User blog comment:Mattalamode/Second Opinion: The Promise/@comment-4037231-20170317131648/@comment-31194372-20170317234355

I actually read that before! It's one of the reasons that I found out about why people hated "The Promise" so much in the first place.

Again, this is deliberately not a feel-good episode - it wants to push the perceptions of taste as much as possible and show Gumball at his worst. It's an episode designed to make Gumball as hateable as possible, something incredibly concurrent with Season 2, so if you can't stand even the slightest bit of cynicism, this episode's going to feel like a massive betrayal.

In terms of Banana Joe, there's this great post called "The Amazing World of Gumball and the Deconstruction of Visual Information" that I pull from a lot for inspiration, and it makes a good point about how the characters are used in such a way that their identity and style is quintessential to their use moreso than just an aesthetic front. That's why I didn't mind Joe being pulverized so much - the show is aware of how violent it's being and how gory it would be in real life and is using the fact that he's a banana to play off of that.