At this point in its run, Adventure Time is no stranger to questions of complicated morality. Situations where it’s hard to know the right thing to do, or where characters we root for do things we don’t. Hell, earlier this very season our commentariat were pretty evenly split on the moral calculus of Nemesis, with compelling but divergent readings based on how out-of-line you thought Peacemaster and/or Peppermint Butler actually were.
Dark Purple is not one of those episodes. The Super Porp factory is a corporate cult, run on slave labor and kidnapping. Susan and her tough-guy hyoomans are unambiguously, 100% justified in every action they take. Super Porp was evil, and the world is safer without it.
So then why is the last scene so melancholy? Why am I sad the Bone Farmer died?
I used to live in Bend, Oregon. Small town, barely 100,000, entire identity of Dogs, Brewpubs, and Hiking1. Absolute nothing town, don’t go there, I’m glad to be rid of it. But, there’s a chance some of you have heard of it. Bend does have one true national claim to fame.
The Last Blockbuster baybeee! The very last surviving location of the once dominant video rental titan. It survived because, statistically, somewhere had to be the last one, and now that it is it can get by selling merch trading on people’s nostalgia for their childhood trips to Blockbusters that didn’t have to buy their DVDs from Walmart to maintain the illusion. The reality of it can’t help but disappoint, but plenty of people have enjoyed a trip or two just to bask in the kitsch and memories.2 Blockbuster as a brand more-or-less died over a decade ago, and the whole concept of video rental stores is similarly critically endangered. Most people haven’t even thought about them since they were kids, and there’s a certain surprise and comfort in seeing this one last store hanging in there, surviving despite it all.
But, it must be said that Blockbuster fucking sucked. They were a scourge on local shops, driving them out of business through cutthroat practices (the classic “cut prices unsustainably low until the competition is dead, then jack them up” maneuver was a favorite of theirs). And they were a limiting, censorious force on movies themselves, refusing to stock NC-17 films which, due to their dominance in the field, made such films much less viable, while they had previously thrived on videotape. And just in general, Blockbuster’s selection was geared to what was new and what sold. You didn’t get the eclectic deep cuts of independent stores. There was a whole cohort of film directors in the 90s who built their taste from video rental stores; there is no Blockbuster cohort because how could that store ever make you fall in love with the medium, let alone cultivate a taste worth sharing. Blockbuster deserved what it got, and frankly it deserves its current undeath, surviving as a mask worn by what is fundamentally a local independent store. A fitting ironic punishment.
So yeah! Super Porp was a scourge, it deserved everything Susan gave it and more. But also, it survived the Great Mushroom War! One of the only remaining 20th century institutions, keeping on exactly as it has for 1,000 years. One of, if not the only remaining things from Marceline’s childhood. Jake says it himself at the start of the episode: the sheer improbability of Super Porp’s continued existence makes you not want to pull on that thread. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just have this? If there was just one silly junk food from 1,000 years ago that still sends out new shipments every month? Just one cultural thread linking two of the only remaining humans left on Ooo3 to their own people and history?
Shit, not to put too fine a point on it, but football season starts in just a few weeks. NFL preseason games are already happening, for the degenerates who wanna watch 3rd stringers scrimmage at half speed. And this is a website where more people unironically say “sportsball” than watch football, so we all know just how destructive football is. How it destroys the bodies and minds of its players. How it enables some truly heinous sex criminals so long as they can catch good or run fast or kick straight. How it shakes down taxpayers for billions of dollars to build palaces of concrete in the suburbs that normal people can never afford to see a game at. I prefer college football, which is in the middle of a centuries overdue reckoning over not paying its labor, and is in the middle of a complete meltdown over it. You tell me that the sport doesn’t exist by 2100, I’d say that’s probably for the best.
But, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t also be hoping that date of death was some time after my own. My beloved Michigan Wolverines are a connection, to my parents, to my extended family. They’re an institution in my own life, the only team from my childhood that I still care about. I don’t want to lose that. Regardless of the broader moral implications, if my annual case of Maize and Blue Porp doesn’t show up I’m gonna be sad. An institution surviving doesn’t make its survival just. It doesn’t become Too Big To Fail no matter how many lives it touches over how many years. But, its survival and prominence means it becomes part of the fabric of countless lives despite itself. Society needs Susans Strong, self-assured iconoclasts willing to do the unpopular but necessary things to save and improve lives. But, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re all far more likely to be Jake here than Susan. We all have our own Super Porp, and when or if justice finally prevails we’ll be in mourning just the same.
Stray Observations
- So Susan’s a human! We get confirmation years later of what Finn has already known: there are no gills under Susan’s hood, so she is somehow another surviving human left on Ooo. And she’s got some tech bits in her skull, mysterious!
- I almost had this in the article proper before good taste prevailed, but. Double-checking my Blockbuster facts lead me to Wikipedia’s article for “Pornographic films” and just, look at that header image. It’s baffling in its majesty, in how little interest the two actors have in each other. It almost feels like a mistake that they’re naked, like they just somehow forgot to put shirts on. It feels like he’s about to point out a cool bird he saw.
- It’s been pointed out that this episode bears some resemblance to Futurama’s “Fry and the Slurm Factory”, specifically the underground secret lair where Slurm is actually produced. And true enough, but this episode has absolutely nothing in common with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, which the Futurama episode is a parody of. An interesting game of telephone.
