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GOD i luv the power structures of ooo, i really hope we get another princess day-adjacent episode before the end of the series >:’00

gonna start sayin that i did enjoy elements! it was definitely fun! but i think there were a lot of narrative and storytelling issues which is a lil frustrating. (some good narrative shit in there too of course! but i live to complain so that’s. gonna be the majority of the post lmao.)

i agree with what most people have been saying, that the pacing was really off and it just felt all over the place. which is unfortunate! i’ve been so looking forward to patience’s plan and all the elements shit, i was so excited to hear it was getting a full miniseries devoted to it.

and yeah with patience’s plan, it just felt so anticlimactic? like we saw her surrounded by diagrams and photos and pins connecting strings on a board so i was really stoked for her having this Really Big Plan like. we haven’t had a big villain since the lich and we haven’t had an effective female villain yet (they so fuckin dropped the ball on maja gfkghj rip...,,,,) and yeah when they introduced patience i was just soooo so hopeful that they’d be able to do a good proper villain plot that ties into the bigger ooo elemental shit. i was excited!!

and then all of her plan happens off screen and in a flashback? like. thanks fhjhhkj like i think that is cool that the second finn leaves everything just goes to hell so he’s stepping into the middle of this catastrophe, and i do fuckin love the gag of patience building up to this huge plan then everything goes wrong and she’s too depressed to do anything about it like girl. same hat gfhdjjhk. and that is an interesting hot take for a villain plot i guess, but i was just sooooo looking forward to some proper villain shit from patience </3

and the whole thing felt really all over the place with just like. who the main character was meant to be? like going into it i thought it’d be patience, but nah they spend a load of time on setting up betty, but then we’re not with betty for very long either. and the elemental princesses have a lot of interesting character shit going on but none of it is ever expanded on or allowed to wrap up, like i would’ve loved to see pb coming down from the mothergum shit and coming to terms with what she had done and all but nah!

and then suddenly lsp is the hero at the end who singlehandedly saves the day for some reason?? like i fuckin love lsp and she has had some interesting development in the past, but in elements they literally only brought her in on ep 5 and refused to give her any kind of new substance or development and then just boom suddenly she’s after saving the day in ep 8. like it felt so rushed and sloppy :’) like i get that she is predominantly a comedic character but she HAS had some development in the past, and if they’re gonna prop her up to be the big hero at the end then they should’ve given her a bigger role in the miniseries and give her more development cause otherwise it just feels so out of nowhere and undeserved.

and with betty i really wanted a better pay off :( like i looooooved her characterisation all throughout of her like giggling and cackling maniacally back to back as if she can’t tell the difference at this point, like you can’t tell how unhinged she is and further you can’t tell how unhinged SHE thinks she is either? it was really interesting! but then the final thing is ‘yea im betraying the good guys and goin back in time to get simon back lol’ like it felt really anticlimactic unfortunately. i was hoping for a much more fucked up and morally grey plan from her?? it just felt kind of standard i guess since she got here in the first place through time travel shit so it’s not doing anything new like. and again like they’ve been building betty up for aaaaaaages and i would’ve loved a better Plot for her :( i know she’s up on mars now so they’ll probably deal with her again, but like using her in the title sequence for elements really made it feel like this was her time to shine yknow.

yeah like i was so excited for elements to do a bunch of interesting character and plot shit for a bunch of female characters in particular since it was dealing with patience, betty, the elemental princesses and lsp apparently. but no one really got that much more fleshed out which is a bummer. :( i think their biggest problem was tackling too many plot threads at once which is a shame because we’re probably not gonna see the show dealing with elemental stuff, patience stuff or big princess-heavy plots after this since this was the allocated miniseries for it like. god the adventure time ladies are so fuckin cool, i was really looking forward to this miniseries having a ton of ladies going rogue and fucking shit up but we got very little substance behind anything </3

