tiny mammal kingdom: Adventure Time and the apocalypse
Why the end of the world makes the Land of Ooo something special
A note: while this is intended to be accessible for people who aren’t familiar with Adventure Time, it does have spoilers. Where those spoilers are for the main series content released up to 2018, including the finale, I haven’t specifically marked them. Where they’re for content released post-2018, I’ve given a warning before I get to them. Where spoilers are necessary, I’ve tried to make sure that it doesn’t give away too much, and that you can still enjoy watching the show with them, but if you want to go into it knowing nothing, stop reading now.
Above: the Earth seen from orbit in Adventure Time.
For the first few episodes of Adventure Time’s first series, it seems to be a relatively standard, if sometimes hallucinogenic, kids’ show about adventuring heroes. In ‘The Enchiridion!’, the show’s fifth episode (and a good place to start), we see the protagonists Finn and Jake given a quest by a Princess, before they travel to retrieve an extremely powerful book called (you guessed it) the Enchiridion. There are silly jokes and funny looking characters and everything seems basically normal for what you’d expect from a show like what Adventure Time appears to be — so still pretty weird. Then, in episode 8, ‘Business Time’, Finn and Jake find some seemingly human businessmen frozen in an iceberg, and as the show goes on we start to see more and more things which look suspiciously like the features of our everyday world — but all of them abandoned, decaying. As time goes on, we start to realise that the land of Ooo, in which the show takes place, is post-apocalyptic — or, more precisely, post-post-apocalyptic, after the immediate after-effects of ‘The Great Mushroom War’ which destroyed most of humanity and left a crater in the earth have passed, but still in its shadow.
This might seem a strange place to start when I’m saying why I love Adventure Time as much as I do, but I think for me the post-apocalyptic setting is the key to the show’s appeal — why it’s more than just a fun kids’ show, but one of my favourite pieces of art. There are obviously other reasons for this. There’s its utter commitment to abstraction, nonsense, and aesthetic muchness as guiding principles, all of which frequently leads it to be extremely funny. There’s its queer representation — and while it never made explicit that it had queer characters until its finale, I think it was pretty clear since series 3. There’s its aesthetic, structural, and narratological similarities with much medieval literature (in my opinion), like its focus on the adventuring hero, its occasional (seeming) inconsistency, or its fundamental suspicion of identity. But for me, it’s the apocalypse, and the stories it allows the show to tell about loss, change, and grief, which make the world of Adventure Time feel so rich, lived-in, and sad.
I find it interesting watching the show to think about how sad it is, constantly. I can think of several episodes which make me cry when I watch them, and several which bring me close. It feels like whenever the show starts to really explore its world and its characters, it hits on some deep tragedy (which is not to say that Adventure Time is always tragic: it is mostly very fun, even in episodes which have elements of this tragedy). This generally has something to do with the post-apocalyptic nature of the world. The land itself bears the scars of this deep pervading sense of loss: the Music Hole, which is literally a deep hole in the ground which sings and is introduced in ‘The Music Hole’, can only be heard by those ‘who see the world with childlike wonder’ or those with ‘a deep sense of loss in their hearts’. You could argue that these two things are the twin poles of Adventure Time. The Music Hole has been there for a thousand years — the span of time since the Mushroom War, suggesting it was probably caused by the war — and has been alone ever since, singing to no one, unable to ‘participate in joy or prevent disaster’. It’s a symbol of how the apocalypse in this world created scars which run unfathomably deep, and demonstrates how the show incorporates the loss and sadness caused by the end of the world into the very land itself.
Above: Simon and Marceline hugging in the episode ‘I Remember You’
The two characters who for me best represent the genius of Adventure Time’s conception of the post-apocalypse and treatment of loss are Simon and Marceline, some of the only two people to have lived through the war (both are immortal). Their stories are deeply intertwined, and, in many ways, they’re the same story: how you deal with having lived through the end of the world. Marceline was a little girl at the start of the war, seemingly only able to survive because her father was a demon (indeed the Lord of Evil himself), and grew up mostly on her own with the exception of a period with Simon and another with a group of refugee humans. She gained immortality as a teenager, after being bitten by a vampire, and began to fashion herself as ‘Marceline the Vampire Queen’. Simon, meanwhile, was a scientist/archaeologist who was allowed to survive by a magical crown which granted him powerful magic but at the cost of his mind, eventually transforming him into the seemingly-villainous Ice King (the trade-offs of magic are a recurring theme in the show).
One of the constant features of how Adventure Time thinks about loss is in terms of cycles. Everything repeats; ‘Everything Stays’, as one of the show’s most popular songs puts it. Marceline, for example, is trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of building community with others — her mother, surrogate fathers like Simon, other groups of humans who end up leaving the continent, romantic partners — only for them to eventually leave, frequently in ways which suggest it’s her own demonic/vampiric nature which is driving them away. The show is, I think, engaged in a deeply meditative, thoughtful examination of the ways in which we can get trapped in cycles of loss and suffering. It’s used to inform Marceline as a character who is shaped — but never defined — by her loss: it explains why she finds it difficult to allow herself to be vulnerable, why she seems frequently to want to alienate those close to her before they can leave her. In creating this cyclic nature of loss, too, the show demonstrates the ways in which these patterns can reinforce themselves, and the ways in which violence and pain can generate further suffering. And none of this would be possible without the post-apocalyptic setting.
