“When does Adventure Time get good?”
Adventure Time aired for 10 seasons over 8 and a half years and ~283ish episodes1, plus 4 hourlong made-for-streaming movies, a 10 episode half hour streaming miniseries, with a second season on the way, and a theatrical film coming at some point. There is a lot of this show, enough to be intimidating to recommend to new viewers. And so it’s not uncommon for people to ask, okay when do I need to start watching? After all, it’s no secret that the first few seasons have a lot of standalone episodes that you could skip and never notice they were missing. And someone who’s a fan of other standout 2010s cartoons like Steven Universe, The Owl House, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power etc. might start to wonder when the show’s going to stop fucking around with weird premises and subverted morals and actually take itself seriously like its contemporaries.
And I’m sure I could, without too much effort, make a highlight reel of just the essentials from the first few years. Hell, I could maintain that approach throughout the entire run if I wanted. A new viewer would have a perfectly enjoyable time watching Adventure Time Kai. And maybe that’s the better approach! If I were to answer “when does AT get good” honestly, the most generous answer I could give is “season 3” and the most true to myself answer I could give is “about season 5 or so”, and neither of those answers gets someone to commit. This isn’t a Steven Universe, where there’s a definitive point, early in the first season, where the show finds its voice, hits the ignition and never looks back.
But, I don’t actually recommend that. I don’t think that’s the proper way to approach Adventure Time. AT is a television-ass TV show. It’s a show that never had a long term plan, that lets its writers and boarders mess about and figure out what interested them the most, and consequently it’s a show that is always in flux. Changing showrunners gives the most clear era break, but I think you could chunk the show into several distinct eras that have only so much connective tissue between them.2 And that’s normal in this medium! The Simpsons doesn’t consistently resemble what we think of it as today until Season 4, for instance, slowly becoming less grounded and more joke-dense through its first 3 years as it finds its unique voice. I think the true joy in watching Adventure Time is seeing how it grows, how it changes. Peak AT is good, naturally, but it’s even better when you know where it came from.
For instance, Little Brother. I love this episode, with its classic fairy-tale rhythms. Each of Kent’s tempters saying “consider this instead”, mwah. Reframing a bottle cap, some dirt, and a firefly as ingredients to a mystical sword is perfect in its childlike imagination. I love Shelby and Kent’s earnest song at the end, even and in fact because the vocals are unpolished. (I saw someone once point out that almost every song in Adventure Time is diegetic; if a character is singing, that’s what’s literally happening in the world of the story, often as part of a music performance. Even in cases like Shelby and Kent’s song, which is a little more of a traditional, suspended reality song, the fact that neither of them sings well because neither of them are trained singers still makes it feel “real”.) And of course, I love the quiet beauty of the final shot, where the willow tree blooms for the first time in a long while.
And I also love how much more this episode gains if you’ve seen everything that came before. It doesn’t really need anything to set it up plot-wise. If you know that Finn is Jake’s little brother, and maybe that Shelby lives in Jake’s viola, you’ve got everything. But the unassuming beauty of the simple structure feels all the more powerful because early AT would be incapable of doing this. They wouldn’t be willing to stick to a simple, classic structure. They’d have Kent refusing the temptations somehow be the wrong thing, and he’d have to learn to be unapologetically selfish to win, except that doesn’t work either, and he can only save the day by yelling real loud, or something. There would be twists galore, and probably a lot more jokes about Kent being a butt. Seeing Adventure Time learn, over several years, the value in restraint, in the simple done well, adds an extra layer of beauty to the whole episode.
And that classic Adventure Time DNA is still here! Kent is in fact a butt. The episode is full of AT’s odd cadence and made-up words (“your sword was shattered to butts”, the sword being named ‘Punch Party’, Leaf Beard shouting about the tree to no one in particular and getting a “heeeeey” from a stranger outside). Kent refusing temptation still has a small twist to it; he never refuses out of his noble spirit, but because he’s simply far too young to even care about money, or life eternal, or being a good husband or wife or whatever.3 And Shelby questions if Kent is really compelled to return to the roots via a Persephone Law or if he isn’t just looking to see how that obviously-flirting-with-him blacksmith girl pans out. Because it’s not like early AT is bad, or anything. It’s just still figuring things out, much like Kent. Much like Shelby. Much like all of us, really.
Stray Observations
- “Myth is a powerful force in my life, dude” such a great line
- Man, those bugs up top are real dicks. Shelby’s the one throwing the party in the first place, you don’t gotta disrespect him to his face like that.
