Earlier in this season, I expressed surprise at the Rainicorn/Dog wars getting a second reference. Here, I have to express surprise that this is only the second Card Wars reference. The original season 4 episode was huge. I was hearing “floop the pig” jokes for years after. It took a fair amount of restraint to not turn Card Wars into a recurring bit to rival Fionna & Cake or Graybles. But, thematically, I suppose that makes sense. The original Card Wars episode was about how Jake becomes a complete asshole1 when playing, to the point where his friends and loved ones refuse to play with him. Maybe it’s for the best to leave this shoebox under the bed.
I can really strongly emphasize with Jake here. I got into competitive Yu-Gi-Oh back in college, age 18, and spent the next 10 years of my life playing some combination of Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokémon TCG, Force of Will, and even Magic: The Gathering2. And, there’s a lot of ugliness there! I made top cut at a YCS3 in 2012, age 20, and spent the rest of my 20s chasing that high. There’s an entitlement that sets in, something that’s frankly encouraged by the competitive culture of YGO. Like, this is a game that a lot of people were aware of as kids without ever engaging competitively, so you get to farm cheap superiority out of people going “oh I remember Yu-Gi-Oh! Blue-Eyes White Dragon was so good, you’d never lose!” and responding “um AKSHUALY Blue-Eyes was never good, it’s too much of an investment to summon for too small of a payoff, the actual metagame in those days was centered around removal spells and efficient ways to generate card advantage” and then they don’t talk to your autistic (derogatory) ass ever again.
And when you get used to thinking of people who aren’t sweaty like you as a lower class, it becomes impossible to lose with grace to them. All of my most personally shameful moments as a TCG player came from losing to someone I didn’t respect. So all that to say, I emphasize a lot with Jake here. Card Wars is mainly past-tense for him, but he doesn’t like how he ended things. He wants one chance at a do-over, to prove to himself and his former friends that he can be the bigger man, and win or lose with grace and dignity. And I relate. I gave up competitive TCGs for good at age 28, when I began transitioning, because I knew what the guys at the card shop said when they didn’t think any girls or queers could hear them. Which, naturally, made me confront how I could have tolerated being in community with them for so long, and the ways engaging with a hobby exclusively through zero-sum play might bleed into your worldview. There’s so much I regret about my 20s, and TCGs are probably not top 5 but they’re certainly top 10.
But, despite all that, I’ve never been able to fully buy into “Daddy-Daughter Card Wars”. Really, it comes down to one moment.
What the fuck do you mean, forcing a stalemate to win off of tiebreakers is a “low-class maneuver”? Are you a fucking child? This isn’t casual play with your friends, this is a competitive tournament! That you had to sail out to an oil derrick and say a password to enter! If a play is legal, and making it wins you the game on the spot, then why wouldn’t you make that play? You’re practically obligated to, anything else is dishonoring the very concept of competition. Anything else is a Scrub Mentality.
I capitalize “Scrub Mentality” because it comes from Playing to Win, an online book published in 2000 about the mentality of playing a game with the sole purpose of winning. It’s written by David Sirlin, a fighting game player, but this book is popular amongst basically any competitive nerd hobby, including TCGs. One of its core ideas is: if something is a legal maneuver, and doing it increases your odds of winning, then you are obligated to do it. Doing anything less is not playing to win; it’s instead what Sirlin calls a “Scrub Mentality”. (“Scrub” meaning “bad player”.4) For instance; you don’t wanna play Meta Knight because he’s OP? Scrub. You don’t wanna spam fireballs because it’s dishonorable? Scrub. You don’t wanna play Ultra Dog to force the game into tiebreakers? Scrub.
And sure, you can see toxicity in this mindset. (It’s not lost on me that simply googling “Playing to Win” brings up some business grindset book of the same name) Amusingly, Playing to Win itself has to scramble a bit to justify the concept of Sportsmanship within its own framework, saying at one point that you shouldn’t scream racial slurs at your opponent to throw them off their game because then you’ll lose access to skilled sparring partners in the community, and so doing that is not actually Playing to Win.5
But, I can’t bring myself to throw the framework out entirely. If we are playing a zero-sum game, then we have already accepted that there is value in doing so. That there is joy, or fulfillment, or something to be gained from a direct competition. And under those terms, why am I obligated to only attempt to beat you in ways you approve of? THAT right there, that’s entitlement. That’s the same mindset that makes Jakes and Katies flip out when they lose a game to someone or something they don’t respect. Oh, you wanted to win a tournament game? Well I guess you should have done so then. It’s not enough to put Jake in a position where he can’t win “clean”, you need to actually beat him. If he has an avenue to victory, and he takes it, then it’s your fault for letting him do so, not his for doing it. If you want to win, you need to win. It’s as simple as that.
