There was a Ninja, some woman with green hair named Gertrude, probably my sister Vengeance, and Lord Skywalker. You know. The one that likes to snorkle.) colabed on a story! The most benevolent of bubblegum-based dictators. Dealers Choice award for TheGreatEater… and bonus for Nova Quill. · 4:09am Aug 31st, 2018
Heya, cartoon enthusiasts!
Some of you might remember I did a patron sponsored blog some months back on Adventure Time’s Princess Bubblegum on the behalf of Nova Quill/Firimil. I did this during my second rewatch of Adventure Time but before I got to two rather important episodes of the sixth season for P-Bubs. So given that TheGreatEater generally leaves me to my own devices for these posts, I decided to add some deets I may have missed my first go around.
To sum up the last blog, P-Bubs was one of my least favorite characters for about the first six seasons of Adventure Time and became one of my favorites during the seventh season. Again, I never thought she was poorly written, in fact, she’s pretty brilliantly written.
So, mad props for that. Source.
First off, she’s mostly presented as someone who is universally good. She has Finn and Jake (two pretty righteous dudes) as champions and is basically completely beloved by her people. She’s also usually the one catching threats that would affect the entire planet and trying to get ahead of that so everyone doesn’t die.
The flipside to all this is she’s a serious control freak at a near Orwellian level inside her own kingdom, and sometimes outside. She has cameras everywhere she can get them (including monitoring Finn and Jake), has a tendency to focus on the results of what she’s working towards with little regards to the means, and tends to get so caught up in running her kingdom and running her experiments she often seems to forget her friends and loved ones have feelings she should be mindful of.
A good example of most of the above is how she handled Finn’s upcoming first kiss with Flame Princess and the potentially cataclysmic results. Rather than maybe try to work the problem with Finn it’s presented to him as a necessity that he not move forward with a relationship with FP. Keep in mind this is a 15-year-old boy who wants to make-out with his super-hot girlfriend who’s hearing this from someone that’s shot him down before. Some might argue that Bonnibel got a little caught up in the safety of her people, and that’s likely most of what was going on. However, at the end of the episode we’re shown that maybe some personal feelings helped informed her how she should best “handle” things.
Another indication that whatever PB considers important at the moment takes outmost priority and everything else, including personal relationships, is secondary is early season interactions with word-of-God confirmed ex, Marceline. Marceline is clearly not the easiest entity on Ooo to get along with yet is also rather easy going in many regards.
Especially when it comes to some light stalking, but who in Ooo isn’t?
Yet, she makes it pretty clear, in her own way, that she holds Bubblegum responsible for their romantic falling out.
Princess Bubblegum’s crummy behavior helps inspires not one but TWO songs in this episode!
There’s other kinda easy to miss hints from her as well. She has a bit of a temper when things don’t go her way and can really throw her control-freak nature into overdrive if say… she’s in a bad mood already, messes up an opportunity to show how right she is, and gets told she can’t respond to a problem by throwing literally everyone else in the vicinity into a dungeon.
Turns out she can totally do that.
PBubs seemingly hits apex horrible behavior in The Cooler where we ultimately find out she’s been spying on the fire kingdom and disrupting the entire kingdom with a magical cold front delivered via Ice King all so she can preemptively disarm the Fire Kingdom because Flame Princesses brother is a bit hot and bothered over the fact that the nation isn’t moving for big change and attacking the Candy Kingdom.
Once PBubs intentions are clear this leads to a confrontation between her and FP and after blows are exchanged, PB calls FB a “ding dong”—
One of many ‘d’ based insults Princess Bubblegum likes to use.
—the pair find themselves in a bit of a stalemate where Bubblegum admits to the whole plot and we get the following exchange.
Flame Princess: You're still spying on me?
Princess Bubblegum: I'm PB! I spy on everybody. No big D!
Flame Princess: You're cold, PB!
Princess Bubblegum: Eh. [shrugs]
Flame Princess: And it's not because you're a scientist or leader; it's because you are a bad person! Something inside you is messed up, girl. And whatever it is, [sighs] whatever, whatever, PB!
Flame Princess last lines really sum up the problems with PBubs, or at least address the common excuses for her behavior and with her dismissing her own horrible behavior as just ‘something she does’, well… It’s not hard to see there are some actual problems with how she conducts herself.
The episode feels like a bit of a turning point with Peebles as we see her disabling her extensive security system.
