For Pearl’s song “It’s Over isn’t it?” the scene is about Pearl accepting a loss. As the series has progressed, she’s learned that she isn’t always right, and that there are things about herself that she’s has to reevaluate. This all comes to a sort of climax in this scene where she accepts and admits out loud that her relationship with Rose was never as deep and complete as she wanted it to be or told herself it was. This is where she’s left at the end of the scene, feeling lost and out of place.

In the outline written by Ben Levine and Matt Burnett, this is how the scene looked:

You’ll notice a lot of things ended up changing compared to the final version. Most of that was due to time constraints. When we started storyboarding the episode, all of the rough demos of the songs were recorded so that we had an idea of the amount of time we had between each song (which ended up not being very much). The result was that we had to basically be transitioning constantly between songs, but doing it in a way that felt natural and as gentle as possible.

In addition, Rebecca remembered a part from the 1982 movie “Victor Victoria” starring Julie Andrews that she wanted to use as reference for the feeling of the scene:

Right away we latched onto this spinning 360 degree camera move. I loved the energy and focus it gave to the character and I immediately roughed out a version with Pearl.

If you’re ever stuck during a scene this is what you do: Don’t start from the beginning, find the moment you see clearest in your mind and build out from there. From these rough thumbnails I built the rest of the scene outward. I brought back motifs like her sword skills and her dance style to help evoke the past events of the series, and I tried to give as much time as I could to each shot and make her acting as expressive a possible.

Below are my rough boards set to Rebecca’s demo. At the end, i added a pause for when she throws the Rose into the air. It felt like a good spot for things to crescendo ring out. Deedee Magno Hall’s rendering of this blew us all away when we heard it.

From there clean up was pretty much straight forward. The scene didn’t change much except for tweaking her acting here and there. I’m super proud of how this scene turned out, hats off to Nick DeMayo our animation director and to the team at Sunimin in Korea where they draw the entire episode on paper:

I think we are all are getting blind sided by the real problem about the Steven Universe thing. We think the Home World Gems are the ones to fear but were not looking at the bigger picture. The gems were expanding their armies way before the war we knew. The war here only started because it had sentient life on it, implying they were doing this on worlds before and just this one had life on it.

The home world gems wrote this place off and came back to it much later. They came back to pick up on some experiments they left off. They want to force fuse “broken” gems. Gems that are already considered dead. The ones that were buried.  

We are distracted by Garnet though. We are distracted about Steven’s problems, Lapiz Lazuli, and your little green dorito. Rightfully so, as any good writer would have you to believe. Distracted from what though? Think about the logistics of it. You go from planet to planet and you plant gems. You should have no difficulty creating an army. You don’t NEED to bring back dead gems if your army’s size is so great. So why go about and do experiments like this?

Because the Home World Gems are fighting a war with someone else, and you know what’s worse? They are losing.

Think about it. You have this great army going on here. You just simply fly to a new planet and plant more gems if you want more, but your gems are getting slaughtered and broken to pieces by something else and they’re starting to get desperate. What ever battle ground this is happening on, they can’t so easily pick up their dead. Logically you go back to Earth where you know there are tons of broken gems and no horrible legions of what ever is out there giving the Home world a run for its money. 

Rose Quartz was a diamond at one point. At one point of time she was a leader who fought for the home world for a reason. Suddenly what happened on Earth crossed her morals. So the Home World Gems weren’t always the bad guys, but what ever they have been fighting has been pushing them.  What ever they were fighting may have even been a lot simpler problem back then, but losing Earth and losing at least one Diamond such as Rose may have dramatically set them back. The Home World only pulled out of Rose’s war because they no longer had the resources to continue two wars at once. Even thinking about it, the home world trying to fuse broken gems could be their desperate measure for making up for no longer having Rose’s vital healing tears anymore.

Putting things in that perspective, it’s possible that when Jasper said that Rose Quartz takes priorities, she didn’t mean it because of her own personal vendetta against Rose but rather the strategic advantage of having Rose’s healing capabilities on their side again. Exactly the reason why they needed to take dear Steven directly to Yellow Diamond themselves.

I bet my ass theyre fighting a war against a race of sentient metals that use he/him pronouns