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Adventure Time: Aiding in Life’s Hardest Adventures
“There is panic around death because it’s coming for you. But if you’re looking at it you can settle down and feel relaxed because you know where it is, and it’s not going anywhere…I really like that sad tingle” (Bustillos, 6). Pendleton Ward, creator and current executive producer of the much-loved children’s cartoon Adventure Time released this sentiment in an interview.
The journalist conducting the interview was probing him about why a children’s cartoon contains such a dark glimpse into death and decay. There is something innately cathartic and beautiful about the graphics of the cartoon. The opening sequence shows dark, deadly images of a radioactive, decaying earth and a mushroom cloud explosion directly juxtaposed with an alarmingly colorful display of candy characters and a lollipop city. How better to soothe the underlying panic we all experience when it comes to the darkest topics of life than to produce it alongside silly humor, goofy characters, clever dialogue, and a protagonist with an unending yearning to do nothing but good for others? Adventure Time is a powerful instrument both for children and the inner-children that coexists in adult bodies to assist in coming to terms with all of the cruelest realities of life; death, loss, abandonment, topics that children are typically shielded from; the issues that as adults we still do not know how to cope with.
The most fitting way to describe the animation style of Adventure Time is helter-skelter meets a comic book. There is a wealth of beautiful popping color and imaginative characters in a myriad of creative and ridiculous kingdoms. Characters have lanky arms and legs that move in a manner contrary to all known laws of physics. This exudes “fun”. After what is mysteriously referred to in the show as the “great mushrooms war” it seems magic has returned to earth in full force. Many animals talk, candy and breakfast items have become sentient and the land’s greatest ruler is made of bubble gum. Humans are generally known to be extinct save one human boy, 2
the show’s great protagonist, Finn the human. Clad in shorts, a bear hat, and a backpack Finn is adorable, and his fight to only do good for others and remain pure continues throughout the course of the show. His loyal companion is Jake the dog, and yes, he can talk and has magical powers. Upon consideration of the above description one’s eyes may roll at the thought of yet another mindlessly stupid cartoon with pretty colors designed to keep kids glued to the television, however, Adventure Time is so much more than that (Strauss, 2014).
Contrasted with this bright, bubbling positivity is an underlying darkness. Due to some radioactive tragedy, much of the earth is a wasteland. An ungodly evil presence is lurking under the earth’s crust. Images of gnarly monsters, maggots, and worms decomposing on trees are shown in the title sequence (Strauss, 2014). There is an infinite number of dead worlds in which the devil rules over suffering skeletons in a lava pit. These dead worlds are dark, mainly black and red, and show the afterlife as a pit of despair. The Candy Kingdom is constantly under attack, and mutants, zombies, werewolves, vampires, etc. are always attempting to ravage the city and eat the candy citizens. There are bloody wars and tragic deaths, but it seems so much more approachable and almost comedic when the crime is happening to a peppermint.
The show’s main characters are the crime fighting, evil stomping duo Finn the human and Jake the dog, and although they are represented as being juvenile figures, they have many confrontations with death and abandonment. Finn was left in the woods as a baby and would have certainly perished if not for the kindness of Jake’s mother, Margaret, who insists on rescuing the baby and kissing him on the forehead. Jake’s parents adopt the abandoned baby and
Finn and Jake grow up as brothers. In the first season of the show Finn grapples with the reality of his abandonment and states that this betrayal and his sadness as a baby are his prime motivations for always trying to do good deeds for others and fight evil. There is a painful, 3
beautiful moment in the episode Sons of Mars when Jake is mistakenly identified as a villain, and sentenced to death. Finn races through time and space to valiantly save his friend using methods he would normally find morally reprehensible, like extortion and threats. This shows the panic we all feel when someone we love is in imminent danger. Finn does not make it there in time and Jake is executed. When the Martian king realizes he has killed an innocent dog, he travels to the lair of death and trades his immortality for Jake’s life, but in the meantime Finn clutches the lifeless body of his best friend, crying out in anguish, angry tears stream from his face until life is returned to Jake.
