What I Bought 8/30/2020 - Part 2

My phone has suddenly decided it can barely pick up a signal inside my apartment. That's not great, since the battery drains like crazy if I leave it on. Hopefully it's some issue with a tower that will get resolved eventually, but this happened my last year working in the boonies, too, with my previous phone. It's just obnoxious, especially since I'm spending more time at home these days.

Amethyst #4 and 5, by Amy Reeder (writer/artist), Marissa Louise (colorist), Gabriela Downie (letterer) - Good thing she landed on that bed of flowers, instead of all those big, unpleasant-looking crystals.

The confrontation with Dark Opal does not go well. He's not responsible for what's happened to Amethyst's kingdom. He does, however, have an opal he split into a bunch of little spider-things he can control and combine to do useful things like let him control the security in his room. Amethyst manages to overwhelm it and he's stuck at the bottom of a bunch of rubble (until he makes a big mech-thing out of the opal pieces to free himself), but the kids are no closer to solving their problems. And Amy's not listening, and she's lashing out, and things are going poorly.

Then things go worse when they confront House Diamond, the judiciary branch of Gemworld. Apparently, Amy's parents had themselves frozen in amethyst to make the rest of the houses realize how much they needed them to act as shield against Dark Opal. And since Amy wasn't around when Diamond figured this out, they concluded she fled because she was guilty and trapped the rest of her people like her parents. With a weapon whose effects they don't know how to undo.

So everyone on Gemworld is just a complete fucking dumbass apparently. Amy's parents' plan is just stupid. "You'll all miss us when we're gone!" House Diamond's over here punishing an entire country for said stupid plan. Meanwhile, Dark Opal was, in fact trying to take over everything and would have succeeded if Amethyst didn't rally the other houses, while Diamond was, presumably, sitting around with their thumbs up their butts.

Reeder makes Dark Opal look a lot less menacing, and a lot more comically deranged. Which, maybe he is nuts by this point. He's not really the threat this time around, for all that he still holds a grudge. So Amethyst clocks him over the head with some piece of machinery, and his head almost does the cartoon accordion smush thing. Of course, then Amy gets whacked in the noggin by a moving piece of floor two pages later and makes a hilarious face.

Because nothing's really going right for her. This isn't like her past adventures. She's not in control, she doesn't know the lay of the land, literally and figuratively, nothing she tries works. Her call to House Sapphire failed. House Aquamarine gave her a fake prince for help. Most of the other houses have been turning their noses up at her. Confronting Dark Opal did nothing. Appealing to House Diamond for mercy for her people did nothing. All the assumptions she held about herself and her parents are falling apart.

Because she's always treated Gemworld as just some fun adventure. Show up, wear purple clothes, fight evil guys with swords and magic, go home. I feel like Amy was more openly thankful for her allies in the original mini-series, but maybe not. Then again, they all kept telling her she had to be the leader, the one who rallied support, so that's on them. Don't make someone else do the work if you want the credit.