so I just rewatched The Thin Yellow Line and i think i get what the episode was trying to say

all the banana guards, they were terrified that if they expressed any deviance from their original ‘purpose’, they would be ‘fixed’ or outright destroyed. the impression they’d gotten was that they were created to guard and not for anything else. they had an almost religious fear of their creator’s disappointment, her wrath.

now this is quite interesting because banana guards are TERRIBLE at guarding, the absolute worst. they function so badly at their core job that Finn and Jake are hired in an official capacity to pick up the slack.

but they are really good at their other interests, it’s where they flourish, right? at least the ones that do have other interests, but the ones that dont, theyre important too.

and when it comes to their “purpose”, perhaps that’s what it was supposed to be after all. PB created candy life not because she wanted to build a terifying empire but because she wanted company. And what sort of company is it, really, when everybody is exactly the same? when everybody only serves one function as if theyre a robot? no. to create LIFE, you have to give it INDIVIDUALITY. and if what you’ve created is truly alive it will develop this by itself.

i think PB might have lost sight of this in the past, which is why she got burned by FP and the Candy People in season 6, but by this time she was calming down a bit (and continues to do so). PB’s character has gone from ignoring the effects she has on others to absorbing them; she has to figure out what sort of kingdom she wants to create, whether to build only semi- paranoid defences against an impeding threat or accept that other people will end up taking losses because they’re people.

of course the candy people havent gotten the memo yet and theyre still scared of her. this will probably be amplified after, say, Elements; they have respect for their goddess but are yet to understand her as a person. i think a fitting end for pb would be her candy people standing by her side as friends, not subjects. then the individuality of their life would be fully realized.

[an analysis like this could be applied to any story with artificial intelligence. i was looking up videos with Javik from Mass Effect in and he said that the reason AI and humans will always fight is because AI know who their creators are, know why they were built. they understand that their gods are inallibale and begin to se themselves as the superior evolution.]