i'm so glad i've mostly dodged the pearl/greg discourse lol. taking umbrage with doodles that arent even canon is silly. you are getting angry at literal colors and shapes. go outside.
if you want my actual interpretation, i see pearl as a lesbian in canon. i think that's probably more-or-less what they landed on, since canon never implied otherwise. in later seasons, she has like 500 gfs and nothing else is mentioned. she seems annoyed at male attention.
but i also see SU as a land where gender and sexuality are fluid, even more than in other gay media. gemkind approaches the idea of earth gender from an outsider pov. i think that's very intentional, this gender-nonconforming perspective from a non-binary creator. it's not just a gay show, it's a queer show.
the boundaries we call "gender" aren't that strict. amethyst can transform into a "male-passing" wrestling persona on a whim, then undo it just as quickly. steven can do drag and gems can present all over the place. its never a big deal. nobody cares whether their gender is "supposed" to do that.
i also think seperationism is lame as hell. i dont see a need to police who gets to be included in what gendered label, especially in fictional self-expression. all of that is based on a very strict, cisnormative, binary ideal of gender in the first place. that's not to say your individual, strongly held binary identity (i'm a binary man!) isn't "valid", just that being honest here, we cannot afford to police this stuff without invalidating other people. and while critique is allowed, i think one should be especially cautious in critiquing other people's creative expression of their own gender and sexuality.
Agree--as presented in canon, Pearl hasn't shown any interest in anyone who wasn't a Gem or a human woman, and has spurned the attraction of at least one human man (Dewey). But if the show had taken stuff in this direction, made this part of Pearl's character, then THAT would have been fine TOO.
Just like in real life, attractions that happen can change what we call ourselves. It would be OK if characters did that too.
And it's important that we understand our existing attractions do not constrict what attractions we can have in the future. If you are queer or have a large number of queer people in your social circle, the first thing you'll notice is this shit is MESSY. And I don't mean that in a negative sense. It's not easily defined. It doesn't stay in boxes. It doesn't always have a term immediately available. But the worst thing we can do with that is say "it can't happen because Person A identifies as Identity B." What we have to do is let the label catch up to the person. The messiness is exploration; it's freedom and adventure. It's one of the best things about queer communities. We splash around and find out what's out there, if we're fortunate enough to escape from the expectations that have always told us we'd be wrong to jump in.
They DIDN'T end up writing Pearl with attractions toward men onscreen, but if they had, that wouldn't have been an insult to lesbians. It would have just revealed aspects of her that we hadn't known about. (And we sure got some unrelated-to-sexuality revelations about things that had always been part of her toward the end of the show, so it wouldn't have been unheard-of.) Pearl makes sense how she was written in the show, and she'd also make sense if these writers had written her a different way, because past does not dictate present or future. I would have trusted Sugar and the Crew to carry that version of the story too, and do justice to it. I have several very queer people in my life who are in relationships that look heteronormative from the outside. Queerness involves throwing away the chains of what an identity label expects you to do and letting your feelings lead the way--and worrying what to name it afterwards.
There are lots of developmental materials that did not become canon and I think people also need to realize that. It's also true that Crew members played around with what-ifs, and now that we have the story they chose, looking at some of those what-ifs feels a little weird to some of us. It's OK if some of the things they thought about doing contradict with what they ended up doing, even if we like the final product better.
Oh yeah and as an addendum I really wanna emphasize that "what we feel now doesn't preclude things we can feel in the future" is NOT an excuse to tell someone ELSE, from OUTSIDE, that whatever they identify as isn't real and therefore lesbians should date men or asexual people should keep trying to be something else, etc. I understand that it's a problem (especially in women-loving-women circles) where sometimes any trace of fluidity is a signal that someone can come and demand that an individual person TRY to change. Recognizing fluidity, evolution, reevaluation, and broadening horizons is NOT the same thing as suggesting everyone is fluid and therefore obligated to TRY to change. (Especially, as I said, if it's through pressure from outside.) As an asexual woman I've had tons of pressure, mostly from men, to "be open" and "stop being so close-minded" when I say I know what my attractions are. Same goes for lesbians. This is a matter of respecting and recognizing when someone follows their own heart to something we didn't know about them before (and THEY may not have known about themselves before). It is NOT an excuse to pester queer people into doing something they AREN'T into, perceiving them as having no convictions of identity, or rewriting someone's real identity into something others can and should negotiate.
