Rewatching Gumball Is Knowing That While There Is No Actual Real Overarching Plot The Episodes Are Still

Rewatching Gumball is knowing that while there is no actual real overarching plot the episodes are still so amazingly interconnected.

I love how they do foreshadowing, how they build on little moments that we see through out other episodes. It's Banana joe's mom's future paintings being a small joke in "The Shell". Rob being in the deleted place with all the forgotten things in "The Void" after we see that Gumball and Darwin have a hard time remembering him and then completely forget him once Darwin kicks him into the sewers a whole season earlier in "The Pony". He then literally still has parts of the void ingrained in his design when he comes back. It's the fact that Penny and her family being hollow shells with something inside was being played as haunting jokes for episodes before the one based entirely around it. It's the fact that characters like Sarah have always been a little fourth wall breaky and so an episode like "The Fan Fiction" is so completely in line with her character that it's unremarkable in context, hell there's an episode where she sings the ending song to end the show and avoid an awkward conversation her being able to take some control of the show feels like the natural evolution of that.

The background characters in gumball have such distinct personalities that have been pretty consistent and built upon since season 2 which is completely insane and unprecedented for an episodic 2010 children's cartoon. The show might not have had an arc but it has always been continuous.

You do really get the sense that this is a world where everyone is very hyper-aware of the rules in which they operate. The show might reset at the end of the episode but the people don't

meditations on the odyssey

I saw one scruffy older Cora-san design and had to draw my take on it immediately, with a bonus Law to fill space.

You can say a lot of things about One Piece Odyssey, but it did give us a Law & Cora tag-team fight in which Law shambled to the location of Cora's bullets and that is just objectively cool.

Supernatural and First Sons. Something about duty and how it is enforced with violence, and love and it being dispensed as anger.

And how the second child is a victim to it all.

Something about how Chuck at the beginning of it all was a second child, victim to his older sisters love and anger. Imprisoned by the wants and desires she had about his life and the way he was allowed to live it.

The First Child is always right in the end, the second child should have listened, but they are weak corruptible and wrong. Chuck destroys the world, how could he think he could ever build it.

This is the story he has always written. It’s the only one he knows.

Do you think the marines had no idea about the humandrills and so when they pulled up on Kurigina and had to face an army of expertly skilled swordmonkeys they had to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about Hawkeyes.

a Marine writing his report like “unbeknownst to the world government Hawkeyes has apparently been secretly training an army of monkeys to sword fight in his spare time and has proven to be very successful as we lost half our men to them.”

And so now their little Mihawk files, that requires its own filing cabinet, contains the the questions;

Did he teach the monkeys to sword fight or does he control the monkeys like puppets?

How did he teach the monkeys to sword fight?

Some kind of animal control devil fruit?

Hawkeyes can communicate with animals?

Is he actually part hawk? Part monkey???

Marines animal fighting division, when?

Could Garp train dogs to brawl?

Can Garp get his own army of monkeys or steal Mihawk’s? 🥺

I feel like the main reason this evil shanks theory is so prevalent (besides the private meeting the the gorsei which up even I can’t explain) is that his general cheeriness and lackadaisical disposition is more of a presented front, a mask to be slipped on and off at will which would be fine if he weren’t often put in the same boat as Roger and Luffy two people ( for as much as we know about roger) who have no masks at all.

Don’t get me wrong I’m pretty sure that Shanks is a naturally happy, good natured dude but he’s also the most politically minded pirate we have seen on the show (and some of these pirates were actual politicians) like I’m pretty sure Roger is more mature and secretive than Luffy ( makes sense he’s older and has seen more of the world) but with both of them you never get the sense that their silliness is something they are putting on for the direct purpose of making themselves less of a threat. They both can get serious when the situation calls for it but that feels more of an extension of their already established personality more than a hidden personality.

While with shanks it’s undeniable that something changed within him and his goals the day Roger died I don’t know if Roger actually told him something or if he just wasn’t dealing with the abandonment well it was probably a mix of both honestly. But yeah Shanks comes off as a guy with his ear to the ground someone who has schemes on schemes on schemes. he’s someone playing in the long run, kind of like crocodile but not nefarious. And when compared with a straight forward head first always kinda guy like Luffy, like he often is, he can come off a little suspicious.

There’s something that’s a little fake about his cheer, something a little too performative about his optimism and foolishness. I think it’s a mix of; he’s housing a deep sadness, he’s more of a realist that an optimist and also dudes just a pacifist unlike like luffy who loves to brawl ( like luffy knows when it’s better not to fight but he also loves a good fight) and he would rather deescalate a situation than fight it out and sometimes the easiest way to do that is with an air of cluelessness and making yourself seem less of a threat which makes it so much more jarring but effective when he reveals just how big a threat he is. but I can see why people think it’s suspicious.

(Interestingly even when luffy tries to emulate this behavior like when he first encountered Bellamy at the pub his plan is to just not react which while in the same vain is very different than Shanks actively playing the drunken good natured take it on the chin role for the bandits Luffy was still essentially himself he just refused to react while Shanks played a role which made it more terrifying and effective when he stopped)

Also it doesn’t help that until recently he’s largely been missing from the narrative with just a man echoing or a whisper here or there of how powerful he is.

But I think we should remember that Shank’s goal is essentially world peace. and peace, a true lasting peace, is just a little more of a precarious balancing act, than utmost freedom. For freedom you have to destroy the old game, for peace you have to learn to play a new one, hopefully with a bit more kindness injected into the foundation.