#ive seen ppl comparing simons call to marcy with stevens call to his dad in future

[dysaniadisorder]

,,,I hope you dont mind me adding my thoughts but I feel like I have to disagree?

like, objectively, yeah, you're right about Simon & his circumstances & the world of the show. ,,,but that's also what adventure time is. a show. a cartoon, at that. it was a kids show, meant for kids to see themselves or their friends or their families in (i know many people who were in love with simon & marceline's plotline as kids because they had family members with dementia or something similar). and we were all kids when we watched it and now all we're a little older and it's grown up a little more, too.

it's still... a TV show. it's its own fictional story but parts of it are meant to symbolize real life and speak to the audience in that way. like in varmints– yeah, the objective heavy overarching plot there is that bubblegums lost everything she worked so hard for and spent her entire life building up with her own two hands, and yeah losing your kingdom to some douchebag guy is not exactly something anyone in reality is gonna relate to. but when she outright says that she "pushed everyone away" and that "if [she] shut everything out and just focused on work it would all be okay." and at the end when she says she's crazy tired, and has been for a long time...... that's something an audience can understand. the overworking, from school or actual work or even just hobbies, the exhaustion and the lonliness she caused herself, that's what we're supposed to be able to relate to.

it's a fantasy world, and so the stakes are gonna be tremendously high in a way they literally just cant be in reality. yes, there's a giant weight to the fact that simon spend millenia literally losing himself and everyone he's ever loved. ,,,,when you connect that to what is almost explicitly real-world depression, it's not 'whittling down his character'- it's interpreting the show and characters in your own way through your lense, which is.... what you are supposed to do with shows.

saying that simon is depressed or even suicidal isnt a disservice to his character at all, even in the fionna campbell intro she casually mentions wanting to die, and has trouble getting out of bed. and simon has a lot of trouble smiling and making it convincing, and even finn tries using real-life mental health methods to help him (keeping him distracted and such) (even if they dont work).

it just feels like in a show where its shown over and over again that simons experiences are affecting his mental health negatively,,,, its weird to think that relating to that experience or putting a word on it is somehow like. bad. or missing the point of the show.

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