'you forgot your floaties'
how one of the weirdest Adventure Time episodes sums up (nearly) everything I love about the show
Despite loving Adventure Time an absurd amount — as most of my friends will attest — I hadn’t, until recently, watched every episode. When I’d first watched the show, I’d been intimidated by its scale and relied on lists of plot-relevant episodes and, in later series, individual episode ratings to judge what episodes were worth watching. I’d always felt faintly bad that there were tons of episodes, particularly in earlier series, which I hadn’t ever watched. If nothing else, it meant I didn’t get a bunch of memes about the show, but I also worried — unreasonably, I think — that I couldn’t be a ‘proper’ Adventure Time fan without having watched every single episode.
In the absence of anything better to do in the pandemic, I decided at the start of the month to watch the whole show, start to finish. I even recorded my ratings for every episode, and made an absurd spreadsheet to keep track of them. I learned a bunch of things from this experience, for example:
The first couple of series are really not particularly good, but the show gets better pretty quickly from the second half of series two;
I really do not enjoy the character of Lumpy Space Princess;
Finn’s character growth is just extraordinarily well-handled;
Somehow, the finale is more emotionally devastating off the back of watching every single episode;
There are short runs where the show gets just weirdly horny;
I just really love this show so much.
On the back of doing this ridiculous thing, I’d originally intended to do a few newsletters looking at different aspects of what I love about Adventure Time. In planning them, though, I kept realising that for almost everything I wanted to talk about, I was going to analyse the series six episode ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’. This is one of the Adventure Time episodes I love most deeply, and while there are others which might mean more to me (for which read ‘cause me emotional harm’), none save perhaps the finale go so far in reflecting what I love about the show. ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ combines absurd, childish humour with genuinely challenging philosophical questions; it creates a rich and important part of the lore and answers so many questions, but raises tons more; it builds from a story about its protagonists into a much wider narrative taking place worlds and millennia away, and fits all this into just ten minutes; it takes a previously unsympathetic character and displays unflagging empathy for their trauma; and it’s extremely funny. So, I decided that I’d just do a deep dive on this one episode. There are things it doesn’t touch on that I want to talk about elsewhere — but that’s for another time.1
I’m going to take my discussion of the episode in parts. I’ll start by giving a bit of background and a summary of what happens, although it’s extremely difficult to adequately sum up and I suggest you just watch the thing if you’re interested. Then I’ll talk about how the episode is structured and its place in the wider narratives of Adventure Time; how it approaches worldbuilding; and finally what it suggests about magic in the land of Ooo and its connection to the unconscious. There are, perhaps obviously, major spoilers throughout what follows.
one: what’s even going on?
background
So first, background — and I am sorry to have to go into so much exegesis, but I don’t think it’s really possible to understand any of what happens in the episode without having a grasp of the key narratives at play. The principal players in the episode are Betty Grof and Magic Man. Betty is one of the few humans around in Ooo, and had been the fiancee of Simon Petrikov, better known now as the Ice King, in the period before the Great Mushroom War (about 1000 years before the events of the show) and before Simon lost himself to the Crown which gave him his powers. After Simon opened a portal to say goodbye to her during a brief moment of lucidity in ‘Betty’, she travelled through in the hopes that she could save him from the Crown and return him to his former self. It’s a big ask, though, and it’s unclear what if anything even remains of the old Simon. Prior to ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’, the last we’d seen of her was her racing away, seemingly with a plan, at the end of ‘Betty’.
Magic Man, meanwhile, had featured in a few more episodes than Betty, but he was generally only present as a straightforward and almost inexplicable antagonist — though one with a remarkable charisma, perfectly voice-acted by Tom Kenny, who also voices Simon/Ice King. In ‘Freak City’, his first appearance, he does Finn the ‘favour’ of transforming him into a giant foot — and Finn eventually discovers a group of others he’s arbitrarily transformed into body parts, with the apparent aim of teaching ‘sissy do-gooders’ the ‘lesson’ that you shouldn’t be kind to strangers. This essentially sets the pattern: doing cruel and absurd things for either no reason or bad reasons, while wearing a silly yellow hat.
