Who Would Win
Written & Storyboarded by
Jesse Moynihan and Ako Castuera

I had a best friend from when I was five. Met him in kindergarten, and the two of us basically did everything together, like honestly up through when I was thirty. He was basically my brother, we were that close. We got along great, but that meant that when we did fight, it was brutal. There’s something about the combination of not actually wanting to seriously hurt the other person running up against the raw vitriol that only long term familial acquaintance can bring that makes for an explosive combination.

When we were in capoeira together, the first time me and him were in the circle sparring with each other, we came at each other so hard, our mestre slammed the music to a halt and demanded to know why we hadn’t told him we were brothers, because brothers weren’t allowed in the ring against each other.

Anyway, all this is to say that this whole thing looks awful familiar. All the way down to the fight deteriorating into exhuasted flailing and mud slinging and pantsing. Because fighting is exhausting. A fight is either over real quick, or it turns into this. And when you’re fighting someone you love, because you don’t actually want to seriously injure them, it’s never gonna be over real quick.

Here, Finn and Jake start with a little quiet time, screwing around, and honestly I like how languidly paced the shot of the two of them gliding along together is. Finn does a little foreshadowing about how much simpler it is when it’s just the two of them hanging out as bros.

And then they come across what is easily my favorite one-off character in the entire series.

In a bizarro world wrestling existence, they find The Farm, the legendary fighter of the Shiny Isles. They watch him trash a horde of the roughhousing Marauders from Memories of Boom Boom Mountain, then make short work of another wrestler fighter named The Train, who is pretty clearly meant to be Macho Man Randy Savage.

After pummeling all oncomers senseless then crapping live farm animals onto them as a final indigity (seriously I cannot overstate how much I love this incredibly stupid bit character), The Farm asks the boys if they want to fight too.

Jake is convinced he’s out of their league, but Finn wants to earn some glory. Jake retorts that he’s already a legend in an online video game, but Finn encourages him to do something legendary with him, setting up the central push of the episode, as the two of them go through a training montage that has some amazing Jake animations.

Jake is clearly not taking this seriously, and Finn snaps at him, giving us a weirdly bizarre moment where Jake’s broken video game professes it’s love to him as it dies. But if anything, this episode really does show us why he never takes anything seriously.

And honestly when would he have to? He has absurd powers and he mostly uses them to be lazy, and to good effect. Hell, if he weren’t so lazy he’d almost certainly be among the most powerful being on Ooo. If he never takes things seriously that’s a good thing, because Jake is flippin terrifying when he actually does.

To Finn’s credit, he holds his own against his super powered big bro, with a combination of dirty pool, quick thinking, and punches, though really, just barely. Jake is clearly way tougher than Finn’s usual adversaries, though this also isn’t the first giant Finn’s had to take down, either, and he’s much wilier than Jake’s used to.

Eventually they end up pathetically flailing at each other, mutually battered and exhausted, reduced to mudslinging and barking and ineffectual slaps, before Finn announces he’s going to really spite Jake the biggest way he knows how- by beating The Farm without him. Which goes about as well as you’d expect.

Then Jake tries to gloat.

Finn and Jake pass out in a heap of farm animals and seawater, and then the show gets real weird. Matthew Broderick shows up as the Dream Warrior in a real Twin Peaks interlude to coach the boys with cryptic clues about used cars and sweatpants.

Armed with divine knowledge of mudslinging and pantsing the guys make quick work of The Farm with some serious heel tactics, but the mauraders don’t care and fete their victory and reward them with medals for some reason.

This episode has some fascinating meditation on the difference between our guys. Finn is really determined, and takes things utterly seriously when he sets his mind to it. Jake, however, because of his incredible powers, never really has to try hard at anything, and honestly it makes him a better person. His lack of ambition and desire to just have fun adventuring with his bro has made him a real hero, where determination and desire would almost certainly lead him to abusing his power. We’ve already seen how out of control he gets when he gets competitive in Card Wars, and we’ve gotten hints in the Apple Thief episode that Jake used to be a full on criminal.

There’s also the question of how Finn really feels about how much more insanely powerful Jake is than him, but my take is that this is less of a concern to Finn than one might think- he’s already the Fighter surrounded by Mages and Sorcerers, he’s used to having to make do against opponents with way more powers than him. If you look back at all of Finn’s fights, he’s almost always up against something much more powerful than he is, and the way he wins here- by taking quite a beating until he’s able to outfox Jake and drop a tree on him- tracks pretty closely with how he brings down most of his opponents. I think the real clash here is only tangential to the power disparity between the two of them- Finn is used to working hard for what he wants, and Jake isn’t, and that’s pretty much the end of it.

I find it interesting how the show seems like it’s pretty philosophically agnostic about which of the boys is right. Normally a kid’s show that has a “one person is driven and the other is lazy and conflict happens” story would make the lazy person pretty clearly in the wrong, but honestly Finn kinda acts like a shit, he straight up breaks his brother’s game, and in the end none of the training mattered, it was all just a waste of time and energy because they were going about the fight wrong in the first place. And on top of that the show seems to say pretty clearly that a lazy Jake is preferable to a Jake who’s constantly using his powers to their full potential, because dear god would that be a problem.