The very next episode features Bubblegum again and she and Finn end up spending a lot of time alone together just sort of hanging out while she leaves the candy people to their own devices for a while.
It goes about as well as one might expect.
While serving as a nice episode for both Finn and PBubs to acknowledge both can have a healthy relationship without Finn either crushing on PB or PB kinda holding Finn emotionally hostage and helps illustrate why our candy princess has been a bit of a control freak. The candy people aren’t fit to make decisions for themselves or even be left alone without supervision. Another easy to miss aspect of this is PBbubs doesn’t really have anything in terms of a royal court, unlike what we see in both the Flame and Slime Kingdoms. The closest she has to an advisor is Peppermint Butler and he’s still 100% subservient to her even if he’s trusted enough to offer his opinion to the Princess.
Anyone who’s still following the series might know why this is, but the fact that Princess Bubblegum has basically had to rule for hundreds of years by herself might even make it seem lucky she usually agreeable enough.
She does also show signs of growing before the big shake-down of season seven. My favorite example of this is The Tower, a bit earlier in the season of the two episodes above, where she respects Jake’s wishes enough to let Finn somewhat unhealthy work out his aggression to his dad only to reveal she was actually secretly watching out for Finn to both let him work out his feelings and not die…
She got clobbered in the face doing this… it’s very sweet.
Ultimately, of course, this all doesn’t quite break the Princess out of all the bad habits she’s holding onto and that comes back to bite her.
I kinda covered that all in the last blog on this topic... but yeah… suffice to say things got pretty donked up for a bit.
Well hopefully between the two blogs that adequately explore the deep and complex nature of an eight-century old monarch made out of gum. Or maybe not! That series finale is fast approaching…
Patreon here for those who want to get in on the fun.
Based off of the "GLOB! My arm!" I think she lost her arm. She's just made of gum and grew it back.
"I'm Just Your Problem" is the first thing about Adventure Time that caught my attention. Then I saw the first Simon/Marceline flashback episode, and that made me a fan--but due to CN's godawful scheduling and my general unwillingness to use pirate sites, I've unfortunately missed...I think about a season and a half? I need to see how much AT is available on the CN app on Roku, maybe catch up this weekend before the finale. (Quite frankly, and I say this as a fan of TTG--maaaybe this is one weekend where instead of showing 10 hours of TTG they should do an Adventure Time catchup marathon.)
But anyway, I digress. Peebs...Peebs is what happens when absolutely NOTHING is keeping the Big Good in check, to the point where the Big Good is ALSO a Big Bad. The one and only thing capable of suppressing Bubblegum and keeping her in check at all is Marceline, and they can't seem to sort out their whole thing to any lasting conclusion.
And yeah, given the origin of all things gum and candy, a lot of her behavior makes sense...if you think about it, Bubblegum is essentially a much more stable Lemongrab, which...explains a hell of a lot about what went wrong THERE.
EDIT: And it looks like my cable on demand has all of season 10 for free viewing, so I'm doing THAT today apparently. I'll have to catch up on seasons 8 and 9 some other way I guess...if I've actually missed that many episodes (I think I saw half of Islands?)
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I meant before that when she was wearing the "Martin" suit. Fin hit her right in the face before he seriously considers removing his 'dad's' arm. He gives up and we see that P-Bubs has a nice shiner. The arm thing is later. Though that might be why she was willing to go so far with the ruse. Finn removing her arm is a rather temporary problem.
Hmm.
So I'm watching season 10 now (and I'd seen a COUPLE episodes of it including arguably the most important one). Looking at Wikipedia, I missed all of season 8 after "I Am A Sword" and all of season 9 except Elements. What kind of shape am I in for the finale if I can't find a way to watch S8/S9 legally before then?
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You should definitely figure out who Fern is before then. The Elements arc had one kinda important plot element, though they go over it briefly early in season 10.
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I know who and what Fern is, I read his entire page on the wiki when I first saw the hunting episode. Also, if you mean LSP resetting Ooo and proving once and for all she's the absolute worst character in the series, I read up on that AND saw it in season 10. Since the finale seems set to primarily wrap up season 10's plot arc with Gumbaldia and the war, I should be good--I'll just have to backtrack and watch all the episodes I missed when I have an opportunity.
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OH, there's also likely to be some Betty, "Normal Man", and GOLB stuff going down.