uh but meanwhile i think finn, jake and ice king were handled really well in elements :’) i thought the characterisation for ice king was really well done, like they didn’t try to make him too simon-y or lucid but he’s still really sympathetic and all. he was just handled well imo! not much More development than we’ve seen before or anything but it was fine. and i fuckin looooooved cloudy giving finn and jake a bit of breathing room to talk about their insecurities and all, really really stellar god bless. i do wish we could’ve gone back to finn’s ‘and the worst thing is-’ thing at some point? like the gag of him getting cut off by jake being too into being a barber was hilarious but i did really want to see them come back to it in another episode or smth :’U i do also wish the ‘hero heart’ episode title came into play a little more, like i love that description of finn and i was hoping for a bit more finn development or smth in that episode i guess :’)

i was reeeeaaaaally really hoping that sweet p getting hit with the lsp anti-element shit at the end would be some foreshadowy thing for him becoming the lich again, like it’s gotta happen at some point,, maybe him getting his horn healed was meant to be that foreshadowing but i would’ve liked a bit more :U and i! am! so! STOKED for shapeshifter jake shit holy shit!!!!!!!!!!! fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i was so hoping they’d come back to the shapeshifter stuff at some point and i was NOT expecting it to come up here, i’m so glad!!!!!!!! i can’t wait for the next few episodes god :’) are we gonna get a new title sequence with the robot arm and shapeshifter jake cause that would be sick as hell honestly. 

also i cannot fucking believe we got an lsp/marceline kiss before bubb/line i was yellin

i fucking. love that finn’s mom is irish holy shit :’) when adventure time first started i really liked that finn was called finn cause that’s the anglicization of the irish name fionn, and the most famous fionn is fionn mac cumhaill who’s this classic irish hero in mythology. he led the group of warriors the fianna and he had blonde hair (’fionn’ means fair or blonde). and i’ve just! always really liked! finn being named after this really archetypal hero embedded in history and mythology, and now that we know minerva is irish, that just solidifies it even more?? that he’s descended from this hero shit. i love it. love my boy.

also i just love minerva’s voice in general, those soft t’s.......love ittshthshtth.............

i wasn’t crazy about martin’s portrayal in this? idk his total apathy to finn later doesn’t really match up with how he did seem to genuinely care about him as a baby. like i LOVE how they’ve handled all the martin shit so far, like i’m so sick of last minute father figures busting in for father/son angst before ultimately uniting with their son and inspiring them to be better than ever. after s5 i was so worried this is how adventure time was gonna play it, especially considering finn already has so many male role models from jake to joshua to billy.

yeah so i’m glad that adventure time portrayed the deadbeat dad AS a deadbeat dad and didn’t try to redeem him at all. so idk, i don’t really get how we get from martin genuinely seeming to care about baby finn to just not giving a shit when he meets him again 15 years later. like i can buy him caring about minerva cause he got pretty defensive when finn tried asking about her, but i always figured he either left before finn was born or he got stuck with sailing with finn on that raft even though he never wanted to look after him, idk.

but i do fucking love how he goes from this really lowly and shitty-person con artist to fucking. committing some AS YET STILL UNDISCLOSED cosmic crime and later convincing all the other cosmic criminals to have him as their leader, that’s so funny :’) i still wish we got at least SOME insight into what he did that was actually cosmic crime-worthy? and where the fuck did those other criminals go?? i feel like the ship has sailed on ever learning about all that but like. it seems important. lmao. and yeah i guess martin was lying about having some spirit quest to go on or whatever. but that bit about wanting to come back for finn but he never did was true so. neat.

i wish we got to see more of the human civilisations! i fucking loooooooved alva’s episode, she was so sweet :’0000 and i really liked that film she showed finn, i love that kind of storytelling adventure time does where they give you certain snapshots or relics of the past without expositioning the whole thing at you, like the running time for each ep is used for what the characters are dealing with right now and to get the Bigger Picture of what happened or what’s going on then you can infer that from all the background details. it’s nice!!

and we got a looot of that with alva and the virtual reality shit, but i wish we got to see more of it with the last island. like,, this is the first time for finn to meet a whole human civilisation and they don’t really spend any time on it. unfortunately things felt kind of rushed towards the end, but i was really hoping for some big human soul moment for finn? especially since they were hyping it so much from the start. and i wish we got to meet more humans, but freida is VERY cool and i love her and i’m glad she and susan are gfs forever, bless them.

