I'm no longer consciously thinking about mood, optimism and perspective, and I seem to be moving away from the theme of sarcastic/ironic happy visuals. I think I'm going to run with the idea of taking orders from people.
Currently a lot of the work I've created doesn't have a connection that's immediately obvious without explanation, but I've decided that worrying about that (that is, the fact that my process appears more disjointed than it is) isn't a priority (especially since over-analysing the themes in my work makes the process feel even more disjointed to me, when actually if I don't over-think it it's fairly logical, organic and intuitive).