In series four’s ‘Sons of Mars’, however, we got some more context for the character, and the first hints of a tragic backstory. It starts with the revelation that he’s originally from the Martian super-society we learn of in this episode, and is the exiled little brother of Grob Gob Glob Grod, the four-headed Martian deity (when people in Adventure Time refer to a god, it’s to one of GGGG’s names). Then Finn finds a photo in his house of Magic Man standing with his arms around a woman, and Magic Man’s claims to have forgotten who it is (‘memories drift in and out of my mind, and the little people get left behind… so whatEVER’, he sings) ring hollow. He’s got a Martian transporter in his basement which could have brought him home at any point — except it requires love to operate, and he doesn’t feel any. The King of Mars (Abraham Lincoln, for some reason; how he got there or if it’s even the same guy is unexplained) mentions how cool Magic Man used to be, ‘before that night you spent with Margles on Olympus Mons’. When he’s alone, Magic Man stands looking at the photo and says ‘Oh, Margles’. And there’s this mysterious promo art for the episode:
While he spends the episode acting like a jerk, and GGGG details his heinous and hilarious crimes while on Mars — like ‘that one time when he turned all the water into hair, and we all got so thirsty we drank it, and when we drank it we went bald’ — we therefore end up suspecting that there’s something more going on, but it was far from clear that we’d learn more. Mars did, though, keep coming up, and in ‘Astral Plane’, GGGG appeared to die to save their Martian super-society.
plot
Which is essentially all the background we need for ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’, which opens with Finn and Jake trying to recover GGGG’s helmet as it falls to earth (‘What do we want with Glob’s helmet?’ ‘Dude, we’re scavengers’) — but they’re beaten to it by Betty. They tail her to Magic Man’s house, hoping to rescue her from his evil clutches, and discuss how to deal with him (‘sever his spine’), but they get ambushed and transformed by Magic Man into a cracked egg (Finn) and a disgusting bowl of soup (Jake). He leaves them upstairs, telling them they’ll rule his house while he’s away — despite, it seems, having told his captive and Stockholm syndrome-d Tiny Manticore that he’d be in charge — and goes down to Betty, where they discuss their plan.
They’ll perform a ritual using GGGG’s helmet which will transmute Magic Man into being the ‘new Glob’ so he can get back home and ‘make it rain on Mars in a bad way’. (Interestingly, they mention that Betty’s ‘ancient human DNA’ is required to activate the ritual, but the connection between the Martians and humans is unclear.) There are some important bits in this conversation, which it would be useful to quote in full:
Betty: A little sad though, right?
Magic Man: Which part?
Betty: Your brother blowing up in space. Doesn't that mess you up?
Magic Man: Nothing messes me up.
Betty: I don't believe that. Like, who is Margles, and why is there a picture of her on your shelf? Something there connects to who you are and your magic.
Magic Man: Someone shines a light into my dark-wizard matter, a way to unclose the circuit of Magic... Madness... and Sadness.
Betty: That's right. M.M.S. Runs through all magic users. I hung out with scores of them, all displaying varying degrees of magic... madness... and sadness. Studying these symptoms could lead me to their underlying cause, and then I'll control the forces that hold sway over Simon.
Magic Man: I see.
Betty: You see what?
Magic Man: The coconut crab who swims in your neighbor's pool at night. Maybe Simon's in there, too. Who else holds their breath in there, Betty? [During this speech, we see a swimming pool with a coconut crab rising out of it.]
Betty: All magic users swim in the loomy gloom.
...
Betty: Is this gonna change you?
Magic Man: Will it change you? And will you be hungry after? Why don't you finish baking your famous bread, huh?
Which brings us back upstairs, where Tiny Manticore is trying desperately to stop Magic Man’s plotting — although he claims ‘I can’t help because I’m psychologically powerless!’ — by pushing egg!Finn and soup!Jake downstairs. Finn falls through a crack in the floor and ends up in Betty’s bread mixture just before she puts it in the oven, and Jake comes down the stairs alongside the picture of Margles, which Betty tucks under her sleeve.
And then, the ritual’s about to start:
Betty: So, you're not afraid of what I might see in you?
Magic Man: No, dumb-dumb. You imagined the lock before the key. You think this is the key, but it's a waste basket. Flumes open!
Betty: We'll see.
Magic Man: Smooth and gray as far as you can see. No life grows in me. Nothing to weed. Nothing to seed. Pure and perfect. Like the marble floors of a bank. You slide with no obstacles, forever blank.
Betty wakes up in a space seemingly within Magic Man’s unconscious, which is — as he claimed — ‘smooth and grey as far as you can see’. From her sleeve, though, she pulls not a picture of Margles but a mask — ‘the key’ — and, putting it on, she’s transformed into this mysterious figure, and starts sliding suddenly towards a giant Magic Man which has appeared on the horizon. Falling into his mouth, she again sees darkness, and hears Magic Man’s voice: ‘Margles? Open your eyes, Margles.’
