Bang! The electrode gun fires at the phosphorescent screen. Ozone-smelling snowfall. The soft glow of the old CRT television set barely cuts through the darkness of my old living room. I get closer, lulled by the gentle pull of static. I feel the fine hairs on my arm stand up. Entranced, I press my face against the glass. It is almost as if I am being pulled into it…

Flapjack, hey, Flapjack, come with me!

*

We’ll go and see…

I can’t help but feel disappointed as I sit with my legs folded underneath me, face illuminated by the light emanating from my new, shiny laptop. This time, the floor feels solid underneath my feet. I am not going anywhere. I miss the buzz. These new thingamajigs don’t sing. Maybe that’s why we got rid of ours well into the 2010s, long past its prime. That big box had always been old, even when we first got it from our neighbours, who wanted to make room for a newer model. It felt alive in a way that recently produced objects don’t. They seem out of place, as if they were somehow forced into this world.

It was from this relic that I sought comfort. I was an incredibly sensitive child, pained by every change in tone, by every tired shrug, every unintentional dismissal. Perhaps this pouty, petulant plea for understanding is common among children. It reminds me of Tom Sawyer’s self-aggrandizing fantasies: “(h)e pictured himself sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid” (Twain 1884: 38). But instead of the tried-and-tested ‘you’ll see’ attitude, my wish turned outwards. Fragile, as I was, I often dreamed of a clean, empty world.

Scrubbed, spick-and-span nothingness.

The hand-me-down TV set delivered its response in the form of a recurring trope: the ‘everyone is gone’ episode.

What if, one day, all those peculiar people with their pesky requests would just vanish? The main characters, fed up with everyone else’s annoying behaviour, wake up in an empty world, just like Earl Holliman in The Twilight Zone.

K’nuckles, the deuteragonist in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, is fed up with the harbour residents queuing for Wishing Well Wednesday and taking over his usual haunts.

“I can’t get away from these weirdos!” (Van Orman 2009, 12:20–12:24)

Between Bubbie’s demands to take care of her baby and Flapjack’s pleading for him to make a wish, K’nuckles runs out of patience. Eventually, he caves:

“I WISH I NEVER HAD TO SEE ANYONE AGAIN FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!” (Van Orman 2009, 13:20–13:23)

[ CLINK! ] [ WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! ]

“Everyone’s gone!” (Van Orman 2009, 13:41–13:43)

[ SCARF! SCARF! MUNCH! ]

Similarly, the eponymous protagonist of The Amazing World of Gumball is exasperated with his family members, who are banging on his bedroom door with tiresome requests.

“I DON’T CARE! Darn it, why can’t you just GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME IN PEACE?!” (Bocquelet 2015, 01:07 –01:11)

[ Warp sound ]

And again, in Craig of the Creek, the protagonist is bothered by how odd the kids of the creek are. Especially his friends, who are trying out bizarre food combinations.

 “I’d rather be boring than surrounded every day by a bunch of gross-snack-loving kids! Do you hear that, universe?!” (Burnett and Levin 2018, 03:15 –03:23)

Do you hear that, universe?

Seems so.

The camera zooms out. All three episodes make use of wide shots to further emphasise solitude (Van Orman 2009, 13:41–13:43; Bocquelet 2015, 06:38 –06:55; Burnett and Levin 2018, 06:07 –06:10). In their respective worlds, the three characters are completely, utterly alone. The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Craig of the Creek dramatise the collapse of Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein: the world remains as-is, but its with-structure vanishes. The harbour, the town, and the creek are empty shells, and the characters suddenly find themselves ‘free’.

Despite what the protagonists desire for in “Wishing Not So Well”, “The Downer”, and “The Last Kid in the Creek”, both Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas reject the idea of a fully self-sufficient subject.

