"Fern the human" fan club

To all creative creators in music, writing, scripts, art, the rest and the lot of you.

Whatever you make and publish, make sure to have an anti-AI clause somewhere in your work. To tell people not to use your work for training purposes or otherwise.

It's not going to fully prevent anything, people will steal as they please. But it will do three things at least.

1) Act as a scarecrow to deter the AI-crows from slopping your work.

2) Gives you legal grounds to sue if it does happen.

3) will make your work attached to our era of history as a reference of how AI affected real creators and their work. Which will make your work remain historically relevant, if that's something you're interested in.

ヽ(●´ε｀●)ノ

And the fact that F&C is basically kinda ‘What if Adventure Time was Created by Someone More Into Sailor Moon than OD&D?” has always been acknowledged by the show, first by making it a Fanfiction of the Ice King and then by making it a Fanfiction of Prismo.

Like, Prismo didn’t even initially set out to do a World based on Finn and Jake, it just sorta ended up like that and he decided to ‘lean into it’… but it was still first and foremost an outlet for his creative ideas. He was using the concept of ‘characters like the people of Ooo but a Little Different’ to tell the stories he wanted to make… and so character personalities and events are sometimes different simply because that was what more appealing for Prismo (who just happen to have very similar storytelling preferences to Natasha Allegri).

And now obviously things are also gonna be different because the whole world has turned Mundane. And while previously their World has been somewhat under the authorship of Prismo and then Simon’s subconscious influence, Season 2, I think, has been especially trying to explore the way the residents of Fionnaworld are distinguished from their Ooo counterparts based on how differently from their Mundane existence has gone.

I think “The Butterfly and the River” really drives that point home about Gary and Peebs. They both had a similar ‘potential’ for both kind sweetness and being a control freak, but Princess Bubblegum’s childhood of fending for herself in the post-apocalyptic wilderness and the Gumbald Incident and the centuries she spent being God-Queen of the Candy Kingdom and generally usually being the Smartest Person in the Room has made said Control-Freakness into a central part of her identity that she still struggles it even when she’s at her best. And while she can be sweet and kind, the responsibilities she has foisted on herself as the ruler of the Candy Kingdom meant she has gotten quite used to being pragmatic or even cruel when she feels it’s ‘necessary’.

And meanwhile, Gary growing up in an actual loving family with parents who took care of him and Nelly and acted as a healthy model of what love and family should look like, and never really having the kind of Power that PB is already used to wielding means he grew up into just a genuinely sweet guy who is generally pretty chill with letting Fionna basically take over the plan to save his business and whose Control Freak tendencies only really come out when it comes to his baking and can be mitigated pretty easily when he’s called out on it.

If Bonnibel was able to have a childhood in a loving home like Gary did she… probably wouldn’t have turned up exactly like him, at the very least she would probably still developed an interest in science and not baking. But Gary still somewhat functions as a vision of who Bubblegum would’ve been if she was able to have that kind of life. And vice versa Peebles is to Gary.

I think we’re also really exploring this idea with Marshall and his childhood throughout the season. It’s very appropriate it’s given so much focus, Marceline is probably the main AT Character whose childhood, and its effect on her current personality, was also given the biggest amount of focus (unless you count the entire show as Finn’s childhood I guess). And comparing it to the Mundane Marshall’s childhood, this is more of a… lateral move.

(And it really says something about what a terrible mother Hana is that I can even consider that she might be a ‘lateral move’ from the kind of Trauma-strewn childhood Marceline had!)

The biggest common thread is that Marceline and Marshall both grew up with a pervasive sense that they were ‘Bad’. For Marceline, that was because from an early age she knew she was the daughter of Basically Satan with literal Soul-Sucking powers.

And since Elise, although very loving and encouraging and well-meaning, also had problems talking about Difficult Things with her daughter… this made Marceline to feel like even her own mom was afraid of her being a ‘scary monster’, which directly lead to Marceline leaning into being a Bad Girl and preemptively pushing people away.

Meanwhile, Marshall feels like he’s ‘bad’ in the sense that he grew up constantly being told he’s not ‘good enough’.

And with no way to escape Hana’s shitty motherhood, and his only Good reference point for a maternal figure being barred from talking to him… he spent most of his life apologizing and suppressing his emotions. And obviously even before the show started… he moved out despite having no steady roof over his head, he tried to cut ties with her… but he’s still in the process of learning to stand up to himself, and not just towards Hana, but with everyone.

(And also obviously Hana’s shittiness as a mother is also a manifestation of Hunson Abadeer’s cartoonish fantasy Chaotic Evil metamorphosing into a much more mundane and realistic kind of evil in Fionnaworld.)

