they’ve done?
i think liking rose and then growing unsure of who she was and being unsettled by or outright angry about the things she did when she was still Pink Diamond kind of captures a similar feeling. it also works well with how you idealize a parent when you’re wrong, then at some point you recognize them as flawed and just a person, like you, and it can be super difficult to reconcile that.
she’s very interesting!! but i think it’s really important to both 1) appreciate how far she did come, in actuality - she DOES grow a lot, at least philosophically, but also 2) her position as both a gem and as a Diamond made changing herself in any sort of meaningful, constructive, positive way REALLY DIFFICULT
lately people have been talking more about how the way pink was brought up (by the Diamonds) contributes a lot to why she acts the way she does (towards Spinel, towards Greg, etc.) which is great! but i also think that people generally undervalue the fact that gems are… ALIENS… literally BUILT to be a particular way, to fulfill a specific purpose… just, in general, they don’t even have a lot of CONCEPTS that we do. of course we’ve learned enough about them to understand gems are susceptible to the same follies as humanity - anger, fear, resentment, mental and emotional instability, etc. etc. But it’s not a really ~natural~ way for them to be, they have to TRY to adapt to that sort of thing, which leads to really extreme cases like Spinel or even Lapis
oof but i’m getting into a whole other topic entirely!! i’ll just rap up by saying yeah, it’s super cool that rose’s character arc is sort of given to us in reverse, it makes for a very interesting relationship between her and the audience, but such an approach obviously has it’s pros and cons. i think it’s cool and i’m glad a lot of people are understanding better why rose/pink is a conflicting character for them.