Rewatching Gumball Is Knowing That While There Is No Actual Real Overarching Plot The Episodes Are Still

Rewatching Gumball is knowing that while there is no actual real overarching plot the episodes are still so amazingly interconnected.

I love how they do foreshadowing, how they build on little moments that we see through out other episodes. It's Banana joe's mom's future paintings being a small joke in "The Shell". Rob being in the deleted place with all the forgotten things in "The Void" after we see that Gumball and Darwin have a hard time remembering him and then completely forget him once Darwin kicks him into the sewers a whole season earlier in "The Pony". He then literally still has parts of the void ingrained in his design when he comes back. It's the fact that Penny and her family being hollow shells with something inside was being played as haunting jokes for episodes before the one based entirely around it. It's the fact that characters like Sarah have always been a little fourth wall breaky and so an episode like "The Fan Fiction" is so completely in line with her character that it's unremarkable in context, hell there's an episode where she sings the ending song to end the show and avoid an awkward conversation her being able to take some control of the show feels like the natural evolution of that.

The background characters in gumball have such distinct personalities that have been pretty consistent and built upon since season 2 which is completely insane and unprecedented for an episodic 2010 children's cartoon. The show might not have had an arc but it has always been continuous.

You do really get the sense that this is a world where everyone is very hyper-aware of the rules in which they operate. The show might reset at the end of the episode but the people don't