More Doodle Wips Hi

more doodle wips hi

thinking ab this

"You know, for a while I didn't even really try to stop the crown." Simon Petrikov put his hands together, absently tapping his fingers against each other like he had an invisible finger trap. "I just... let things happen."

Bubblegum nodded, making a note of it in a small notepad she had brought. "Mm hmm?"

"At first I didn't know what was going on. And when I did, I suppose... I just wanted to know what was happening. I was scared but it was a new, unprecedented experience. And honestly, finding things out was all I had left." He looked into the distance. "Betty was gone. I, uh. I never really had any friends. And for a while, once I started looking different, I could only go outside at night."

"Why exactly?" Bubblegum appeared to rethink the question as soon as she said it, having put a few things together; humans hadn't always been so used to things that looked... too different.

"Well, you probably already guessed but once my skin turned blue, and I couldn't stop my hair from going all over the place, I... oh, it's silly. It must sound like a such a minor thing."

"No no, it's fine! I just forget. The world wasn't always so... hrm, what's the word? Morphologically diverse."

Simon nodded again. "Yeah, I never really thought of it like that but, yeah. It's easier, nowadays, to just be something different." He thought about the old days, before the war but after the crown.

Simon thought about telling her about the newspaper articles. 'A Sighting of the Sideways Ghoul.' Or the times he'd been trying to get groceries without being seen, and spotted too early or just before he was out of side, and then for a moment after the screams stopped, imagining what it had been like to see him lurking in the dark. Blue skin and a body so cold his breath was visibly making little frosted plumes in the air... hair sticking all over the place and not quite hair anymore and not exactly feathers. His hands, long and gnarled with too many joints and sharp at the ends...

He'd saw himself in a mirror, once, back then, when he hadn't expected a mirror there. It helped him understand, he supposed. It just didn't make him feel any better to see what he had become. And how much further he was going to fall.

"But, well, then the Great Mushroom War happened and I had a few more pressing issues at the time. Staying alive, finding food, avoiding people..."

"Wait, all people? Even other survivors?"

Simon looked down the table. "...Yeah. People got... trigger happy. Even if they were looking for community, or other survivors, they weren't looking for something like me." He stopped, and rephrased the sentence, realizing too late the reflex, what it suggested about how he thought of himself. "Some one like me, I mean."

"Anyway," he continued. "I just... stopped caring, I guess. I let the crown do what it wanted. I let it in, you know? I just... stopped holding back. I let it in," he said again. "I think I didn't see a way out then. I was alone, everyone I met ran away or shot at me, and it hurt, thinking that I'd spend the rest of my life alone."

He drummed his fingers on the table. Absently, he glanced aside at the third member of the little get-together, currently making something in the kitchen.

He breathed in and out; it took a long time, like he was gathering up years and years of loneliness and self-loathing and misery and just... letting it fly away.

"So what changed?" Bubblegum asked. She glanced aside too. And he knew that she already knew what he was going to say, or had a suspicion. "Clearly you started fighting against the crown's influence at some point after that. You kept yourself reasonably lucid for years; from what Finn has told me, and what I've learned, no one else has managed to do that for even a matter of hours, and you did it for years."

"...Huh. Weird. It kind of makes me feel a bit better about things. But, well, I guess its always the simple answers that surprise you. So what changed, you ask?"

Simon glanced aside again, and once more he looked right at Marceline. She looked back at them, gave them a cheeky little wave, and went back to what she was doing. Simon turned to Bubblegum, found a little smile, and more calmly than at any point in the conversation he said "Well, I guess I found something to live for."

i should watch all in one day just because

Petrikov lore

it seems significant to me that Betty is quite literally the ONLY person in Simon Petrikov's life we hear about in any form, and the implication I get is that she might have been the ONLY person he was close to in some way until Marceline and later Finn and Jake (and barring any people Ice King knew in the interim)

take note that when Betty regards Simon as a lovely experience (a worthwhile and good part of her life), Simon previously refers to her as his everything. Like he had NOTHING before her.

Simon, even after being freed of the crown, never talks about family or friends from before Betty. When given a chance to speak to his loved ones before he goes, he only thinks about Betty, and he never ever discusses or implies that there was anyone else in his personal life. This suggests to me that there WAS no one else; he could well be a man with either no family or one he was estranged from, and who had no friends.

Given his reception at his lecture, its further possible that he might have been a laughingstock among academics; Betty's receptiveness might have been the first positive reception he got at all.

This in turn creates an interesting closed circle approach to his life; he was alone before Betty, and he was alone after Betty. It goes a long way to explain why she was such a massive fixture of his life, as the only person he felt genuinely closed to or that he loved. It follows that when Simon DOES have people he cares about, his immediate impulse is to find a way to hurt himself on their behalf. He thinks less in terms of being around people for his own happiness, and more of a kind of a desire to martyr himself, which might line up with someone who's been so alone that they don't think of themselves as worthy in their own way, and the best way to be of benefit to someone else is to lose himself for their benefit.

This further adds dimension to his dynamic with Marceline, being the first real family he had since Betty, encouraging him to be more proactive rather than the passive figure we see a lot.

It's telling that what makes Simon perk up in Fionna And Cake is the opportunity to sacrifice his mind for Fionna and Cake's benefit; in some way, Simon CANNOT conceive of himself helping anyone without destroying himself in the process.

i dont believe i ever posted theseseee sketches anywhere except for sharing on discord so here

fionna and winter king