Theory of Corruption
So, to avoid the leaks going around, I’m just going to make my usual posts for a while. And this one is something I’ve been working on for a while, but I wanted to keep it as evidence-based as possible.
My idea of corruption stems from my Light Bomb theory, and so far it’s been supported from what we’ve seen in the show. In summary, the theory states that the large explosion at the end of Lapis’ flashback in Same Old World was part of the Homeworld effort to annihilate all the gems left on Earth. The process bombarded light and radiation, and aside from physically destroying everything in its proximity (chunks of Earth are missing from the map in When It Rains), it would also irradiate the more distant gems. The side-effect was corruption. With that, let’s get started.
1. Corruption involves tampering with the physical form
What I imagine from the Light Bomb, is that similar to any other bomb, the centre of the explosion would have intense heat and pressure in order to propel its reach. But what exactly is being propelled? If humans are subject to shrapnel or sound waves, then they die. Our bodies can’t sustain the impact. But Gems can just poof if their physical form is injured on the macro level.
The reason I considered the cause a Light Bomb, was that gems are themselves, made of light. And light is not only a wave that travels, but also a particle. The photons that make up gems are packed densely enough to have mass and volume, and this is the light that is released by the Light Bomb.
So the light is travelling at incredibly fast speeds; it has mass and volume. These photons are incredibly small. And they’re being dispersed away from the site of impact with enough force such that they can reach the entirety of the world.
[Insert LIGHTBOMB PICture]
At the speeds they’re going, the photons actually do deal a significant amount of damage to gems. They’re approaching them at speeds that can embed themselves in the matrix of their physical forms. This is similar to the idea that anything, with enough speed and force towards you, could be fatal. And it’s immensely painful. It’s like something is coming in-between each of your molecules. These gems are being torn apart on a molecular level. But the catch is that they don’t get torn apart. Their matrixes struggle to retain the integrity of their forms, struggle to survive.
When the pain is too much for them to function, because again, pain is a great indicator to survive, they poof, and attempt to reform. But there are a lot of natural laws about this. Living organisms tend to be closed systems. That’s how they retain order in order to survive, as open systems tend towards greater entropy and disorder. But living things have so many complicated systems that all have to work together to make life possible. Two of the most fundamental laws are the conservation of mass and energy. When the gems poof and reform, the light energy that was their physical form remains constant. This is why Amethyst is Reformed tried to make herself bigger, but could succeed only in augmenting some parts of her body. It’s why shapeshifting for long periods is dangerous. Because the material that makes up their forms is in constant amount. When they shape shift, the density gets manipulated, but the number of photons, their mass, their light energy, remains constant. It weakens the structure of their physical form for them to shift.
In fact, when Amethyst continues to stretch her system to unsustainable lengths in Reformed, we can visibly see the physical stretching of her body resources. Even if she wanted her upper arm as big as her forearm, it just wasn’t possible anymore. And that’s what the corrupted gems began to realise. New matter was forced into their systems. Their old forms were unsustainable, and this new matter isn’t their own, so they can’t manipulate it. They have to work around it.
So the gems have to start incorporating these photons into their forms. And they have to do it in a way that minimises the pain. They just want to survive, and lessen the pain. This would mean forgoing the humanoid form that gems seem to take by default. Their forms would depend on which parts got hit worst by the Light Bomb. Not all photons would hit them uniformly thought their bodies, though the gross effect is the same.
Gems that are hit hard at the torso for instance, would elongate that torso, and that means that they have to let go of walking on two legs. By extension, that would mean the eyes have to migrate to somewhere that would still allow visibility, since they’d be closer to the ground. Crawling on the ground would mean less lung space, which was what allowed us to vocalise, so speaking would be forgone. But the appendages may not have as much additional mass as the torso, and they would be shorter, probably cutting off the extremities. The example I’m referring to is Centipeetle.
This would also explain why corrupted gems tend to be much larger. The other possibility when bombarded by photons, is for some of the original light mass to be displaced, which would lead to smaller corrupted forms.
The thing is, these forms aren’t immediately conceived. The gems are in a lot of pain. The process of settling on a form involves a lot of trial and error. And that thought is incredibly unbearable: Reforming in the hopes that this is the form that becomes stable and then having that form backfire and just hurt.
Even in their “most stable” forms, these gems are still in a lot of pain. Because their formerly closed systems were interfered with. Natural laws have been violated and there’s just something not right about how they feel and the physical matrix. It leads to these gems feeling threatened and vulnerable. It makes them hostile and cranky, more willing to attack things. Notice that the other reason these gems become big is that they’re afraid and they want to be strong and fend off the perceived danger. But as mentioned before, that’s not stable either. Because these gems weren’t meant to be that big. And that contributes to their fatigue and physical stress, making them feel even more vulnerable and hostile.
This is why Centipeetle gets much smaller in Monster Buddies, and can make it through most of the mission without feeling threatened. She’s threatened by the specific trigger of gem weapons being summoned, not “everything that appears.”
It’s because the form is more stable, less exerting and taxing on their systems. It leads the gem to be much calmer, and able to at the very least respond to very specific stimuli, rather than just lashing out at everything. I think this is because of the following reason.