She does, and she’s in ancient Mars with a notably hat-less Magic Man and his siblings. It turns out that Magic Man created a ‘planetary defense system’ for Mars, to be installed on Olympus Mons and to protect against the second coming of GOLB — a chaos deity which had been briefly glimpsed (though not named) in ‘Puhoy’ — which had taken Margles, Magic Man’s wife. In ‘tribute’, his defense system was in the shape of Margles, and called MARGLES (‘Magical Automated Resistance Generating Laser Energy Supplier’). GGGG is unconvinced, and asks Magic Man if he thinks that ‘your feelings for your lost wife might have compromised your spell programming?’ — but Magic Man dismisses these concerns.
And then MARGLES and Magic Man are climbing Olympus Mons, and we have a sinking feeling about what’s going to happen. This is when things get (even more) complicated. As they climb the mountain, Magic Man says he didn’t simply use his magic to get them to the top of the mountain, but MARGLES doesn’t buy it: ‘All I am is in you, so know yourself, Magic Man.’
They start to carry out the installation, but Magic Man has second thoughts — but as MARGLES points out, ‘I’ve got to stop the second coming of GOLB.’ Magic Man responds:
Uh, he’s probably not coming back. I wish he would. Maybe I would see you again — original you. I looked everywhere, you know. … Every dimension, every dead world. I even wished you back in Prismo’s time room. … But you were gone, erased. Only existing here [gestures to his head] and here [gestures to his heart]. For hundreds of years, I held that sadness until my magic and science were strong enough to create you from my nightmares.
There’s a brief cut to Magic Man with Prismo, an essentially omnipotent ‘wishmaster’, where instead of Margles there appears just a bin with a basketball hoop (‘Balls, man, that has never happened before’). The installation starts properly, and MARGLES is monstrous:
Magic Man starts grappling with MARGLES, trying to force her not to activate — ‘You came from me, so you’ve gotta understand!’ — but she transforms into something monstrous, and screams ‘I came from your nightmares!’ before electrocuting him. He manages to knock her crown off — seemingly the source of her power — and they start to tumble to earth, with MARGLES falling off the cliff of Olympus Mons.
Meanwhile, in Ooo, the bread’s baked and it emerges in the living shape of Finn, who staggers around a bit — and rolls in the spilled Jake soup — before starting to smash the glass structure Betty and Magic Man are sitting inside, and we see them gasping in pain. We cut back to Mars, where Betty and Magic Man suddenly swap places, so that Betty’s reaching down towards Magic Man who’s falling off a cliff — inverting but repeating the image in the ‘Sons of Mars’ promo art. Magic Man yells ‘wait, what’s happening!?’
And then he wakes up next to a seemingly unconscious Betty and with his normally ever-present hat lying on the floor next to them both. He notices bread!Finn, and says ‘Oh look, the bread’s alive. Betty, you see?’
Betty stands before him with her jacket floating around her and wearing his hat, and responds ‘I see a crab, emerging from a dark pool.’ He asks what the crab says, and it shows us the same swimming pool as earlier in the episode — but with Simon’s face. It mouths the episode’s title — ‘you forgot your floaties’ — and Betty screams, merging seamlessly into a maniacal laugh as she disappears (‘laters!’).
All that leaves behind Magic Man, ruminating on the ground — ‘Whoa, my sadness is gone, and my m—’ — breaking off as he’s hit by bread!Finn, asking him to turn him back. But Magic Man doesn’t have any powers anymore (‘I’m just a normie now’), so it’s down to Tiny Manticore to take Finn and Jake to Magic City. The last shot is Magic Man asking ‘what do normies do? Get… smoothies, or something?’
two: structure
how the episode fits together
I just wrote a ton of words summarising the plot of an episode whose total runtime is ten minutes. It moves extremely quickly throughout, but you never feel like it’s losing you or glossing over points too quickly. It takes time for jokes and confounding imagery, and trusts that it’s laid the groundwork for viewers to follow along — even if they don’t necessarily understand everything on the first viewing. One of the ways storyboarder Jesse Moynihan achieves this is in the essential economy of the visual medium — for which a good example is this eleven second-long clip, while MARGLES is falling from Olympus Mons:
It’s extremely difficult to describe what happens here — not least because doing so would have to address its many ambiguities — but showing us takes seconds. The image of Magic Man crawling to the cliff-edge recalls the ‘Sons of Mars’ promo art, and this informs our affective response to it, but that prior knowledge isn’t necessary. It manages to hold the ambiguity and the information at once, with this remarkable visual fluency.
