Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-26006155-20190902023435

WhatsYourExcuse wrote: If Gems can just make light constructs at will, what's the point of continuing to create more Gems? The Diamonds could just create an army of light and never have to colonize any planets. Or are they somehow not aware this ability exists. Without a physical gem, once a light construct gets poofed, that's it, it's dead. They only regenerate and come back if they have a real gem of their own.

Remember the episode where Steven steal a replicator, and trades it to Onion, who uses it to create an army of G.U.Y.S. action figures that bury the town? And all of the conjured action figures poof and vanish once Garnet breaks the mother replicator, destroying them all?

I think that episode is an analogy for Onion himself. His father was a hybrid, his mother Vidalia is, I believe, a full gem. So he's basically 3/4's light. And while he can't seem to speak human langague, he was able to talk to Topaz and be understood by her. He definitely has gem ancestry.

White Diamond weighed in on the idea of "being spread thin" in "Change Your Mind". Each gem seed is created with part of the extracted essense of a diamond, which then sucks in energy from the planet around it to become a fully fledged gem, it's own being, but also still connected to the mother Diamond, like the G.U.Y.S. were connected to the replicator.

Perhpas there are limits to how many thin a Diamond can spread themselves, and how many gems they can make. And perhaps when a gem is shattered, that diamond essense normally returns to the diamond, like how Steven returned to himself after the Watermelon Steven he was possessing died when he tried sending a message to the Crystal Gems while captured in the Diamond's tower.

I fear that if a Diamond was ever truly destroyed, all of the gems that contained its essense would also poof, or become shadows of what they used to be.

Pink Diamond is strange in that her essense has moved to a different entity, Steven, so something of her remains, even if not in her original form. But if Steven himself got shattered, and Pink's original gem hadn't been healed yet, that would be it.

So long story short, light constructs need to have a gem to respawn themselves, and enchance their powers with summoning weapons and such.

Each gem contains a seed of diamond essense, but it's also greately enhanced by the life force of the planet it was grown in.

If the Diamonds tried to make a vast army, entirely with their own energies, they would quickly run out of essense. Which is why colonizing and exploiting new words is essential for them.