pyreo:Okay all right give me ONE more SU post because I ADORED the space garden scene. God I love th
pyreo:Okay all right give me ONE more SU post because I ADORED the space garden scene. God I love the device of a robot/immortal whatever standing and waiting in the same place for eons just because they were told to and when I realised that’s what this was I got so excitedEven the establishing shot is heartbreaking, it was obviously an intricate place of importance but it’s rotted to nothing, there’s visual motifs of it literally hanging by a threadYou can tell from the animation why Pink left her ‘toy’ behind. She was gonna be a real Diamond with her own planet and that meant she had to grow up. The garden and the neverending playtime with Spinel represent Pink’s childhood and you can see when she’s on the phone with Blue and Yellow and Spinel keeps bouncing into the shot, she’s embarrassed. She wants to be a proper Diamond with colonies and she won’t have time to play any more, but she doesn’t do the difficult thing and explain this. She strings Spinel along because it’s easier and she has her trust. Diamonds have trouble seeing non-diamonds as worthy of time or respect.Then you get the refrain “Happily watching her drift away” with the extension, a full bar to itself before the key change, on ‘drift’, making you wait for it to conclude, just like Spinel, making you focus on the drift, the slow, gradual separation of something you don’t want to acknowledge, the three beats desperately holding on until the fourth one dives into the minor. Finally you get the impact: the years passing, hundreds of them. Hundreds, and her smile has only dimmed a little. Like all SU songs that explore relationships between magical mineral aliens, the lyrics are metaphorical and applicable to ourselves when taken out of context. “Happily wondering, night after night, Is this how it works? Am I doing it right?Happy to listen. Happy to stay. Happily watching her drift away. You keep on turning pagesFor people who don’t care, people who don’t care about you.And still it takes you agesTo see that no-one’s there, see that no-one’s there, see that no-one’s thereEveryone’s gone on without you.”It’s any relationship with a person who doesn’t give you emotional support. Leaving you thinking you must be doing something wrong and it’s up to you to figure it out and do better, on your own. It could be any relationship with a person who’s physically present, keeping you around, but isn’t interested any more and hints that it’ll all go back the way it was if you play their game correctly. You become an outsider to a life you thought you lived in as someone you love replaces you with others and doesn’t have the honesty to tell you things have changed. After 6000 years we catch up with the present day and connect to the foreshadowing at the beginning. The broadcast going out to a seemingly uninhabited wasteland. Spinel can hardly move, her feet are nearly merged with the ground. Pink said ‘stand very still’ and she never so much as unclasped her hands.Spinel relives the memory of the emotional impact and we get to see it, when she realised nobody had thought about her for 6000 years, nobody was coming back, that she could have used the teleporter to leave any time and nobody was going to reward her diligence for trying so hard to play the ‘game’ of her last instructions. As usual, SU uses the framing of immortal, mentally-programmed gems to dig down into the extremely human problems of misusing power, and loving somebody more than they love you.Then having relived the experiences that made her her, like the others, Spinel changes form to before she was reset. By losing her memories she was able to act without malice, but in order to start recovering, she has to allow herself to acknowledge that she was misused. She later says that nobody would want her in that form - the one in disarray, unkempt, with a mimicry of mascara streaks down her cheeks from crying. She’s ashamed to have loved and been hurt, implies she should have known better. The rest of the finale is trying to figure out how to help Spinel recover without erasing what she went through, so she can live with it and realise it wasn’t her fault. Steven starts a duet with her and tells her she can learn to love again and she deserves better, in which the line “You just need to find someone” ends on another elongated beat, and Spinel repeats the same drop in cadence from the “drift” in Drift Away, but the song has Steven lead her from that painful memory into a new tune. She can’t go back to the person she was before and she can’t remove the effects on her personality or appearance from being mistreated, but she can still have a future. -- source link