Y’know…this probably wasn’t intentional (although it is Adventure Time, so who knows) but the name of Simon Petrikov always reminds me of the name of Stanislav Petrov, the man who correctly deduced that a computer’s warning of a missile strike on the Soviet Union was an error, and so didn’t retaliate. Sometimes he’s credited as ‘The man who saved the world’.
Last month I wrote an Adventure Time fanfic in which Simon, horrorstruck by the person the crown is turning him into, is contemplating suicide when Death himself turns up and talks him out of it. Okay, so far, so kindasorta bleak. But:
That line up there is said from Death to Simon, right at the end, when Simon asks what Death itself could possibly be afraid of. And something about it just got to me. I mean, damn do I relate to Simon – everything that happened to him is a pretty heavy metaphor for mental illness and I’ve got that in spades. And the idea that one’s devotion to willpower and survival could make Death afraid of you was apparently an idea I needed to hear. And also apparently had in my brain somewhere.
So me and my boyfriend made this – he did the drawing for me and I scrawled the text on. I’m keepin’ it around, and on here, just as a reminder…
I’m gonna miss you, Adventure Time. Especially you, Simon.