For Heidegger, human existence (Dasein) is fundamentally relational; it is Mitsein, literally “beingwith” (Wrathall 2021: 111). Dasein rests on the precondition of companionship, of being-with others, even if they are not actually present. K’nuckles, Gumball, and Craig do not really know what to do with themselves in the empty world. They pace around aimlessly, their entire routine, so fundamentally entrenched in the existence of other subjects, now rendered meaningless. As Heidegger writes, “being-with is an existential constituent of being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1927/1962 SZ 125, quoted in Wrathall 2021: 111).

Solitude, for Heidegger, does not negate being-with. It can even enable authenticity: a confrontation with one’s thrown existence into a world they did not choose and the awakening of a sense of responsibility for said world. As Chantal Bax explains, authenticity arises “when the human beings who find themselves in the same socio-historical situation resolutely take up their specific heritage and actively give shape to their proper place in history” (Bax 2017: 382).

Levinas, however, takes issue with this ontological framing. While he agrees that the self is not self-sufficient, he argues that Heidegger subordinates the relation to the Other to an abstract relation to Being. This, Levinas insists, is ethically dangerous: “Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (Levinas 1969: 47). 

Levinas criticises Heidegger for seeing authenticity as a return to oneself within a shared historic world. To the former, subjectivity does not arise in solitude, but when the I is interrupted, questioned, or even obligated by the Other. The move from being-for-itself to being-for-the-Other is essential. His response to Mitsein is the face-to-face encounter, in which the Other confronts the I as absolutely singular and vulnerable. Ethics emerges as responsibility, as the “priority of the other over the I” (Levinas 1987/1998: 217).

Can they work it out on the remix? Probably not, considering Heidegger had an antisemitic streak that managed to make its way into the very core of his arguments. Once a student of his, Levinas became one of Heidegger’s most significant critics.

Why do I discuss these philosophers? To be perfectly honest — if such a thing is even within reach, as this attempt at honesty, too, conceals an appeal to be granted understanding — I do not think I am very good at philosophy. I invoke Heidegger and Levinas because I need a crutch for my simple observations. They are not enough on their own. I rely on symbolic capital to squeeze out some value from the things I found comfort in as a lonely child.

As Bax argues in ‘Dying for…’, Levinas wanted to “rescue rather than reject being-with” by changing the telos of Being to ethical responsibility (Bax 2017: 388).

This is precisely the lesson staged in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Craig of the Creek. The characters surrounding the protagonists are strange, bothersome, and excessive. Their radical alterity is obvious, intrusive. But their absence feels wrong. This is evident in how all three protagonists try to either replace or mimic the presence of the people they were initially annoyed with. K’nuckles addresses a pack of rats: “Maybe you can be my new family. You could take care of me, like Flap and Bubbie used to, and I can yell at you and sleep on your tongue” (Van Orman 2009, 15:38–15:49). Here, the deuteragonist acknowledges how he himself is bothersome and in need of care. Similarly, Gumball stages an imaginary dinner with his family, mimicking each of them in turn: “What’s the point of being in a bad mood when no one’s around to notice?” (Bocquelet 2015, 05:49 –06:27). And finally, Craig makes stand-ins for his friends Kelsey and J.P. out of trash and rocks (Burnett and Levin 2018, 05:06 –05:17).

Seen through a Levinasian lens, what is bothersome about the empty world is the loss of ethical interruption, of ‘being bothered’. In the case of “The Downer”, this loss metastasises into

a̶͙͐́ ̴̱͖̓v̵̤͗͝ơ̸̡̳͘i̴̖̍d̷͈̐̿ ̷̖̼͌̎t̶̮̳̚͝ĥ̶̫͋a̴̢̩͑͝ẗ̶͚́ ̴̭̺͐c̷͘ͅo̸̲͊n̸̩͊͛s̸͍͋ụ̸̢̋͊m̴̙̠̒́e̴̬̥͂̒ş̸͌ ̸͎̻̏ě̵̢̳͘v̴̾͜ȅ̵́ͅr̸̹̥̍͝ẏ̸͎͙͌ḩ̶̞̅̚t̵͍̉ì̶̮n̷̞̓̕g̵̛̰͍.