Stray Thoughts:

• This episode gets real creative with the modeling on Jake even before their big fight. The squirrel suit to start, then he’s weirdly squishy during dialogues, like when Finn is trying to convince him to fight The Farm, and then the wild stuff he does during training. And they really go for broke when he’s fighting Finn. I love when the animators have fun with stuff like this, and Jake has so much potential because he can be as far off model as you want to make him.
• The Farm, as previously stated, remains one of my favorite one offs. Everything about this dude is a riot, the weird way his head lolls, the barn pants, crapping cows onto his opponents, him just napping in this pond for some reason. And I don’t know why but there being a farmer mixed into all the random animals multiplies the hilarity.
• The eerie message when Compy’s Castle gets broken still freaks me out.
• In true Shakespearean fashion, when the universe is disordered by the brothers being in conflict, it immediately starts to rain.
• Flame Princess’s new place is in the same location as the former Maurader Village from Memories of Boom Boom Mountain and (briefly) It Came From The Nightosphere, so it’s nice to have confirmation the Roughhousing Mauraders are still doing okay somewhere.
• There’s something deeply amusing about the boys getting a spiritual message to the effect of “throw mud in his eye and kick him in the crotch” as fighting advice. This show very much has a “why would you try and out brute someone who’s stronger than you” philosophy towards conflict.
• The timing on “yeah that’s whatchu get” before the fist comes down on Jake makes me laugh every damn time I see it.
• In the model sheet and storyboard notes, what Finn does to Jake’s arm is called a “bumpkin burn”, which I like cause the only name I knew for it was vaguely racist.
• This might be the most demolished we see the guys. They really go for broke on how brutal this fight is between the two of them.

Ignition Point
Written and Storyboarded by
Somvilay Xayaphone and Bert Youn

This is such a crazy show when you actually start picking it apart. Like this episode, which starts with fart jokes and visual allusions to anime then suddenly veers into an extended Hamlet riff.

We start here with the most elaborate version of setting your farts on fire that I’ve ever seen, before we sweep onward, sending the guys on a quest to recover Flame Princess’ scented candles to cheer her up and clear out the stink, via one of the most unlikely deus ex machinas you’ll ever immediately forget about because the show clearly has better things to do than blow two minutes justifying how the guys get a flame shield spell cast on them.

And a good thing, too, because it takes them exactly 26 seconds (I timed it) of being in the Flame Castle to get embroiled in a conspiracy to assassinate the Flame King.

The guys set off to try and track down the conspirators with the meager clues they have, and we get one of my favorite things Adventure Time does- a random voice actor who really just goes for it. Like, why does this one flame guard in the middle have a Spanish accent? Whoever made that decision, I love them for it.

There’s something about this show’s storytelling where it sweeps along with an easy confidence such that even when something is goofy or contrived you don’t really have time to dwell on it. The red herring of the snake on Finn’s shoulder being the source of the hiss voice makes zero sense if you think about it for longer than two seconds, but you don’t really have that long cause the guys are already being chased by a cleaver-wielding sentient jalapeño chef and you’re gonna miss the next joke.

I think this easy confidence is why this show’s weird slang comes off as natural rather than contrived, because the characters just feel like they’re using words they know and the show never stops to explain it.

Other times, the show stops just long enough to point out how absurd something is that shows up in other fiction unquestioned.

About this point we move out of subtle allusions (if a character offscreen reciting not just *a* monologue, but *the* monologue, could be called subtle) to a full on homage, as Jake has an entirely original by him idea to expose the conspirators by putting on a play with the details of the assassination plot in it while watching the audience’s reaction to see who looks guilty. They even have the “poison in the ear” bit.

This utterly fails to work, though it does nearly get them executed for their trouble once the Flame King finds that they’ve stolen his daughter’s scented candles. Lucky for them, the executioners turn out to be their suspects and Finn rolls a natural 20 on his Charisma check to cause a diversion, screaming about naked babies.

Finn discovers that they’re his nephews and they wanted to kill the Flame King for revenge for murdering their father, and the Flame King had already tried to kill them, too.

In a moment of youthful naïvaté, he wonders if his girlfriend might just be Chaotic Neutral before immediately getting shot down by her dad, though he does admit for the possibility that she could change. Hope is all Finn needs, so off they go.

This is a real great episode of the show. The jokes are on, the plotting is off the wall yet makes perfect moon logic sense, and Keith David is a delight. I love his cheerful, “Mmm hmm!” when Finn asks if he killed their dad. In fact, for whatever reason, a bunch of tiny moments like that are my favorite bits of this episode. Finn’s “These candles must be they”, because I love overcorrect grammar jokes. Jake’s “I can’t think of the future,” which is a great example of this show’s sort of weird phrasing. Or the executioner when they remove the hood yelling, “MY IDENTITY!”

This one also goes hard on the D&D vibes. There’s the explicit callouts, like Flame Princess suffering an EXP penalty for acting out of alignment (which implies that Adventure Time is powered by 3.5e rules) and Finn asking if she’s Chaotic Neutral, but there’s also the subtler things, like how the show doesn’t ask how Finn and Jake got on stage without anyone else in the acting troop interfering somehow, it just lets the characters come up with their plan and go for it, which is definitely a D&D plotting sort of angle. Another is Finn’s “NAKED BABIES” ploy working, because that’s the kind of thing that happens when a player comes up with an incredibly stupid plan, then rolls incredibly well and it works anyway. And, again, somehow the show makes all this seem natural. It’s a real testament to the crew’s breezy confidence how well they make all this nonsense hang together.

Stray Thoughts:

• Everything that comes out of Keith David’s mouth here is a delight. Even little things like his chuckle and “oh yeah” when Furnius and Torcho accuse him of killing their father. I especially love his “SICKOS!!” when the guards find his daughter’s scented candles in Finn’s pack.
• The fire people have such incredible character designs. I’m constantly impressed by how many weird and creative random background characters this show will create for an episode.
• Finn and Jake stumbling backwards through a funhouse mirror of Hamlet really makes me think of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, which was one of my favorite plays when we read it in high school.
• NAKED BABIES NAKED BABIES NAKED BABIES! NAKED BABIES NAKED BABIES NAKED BABIES!!