✨ hi i’m jasper/mika and i love my friends and cities at night!! i think my body also completely consists of coffee at this point but please promo omg?! 🌺 ✨
this more I think about it, the more creepy, but interesting and complex super watermelon island is. specifically the huge difference we see between how malachite treats the watermelon stevens when lapis is in control vs when jasper is in control.
like when lapis is in control, she is angry at them and eats them. you can argue that this is maybe a combination of lapis and jasper (and I am not going to completely rule out the possibility) but all of the cues are there to tell us that this is lapis: the water chains havn’t broken, and jasper is still fighting to break free. but most importantly: malachite clearly growls out steven’s name.
jasper never calls steven anything other than rose. a huge part of her character and her arc is her trying to get her revenge against steven because she thinks he is rose.
but when jasper is in control she’s delighted by the watermelons. she laughs like they’re playing. she doesn’t attack them, even when they shoot arrows at her, catapult rocks at her face, punch her right in the eyeball, or trip her up. the worst she gets is “annoyed”.
she only attacks them when she thinks they are trying to “hold her down”. which is related to her trauma/ptsd from lapis:
“I’m really trying to enjoy it out here, but… I can’t stop thinking about being fused as Malachite, how I used all my strength to hold her down in the ocean, and how I was always battling against Jasper to keep her bound to me.”
(it’s no coincidence that they repeated this very specific wording in alone at sea)
and what makes this interesting is that this goes against how the show typically presents these characters. lapis is steven’s “beach summer fun buddy” she’s not “mean” she just wanted to go home! and jasper is horrible and mean. knowing this patter you would probably assume that of the two, lapis should be the one laughing and playing with the watermelons, and only hurting them if they triggered her ptsd. and jasper should be the one growling and chowing down on them in rage.
but it’s actually pretty in character for both of them, once you consider the emotional context of both scenes (lapis was trying to hold the fusion together, jasper was having fun beating up the crystal gems) and how they treat their enemies.
like during ocean gem, connie, steven, and greg, weren’t really a threat to her. she would know this too, considering she knew what humans are, that they were harmless, and specifically knew that she could drown them if she bubbled their heads in water.
and while jasper is ruthless towards the crystal gems, they’re her enemies. she’s violent towards her “army” but this isn’t a surprise when we see that homeworld has gems like agates, and how homeworld abandons and/or shatters it’s “off color” gems. peridot tells jasper that she’s a crystal gem, and antagonizes her, but jasper never tries to attack her. jasper is angry that “rose” took away her limb enhancers.
jasper and lapis are both violent, but lapis typically lashes out at any convenient target regardless of what they have actually done or what kind of threat they actually pose to her. jasper obsesses over the crystal gems (and rose specifically) and she directs all of her wrath at them. she doesn’t lash out and hurt others out of anger the way lapis does. and while she isn’t exactly pleasant or harmless in other contexts, she’s not hurting them out of anger. she does these things because she thinks is the right thing to do, and that this is just how the world works.
so all of that being said, what are their motivations in that episode?
well, jasper’s is pretty easy. she is in a good mood, lapis allowed her to have all the freedom in the world after months of keeping her in captivity. she doesn’t see the watermelons as a threat. so their attempts to attack her might seem funny or cute to her. the same way a kitten attacking you is funny and cute. she freaked out and attacked them when she was triggered.
but why would lapis be so angry at steven? to the point where she has made such a ritual out of eating his effigy that the watermelon stevens made it into a ritual? it seems to conflict with basically every other source (in and outside of canon) which talks about how much she loves him. it could be that she only attacks them because they’re there but….
remember the events of chille tid?
“just let me do this for you!” only came after steven refused to leave, no matter how many times she told him to go away and that she didn’t want his help. we know her actual motivations thanks to her lines in alone at sea and interviews. she never did this for steven. she did this because she wanted revenge, and she wanted to feel in control. it was a desperate attempt at manipulation to get him to leave, along with saying they she’s not lapis anymore (another lie, since we see that lapis and jasper maintained their separate identities in super watermelon island)
she was desperate for him to leave because his presence made it difficult for her to keep that control. she didn’t want to be “rescued”. she wanted to keep malachite going forever.
so it’s possible that she was angry at steven specifically because he tried to help them break up, and that made maintaining malachite more difficult for her. which is something that she took out on the watermelon stevens.
