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Ep 19-20, Gallifrey Gals Get Bubbled! S2Ep7

🕑 Added 2023-03-10 18:00:06 +0000 UTC

Comments

DarkAshtar

I hate to do criticism but may you can tune your audio down because it overrides the shows audio quite a bit. Or maybe before you start you can do a countdown like with Marvel Pals cause I have HBOMax, or maybe the audio was mixed wrong this episode

Matthew Zeidman

Although I generally don’t like when non-human characters are used as neurodivergent stand-ins (as that further “otherizes” the neurodivergent community), Peridot has often been interpreted as autistically coded and speaks a lot to the autistic experience. For example, we can see Peridot struggle to adjust to the idea that neither she nor the other Crystal Gems are inferior (she still describes herself and the other gems as “defective” at the end of the episode). This mirrors many real-life autistic experiences, where we’re taught that we’re subhuman when compared to neurotypical people and that our only purpose/value is to be compliant and serve our neurological “betters.” Even after betraying Yellow Diamond, Peridot still sees Pearl’s value as tied to whom she “belongs to” and how she can serve. At the same time, Peridot boasts about her own training and qualifications, portraying herself as having more value as a gem in comparison to Pearl. This is reminiscent of a lot of autistic people who accept the false notion they are inferior, but are happy to enforce an arbitrary caste system of inferiority as long as they don’t fall at the bottom. This is why a lot of American autistics still cling to the “Asperger’s” label a decade after its retirement in the United States; it allows them to classify themselves as inferior, but useful, and other autistic people as both inferior and useless. If all autistic people are classified as simply autistic, that caste system falls away, forcing a lot of people to confront the ableist beliefs they’ve internalized, just as we see Peridot slowly doing.