First Impressions: Adventure Time

As a Steven Universe fan, I hear lots about other great Cartoon Network shows. Including, of course, the one that boosted Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar’s fan cred: Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time.*

So many of my nerdy friends/random people on the Internet love this show, so I thought I’d give it a try. I borrowed the first season from the library and got halfway through before I realized that wasn’t for me, but I heard the show got better. So I picked up season 3, and then 4, and then 5.

Obviously, I liked it enough to keep watching. And I’ll probably go back and grab the earlier seasons before long, just to catch up on the references in later episodes. (At this writing, I’ve already gone through season 2.)

So far, the adventures of Finn the human and his adoptive bro, Jake the shapeshifting dog, are engaging. Their homeland of Ooo, at turns magical and dark, sets up endless storytelling possibilities, and the ever-growing cast of secondary characters fleshes out the setting.

Here are my more detailed thoughts:

+ I appreciate that the characters are fallible in interesting ways. Our protagonist, Finn, is allowed to make the same mistakes as any other well-meaning teenage boy. We watch Finn mess up his relationship with his girlfriend and then awkwardly try to get her back after she’s moved on, and in both cases, we’re asked to cringe for him. Likewise, Princess Bubblegum of the Candy Kingdom slowly reveals the ego, flexible ethics, and dogmatic materialism that go hand-in-hand with her scientific ingenuity and benevolent leadership. The more we learn about the past of this world, the more we learn that not everyone is as good or bad as they initially seem.

+/- However, I reject the idea that this show is universal. The narrative’s perspective is straight cisgender male, which is 100% fine. Boys and men deserve stories that show heroic boys grappling with feelings they have no model to express and learning to accept what they can’t control and having great silly fun chopping off bad guys’ heads with their swords.

And people who aren’t straight males obviously still can and do enjoy stories about them, as witnessed by almost every popular franchise.

– To add to the above, for me, it often stands out that Adventure Time‘s women and romances are written from and for a straight male perspective. It’s great that the show sometimes plays with gender through Ice King’s gender-swapped Fionna and Cake fanfiction and by showing female characters who have traditionally masculine skills like SCIENCE! and rad electric guitar shredding. And it’s great that the showrunners tacitly support LGBTQ+ relationships with canon same-sex exes. But though behind-the-scenes support and intentional stereotype-smashing are great, the show isn’t for those groups.So far, watching, Bubblegum and Marceline and Lumpy Space Princess and the rest often feel characterized from the outside in to me, while Finn and Jake usually feel characterized from the inside out.

+/- … which becomes most obvious in my mixed feelings toward one of its more intriguing characters, Ice King. Every female-presenting person knows an Ice King, and so does everyone else, although they may not know they do. He’s the guy who has real and legitimate feelings of loneliness but acts on his need for companionship in unacceptable ways. He wants to be a nice, fun guy, but his way of achieving that is to impose his “niceness” on others and ignore their wishes, including their consent or lack thereof. He believes — or wants to believe — that it’s his personality that keeps people close to him. Instead, he wields his power in ways that prevent them from leaving.

Everyone hates feeling lonely, so we have sympathy for Ice Kings. In Ooo, we have particular sympathy for this one, because both his power and his willingness to cross others’ boundaries come from a magical artifact that has affected him in ways beyond his control. Before he was the Ice King, he was a thoughtful man who cared about other people’s feelings.

It’s great that Adventure Time presents Ice King’s endless manipulations as wrong, unjustified by his painful loneliness. And it’s good that it presents a model of heroism that includes men like Finn and Jake rejecting Ice King’s protests about deserving companionship and calling him out on his behaviour.

But the show still makes Ice King’s plotlines about his feelings. He’s the subject; the women and girls he victimizes are props in his story. We are asked to sympathize with him in ways we’ve never been asked to sympathize with the princesses he endlessly pursues. This is fine, on strictly storytelling grounds. But in real life, that narrative is old and harmful: women and female-presenting people are constantly asked to consider the feelings of those who harass us while having our own feelings about the harassment ignored.

And although the Ice King’s pre-magical-crown past is an interesting conceit that deepens the character, the way it separates his “good” self from his “bad” self suggests a false dichotomy between the two sides of his existence. In real life, many Ice Kings aren’t Ice Kings to everyone. They are Ice Kings to the princesses they kidnap — and, at the same time, they are Simons to their friends and families. Those two personalities aren’t separate: they’re the same person, always fully aware of how they’re behaving and choosing to act differently based on the context.

Because this show is aimed at boys and men, the implied messages of the Ice King’s story is: don’t tolerate Ice King-like behaviour, but remember that you don’t know why other people behave the way they do. It might not be their fault. That’s a great message for those who are more likely to witness harassment than experience it, but for those of any gender who do experience it, it’s the same old burden of being expected to consider and care for your harasser’s feelings before you care for your own.

+ On the lighter side, I enjoy how the whimsy of Ooo gives the series space to tell many different kinds of stories. The series enjoys romps through different genres, and there’s always room for new fun (and funny) ideas. The show can move from sitcom-like character drama to murder mystery to horror-lite to action-adventure in each ten-minute episode.

+ Also, the writing voice is unique. The show’s Ooo-ian slang is earworm-errific. Like, oh my glob, that biz is addictive. Just watch and try not to spit it out accidentally somewhere all professional.

+ Finally, I like how the show subverts many fantasy tropes. It has characters defeat life-long curses by embracing them, not sacrificing part of themselves to negate them. It lets vampires be cool and fun and also terrifying and dangerous at the same time. It lets evil characters love their kids. It laughs at seriousness without dismissing it, which is a tough balancing act to maintain.

* Lots of people have mentioned Adventure Time, but my cousin spoke for it most passionately. And I trust his taste: even though I disliked it, I still read Lord of the Rings because if six-year-old him found stuff to enjoy in it, surely I could too. Thanks for the rec, Nate!