TAWOG
Created by SupremeDreams, 7 d ago.
What it means to be a protagonist in gumball and how its world works (Mainly from https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:James_Plays_4_Games/The_Amazing_World_of_Gumball_Protagonist_Status_Explanation_Blog_Post)
* Season 3, overall episode 88, The Void: The Void is a realm where the universe's mistakes go. It erased Molly from existence because she was very annoying, telling lengthy stories. Gumball, Darwin and Mr. Small investigated the disappearance of Molly, and when they discovered the Void, it appeared to be static, digital and unorganized as if the objects were deleted from the main setting and kept there.
* Season 4, overall episode 140, The Signal: Something weird was going on, where the reality that Gumball and Darwin live in was glitching. By the end of the episode, it was revealed that there were satellite broadcast issues in Elmore. Gumball and Darwin deduced that they live in a TV show, because what was happening on TV was happening in their reality. ("If what happens on TV happens to us, does that mean that we're on-?")
* Season 4, overall episode 156, The Disaster: Rob outright stated that he was forced to be Gumball's nemesis because Gumball is the "hero" of "all this," a fictional world that revolves around Gumball as the protagonist, in which Rob had to be the villain, because Gumball led him down that path during previous episodes. It was apparently inevitable for Rob to be rivals with Gumball instead of friends with him, contrary to what Rob initially wanted. Rob said that if he got rid of Gumball, he would ve been able to become whoever he wanted to be. Rob was going to use the Universal Remote to send Gumball to the Void, a realm where the universe's mistakes go when they're erased.
* Season 5, overall episode 157, The Rerun: The Void returns, with the same portrayal as before, when Gumball was trying to get Rob to go back to the normal world. It can be set to display TV using the Universal Remote, and Gumball commented that being in the Void is like being "inside a giant [TV]."
* Season 6, overall episode 229, The Silence: Gumball and Darwin finally ran out of things to say to each other, and when discussing how they couldn't keep up a conversation anymore, Darwin said that their speaking "goes limper than an animator's handshake." Darwin's leg immediately got erased for a moment to make him fall to the ground, with the joke being that an animator of the show didn't like what Darwin said and decided to give him trouble.
These points are important to take into consideration.
* Season 5, overall episode 164, The Test: According to Sarah, who knows a lot about metafiction, in accordance to the theory of nature abhors a vacuum, when Gumball changed his personality so his classmates could like him more, Tobias replaced Gumball as the star loser in the grand sitcom of their lives. This resulted in Tobias obtaining the main character status within the show, which changed the style of the show into a comically clichéd sitcom. This resulted in various effects altering reality. It changed the causality of the show to center around Tobias and the lazy writing attributed to his antics, much to Sarah's aggravation. It led to Tobias being supernaturally inserted himself into the Watterson family, and it led to the episode skipping to nighttime, then to Christmas. It led to Tobias being able to date Masami and Penny, despite Tobias' personality not changing as the protagonist and Tobias having been rejected by those characters during other episodes. Tobias' influence was also able to make it so that the previous events of the episode were all just a dream, while still maintaining his status as the main character, which he achieved during those events in the first place.
* Season 3, overall episode 116, The Money: The stability of reality in The Amazing World of Gumball depends on the budget of the Wattersons, the family that the show is centered around. When they became bankrupt, the whole world started to corrupt and have lower production quality until it became worse than a storyboard and would be disappeared. According to Gumball, without money, you're nothing and your whole world falls apart, meant literally.
* Nicole said "we've gotta sign that contract before there's nothing left of Elmore," but this wasn't because the Elmore town was necessarily the limit to the data corruption, it was just because the family lives in Elmore and they were trying to go to a location within Elmore to revert the data corruption by selling out. The corruption was clearly affecting the sky and the nature of reality and the "world" itself, not exclusively the town geographically. Being a threat to the "world" on a metafictional level, as in a threat to "The Amazing World of Gumball" which is canonically a TV show as explained during the previous section, the data corruption was contextually more consequential than the time Richard was accidentally destroying and tearing apart the fabric of the universe during season 2. overall episode 44, The Job, partly because "the show" encapsulates the universe plus the Void.
* Season 2, overall episode 76, The Finale: The negative consequences of previous episodes finally impacted the Wattersons all at once during this one episode, and they finally got defeated by the end, but this was never consequential, because no matter what happened in the end, the next episode will always start with the Wattersons being in the status quo, like all other episodes with a few exceptions. It was implied that the Wattersons were saved by reality being reset by some kind of magic device off-screen, which was a reference to us, the viewers, and our devices, being able to simply watch another episode of The Amazing World of Gumball after watching The Finale. This episode revealed that the Wattersons are, canonically in-setting, immune to their past actions that would take them out of the status quo. At the beginning of the episode, it was revealed while the Wattersons were looking at their Family Album that their house was perfectly fine twenty minutes after being irreparably water damaged during the events of The Responsible. Richard said that he has been in prison many times, and that it's as simple as being put in and then suddenly not being in there anymore.
* Interactions beyond the fourth wall have ended other episodes, as seen such as at the end of The Spinoffs, where the viewers go to a different channel to watch a different show.
* Some fans theorize that The Finaleforeshadowed the Universal Remote. However, there has not been a confirmation of this, and that interpretation only thinks of the series on a surface level, rather than diving into the nature of the writing.
These points only provide additional context, rather than leading the justification, but are worth mentioning nonetheless.
* Season 2, overall episode 67, The Voice: Tobias mentioned that he feels like the world isn't set up how it should be, because he thinks he's better than Gumball, yet he feels like his life isn't as interesting as Gumball's, as if Tobias is merely a supporting character. This is because, despite Tobias seemingly having a more successful life than Gumball and Darwin, Tobias is a secondary character, so he doesn't get to incidentally have as many exciting experiences as Gumball and Darwin get to.
* Season 2, overall episode 72, The Sweaters: Gumball knows that he and Darwin are the main characters, and that events happen in specific ways because of that fact: "And I know what's gonna happen if we roll with this. We're gonna have a fight, it's gonna look like we're losing, but then we'll win thanks to our "part" or something, then those sweater guys will respect us, and then we'll freeze-frame at some kinda high five mega happy ending cheese pose." The context was that the tennis sweater guys from Richwood High challenged Gumball and Darwin to a competition, and if they didn't accept, then Elmore Junior High would get replaced with a golf course. This didn't interest the Gumball and Darwin, but everything was oddly forcing them to be part of this story through weird happenstance and the sheer stupidity of everyone else. Sarah, a character who is a consistent outlet for the show's meta humor, made significant contributions in this episode. This episode is a parody about clichés, tropes and contrivances in certain kinds of school sport movies, and it used Gumball and Darwin as the protagonists of which all these specific events happen to and revolve around.
* Seeing as how the story turned out almost exactly like how Gumball predicted, because of how predictable the plot was meant to be as a parody, it can be interpreted that it was narratively mandatory that Gumball and Darwin in particular participated in the story and won against the challengers in the very specific way that they did.
* Season 3, overall episode 78, The Fan: Sarah is madly in love with Gumball and Darwin despite them usually being portrayed as unremarkable, and Sarah is notable for her fourth wall breaking, Meta Humor and general fascination with how fiction works. It's implied that she thinks their lives are far more interesting than hers because they are the main characters, implied by "since l'm in school to be near you guys" combined with how Sarah doesn't have a strong sense of self-identity, along with her aforementioned knowledge of the fourth wall.