One of the shows key writers, Kent Osbourne in an interview last year said, “Hearing
Jake talk about his perception of death and dying, I remember when that was pitched, it made me feel better about my own mortality…It prepared me for death better” (Bustillos, 6). That quote is in reference to the episode The New Frontier in which Jake has what is referred to as a “croak dream.” His own death is played out before him, and the sequence is accompanied by the ethereal entity the Cosmic Owl, who is said to only make an appearance when there is supreme cosmic significance. Rather than reacting with fear, Jake is at peace. He explains to Finn that his individual earth consciousness will be spread everywhere throughout the cosmos. Trying to be reassuring he says, “I’m going to be all around you; in your nose, in your dreams, in your socks-
I’ll be a part of you in your earth mind-it’s going to be great.” Finn reacts as most of us would react. He tells him to stop talking about the possibility of death. He exclaims, “Dude, I’m 13.
Stop it, you’re messing me up.” Finn responds with denial and contempt when Jake seems reassuring, almost consenting. Here, Finn represents typical human reaction to the mortality of a loved one, and the contrast between the two characters shows the progression of the stages of grief. 4
Adventure Time conquers topics most children’s television avoids religiously. The show is post-apocalyptic, the world is riddled with nuclear decay and mutated monsters. Finn is a mere child and has no stable support system, no parents, no rules, and yet he chooses to never cease the fight to conquer evil. Aside from Finn the only humans that exist from the pre- mushroom war era are the Ice King and Marceline the Vampire Queen. The Ice King is a villain and a shut-in, and has a general disregard for other people’s feelings and Marceline has no problem with the theft of innocent souls and meaningless killing. In this way the show almost suggests that people before the apocalypse had already been corrupted, that perhaps this nuclear cleansing was necessary for true good to exist once again. Unlike in other children’s cartoons, in which cartoon cats can survive an alarmingly high amount of traumatic deaths and continue to survive in every episode, death in Adventure Time is final. Once characters die they do not return, and the remaining characters mourn them. This shows children a more realistic view of what death is and what it means to die.
While no single medium, be it poetry, song, novel, painting, comic may take away the pain, confusion, and anger of loss, creating a safe space for the vocalization of children’s feelings and thoughts is important. Sometimes that safe space means one that is separated from the child’s own experience (Maguth, 85-86). It has been shown that children need more emotional space than adults to acknowledge pain (Wiseman, 10). A platform like that of Adventure Time causes a good amount of safe space away from personal pain in which to have a platform for a conversation about grief, a platform in which the loss is happening to a fictional kingdom of characters that are clearly separated from our real life experiences, thus making it much easier to open up without feelings of threat or insecurity (Maguth, 83-84). 5
When my mother died and my family was waiting for the hospice nurses to arrive I sat with my seven-year-old brother on the couch upstairs. Hoping for a distraction, I turned on the television. Adventure Time happened to be replaying an old episode. This particular episode showed Jake’s parents Joshua and Margaret before their deaths. My mother’s name is also
Margaret. The episode went on to show Finn and Jake missing their parents and reminiscing about when they were still alive. Always logical, quietly, my brother said, “well, Finn and Jake don’t have a mom and they’re still fighting evil.” He then went on to think of all of the historical figures and Nobel prize winners he could think of who grew up without mothers, reassuring himself that he would be okay. This child’s reaction to exposing his own grief, and relating himself to a bereaved character mirrors a study conducted on the importance of children’s picture books and narratives in the educational realm of childhood mourning. The study further concluded that biobibliotherapy, in which children relate their own experiences to that of a fictional character, helps validate the emotions of children who would otherwise self-blame, and gives them valuable coping tools to deal with their own grief and pain (Wiseman, 3-5). It is my surmise that this early exposure to the reality of death and decay; this glimpse into how mortality can be addressed in many creative ways, can aid in emotional development.