Simon, meanwhile, is trapped in a similar kind of cycle, though this is one with multiple participants. Both he and his romantic partner Betty are in a seeming loop of losing one another: originally he fears he has driven her away as he loses his mind to the crown (in a character beat which echoes Marceline’s anxieties over scaring away those she loves) and tries to find her in a process which, it is implied, further drives his loss of himself. Eventually, Betty attempts to save him from the crown, and loses her own mind to magic; finally she succeeds, and rescues Simon’s mind, but only by completely losing herself. This, of course, only leaves Simon in exactly the position Betty was in, trying desperately to win back his love. It doesn’t work, really. You can’t get back what you’ve truly lost, not without sacrificing something important.
I mentioned how Simon’s story mirrors Marceline’s, and there’s a clear design of multiple related or parallel losses running throughout the series (particularly in later seasons). So, for example, the mainly-antagonistic Martian mage Magic/Normal/King Man’s search for his wife Margles, also lost to an unknowable power, is placed into conversation with Betty’s loss of Simon — most notably in the sensational episode ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ — and with Simon’s loss of Betty — there are identical shots of Simon and Magic Man talking to the near-omnipotent wish-master Prismo and coming away unsuccessful. Finn’s mother, Minerva, who is introduced in the mini-series Islands, is shown sitting desolate looking at a vast, uncaring ocean which she believes has killed her son and husband — and she too loses part of herself to an obsessional attempt to care for her people. Even Finn’s father, Martin — at times seemingly the most unsympathetic character in the entire show — is shown to be afflicted by a deep and irrecoverable loss. Many of these aren’t explicitly the results of the Mushroom War like Marceline’s loss is, but several are deeply associated with its effects, and I would argue that they would not be possible thematically within the show without that central, defining loss of the apocalypse.
Above: Marceline as a child, standing in the burning wreckage of a city.
And it is remarkable to me how competently and evocatively the idioms of loss are deployed by the show to create and engage in these conversations. Perhaps the single most evocative moment of the finale, for example, is when Marceline is telling Bubblegum about the costs and horror of war, and there is a brief cut to a single shot of a young Marceline holding onto Hambo — the stuffed toy gifted to her by Simon which is in some respects her only physical connection to the past — standing in front of a burning cityscape. Instantly we are reminded of what specifically war means to Marceline, made to understand the horror it provokes in her, and it gives her comment later in the episode that the appearance of GOLB, possibly the most powerful and evil being seen in the show, is ‘the worst thing ever’ a ring of deep emotional truth.
This is not to say that Adventure Time is a pessimistic show, although I suppose that at times it could be considered as such. Instead, one of the most continually remarkable things to me about the show’s treatment of loss is its abiding optimism, its faith in the ability of community and love to allow us to work through loss and grief and come to a productive resolution. As the show progresses, for example, Marceline becomes more and more open to love and connection with her friends and girlfriend, and comes to a place where she has dealt — at least in part — with the grief which has remained part of her all this time. At the start of her arc on the show she seems unwilling to form any bonds with those around her, and she continues to struggle with this and with admitting to genuine vulnerability. The key turning point is in the mini-series Stakes, which presents her vampirism as an allegory for her grief. She realises she is only able to resolve this part of her with the help of others, by opening herself up to genuine connection and vulnerability. And by the end of the show’s finale, she’s depicted in a loving community with those she cares for. The Music Hole’s song — ‘Come Along With Me’ — serves as a representation of this ethos. There is a deep faith and trust in the importance and significance of opening yourself up to others, and of working through conditions of pervasive loss together.
The following paragraph has spoilers for the new episode ‘Obsidian’.
If this was the extent of Adventure Time’s grappling with these themes it would still represent one of the most sophisticated and nuanced takes on them I’ve seen really in any media, but particularly a kids’ show. But what sets the show apart is its ambiguity, and Stakes and ‘Obsidian’ are fantastic representations of this. In Stakes, the final resolution isn’t Marceline being cured of vampirism, as she had initially wished to be: instead, she gets bitten once again, but on her own terms. If we understand vampirism here as a representation of the pain which lives inside Marceline, then what I think this is saying is that we can’t ever really be ‘cured’. Instead, we need to work through these parts of ourselves: acknowledge that they will always be there and will always form part of who we are, but not allow them to define us. Make them part of ourselves, that is, but on our own terms. In ‘Obsidian’, we return to Marceline after the events of the finale, and while she’s clearly happy and healthy her pain isn’t really gone. She still can’t bring herself to show Bubblegum a song which expresses how much her girlfriend means to her; she’s still upset to see where she once lived with her mother; she still can’t quite talk about it. And the episode isn’t about repairing this part of her, or about closing the book on her past: it knows you can’t do that. The mistakes we’ve made and the people we’ve lost are still part of us even if we want to try to move on from them. And so Simon is shown singing ‘I Remember You’, a song constructed from lines written by him before he lost himself to the crown but put to music by the Ice King, at an open mic. The parts of his past in which he created that song — the scared man trying to care for a girl as he loses himself to a magic he can’t control, and the Ice King fully in thrall to that magic — are still there. But he can bring them into a new context, engage with them on his own terms, create something better.
What stays with me from Adventure Time, then, is this deeply sensitive, caring, careful approach to its characters and its world. It isn’t the fact that the show’s setting is post-apocalyptic in itself which makes Adventure Time special: it’s that it cares enough about its characters to truly work to understand how living through the apocalypse would affect them. In doing so, it leaves open space for how we can heal through and with our communities, but it trusts its audience to understand that there are no easy answers.
Speaking of no easy answers, I realised after writing this piece that I could honestly write another 5 newsletters of this length about why I love Adventure Time: there’s just so much I love about it, and so much to say. So this might become a bit of a series, though I’ll definitely make sure to talk about other stuff first.
If you want to watch Adventure Time, I have a list of episodes I think are worth checking out, highlighting episodes which are fun, episodes which are plot-relevant, and episodes which are gay.