It shouldn't be that serious but I haaate people summarizing Simon and his struggles in Fionna and Cake as the symptoms of one mental illness or another. Like, his struggle with being content now that he's Simon again echo depression and he very well may have it. The way I've seen some people examine his character and conflict through a pathological lens, though, just picks out what words and actions they can diagnose as some documented and studied condition. They divorce his character and conflict from his setting, his time as the Ice King, and how he fits in the extended narrative of Adventure Time.
Simon is a pre-mushroom bomb era human in a post-mushroom bomb world. The people he knew, the surroundings he's come to understand, and the life trajectory he had going are all long gone. He's come to in a new society where things function in much more fantastical, irrational, and advanced ways. He's been a part of this society- even shaping it- as the Ice King, and now he must continue playing into the happenings of Ooo as Simon Petrikov. The new civilizations are alien, the new Earth functions by new social and natural laws, and he has the remains of new life that disgusts, horrifies, and humiliates him.
Simon spent almost a thousand years as a man stripped of his former values, dignity, and cognisance. As the Ice King, he lost his ability to control himself, and inflicted what would accumulate to be significant harm unto others. He learned how to get along with others by the end of his time as the Ice King, but those years were a blip in the span of a near millennium, and the degree of self-control he learned was basic decency. Simon spent his life before the mushroom bomb developing to be a composed and academic man, and endured having his antecedent personal growth and his own autonomy regarding his identity nullified by the ice crown.
Adventure time is a fantasy show that explores the consequences of the endless possibilities inherent to a fantastical setting. Powerful magic and magical existences destroy and ruin lives, abundances of mystical organisms amount to exhausting effort to defend oneself from danger, and the lack of predictability of what the world has to offer someone next spells out a compromised sense of security and stability.
Simon/the Ice King's story is one example of the show's exploration of the undesirable side of fantasy, and one story that's been built on for over eight years now. It's a story with circumstances unique to the show, with numerous writers informing its contents, with some parts planned and some spontaneous. It's a charged story, and it's narratively reductive to effectively whittle Simon's character and conflict as the showing of a real world mental illness
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girl help i lost sight of creating things first and foremost for myself and got overly invested in external validation therefore setting myself up to feel terrible about my works because i started looking at them too closely and became paranoid that they weren't good enough and that people would think they're stupid and—
i am going to be on here less and for a little while may be engaging with other people's writing a bit less as i try to get back into my own creative flow again 🥲 will still pop in now and again but i think being too tuned-in to everything has been making me a little insecure (<- a me problem; all of you are lovely and sweet) and with some added work stress i'm just!!! not engaging with things in a way that makes me happy or that feels particularly healthy.
honestly i feel strange even bothering to make a post about this bc Who Cares but i didn't want anyone to feel ignored if i am just straight not replying to messages etc for chunks of time. 🤝
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ok so obviously we have the gumball guardians, ricardio the heart guy, lady rainicorn, magic man, the jiggler (the jiggler! i didn't think we'd ever see him again! i love him!) and the lich, but who is that guy in the first gumball guardian's baby carrier thing? like that's a human baby right there right?
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