2. The “software” in gemstones is spared
The way I’ve always understood gems was to have their main data stored in their gems. This would contain the blueprints of how they should reform. The gemstone, much like our physical matter, isn’t made of light. It’s really a stone. The Light Bomb may irradiate it, but that light can’t affect the data inside, because it’s not propelled with enough mass to penetrate the gemstone. And this is why Lapis wasn’t affected even though she seemed very exposed to the Light Bomb. The Galaxy Warp was clearly not the impact zone, because it’s still intact, and again, to propel that much matter to all over the planet, you’d need a lot of combustion. That means she would have at least been exposed to the light rays. But she comes out fine. It’s not because she’s cracked, because it’s been pointed out that we’ve seen simultaneously cracked and corrupted gems.
In the same way, Amethyst was spared, because she was “overcooked.” Homeworld would have been aware that the quartz soldiers would have emerged at that stage in the war. But Amethyst hadn’t yet. She was still a gemstone incubating without her stable physical form. There was no matrix to speak of, and she was able to make it out long after the rays had dissipated, most likely back into space. She emerged without corrupting.
But the reason I say the software is safe is found in Centipeetle’s reformation sequence in Monster Buddies:
The very first thing she tries to do is regain her humanoid form. And many people have pointed out that as she does this, she has a noticeably longer torso than do most gems. And again, I think it’s because of the way the light rays irradiated her body.
As she does this, she screeches in a way that supports the idea she experienced great pain trying to reconstitute this form. She then reverts to a form similar to a myriapod.
The thing is, this form still has a very humanoid torso. It’s not segmented and she still has legs.
Only later does she segment her body. And amid Steven’s assurances that she’s in a safe place (and his look of fear), she stabilises in a much smaller form. This to me shows that the programming in her gem is still there, but it’s very, very difficult to retrieve it. Storage without retrieval. And the result is a corrupted form, because not everything can be retrieved without compromising the stability of the output.
3. Existing gem abilities are retained, and at times amplified
The other thing about Centipeetle is that she can spit acid in both her forms.
I’ve answered an ask regarding this question before, but to answer it more comprehensively, I would attribute this to again, the software being intact. I mention rather often that gem abilities are preprogrammed at creation, and harnessed by Homeworld to suit specific purposes. This means that it’s inherent to the gem, unlike unique weapons which would be summoned as the individual self-actualises.
This means that Centipeetle is a gem who had acid control even uncorrupted. And her being able to create “babies” would be an amplification of many gems’ ability to form holograms. Because these babies have no gem of their own and are significantly less crystalline in structure. They’re also weaker than Centpeetle herself.
Because she’s lost a lot of abilities in the process. Speech is definitely one of them, and one eye is cause for bad depth perception. But having smaller, more manoeuvrable clone scouts? That would be a plus. Her presented abilities are compensating for the ones she’s lost.
And this is why, I think, corrupted gems seem to be headed for the Gem Temple, or other gems. Their sense for other gems, similar to our feelings of being watched or that we’re not alone, is amplified exponentially. They’re asking for help, but they can’t vocalise how. And again, they can’t really think of a lot of things. Even at her second regeneration, Centipeetle is still responsive to very short, almost Pavlovian stimuli, as well as general sentiments and feelings. So corrupted gems in their first stable corrupted regeneration would be capable of processing even less. Again, not because the gems are lost, but because they’re in a lot of fear and pain, and they’re not stable. A lot of energy is spent holding that form together.
Aside from that, notice that corrupted gems appear to be doing a singular thing, such as the gem guarding the Shooting Star, the Giant Bird from Giant Woman bubbling gems on its own after eating them, and Centipeetle herself, a very protective gem.
Because these gems are locked in their last objective before corruption. They can’t process new stimuli very well, but they do have an inkling of who they used to be. The data is there, the “last saved file” of what they were doing is there. For instance, I feel Giant Bird would have been looking for other corrupted gems, bubbling them, right before corruption hit her. Or Centipeetle, who might have been caring for other gems; hence her scout babies, and then later looking after Steven. It shows that they are still trying to retrieve the stored data, and this leads me to my final point.
4. Healing is possible, but very difficult
The reason Rose’s healing tears, or Steven’s healing saliva don’t work as a cure-all for corruption, is exactly because of the nature of corruption. It’s not that something is “broken” and needs to be mended. Steven and Rose are able to heal cracks on gems, because the gems just need to be put back together. It’s not like that with corruption. From again, a technical view, everything is intact. There’s actually an excess of something in the system.
That requires a “fixing” at a different level. It would mean slowly easing the gems into stable forms, just as Steven was doing with Centipeetle. The shock of that much physical pain can overload a gem into rash and extreme behaviour, so calming them down is a good first step. Because the scale of the damage is so small, and at such a basic level (the building blocks of their form), there needs to be a slow re-regeneration into a viable form.
And that might require some data editing to accommodate the workable photons. I think this would be a process akin to Steven’s entering the fusion spaces. But whoever enters would have to be armed with a lot of technical information about how gemstones store data and how that data is retrieved. We need a technician for the micro-gemological level. Someone like Peridot.
This is why I have a lot of hope for gems like Centipeetle. Because she wouldn’t factor in as much of the show, and have a possible episode up ahead for her (Monster Spelunking) if there weren’t any possibility of development. That’s something I’m definitely looking forward to.