What initially seemed like freeing wish-fulfilment now feels lonely and hollow. From this point onwards, each narrative is built around seeking the Other. In doing so, the protagonists’ own strangeness is amplified to drive the point home for the viewers. In The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, K’nuckles goes into the well to get his coin back and undo his wish, growing old and grotesque in the process. Looking dishevelled, dirty, and terrifying, he is brought back by Flapjack’s wish. Back among Others, he attempts to embrace them, but they turn away in fear. The show further emphasises this radical alterity by having the character confront a younger version of himself, who rebukes him:

“Stay away from me, you weirdo. Leave me alone! I just want to be alone!

>> Old K’nuckles: OH, NO, YOU DON’T!” (Van Orman 2009, 22:11–22:23)

Similarly, the protagonist of The Amazing World of Gumball externalises his frustrations as a separate persona, with its own voice and distinct facial expressions. His regular, social self reflects on the double’s comments and confronts this aspect of himself:

“Gumball’s Bad Mood: NEH! NO ONE CARES ANYWAY!!! I DON’T NEED ANYONE!!

Gumball: Wait, what am I saying?

Gumball’s Bad Mood: STUPID TOWN! I HATE LIVING HERE!!

Gumball: What the— What am I talking about?

Gumball’s Bad Mood: I HATE PUPPIES, CUPCAKES, AND RAINBOWS, TOO!!

Gumball: What, that’s not true. I love rainbows. What’s going on?” (Bocquelet 2015, 07:40 –07:54)

His return to normal is achieved through embracing Others:  

“I missed you guys. Oh, you won’t believe what happened. I let my bad mood take over and before I knew it, this, like, darkness thing took over everything that was good, but fortunately, I remembered Dad’s words and managed to snap out of it.” (Bocquelet 2015, 10:03 –10:16)

To further emphasise how Gumball himself is strange and bothersome, it is revealed that the isolation was never real, and in fact, just imagined by the protagonist, who was in a bad mood and did not feel like embracing his responsibility towards the Other.

In Craig of the Creek, the message is underscored via humorous meta-commentary. The teenage ‘Witches’ identify Craig’s predicament as a classic morality tale, a wish fulfilled too literally:

“Tabitha: Whoa, really? Every kid gone?

Courtney: It’s like something out of that show, ‘Tales from
the Shadow Zone.’

Courtney: Oh, yeah, definitely. You are clearly in the middle of a classic supernatural morality tale.

Craig: W-What’s that?

Tabitha: Oh, it’s like when someone in a story wishes for something, but then they get that wish, but it’s bad and teaches them a dumb lesson.

Courtney: Like you say, ‘I hate school! I wish it didn’t exist!’ But then you wake up in a world
where everyone’s dumb because there’s no school, and you raise your fists and yell at the sky.

Craig: [ Gasps ] I did that! I yelled at the sky!” (Burnett and Levin 2018, 07:09 –07:40)

Following their advice, Craig overcomes his disgust and concocts a smoothie out of the various foods he shunned: spam, the Horse Girls’ oats, JP’s cabbage and clam chips, and barbecue-flavoured yoghurt.

Finally, the harbour, the town, and the creek return to normal on screen, encouraging children to ponder the vital inconvenience of companionship.

*

The closing theme ofThe Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack fades out, lulling me to sleep. The dust settles on the warm plastic casing of the TV set. In the kitchen, my mom is making tomorrow’s lunch. Although the door is closed, I can faintly make out the smell of garlic. When she is done, she will make her way into the living room and plant a tired kiss on my forehead. In a couple of hours, I’ll meet my friends at the crossing, and we’ll go the rest of the way to school together, holding hands. By then, I will have already forgotten the troubles of the day.