Here are some initial impressions after watching the episode: "I drowned a lot of people" Wow is Lapis blase about human lives or what? I actually find myself disliking her more and more with her complete disregard. But then, I'm sure you have your thoughts on that.
Hello! I picked up on that line as well and I immediately thought of her first encounter with Greg after Ocean Gem:
Greg: Uh, Greg Universe. You broke my leg trying to use the ocean to fly back to your homeworld?
Source: SU Wiki
Lapis: Lapis Lazuli. Nice to meet you.
Source: SU Wiki
In that episode, we learn that Lapis was trying to be nice. She was trying to have fun. She was trying to overcompensate for the things she did because I think to some extent she couldn’t believe the things she’d done. They were truly awful, hurtful, and destructive. And she feels guilty because she knows those things were wrong.
As she told Steven later, she did feel guilty about taking the Earth’s ocean and breaking Greg’s leg. But you get the sense she felt guilty because these things were categorically wrong. As in, it seemed like, on their own, they were “bad things” to do.
But at that point, I don’t think she’s felt any personal accountability for what had happened. In Alone at Sea, Lapis was coming to terms with her having done bad things. She hasn’t yet reached the point at which she comes to terms with her having done bad things to other people.
When Greg introduces himself that way, it would have been a cringe-worthy situation, but Lapis sort of awkwardly smiles it through. She’s uncomfortable, but she’s determined to “make up for it.” And when she does try, she goes over-the-top and it upsets Greg, and then she breaks down, and well, we know how the episode went.
What’s changed since then is that she knows Greg now. Enough that if she were to try personally making it up to him, it wouldn’t be an empty gesture to assuage her guilt. Because she recognises his individuality better, there’s a face to the idea of the person she hurt.
And I think that’s been happening around the time of Gem Harvest. See, Lapis wants to be alone, but being alone also prevents that “putting a face on a name” process. After spending time with Greg and Andy, seeing how they’re individuals with feelings and dreams and plans for the future, it’s becoming harder to just lump human beings together with the concept of Earth.
Each person and each life being harmed is another future extinguished, more potential that will never be tapped. And then the thoughts come. Imagine all the connections they’ll never have. All the people they’ll never meet. All the things they’ll never do.
It’s scary to think that she could have ended that times three because of that run-in in Ocean Gem. How about that times seven billion because the whole planet relies on our water sources?
I’m not saying Lapis has reached this sort of reasoning, but it’s a path that comes when you begin to spend time with people and realise they’re not just faceless organic projections that come out of the Earth. That she didn’t just hurt human beings, she hurt people.
Connie: You almost drowned me when you tried to steal the ocean’s water?
Lapis: I almost drowned a lot of people.
Alone at Sea has such a clear parallel to this episode. Connie introduces herself in the same way. And there’s a difference. Connie is ambivalent. She’s not like Greg or Steven. She’s not so willing to just shrug it off and forget it ever happened.
And even though Lapis might have put it “behind” her, Connie certainly hasn’t. I’ve no doubts that Steven would talk about Lapis a lot, the allegedly new Lapis. But Connie has none of it. “Um, Lapis, you don’t remember me?”
Here’s the thing. Lapis is in the position of wanting to keep her moral high ground. She doesn’t want to appear weak and she definitely doesn’t want to appear like a hypocrite. After all her talk of the worst kind of gem being those who don’t care about others, and being confronted with doing exactly that, she was deeply uncomfortable.
Being pushed into a corner where brushing off the encounter was no longer a possibility, means that she went on the defensive.
And Lapis’ defence was to be intimidating. But it’s rather half-hearted if you notice. In Mirror Gem, she loudly proclaims her name and why she’s so determined to fight the Crystal Gems. She glares at the gems even without pupils and it’s so unnerving. Here, she goes quiet and looks away. She won’t face Connie and her stance is so much more relaxed.
I’d say it’s partly to remind Connie not to push it, because she still could hurt her (I almost drowned a lot of people) but at the same time she herself doesn’t push it and assert that she was in the right.
So I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re categorically wrong, as in the action was wrong in itself and feeling personally liable. And I feel Lapis is struggling with the latter.
Because Lapis is incredibly powerful. She knows exactly how to incapacitate specifically human beings, which means she’s dealt with them before albeit in a different context.
My thinking is that at one point, she did view human beings as just collateral damage or even guilty by association by virtue of living on Earth, which was to her an irredeemable planet. But now she knows she can’t do that anymore (part of the categorical wrong). It’s just she’s struggling with not wanting to disregard them in that manner sometimes, as in the car wash prank.