Why do there have to be episodes with so many questions and so few answers? Yes, they’re fun to wonder about, but… Alright, they’re very fun to wonder about actually. Buddy’s Book is definitely high up on the list of unanswered questions though. Still, read on, and we’ll ask those questions, and try to answer what we can.
Everything changes
Let’s start off with a bit of mystery we talked about yesterday: the mysteriously changing illustration on the pillar at the Lunar Sea Spire. It’s definitely the same pillar that the Crystal Gems passed by in Cheeseburger Backpack: there’s an exterior support pillar with the middle missing, and four pillars to the left of that one there’s a pillar with some chunks missing at the top (in between Buddy’s travels and the destruction of the spire further damage to the support pillars took place, but these two pillars are the same).
So it’s definitely the same part of the same center pillar showing a very different image, and not a different part of the pillar with different decorations. The question is how and why it changed from depicting lions and space to herbivores and nothing. Considering Rose’s secret pride of lions, she’s certainly a suspect, but what could her motives be? The Crystal Gems were at the spire in the past hundred years, pretty much right in between Buddy’s exploration and Rose deciding to have Steven, so if it was meant to keep information from them it must have nothing to do with Rose’s impending loss of her physical form.
One question we can try to answer is why the Heaven Beetle’s room lost its modern trappings; in Giant Woman there was a television, along with other modern items, while in Buddy’s time those things weren’t there. It’s possible that someone maintains its room (it’s possible for it to be Rose if the latest electronics the Heaven Beetle had were a Sega Genesis and an original Game Boy), but it’s also possible that its room is a projection like its physical form, and so can be easily updated like a room in the Crystal Temple.
Lion the mood
We come back to the question of Rose’s lions, though. As we said yesterday, Pearl definitely didn’t know about these lions. Many people have pointed out that we can’t say with any certainty what color the lions actually were, since Buddy doesn’t mention colors in his description of them or Rose; it’s therefore possible that Lion was one of these lions, already pink but his fur color going un-commented on because Buddy had more important things on his mind at the time.
Even if Lion was already part of the pride rather than a special project, however, that doesn’t answer any questions: rather than a single magical lion, we’d have to wonder about the existence of seven. They’re obviously quite tame and loyal to Rose, so they may be corrupted Gems who Rose was able to mostly heal. Why she’d keep her success from the others, however, is a good question. One possibility we haven’t heard others talking about is that Rose someone turned her human lovers into immortal lions towards the end of their lifespan, but that one is kind of out there. You have to admit though, Greg’s mane would have meant he’d make a great lion.
The Palanquin
Buddy documented what we can only assume was Blue Diamond’s palanquin, as seen in The Answer. Lots of people have caught this, but we want to be cautious about the conclusions we draw from it: while Blue Diamond may have run into trouble on Earth and had to abandon her palanquin, she almost certainly survived the war. When Pink Diamond was shattered, she was removed from the Diamond Authority’s insignia.
People have spotted candidates they believe might be White, Blue, and Pink Diamond all bubbled safely away in the Crystal Temple. Shattered gems are not necessarily beyond Rose’s ability to repair them, so people could possibly be right about all three of these Diamonds having fallen to the rebellion (or, scary thought, not to the rebellion) in secret, but Yellow Diamond would have to be quite crafty to hide the fact that she is the last survivor of the Great Diamond Authority for five thousand years.
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Its obvious why the spire looks different it reformed. They keep putting the moon goddess statue everytime the place starts rotting. Till steven messed up.
Alright guys, just because some of the book flashback was Steven’s imagination doesnt mean it all is, those lions are lions normal brown lions.
No, None of those gems look like the diamonds only one does the one from serious steven but it glows yellow so it clearly is not white diamond. And YD is fine. White and blue are fine.
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A constant cycle of reformation? Fascinating. That would require them to leave the statue behind in Buddy’s day though, but already have it in Steven’s (apparently not having been back to the spire since they last fixed it).
If that’s the case, does that mean they’re taking the statue away from it again every so often? Is there some reason it shouldn’t be left there? Or was this just the first time it broke down? Alternatively, maybe they have a lot of statues.
Also, on the whole color-of-the-lions thing, that strikes me as being in the same category as the whole “Pink Diamond wasn’t shattered!” thing — yes, it’s possible that the showrunners could be lying to us, but it would be a pretty cheap tactic, and I think the Crewniverse is better than just resorting to what are essentially retcons. On the lions things specifically, it kind of matters that these are normal brown lions — that’s an important detail when all we’ve seen is pink Lion. Why would they lie to us? It’s not like we’re getting too close to solving the mystery of Lion or anything. If Steven were just making it up based on what he knew, he might as well imagine them as pink — but I tend to err on the side of assuming what we’re shown is true. Otherwise, we might as well start questioning everything we saw in “The Answer” and the Greg flashback episodes too, cause after all those were just Steven’s imagination of other stories too. And that means we wouldn’t have Blue Pearl, which would make me sad. Therefore, I trust the brown lions.