The other thing that makes this episode work is its structure, although the precise divisions of the narrative are arguable. It could plausibly be understood as a single five-act story, with act one taking in everything which occurs before we enter the basement; act two finishing as the ritual starts; act three the start of the dream sequence until either the beginning of the Olympus Mons scene or when MARGLES and Magic Man reach the top; act four from there until either the end of the dream sequence or Betty’s disappearance; and act five the rest of the episode. Alternatively, we could understand it as two three-act narratives nested into each other: in the first story, act one as in the five-act structure, then act two everything outside Magic Man’s remembrances (but including, I think, the dreamspace Betty exists in before entering his head) until the end of the dream, and act three beginning as Magic Man wakes up. In the dream narrative, the division between acts one and two is the beginning of the climb up Olympus Mons, and act two ends once Magic Man starts to wrestle with MARGLES.
Despite this structural ambiguity, however, the writers use a set of extremely sophisticated framing devices to take us through the episode. For one thing, it proceeds through a series of zooms-in and epistemological gaps. It starts in an undetermined, totally open field with Finn and Jake, then showing them outside Magic Man’s house wondering how to proceed before he takes them by surprise and the action shifts inside. Once there, we’re still left with Finn, Jake, and Tiny Manticore, wondering what exactly is happening in the basement — but then we cut once again, and we find out. The puzzles don’t end, though, as Betty and Magic Man’s conversation focuses on yet another set of questions: what they’ll both see during the ritual, and what’s inside their heads — a set of puzzles for which the coconut crab and the loomy gloom provide a convenient image. While the cut to Mars might appear to be a shift outwards, it’s actually another zoom inwards — confirmed by Betty literally falling into his head — and the long shot of MARGLES’ face just before the action shifts to Olympus Mons yet again foregrounds Betty’s and our lack of knowledge about what might be discovered within both Magic Man and MARGLES.
By structuring the narrative in this way, Moynihan is able to achieve a set of really important things. Firstly, by aligning the viewer’s lack of knowledge with a specific character at every stage, he’s able to clearly highlight exactly what questions are important and then provide an organic way for us to discover their answers alongside that character. This lets it deal easily with the vast amount of both questions and information the episode throws at us. The constant move inwards, furthermore, means that in the climax he can freely move to action taking place in previous layers — like Finn’s destruction of the ritual apparatus — while knowing that we have sufficient context to understand it and no further work needs to be done. The structure also means that parallels can be clearly drawn between different bits of the action, so that, for example, Finn and Jake twice get their plans ruined by surprises — from Betty and then Magic Man — but the climactic scene reverses these roles so that it’s Finn and Jake ruining Betty and Magic Man’s plans.
Most importantly, though, it means that the episode’s structure reflects one of its key themes: the inadequacies of subjective perception, particularly of others’ intentions. Aligning us with characters with inadequate knowledge is one way of doing this, and from the very start — when Jake trips himself and Finn up because his telescope is zoomed in too far, and again when they struggle to make out Betty through smoke — we’re shown the failures of these characters’ perspectives. That Finn and Jake instantly assume that Betty’s being manipulated or controlled by Magic Man shows how these failures of literal perception echo broader misunderstandings of others’ intentions. This point is of central importance to the episode, through the two points at which Magic Man denies his own emotions — when he tells Betty that ‘no life grows in me’, and when he tells GGGG that his feelings didn’t affect how he made MARGLES. But these points also highlight how inadequately characters know themselves (Magic Man is even told directly that he needs to know himself better), and the central tragedy of the episode — Betty losing herself to magic — is only underlined by her conscious ignorance of whether the ritual would change her.
All of this sets us up for the conclusion, which is only made possible by all of this prior work. We’re never told precisely what goes wrong for Betty, and how she ends up losing herself to magic, but her mistakes become obvious when you look at the episode as a whole. She tried too hard to understand magic, got too close, and fell into its trap, just as Jake — zoomed in too close — literally fell over at the start of the episode. Like Finn and Jake getting ambushed by Magic Man while planning his demise, she ignored the actual risk to herself by focusing on her assumed antagonist. And she ignored the essential factor of her own emotions and got caught out in doing so, just like Magic Man assuming his heartbreak wouldn’t compromise his creation of MARGLES. Her mistakes had already been made, so the episode can get away with an illusive scene where someone mouths the episode’s title to make its point: she forgot her floaties, and now she’s going to drown.
how the episode fits into the series
All of this is further cemented by how the episode fits into the broader context of the show and the series. Its impact is deepened by knowledge of the symbolic idiom Adventure Time has developed throughout its run, and by how it interacts with the wider arcs it intersects with, is part of, or just happens alongside. In a post on his website about the episode, Jesse Moynihan describes the process of how developing the episode worked:
The process of coming up with it had a lot to do with waiting and seeing how all the other episodes and character arcs were playing out, and how Magic Man’s story could fit in there.