And then there’s the interesting case of Fionna and Fennel, which I have often noted have kinda inverted the dynamic between Finn and Fern, with Fionna being the more violent and impulsive one and the one who was initially resentful and jealous of the more well-adjusted normal Fennel.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get a good look at the kind of Adventures that happened with Fennel the Human pre-Mundanefication. And since Fern was partially born from the Finn Sword, which was created by a bunch of Prismo Multiverse Fuckery that probably couldn’t have happened to Fionna, Fennel should probably have a somewhat different origin so… It’s possible that Fennel was just always Different from Fern because Prismo just decided to write her different. Maybe Prismo just thought that having the Grass Clone be more nervous and insecure about fighting in general was a more compelling story for him to write…

But I think what’s more likely and more interesting is that Fennel’s story in the Magical Fionnaworld did parallel Fern very closely and the inversion in the dynamic between her and Fionna is a result of their very different reactions to the Mundanefication.

Fionna isn’t really more violent or impulsive than the default for Finn or her former Magical self, it’s just that she now lives in a world where her hot-headed passion for justice comes off as inappropriate or gets her in trouble rather than make her a super-beloved and popular heroine.

A lot of her Human Disaster qualities is because, like… we know that everyone in Fionnaworld has some sort of subconscious echo of their former Magical selves somewhere…

But Fionna and Cake are the only ones for whom this actually seemed to really affect the way they engaged with their everyday lives, and sometimes negatively affected it too. Maybe it's some sort of a side-effect of being the 'Main Characters' of Fionnaworld that lead to them being more aware that something Isn't Right, maybe Fionna's subconscious just clung harder to her old Magical life because deep-down she knew she had a better life than the shit she has now.

And part of the reason she's so brash and hot-headed is because she's still kinda operating at this Ooo-ian baseline that most people in her World don't operate on, and she had a hard time sorting out her life because deep-down she's longing to be Magical Hero Fionna again, and sometimes she just makes Bad Decisions based on the kind of Fairy-Tale Logic her world used to operate on.

In many ways, Fionna is in a very Fern-like position. Trying to act like the Hero but constantly finding herself falling short of both her previous self, who she feels is kina 'trapped' inside the Failgirl she is right now…

And also feeling like she's falling short of Finn.

And then on the other hand you have Fennel and, like, if anyone got an unambiguous net-worth benefit from Fionnaworld getting Mundanefied, it would be Fennel.

Fern was stuck in such a miserable state because of the unique Magical circumstances of his own existence. Possessing all of Finn's memories while also being very clearly Not Finn to everyone around him. The fact that, when trying to forge his own identity, he kept on being a person who he didn't like as much as he remembers liking being Finn. The fact that the differences between him and Finn are a result of him being Half-Grass-Demon so trying to be his own person basically led him into being Kinda Evil. It was a sucky no-win situation where the only way to rid himself of the Literal Demon making him into someone he didn't want to be, also basically killed him.

And I think that Fennel, most likely, did go through something pretty similar.

But being Mundanefied with the rest of Fionnaworld basically solved all of those problems. Fennel got her own life with her own memories totally unrelated to Fionna and her own friends and her own family. She got basically what Fern was initially trying to work out for himself, she actually got the opportunity to be her own person.

And even if the Grass Demon got some sort of Mundane Equivalent, like anger issues or a mental illness, or maybe some sort of trauma or a shit parent or something… like, not to minimize the difficulty of coping with any of these problems, but they are still considerably more surmountable than 'be an unsatisfying version of yourself forever or die'. Fennel could learn how to work on any of those problems and become a happier person, while still remaining recognizably the unique living individual that is Fennel.

So I think on some level the reason why Fennel seems so well-adjusted and Normal compared to Fionna is because she has adjusted to the normal Mundanity she lives in now much more readily, because on some level she knew it has basically given her everything she has now. If Fern is just another side of the Finn Coin, a vision of what he would look if he lost everything - then Fennel is also the other side of the Fionna Coin, what she would've been like is she never subconsciously clung to the world she used to have, if she just allowed herself to be Mundane.

And this is why Fennel is both better-adjusted in general and also has no real trace of that Ooo Violence and Adventure within her. Embracing this new Mundaneworld is much easier to Fennel, for whom this mundanity was the first real chance for life she had.

Of course, this is not to say that, like, Fennel not having any subconscious desire to cling to the Old Fionnaworld makes her 'better' than Fionna or that this demonstrates that Fionna's desire for adventure and magic is inherently foolish or this is the real source all the problems in her life… I say Fionna and Fennel invert Finn and Fern's dynamic but with them it's a lot more of a 'the Grass (Sword) is Always Greener'. Fennel sees more well-adjusted, but she also admires Fionna's brave, heroic, violent impulsivity.

And it is because Fionna is Fionna, because her personality was shaped by her subconscious longing for her old Magical Life, that she is able to jump so readily into Adventure when it presents itself. On so many levels, this is why she was the hero who was able to save this new Mundane World.