- The snail was in your heart all along
The Diary
The Diary | Written & Storyboarded by Jillian Tamaki from a story by Kent Osborne, Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis, and Adam Muto | Originally aired February 26th, 2015 | Review by LibraryLass
TV, one of Jake and Lady’s kids, voiced by the hilarious Dan Mintz, has remained something of a mystery thus far, but it’s time to take a closer look at him– Very close, as we start the episode watching from his perspective as he plays a Dragon Quest-esque JRPG on his computer. His parents are near at hand. Lady expresses concern about his lack of a life outside his gaming, but Jake is unconcerned.
Lady pressures Jake into sending TV out to pick him up a chocolate bar, and the erstwhile NEET uses his teleportation powers to dodge a social encounter with an elderly Candy Person on the road. While grabbing a brick of chocolate out of the bridge to the Candy Kingdom, he spills his ass and finds a diary in a sealed plastic bag in a puddle and can’t resist snooping, despite the warnings scribbled by its author “B.P.” in the front.
BP is clearly something of a kindred soul to TV, as she too is a quiet, awkward type whose mom hassles her about how much time she spends reading. She aspires to be a songwriter, struggles to meet boys, and has a vaguely homoerotic desire to fit in with the popular girls, Taffy and Mochi. TV is soon fascinated, especially as things start to pick up between BP and a young man named Justin Rockcandy. But just as things are reaching a dramatic crescendo, complete with a birthday rendezvous and a surprise present at Love Tree Point, TV turns the page… and finds the next several are torn out and the rest is apparently blank. He reacts with the anguished groan Dan Mintz’s career on Bob’s Burgers has made so famously a part of his image.
Seeing her son skip breakfast on his way to investigate further, Lady is relieved to see he’s picked up other interests. He heads back to the bridge in search of further insights. He re-enacts what he imagines must have been the diary’s final moments, alarming a Candy mom and child before the rose decal on the front of the diary seems to float off and the diary itself turns into BP’s least-favorite school lunch, a sloppy joe. The real world peels away as TV descends into his interpretation of BP’s memories in the form of a roller coaster that deposits him in a dirty ocean from which first Taffy and Mochi emerge, then Justin himself, who picks TV up and invites him to Love Tree Point. TV screams as we smash cut to black.
Later at Lady’s home, she and Jake are playing Canasta and she’s off her game because she’s still worrying about TV, who hasn’t come home. Jake goes out looking for him and finds him rolling around in the ditch, having completely dissociated into BP’s personality. Jake chides his boy for being too susceptible to fantasy as he pages through. Soon enough Jake is filled in on the mystery and joins TV in speculating. Father and son hypothesize a stress-induced physical breakdown that leads to BP being hospitalized and having her hand replaced with a crab’s claw before discovering Justin cheating with Taffi and Mochi, as TV imagines it happening to himself. TV/BP gets lost in worrying about whether he might be unlovable, but Jake recognizes the mention of Love Tree Point and suggests they continue their investigation there.
Love Tree Point has definitely seen better days, but their search quickly bears fruit, as a box has been secreted inside the tree. A box marked “BP+JR 4EVA.” They open it and find it’s a music box with a pair of wind-up cats waltzing on a track inside. BP never saw the gift, and Jake reasons Justin must have been too heartbroken to return and take it back, or hopeful that BP might seek it out someday. They resolve to find BP and provide her with the box for the sake of closure as Lady looks on, clearly frustrated with both of the men in her life.
The next day at the marketplace, Jake and TV bring the music box to an artisan– the box’s own creator, as it turns out– in hopes of getting more information about Justin as a starting point. The boxmaker waxes poetic but reveals BP’s first name was Betsy and says that she ran away and became a cave-dwelling hermit, never to be seen again– and points them to the cave. Jake charges off in greyhound shape, TV on his back.
At the cave Jake offers one of those didactic father-son talks, reminding TV that hiding away from the world doesn’t solve problems. At the back of the cave they find a sinkhole with a cabin in it, and in the cabin they find a lone skeleton… made of plastic, attached to a pole, and stored alongside a number of textbooks and medical supplies, along with a letter Betsy wrote for Justin. As she reads it, we finally see her for the first time.
Turns out that Jake’s speculation was broadly true. Betsy, preferring to avoid the stress and drama of high school life, hid away to focus on her studies for a few years before reaching the conclusion that she couldn’t just avoid the world, although she thinks it would never have worked out with Justin. She even learned how to fix her hand so she no longer needed the crab hand. We see her set the diary afloat in the then-full ditch as she reveals her identity: it’s Nurse Poundcake, who Jake and TV watch as she and Dr. Ice Cream save a life at the Candy Kingdom’s emergency room.
Jake reflects that Betsy turned out fine, but TV still wants to know what was on the ripped pages. Jake says they were in the cabin and were mostly just her working out her frustrations about Justin. Jake offers to take TV to go find out what ever became of Justin, but TV flatly turns him down as the episode ends, having found the assurance he needed that he, too, will turn out okay in the end.
That’s been a recurring theme with Jake’s kids, hasn’t it? Even though they’re all already adults, all of them seem to need the assurance that they’re gonna turn out alright. Except maybe Kim Kil Whan, who has taken care of all his material needs and set aside his moral ones.
Stray Notes:
- Jake’s newspaper refers to the aftermath of the Candy People’s crisis in “Pajama War”
- Back in season 1 Jake couldn’t even have chocolate! Has he since learned he can eat it or was it just a ruse to get TV out and about?
- I think Betsy’s hermit cabin has what might be a copy of “How To Cook For Forty Humans” in it.
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