It’s interesting to me how Adventure Time’s character arcs happen on their own time, rather than in a direct, continuous line. I think this is because all the pieces are falling all over the place, and you have to wait and see how they land. Then you gage where your ideas maybe fit in that landscape. It can take a long time to get an idea through at the moment where it’ll work harmoniously with everything else that’s going on. The philosophy of Adventure Time I feel, is that life is moving along without a “story”. Life is just life. The story part is the pieces that viewers put together. I don’t know if that’s a perfect description but maybe it’s a loose template for how our story threads work.
So telling Magic Man’s story required that it both resonate thematically and make sense narratively with the episodes around it. Its place at the end of series six is a perfect fit: many episodes in this run — ‘Hoots’, ‘The Mountain’, ‘Gold Stars’, and ‘Orgalorg’ — both take an interest in hidden aspects of previously-introduced but still-mysterious characters, and particularly explore the unconscious and dreams. The combination of cosmic scale and personal or psychological significance is a vital part of the entire ending arc of the series, with closer ‘The Comet’ taking Finn into space and into contact with near-mythical figures — but in the process learning about himself and interrogating his own nature.
At a simple narrative level, furthermore, a number of plot points had to be reached to make ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ possible: Betty had to have returned, but also to have disappeared for an extended period to make her status mysterious; GGGG needed to have been slain; and so on. Beyond that, too, the episode relies on — and makes important contributions to — the symbolism of the show as a whole. A good example of this is in Magic Man’s hat. Not every wizard in Adventure Time wears headgear, but a good proportion do, and especially in the character of Simon/Ice King, we’ve been conditioned to associate crowns, hats, and so on with magic use. ‘I Remember You’ and ‘Simon & Marcy’ makes this particularly apparent, underlining that Simon is losing himself as much to the Crown as to magic in general. The literal role played by the Ice Crown is elaborated in ‘Evergreen’, only a bit earlier in the series. This enables some of the narrative fluidity of the episode — we can clearly identify the times Magic Man still has or regains his sanity by when he’s got his hat on — but also increases the emotional impact of the ending. When Betty is shown wearing Magic Man’s hat, we not only get an immediate visual marker of her newfound magical abilities, but her transformation is also placed in the wider imagery of magic users' headgear.
In particular, it turns her story into a clear echo of what happened to Simon: in trying to get him back, she lost herself in the exact same way. But it’s also connected with Magic Man’s story — which is itself placed in conversation with Simon’s through this episode, as it shows how both of them lost their loved ones and then lost themselves to magic — and it therefore returns us to one of the central themes of Adventure Time as a whole: how events repeat, and mistakes aren’t learned from. Betty’s mistake is the one characters in Adventure Time make again and again, and which Marceline states outright in the next series:
Everything repeats over and over again. No one learns anything, because no one lives long enough to see the pattern, I guess.
This allows us both to see what might go wrong and to empathise with Betty more when she makes this mistake — it’s not her fault, because everything repeating is just the way of the universe. And it’s not just mistakes which repeat, but tragedy, and by making Betty, Simon, and Magic Man’s stories part of a wider whole, they resonate with each other and become part of a broader picture of loss.
three: building a world
I think one of the things I admire most about Adventure Time’s approach to storytelling in general and worldbuilding in particular is their absolute willingness to leave things unsaid or ambiguous. While obviously Adventure Time is first and foremost looking to tell its viewers compelling stories, it’s not looking to explain every detail of its world or its characters’ lives. This is, I think, for a few reasons. Firstly, because Adventure Time is looking to tell compelling stories in quite short chunks, the amount of extraneous information it can afford to convey is quite small, and anyway it doesn’t want to slip into just telling us facts about its world. It has to make narrative sense on the episode level to share bits of lore. Secondly, on the series level, narrative and thematic coherence — to at least an extent — has to be maintained, and so the show tends to avoid sharing stories and bits of lore which don’t quite fit. This is, I think, particularly important because of the storyboarding teams Adventure Time normally works in, so that episodes are primarily developed by individuals or partnerships.
