User blog comment:ThatGuy456/A Guy's Thoughts: Slight Shortcoming/@comment-31194372-20181121071256

Hey, Guy! Long time, no read! I remember when you were talking about wanting to write about this specific issue and I think you knocked it out of the park here to the point of me not really having too many insightful things to add.

I think I'm generally a lot more forgiving of Gumball when it comes to, say, it's Rob and Penny storylines. Penny was sort of the show's first attempt to try to establish any solid change in the show's narrative, and I can respect that it floundered with it, even if these past two seasons have been particularly troublesome in terms of her representation; Rob, too, is a character that I see more as problematic in regards to the show playing their cards way too early. "The Disaster" and "The Rerun" both came at an absolutely terrible time in the middle of the show, obliterating his chance of ever appearing meaningfully after the fact, though I can at least see why they kept bringing the character back—he's just fun to work with and brings a different energy to what he appears in. Carrie, though, is where I draw the line (review plug) because the show had its bouts of experimentation, meaning they should've known how to actually approach her and Darwin's relationship only to do the exact same thing as usual and utterly neglect them.

I get the show's intent on wanting to tell deeper narratives, but I feel like that brings about a strange mentality in the show's writers, who are far more interested in the show's lack of serialization and adherence to sitcom conventions instead of creating something deeper. Perhaps they were feeling pressure due to how much the tides have shifted in how animation is generally perceived, considering that cartoons are becoming increasingly story-driven and complex (as opposed to Gumball's zany, one-off attitude) and wanted to adjust to those trends. That's just about the only legitimate theory I really have, though.

Oh, and congratulations on two years of progressively better articles!