some art of @wolfertinger666 's oc [and main sona] Salem! I've been following him a while and he has helped indirectly with some of my self image issues, and I want to pay it back with some art!
[keep in mind Salem is a guy with he/him pronouns]
it's so cute that PB calls jake "puppy" at the start of incendium and i wanted to revisit the interaction between these three in that episode as the boys get older
Do you ever think about how when BMO plays pretend, they favor nomadic/loner roles like a cowboy, a hard-boiled detective, a traveling salesperson, etc., which is pretty in line with their directive from Mo. But when they really are on their own (eg in BMO Lost) they immediately, desperately establish a family from their surroundings.
And how one of those universal struggles of people, especially in the context of growing up (including but not limited to childhood) is dependence vs. independence. Wanting a hand to hold and wanting to be able to drop it at will. And how some people need to hold that hand less often than others, and how some people really don’t want to even when they really need to.
Finn and Jake get frustrated with each other and try to solve a dungeon separately, only to be met at every turn with a challenge that they can’t face without the other. Marceline travels for a thousand years and settles down here and there and picks back up because the people around her aren’t constant so she doesn’t want to be either. PB and IK each create an entire kingdom because they’re lonely, and neither of them feel whole because, just like the quarters of Ooo in Elements, living in those kingdoms is too much like living inside their own heads.
Every episode of Distant Lands is about characters who both resent and long for the versions of themselves they used to be— the versions who needed other people, the versions who could still insist they didn’t — and have to reconcile with the fact that they never really stopped being those people, but also that they can never really be those people again.
Every major character in the series is building connections and love and safety using whatever tools they have, and distancing themselves with equal effort. So they’re all kind of just alternating between playing cowboy and playing house, figuring out how to balance both and where they fit in between.