So, I mostly didn’t watch Adventure Time as it was airing. I was aware of it, especially in its earlier years. I knew the Big Twists; Ooo was post-apocalyptic Earth, Ice King was a dude named Simon, who was a de facto father to Marceline. I had caught Event episodes with roommates before, like The Litch, Finn the Human/Jake the Dog, and Wake Up/Escape from the Citadel. I was aware that Finn had dated and then broken up with Flame Princes, and that some people were annoyed by that. But the only time I chose, by myself, to watch new episodes as they aired is a small run in season 6: “Food Chain” up through “Joshua and Margaret Investigations”. They were really good episodes! They really impressed me, and made me really consider following the show full-time. But, the show went on a hiatus after that, as it shifted from airing every week to airing god knows when like every other Cartoon Network show, I didn’t have a DVR back then, and I would eventually lose my free time to death march crunch anyway.4
So it’s this context, of a fresh-faced 21-year old living on her own for the very first time, having to pay rent for the first time, dealing with the awful rental market of Bend Oregon (I rented a two-bedroom apartment despite the second room being pure wasted space, simply because it was the only opening in the entire town) that I first watched Ocarina. Which maybe helps explain why I have such a pronounced and visceral negative reaction to Kim Kil Whan. Even all these years later, I’m annoyed the resolution to the episode isn’t Finn and Jake socking him one.
A big part of the issue is that the episode relies on Jake being an absent father to make any sort of sense emotionally. And I’m sorry, but that’s an absolute retcon. Jake was in fact overly present in his kid’s lives, smothering them and refusing to accept their growing need for independence. The show makes up some magical accelerated aging lore so it doesn’t have to fuck with its status quo, but make no mistake Jake was no deadbeat. For the show to then double-back on that, and try and act like Jake’s been flouting his responsibility after all, it just doesn’t play. And look, I get that Jake is a flake. He definitely fucks up the birthday lunch, and his nonchalant “We’re super late” also kinda infuriates me, as someone who’s lived on the west coast all her life and thus dealt with people who think this kind of behavior is cute. “Jermaine”, later this season, will explore that I think a lot more successfully.
But Kim Kil Whan is just genuinely evil here? I know I’m overreacting to a certain extent; in the grand scheme of things he takes his dad and uncle’s5 house for less than 2 days. He clearly has no intention to landlord them long-term. He’s trying to help them, in his own business-poisoned understanding of the world, and he drops it when he learns to accept that his dad does things his own way and that’s never gonna change.
And yet, every time I see Finn get stepped on by that stupid bug (who by the way is invading Finn’s apartment! Where’s Finn’s justice huh?), when I see that elf cry its Karen tears calling about a “home invader” while Finn washes his eye, my only thought is how Kim Kil Whan will be first against the wall. Like, what an absolute slumlord right? That treehouse has one bathroom and one kitchen and he’s selling it as 37 units??? And as Finn points out, it’s complete bullshit that he can even buy the treehouse in the first place. Marceline gave it to them years ago, but because they never got that in writing oops now a parasite bought it, ah well that’s life under capitalism what you gonna do? Jake’s explanation of how law really works, and its fundamental moral illegitimacy, always resonates with me. I’m a little surprised it didn’t gain more real-world traction on “children’s cartoons are revolutionary praxis” tumblr/Twitter (god the 2010s were a dumb fucking time) but as a recent college grad and good student trying to shake her “if I follow the rules everything will turn out okay!” mindset this hit me at the exact right time.
I think I also focus so much on the politics because the story’s resolution doesn’t work for me either, rooted as it is in the false premise of Jake as an absentee father. Later Kim Kil Whan episodes will do a better job with the idea of him as a straight-laced no-nonsense guy dealing with a world that is all nonsense, but here it just feels forced. He relents and accepts the ocarina because the status quo needs him to, just as the status quo needed committed dad Jake to somehow be back to adventuring 11 minutes after the pups were born. Maybe in a sense the ocarina is an apology gift from the status quo; maybe that’s what Kim Kil Whan is forgiving when he gives the boys the deed to their house.
Stray Observations
- They sure do keep saying “pop pop” in weirder and weirder ways throughout the episode
- So immediately after the episode Finn and Jake beat up a few dozen forest creatures to evict them from the treehouse yeah? That’s the part about Jake’s law primer that he skipped over; laws are only real when enforced by violence, and in the Candy Kingdom6 that enforcement comes from Finn & Jake
- That might have been how the season 1 version of this episode would end, actually
- We see a framed picture of Kim Kil Whan’s daughter Bronwyn on his end table, meaning Jake is, unbeknownst to him, already a grandpa
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