Bruno Bettelheim is a revered child psychologist who wrote The Uses of Enchantment, which speaks to the importance and significance of fairy tales in child development. And what is
Adventure Time if not a fairy tale? In this examination, Bettelheim writes that since the content of the fairy tale is clearly not true, then children can surmise that the significance of the tale lies elsewhere, that they are “unreal, not untrue”. They show that the information that is external is irrelevant, rather, the relevance exists in the inner processes that take place, and can lead to an inward examination. Consciousness of reality, consciousness of hardship, heartache, and loss are 6
important because these realities comprise the entirety of the human experience, and they must be acknowledged and faced in order to find some sort of purpose; some sort of meaning interlaced in the chaos of life (Bettelheim, 7-10). Just as my little brother can clearly see the underlying pain Finn feels when he misses his adoptive mom, he can connect his own pain in losing his mother, even though the premise of a talking dog adopting a human baby in the woods is ridiculous. The circumstances are completely unreal, but the sadness; the remembrance, those things are not untrue.
In regards to television and film, Ridvan Senturk, visual communication researcher and professor of cinematic film studies, argues that violence, anxiety, high stress, and fear in children’s television programming may be damaging, lead to emotional stunting, and make it more difficult for children to fit in with their larger cultural and sociological groups as a whole.
The big word Senturk uses is “anxiety.” He repeats the word anxiety time and time again in his work. He writes that the coupling of visual violence with the anxiety it produces in the child audience can cause psychological trauma that cannot be undone (1129-1131). I have already clearly painted the darkness of Adventure Time, yet how can I support its aid in childhood development if I take the research of Senturk into consideration? The key word is anxiety.
Adventure Time has moments that feel intense, particularly when there is some big conflict or maybe a beloved character in peril, and it is emotionally charged. However, there is never any underlying anxiety. The audience knows that ultimately good will conquer, because the entire message revolves around the fact that while characters may be flawed, there is an underlying inner struggle between good and evil inside even the worst characters, and eventually the good side will win. Anxiety induced by violence can be traumatic, but the bright silliness of
Adventure Time does not render itself to anxiety, nor is there any “serious” violence or the 7
presence of gore. In this way it is a perfect tool to make children more understanding of death and loss, but not panicked, anxious, or traumatized.
The balance in the emotional inner-workings of children is delicate. Many American parents try as hard as humanly possible to shield children from difficult topics, and refuse to discuss death with their children. But the reality of the human condition is that death exists. It may start with something small, like the death of a pet, or children may be exposed harshly to it very early. Regardless, assuredly there will come a time when everyone will be exposed to death, and it is helpful if some emotional development and cognitive action has already been undertaken when this happens. Adventure Time as children’s television programming is a truly unique entity. Somehow this creative team has been able to access the inner child; making something completely fun and innocent, colorful and goofy, clever and heart-warming, while simultaneously tackling what is hard about being an adult; moral dilemma, moral ambiguity, complicated relationships, and most of all the reality of the finality of death. Thus, it achieves a very curious goal. Adventure Time reaches out to the part in all of us that is petrifyingly scared, like children. It touches that soft spot that is terrified of death, panicked by finality, uprooted by loss, and gives us a little soft pat. It plops death down in front of us and says, “don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere.”
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Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. Vintage, 1989.
Bustillos, Maria. “It’s Adventure Time!”. The Awl. 2014.
Maguth, Brad, et al. “Grappling With Death and Loss Through Children’s Literature in the
Social Studies”. Social Studies Research & Practice 10.3 (2015): 80-87. Education
Research Complete.
Senturk, Ridyan. “Anxiety and Fear in Children’s Films”. Educational Sciences: Theory and
Practice 11.3 (2011): 1122-1132. ERIC.
Strauss, Neil. “Adventure Time: The Trippiest Show On Television”. Rolling Stone. 2014.
television.>. Wiseman, Angela. “Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying”. Children’s Literature in Education 44.1 (2013): 1-14. Professional Development Collection.