A third and less practical-minded reason has to do with the point Jesse Moynihan makes in the post I quoted from above. Adventure Time seems particularly invested in the lives of its characters, in the sense that it can sometimes return to quite naturalistic moments and brief snapshots of their version of normalcy. So, in ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’, you get brief asides where Finn and Jake discuss their brunch that day. Doing so serves essentially no narrative purpose, though it gives us some funny lines — but it’s also what the pair would be talking about, the way they’d see the world: in terms of their day so far. Within that, though, it doesn’t make sense for the show to be forcing revelations of characters’ backgrounds without it making sense within the lives they lead and the stories they’re part of. Adventure Time’s lore for this reason comes up in patches, and it’s notable that flashbacks and recollections of the world’s or characters’ history almost always arise within the narrative and from specific characters (maybe the one exception is ‘Min and Marty’, but this is one of my favourite episodes so I can forgive it). If no one would remember it, no one would tell it.
Because of this investment in the characters’ lives, however, alongside the individual storyboarding teams’ independent imaginative work, we’re also left with a phenomenally rich lore. The land of Ooo is bursting with stories which could be told but aren’t — and Magic Man’s was almost one of them, until the perfect moment came along where it could fit in and make sense. Until that point, it had just existed in the mind of Jesse Moynihan and the few hints scattered throughout ‘Sons of Mars’ — at the edge of viewers’ consciousness but with so many unknowns. Betty speaks for all of us when she questions if nothing really messes Magic Man up:
Like, who is Margles, and why is there a picture of her on your shelf? Something there connects to who you are...
Certainly, ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ answers a lot of these questions about the real nature of Magic Man’s past, and develops our knowledge of the universe of Adventure Time. We get a pretty clear picture of who Margles is, what happened on Olympus Mons, why he became like he is now. And our image of Martian history and society gets a bit more developed: we see what they looked like before they started having to use headgear to disguise their lost hair, and enter a building other than the giant colosseum which is essentially all of what we’d previously seen of Mars. We also don’t appear to see the giant domes of present-day Mars, and the King of Mars is notably absent — though presumably existed at this point, as he remembers Magic Man from before Olympus Mons. Magic Man confirms, also, that he’s lived thousands of years. And we learn that the weird red baby who Finn saw in ‘Puhoy’ is called GOLB, who appears to be immensely powerful but remains mysterious.
What we learn, though, sometimes just prompts yet more questions. Like: how long ago was that night on Olympus Mons? How and why did Margles get taken by GOLB, and why were others spared? What, exactly, is GOLB, and why did he come to Mars in the first place? How can he be powerful enough to destroy Margles so completely that even Prismo can’t get her back — and who exactly sent the basketball-hoop bin anyway? Is GOLB definitely returning, or is Magic Man right that ‘he’s probably not coming back’ — but if so, why create MARGLES in the first place? The existence of these questions is part of what I enjoy so much about Adventure Time’s worldbuilding, as you feel constantly like this is really genuinely a world that’s being created, with branching possibilities and questions that you can never fully answer. This is helped by the fact that the show’s approach is frequently to repeatedly return to points of lore and add more information, details, and — crucially — questions to what we already had. Adding depth through these iterations and revisitations cements the idea that this is a world you can never reach the bottom of — there’ll always be more to discover.
All of this is, of course, echoed in the essential format and structure of the show. It’s part of Adventure Time’s concept that so many episodes — including this one — just open with Jake and Finn going on an adventure together and discovering some weird and amazing part of their world. They don’t need to go out with a plan or a purpose — they’ll just hit on an adventure, because the world’s limits are the imaginations of its creators (which is also why the scale of Ooo seems to be constantly shifting: the Ice Kingdom is sometimes miles and sometimes minutes from Finn and Jake, and the Grasslands are big enough to always contain something unfamiliar but always be crossed quickly). I think it can be easy to think of worldbuilding as about answering every question, covering every square of ground, and giving as much information as available, but Adventure Time reverses this: it builds a world that can be constantly added to and changed, and which can never be fully explored. It recognises that the questions, and the possibilities they raise, are the most important thing, not the answers.