and with minerva, i really wish the final confrontation and conclusion were a bit more dramatic? like this is something they’ve been building for 8 seasons and devoted a whole miniseries to, and it feels pretty rushed :T i was waiting for them to do something like, the only way to shut off the guardian is to turn off all the power on the island which will shut off minerva’s cloud brain or smth. like it didn’t have to be that ridiculous but idk, give me something :’)

i did really really love it, i just wish they left more time for the last two episodes to really lay on that emotional plot shit. like it’s Time, we’re Ready. but i rly loved finn’s final conversation with minerva through the vr goggles, that was so sweet and sad,,, but also like. if we’ve established minerva can upload her cloud brain shit to different machines like the guardian, why can’t she hook herself up to a portable device for finn to bring back to ooo or something? portable mom. they did say they lost the signal when finn went too far out of range, but idk. feels really weird to just leave her and the rest of the humans behind forever. idk! we’ll see what happens later i guess.

(referring 2 this post lmao)

aw that’s really cool, i’m glad my ramblings struck a chord with you!! :’) and yeyeye i totally agree. it’s one thing to want to explore all this grand themes in the show but it still has to be FINN exploring them and not just the storyboarders using him and the show as an excuse to explore their own problems? (this sounds so accusatory omg I DO RLY LIKE JESSE’S WORK ON THE SHOW it’s just he seems to be the guiltiest culprit on the team of doing this ahaha :’) )

astral plane could’ve worked really well if they focused it on finn dwelling on creation and destruction and the cycle always linking the two. finn meeting martin was a really good opportunity to have finn question creation cause he’s just after getting this really unsatisfying answer about his own birth and abandonment in the woods, like does creation have a Point, does it need to, what does it Mean? and linking that with the lich being remade into a baby and one of finn’s past lives as a comet coming back to earth, there’s tons of creation shit going on idk. as well as destruction with orgalorg and with the comet coming to nuke the earth again on this 1000 year cycle, finn really is “the end and the beginning i am the hand of madness” yadda yadda in all his timelines/lives.

ANYWAY s6 was definitely going for these themes of creation and destruction and cycles and if any of it has a POINT and that could’ve been really interesting territory for finn to explore! i did like the conversation he had with glob at the end where he was questioning trying to save mars from the comet if there’s just gonna be another comet in another 1000 years, if the people of mars are gonna die out eventually at some point anyway, like why help keep the cycle going, are you not just trapping yourself? that’s a really interesting crisis of self for a self-proclaimed hero to have, where finn starts questioning the point of saving Life. and then glob blows himself up to teach finn a lesson or something idk.

anyway i think astral plane would definitely have been salvageable if they made sure to keep it from FINN’S  point of view and work through how Finn works through all these big ideas. instead jesse throws in all this stuff about creativity as its own entity and sadness being the source of creativity and stuff which?? really isn’t finn?? i definitely agree that a lot of finn’s monologuing in that episode just sounds like jesse writing down his own thoughts and having jeremy shada voice them, like it doesn’t sound like finn at all :’) so the point of the episode is kind of lost sadly imo, since this is the closest episode we get to finn mulling over the grand themes of s6 as a whole. so instead of hearing Finn’s thoughts on the matter, we’re just hearing jesse.

this is all totally subjective tho. like one of my sisters’ favourite season was s6 and she loved all the big trippy existential stuff!! and i can see the fun in that too, to each their own. i just think it’s a lot more satisfying when we get to see finn work through finn’s issues, ya know :U

i totally agree!! jesse’s work this season has been so fab, he and sam alden have made such a good team!! their episodes feel so ‘quintessential adventure time’, like all this existential stuff AS WELL AS grounding it in the characters and their development and emotions. that’s when the suffering happens and i l i v e for the suffering. ye same, i am gonna miss jesse and i hope he goes on to do great things obviously, he can be a fantastic writer! i am super glad he went out on adventure time on such a good note with some of his best episodes, and we still have normal man this thursday which i can’t WAIT for it’s gonna be a blast :’)