I feel like the finale was a great challenge of Princess Bubblegum’s character.

You have to remember that her past is buried in bloodshed. She made her kingdom on top of ashes old and new, which is pretty fucking metal now I say it out loud. But if you think back to eps like Rattleballs, The Cooler, What Have You Done, maybe even her reaction to being unelected in the s6 finale, it took a lot of growth for PB to get past what she was before. Even after becoming less cold, she still feels vulnerable and makes great efforts to retain either her own life or, more recently, the legacy of her kingdom.

After all her efforts to become a calmer person, to not headway into brash and vindictive decisions, here comes Uncle Gumbald with his miraculous candy city. She’s being taunted by one of her creations who is a great smear against her pride. He’s simultaneously her child, her father figure, and her bloody nemesis! He gets under her skin because he’s a bit like her, but somehow more ambitious, more powerful (the fuck??), more evil, and arguably the stigma for all those furious bloodshed PB carried out in her younger years. She can’t deal with him being around and wants him gone, and it makes her recede back into that vindictive dictator state, trying to justify it all to herself.

Finn protests about her ideas for war, and even Marcy gets involved, and you can see PB is quick to dismiss criticism of the war from Finn but when Marcy gets involved you can see her visually questioning herself a bit more. I really liked that moment. Marcy makes it clear that PB’s idea is going to end in misery for herself, but PB feels backed into a corner, and quietly says they’ll talk about this when it’s over, and basically begs Marceline to wish her luck. PB isn’t sure if she’ll speak to Marceline ever again, because they both sense that any actual war would result quickly in her death.

And when Finn says he’s known her a long time, she sees his robot arm, is reminded of Shoko and just what she did to her during one of her previous attempts at an arms race. Shoko died because of PB overreacting to a challenge and making her weapons a little too deadly.

Of course as soon as Gumbald opens his mouth PB goes fucking 180 again and tries to wreck him. Finn and Jake have already set their trap, however - they bind them together in a dream, where they’re not able to just murder each other with opposing armies and have to deal with this together.

While PB and Gumbald immediately start trying to kill each other in the dream, once they “succeed” in a toothbrush lance battle, they start to hallucinate being in each other’s shoes. Quite fitting - PB at this stage is so filled with bloodthirst she’d be ready to commit the sin her uncle did against her, and she faces the consequences. She sees Gumbald build the candy kingdom around her, is filled with such shock and envy. Gumbald meanwhile experiences the horror he put Bonnie through as a tiny kid, and just how hard it is to follow his dream to keep a kingdom together when it wants to fall apart. When PB wants to help him, she can’t do anything but make a dumb joke, and starts craughing. He does the same. A rather hilarious and dissonant scene that contains a lot to pull apart regarding their characters.

Waking up from the dream PB realises just what the fuck she was doing, she’s snapped out of her revenge stupor, and apologises to her uncle even though she’s got no idea whether he will apologise back.

Gumbald’s “apology” is very inkeeping with the show, to be honest. Sometimes people in AT are just assholes and you have to deal with it. Sometimes AT has abrupt anticlimaxes like that. Think Magic Man’s initial appearance, and every time it looks like Ice King is gonna show a bit of empathy but turns it around into comedically timed selfishness. Aunt Molly doing a 180 makes me glare daggers in suspicion but once again that sort of character change is also extremely common (i mean, think of Lemongrab and how violent and horrible he is, but he’s still hanging with the good guys because there is no reason to fight. It’s a peculiar dissonance but I think AT wants to show that, to show that good people and kinda-evil-but-not-supervillainous people live in the world together).

Anyway, PB rolls with it. TWO CANDY KINGDOMS IT IS!

Of course when Golb attacks, PB has to think on her feet and you can tell by the sweatdrops she’s panicking internally… the Banana Guards are terrified she’s gonna make them attack, but instead in a moment of pragmatic empathy she tells them to flee for their lives or they’ll add to its mass, and gets the Gumball Guardians to attack instead because only they stand a chance at stopping the threat. PB decides to stay on the front lines and tries her best to coordinate the attack but isn’t doing very well, and while everyone else is caught in the battle and her remaining forces are turned against her, she sort of loses all her backup support. The she FACES DEATH ITSELF, which is getting slamdunked by a horrible candy flesh monster.

To be honest I thought she’d just turn to mush again, like in the season 2 finale, but while she had an extremely close brush with death her quick thinking emergency shield let her survive.

Marcie coming in to avenge her, the tender moment they have when Marcie realises she’s still alive.. Marcie understands how vulnerable PB is, how she so easily gets over her head and takes so many risks, and PB is taken aback by how much her girlfriend really worries about her wellbeing, even back when they weren’t talking Marcie still cared for her. She reassures her that she’s a tough gum and she’s “nothing’s never happening to me. never.” And admits she might have a concussion. Fucking adorable.

I loved this scene not just for its immediate fluff but because Marcie is ready to admit to PB that even when they were not talking before What was Missing/Sky Witch, even when Peebles was a bit of a monster who had shut off everybody else from her life, Marceline still saw her as a little vulnerable, someone who needed and deserved a bit of protection. This goes so well with how they interacted in Season 7, when Bonnie had ran away from the kingom and was trying to pretend it was all okay but Marcie saw right through her. Marceline has never had the openness to say something like this before and when they spoke in the past during their breakup she had always recoiled or backfired to PB’s cold attitude. Here, Marceline is fully open and expressing herself and her great fears of losing Bonnie. With themselves fully open here, feeling a deep level of affection and appreciation for each other, they fuse kiss. The familiar kiss of two people who have been in love for quite some time. Astonishing moment.

Then they’re basically joined at the hip,they embrace in hopes that they can make it out alive when the fight gets too big for them to be involved, then they notice BMO singing and Bonnie’s nerdiness lets her realise HARMONY was the secret weapon against the chaos. Kinda cool. (BMO’s moment with jake was wonderful btw and i hope lots of people are thinking about it.) I must give credit to Hynden Walch’s beautiful backup singing which stands out as she does so in a different key.

GOLB nonsense aside, she ends the series going up to Finn, no crown on her head, and thanking him for disobeying her with a kiss on the cheek. She says he’s growing taller. PB and Finn having warmer moments like this has been a staple of the past couple seasons, as he got over his fiery passion for her and his childlike rejection, and learned more about who she was… idolised her less and saw her as a friend. They’re able to be far more Real with each other than in season 5 when they were both pretty much loners.

Anyway, as Adventure Time ends, I’m happy with the roles of all the characters in the finale, even if it was a bit of a jumbled fucking mess. Adventure Time as a whole is a jumbled fucking mess, so it fits.I also like that the adventure ends with you not knowing exactly what’s going to happen to the characters in the future, they could pump out a new episode next week following from this one and t would be perfectly fine. I like that we get to see some people being happy and silly in the next post apocalypse, and that we never find out what caused the world to end again but we are able to speculate as to what happened.

I must note that PB is probably still around in this future as hinted by the giant Gumball and the “office” inside it, and has managed to protect her people one last time… If I were a betting lady she’s probably taking a break until things cool off by going on new adventures with her partner. But she could be dead! Maybe there was a great war in the end? Maybe it was just a really bad experiment. Who knows? Who cares? Anything could have happened in Adventure Time.