I guess, at a very basic level, that’s why I love Adventure Time as much as I do. There are endless things I appreciate and admire and adore, obviously — but the endless depth of its world, and its commitment to being about a world and an ethos more than it is any one narrative or characters, is what makes it special. It doesn’t stop exploring, adding new depth and detail and strangeness and sadness; we keep coming across new places and characters, but also finding old ones transformed and developed when we return. ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ is testament to that vision, but it’s only — can only ever be — just one part of the whole.
four: Die Magie und ihre Beziehung zum Unbewußten
An oddly significant ambiguity in the lore of Adventure Time is what, exactly, magic is — and ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ provides some of the most significant information on this. While it seems like a ‘know it when you see it’ kind of question, there’s a lot of vagueness at the edges and magic’s source is extremely unclear. Questions we might ask include: are elemental powers magic? Are Marceline’s vampire powers? Is Bubblegum right when she describes magic as ‘scientific principles presented like mystical hoo-doo’? What’s the connection between magic and dreams, which frequently appear to come together in this world? How come dreams repeatedly give characters knowledge they have no way of knowing, and sometimes have material consequences? What’s going on with the shared dreams we see a bunch of? This episode starts to resolve some of these questions, and suggests that magic and dreams are intimately connected through being representations of the unconscious which take on a material force beyond what we’re used to.
The main theory the episode offers is that magic is part of a system Betty terms ‘MMS’: ‘magic, madness, and sadness’. This isn’t just her own hypothesising — Magic Man, unprompted, mentions ‘the circuit of Magic... Madness... and Sadness’ before she does — and she seems to have the evidence to back it up: she ‘hung out with scores of’ magic users, and all of them displayed ‘varying degrees’ of the three properties. But what this doesn’t offer is a causal mechanism — MMS are only ‘symptoms’ to Betty, and she still wants to find the ‘underlying cause’ so she can ‘control the forces that hold sway over Simon’. It seems clear that, while each part of MMS is always present in magic users, they aren’t directly correlated, and you can have high levels of one without the others. However, they are loosely correlated, and the stronger someone’s magic, the more likely they appear to be to have a high level of the other traits (inversely, Abracadaniel appears to be an extremely ineffective wizard because he’s neither especially sad nor mad.)
All of which is to say that this only gets us so far. More information is forthcoming from Magic Man in the dream flashback. He tells MARGLES that he:
held that sadness until my magic and science were strong enough to create you from my nightmares.
This quote is extremely interesting to me. While Bubblegum thinks magic is just science under a different name, Magic Man — clearly an expert in both — treats them as separate. He needs magic and science, so the former can’t simply rely on the latter. However, he also puts them as part of the same process — separate skills, perhaps, but they can be applied alongside one another and for the same aims. While magic isn’t the same as science, therefore, they aren’t incompatible, just different ways of solving the same problem — or different parts of the same method. This is further supported by an earlier comment from GGGG — as he refers to Magic Man’s ‘spell-programming’. If you can use ‘spell-programming’, magic and science can coexist: perhaps science can be used to deploy magic.
This suggests, then, that magic is certainly a separable force from the scientific principles that Bubblegum thinks govern the universe — but it’s still not fully clear what this force is. The rest of the Magic Man quote might develop this further. He ‘held that sadness until’ he would be able to give it a use and create MARGLES, and the way this sentence is constructed suggests that doing so was a necessary part of his being able to do so. It could be read as framing his magic as using his sadness as a kind of natural resource which gets converted into something; the ‘skill’ of magic is in refining it and applying it precisely and for specific aims, which science can help with. When Magic Man has lost his powers, he starts by noting that his sadness specifically has gone, as if this is the necessary precondition of his powers. This seems to solve a lot of problems in one go: it explains why some people can be extremely sad but not become magic users, and how magic can be a learned skill; it makes Bubblegum’s statement about magic and science not entirely incorrect, in the sense that presumably the principles that magic manipulates typically make sense in scientific principles; it explains why magical ability and levels of sadness are correlated in the first place; and it lets us account for some of the magical edge-cases (we can suggest that the Crown provides its wearer with the ability to use magic, but it draws on their own sadness; conversely, elemental powers might be a kind of magic which draws on a different source).
It doesn’t, though, resolve every problem. Most notably, there’s no clear place in this economy for ‘madness’ within magic. Once Magic Man lost his sanity after Olympus Mons, he doesn’t appear to have gained more magical ability — which suggests that madness doesn’t operate as a resource for magic in the same way as sadness — and the fundamental aesthetic character of his magic doesn’t seem to have changed at all. How do we resolve this?
