Rebecca Sugar herself said that Jasper had a deep sense of hate for herself. But why? She's the perfect soldier. She has no defects, as Peridot revealed in Earthlings Even Matt Burnett said she was a complicated character. What's so complicated about being better than everyone else? Jasper is always talking about it and showing off her strength. So what reason would she ever have to feel bad about herself.
Serious question. Because I see a lot of jasper meta out there that includes her status as “the ultimate quartz” as something that earns her special treatment (but also being up on the pedestal isolates her) and as something she feels like she has to live up to. But the only homeworld gems that we’ve seen that know about her origins are peridot and eyeball ruby.
Peridot naturally assumes that jasper is defective. But not only is she defective, she must be defective on such a fundamental level that amethyst (a visibly defective quartz) is clearly superior to her and this isn’t even a contest. Yes, amethyst is small because she spent too much time in the ground, but everything about her kindergarten was perfect. Jasper has no visible flaws, but she came from beta therefore she must be defective. Peridot got through talking about how an exit hole has to have a “clean, strong silhouette” and when they see that with jasper’s hole? She dismisses it. She literally tries to nitpick every single possible flaw that jasper could have had, and only when she ran out of things to look for did she come to the conclusion that she’s “the ultimate quartz”.
Jasper is eyeball’s hero, she see’s her as important, a living legend from the war. And yet she knows her as “the facet 9 quartz that could”. Jasper’s legacy is that she’s someone who succeeded despite her origins through sheer willpower. The only difference between this attitude and peridot’s is that the veterans who know of her also know her accomplishments. The underlying message is still the same: she’s from facet 9 so she should not have been able to succeed, but she did because she had the willpower to do so. And when you look at it from that perspective jasper is not seen as a perfect specimen who is admired for her accomplishments as “the ultimate quartz” even among the gems who admire her. no, she’s the “the only disability in life is a bad attitude!!!” inspiration poem.
The only way anyone would even know that she’s “the ultimate quartz” was if they took the time to inspect the way peridot did, and I doubt that was a priority, or even a thought that would cross someone’s mind when literally every other quartz was defective. It would have been easy to assume (as peridot did) that she’s just as defective as the rest of her sisters, she just happened to be bigger than them.
Yeah jasper says “this planet ruins everything except for me!” and how she got out because she’s “better than this place”. But I think a lot like amethyst’s “I only feel how I wanna feel” that’s just something she tells herself. We know from the rebecca sugar interview that jasper has a deep sense of self loathing because of her origins on earth. She probably does feel like despite her strength and her accomplishments that she has to be defective on some level. She could be the perfect quartz soldier and do everything perfectly but still have the nagging feeling that no, something has to be wrong.
She has to be different, she has to be wrong, and she doesn’t know what her flaw is but it’s only a matter of time before someone finds out the “truth”. After all, everyone in her life has either dismissed her outright as “ok so she’s tall and strong but she’s defective somehow” like peridot, or praised her as “look at you go!!! Doing everything a normal quartz can do even though you’re from beta!! You must have such strong willpower to overcome that! :)” like eyeball.
So each failure is especially painful for her, not because she failed to live up to the perfection that’s expected of her, but because she did live up to the expectation that something must be horribly wrong with her. That it just proves that she really isn’t any better than her sisters. and that ultimately makes her feel worthless and that she should have died on earth, because that’s what happens to defective gems like her in her perfect world. She feels like she deserves to suffer because she “allowed” herself to be weak and for that situation to happen instead of using that legendary willpower of hers to overcome any obstacle.
Twitter: Emerald
