OKAY SO. People are looking at this and assuming Rose made Lion out of one of these lions.
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT’S PROBABLY NOT QUITE TRUE?
Because there is one extremely key point emphasized repeatedly throughout the episode, even ending on calling extra attention to it yet again:
Steven and Connie are not imagining it accurately.
They assume there are seven regular lions. (They also assume a 3:4 gender ratio which could also be wrong but I digress.)
With that in mind, I propose that one of them WAS Lion. Not “the lion our Lion was made from”, but ALREADY Lion as we know him.
What if-
For that matter, what if:
What if Rose had a full rainbow of Lions?? An Amethyst lion and a Carnelian lion and a Jade lion and so-on?
Of course then that begs the question… Why? Do all these lions have similar abilities to our Lion or was each unique? Were lions just conductive to Rose’s gem-organic-hybrid research, or was there a more specific reason for working with them? Were they just her test subjects / pets, or was she trying to build an alternative-to-full-Gems army, or was she using their powers for something else altogether, or….?
I mean this still doesn’t answer anything but it changes the questions we really should be asking.
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(Edit: “But wouldn’t Buddy have mentioned the color???” so many are asking.
Buddy literally doesn’t mention the color of one single thing in the entire episode. The closest he gets is describing Rose’s “hair spilling over her shoulders and back like a swath of roses”, which sounds more like a descriptor of shape to me. (A “swath” is “a line of crops the way it lays when reaped”.)
Either Buddy didn’t think color was important to mention amid so many other details or, quite possibly, he could have been colorblind. That is an option that exists.
This theory could easily be wrong, but “Buddy didn’t mention color though” is not definitive disproof. And I really do hope for the rainbow variant specifically, now, as someone pointed out that would make it a… gay pride.)