I think a good place to start is with my friend and yours, Sigmund Freud, and specifically his model of the dream-work. For Freud, dreams have a manifest content — what you actually experience as you dream — and a latent content — what the dream means. The dream-work is the process which the latent content undergoes so that it can arise as manifest content, during which it is condensed, displaced, and formed into representations, often symbolic in nature. I think magic in Adventure Time works in a similar way to the dream-work: it takes the latent content of sadness and transforms it into something different. For this reason, though, magic is an inherently irrational process: it doesn’t create anything itself, but instead relies on the irrationality of ‘sadness’; and because it transforms that ‘sadness’ into something it isn’t, it has to follow its own irregular rules — it can never straightforwardly transform ‘sadness’ as if it’s an already-processed raw material.
All this is alluded to, I think, when GGGG asks Magic Man if ‘your feelings for your lost wife might have compromised your spell-programming?’2 His inability to fully determine what he creates in MARGLES is driven by the fact that he’s relying on an irrational process which is always going to be shaped by his own subjectivity, by the nature of the ‘sadness’ he’s deploying. MARGLES tells him that ‘all I am is in you’, but she comes from his unconscious thoughts as he created her in a ‘deep trance state’, made her from his ‘nightmares’. He misses the point when he tells her that ‘you came from me so you gotta understand’: the unconscious is rebellious and contains the fears and delusions and knowledge we repress in normal life. Because magic is the process which takes the unconscious and gives it physical form, MARGLES is never going to fit his wishes — she came from his nightmares.
If magic is therefore essentially uncontrollable and irrational, madness arises from this very property, from the inability to reconcile intention and action, to find sense in the products of magic, and to ever adequately work through the trauma that magic relies on. If resolving trauma means working through it — to be able remember without repeating — magic insists on an eternal repetition and on accepting the logic of the unconscious. If, as Freud suggests, ‘identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects’ — that is to say, if the only way you can move on from grief over the loss of a loved object is to identify with it, to bring it inside yourself — magic is a refusal to grieve, an endless externalisation of loss. Of course it leads to ‘madness’; how could it not? And of course this loss leads to Magic Man attacking his family and society, as this is just another way to externalise the loss and grief and attempt to protect himself from it.
This maybe lets us understand the ending of ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’, and how it is that Magic Man loses his sadness while Betty gains his magic. If we think about magic as essentially a mode of processing sadness without resolving it, then what the dream sequence — and specifically the moment when Magic Man and Betty switch places — does is force Magic Man outside of that cycle of repetition. By truly remembering the scene from a perspective which is not his own, as opposed to repeating his feelings at this moment of profound loss, he can think about it differently and begin to process and heal from it. By forcing Betty into this moment of repetition, however, it both forces her to take his place in a literal and seemingly psychic sense, but also to take on this mode of remembrance — and therefore his magic, and his inability to resolve his loss. But the essential material for this — her grief from and her determination to refuse the loss of Simon, therefore preserving her sadness just as Simon did — already existed inside of her.
Magic, then, is one way Adventure Time attempts to understand how we process loss — alongside dreams, which are tightly connected to this theme. That dreams frequently have a closer connection to the world than we are used to is just part of how Adventure Time works to literalise the material effects of the unconscious and the dream-work, turning them into forces which can reach beyond the mind and reshape our reality. All of this helps us understand the themes of grief and change which run through Adventure Time, and teaches us to think about our own loss in new and more productive ways.
conclusion
This has probably gone on long enough, but I wanted to quickly sum up. ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ is just a wonderful episode: it takes in so much information, both old and new, and covers so much ground so quickly, but it never feels expository or rushed. It seems to have so much depth, but you don’t necessarily need to go into the Freudian implications of what it suggests about magic to enjoy it or find it compelling. Having zoomed in at last on its central story of Magic Man’s night on Olympus Mons, it manages to locate a tale which is, in its way, quite a simple one about love and loss. It’s so richly compelling and beautiful; that it takes that basis and builds such a complex and important narrative on top of it is staggering.
I want to write separately about: Finn’s character development throughout the show; Princess Bubblegum, my favourite character, beautiful lesbian, and sometimes brutal dictator; humour and strangeness in the show, possibly especially in the character of Tree Trunks and the episodes ‘High Strangeness’ and ‘Ring of Fire’; and trans readings of Adventure Time. ‘You Forgot Your Floaties’ also touches on the theme of loss and trauma, but I’ve already written about that in other posts: in general and focusing on the character of Martin Mertens.
That Magic Man resists this possibility might echo Freud’s observation that patients can never understand the true sense of their neuroses, and can never understand what it is that they are unconsciously doing and why.