This episode always gets me a bit tribal, honestly. The original Card Wars has Jake pulling out a shoebox of loose cards that he assembles into decks kinda haphazardly. That’s how a hyper casual player approaches card games. I have no doubt that many people involved with Adventure Time have played shoebox Magic before. But I don’t think any of them have played in a YCS, or a GP, or any sort of Regional of note, in any game honestly. Because this one beat just doesn’t make sense to anyone who’s ever taken a game seriously! Like, what’s next, you gonna get mad at chess players who set stalemate traps when they can no longer win via checkmate? You gonna whine when the leading team kneels out the final two minutes in victory formation instead of throwing deep for no good reason?
And what gets me is, if they had a recovering TCG player, they’d know exactly what to put in that beat instead: cheating! TCGs are notorious for cheating. Jake does it himself, to cover for Charlie’s absence. And good guys Moniker and Grand Prix are fully okay with it, because so-called “soft” cheating is endemic to the scene. I’m not proud to say I’ve done it too. You’re in a position where you know you’ve lost, but you still technically have plays to make. And you almost have an out, except there’s one tiny little rule stopping you. Like, I could finish my opponent off with a Ceasefire, but their Ojama Tokens technically don’t count as effect monsters, so it won’t deal enough damage.
But, maybe they don’t know that? If I activate it anyway, and say that they’re dead, will they know to call me? And if they do, I can just play it off as if I didn’t know the ruling, take a slap on the wrist warning and lose the game I was already losing. It’s directly illegal, it’s a disqualification and ban from competitive play if you get caught, but unless you do it so much you develop a reputation you’re not gonna get caught, it’s fine. And nobody wants to push too hard because they do it too. Part of that toxic superiority complex is the fact that you can shark less experienced players this way, exploit the fact that you know obscure rules interactions to just lie to them and steal their wins.
It’s awful! It’s genuinely toxic, it ruins competitive play, it bleeds into locals to make them toxic for newer and more casual players, it’s exactly the sort of thing that Goblin 20s Jake would see no problem doing but would horrify Dignified 30s Jake. But because no one involved seems to have ever actually experienced this darkness first hand, they get it wrong, in a way that I just struggle to deal with. Like, is this really about how marinating in a competitive mindset can erode your empathy and make you something you’re not proud of? Or is this about how you built an objectively shitty Commander deck and then got mad at your friend for always winning instead of sitting perfectly still and giving you 15 turns to draw something usable? Are you in fact Mr. Outrageous, someone who felt entitled to a victory that you were denied through entirely legitimate means?
I dunno. Jake does at least get an unobjectionable resolution, losing once again to the superior Moniker and Grand Prix and taking the loss with dignity and grace. And despite my flashes of aggression whenever I smell Scrub in the water, I’ve learned to put my 20s to rest also. I don’t play competitive TCGs anymore, but I’ve recently been able to return to Yu-Gi-Oh entirely as a casual, kitchen table endeavor. Something to play with no care for official formats, or even official cards6, with friends and partners for fun, where you don’t really care if you win or lose any given round.7 Though, anything gets more fun when you can go cuddle on the couch once you’ve had your fill. So maybe that’s my true wisdom; instead of playing TCGs with 20-something dudes you fastidiously avoid talking politics with, play them with your transfemme polycule. Time to hit up PB for some estradiol, Jake.
Stray Observations:
- I enjoy how the rules summary for Card Wars includes a bunch of contemporary board game tropes, what with the worker placements and blind auctions. (Though, it also reinforces my suspicion that no one here could tell you what the current best decks in Standard are, if we’re out here riffing on Puerto Rico and Carcassone instead of, idk joking about Pendulum summoning. Posting that image of Endymion, the Mighty Master of Magic that everyone uses as an example for YGO cards having too much text)
- Having made top cut at a YCS these days is mostly useful because a couple Yugi-Tubers recorded deck profiles with me at the event. And as a result, I have proof that no, I haven’t done any voice training, I somehow have just always sounded like a trans woman my entire adult life. The universe tried to tell me but unfortunately I’m not observant.
- Steve Wolfhard drew a short promotional comic for this episode. The whole thing’s worth reading, but I’ll share this page because it includes all my favorite moments, and I think is the most thematically resonant.
- You know, I got so focused on Jake and our shared history as recovering TCG perverts that I completely neglected Charlie’s part of this episode. So, please welcome special guest LibraryLass for analysis on what Charlie and her tarot readings bring to the episode. Take it away, Rachel!
I mostly wanted to talk about the tarot elements in this episode and see if there was anything interesting to be learned from them. BMO’s initial spread includes the Hanged Man, the Three of Swords, and what I think might be the Three of Pentacles. She doesn’t seem to be using a deck that relies too much on the standard Rider-Waite-Smith imagery. The Three of Pentacles is the most odd one, as it seems to depict the moon in a waxing crescent, full, and as a waning crescent. (I might be guessing wrong, it could be The Moon, but I think it would be an even odder design if it was.) Notably, the design is symmetrical in a way that would make it fairly difficult to tell if the card is reversed or not. The best hint is that the craters on the full moon aren’t arranged symmetrically. Treating them as a major simplification of the mares and craters on the actual full moon, I think it’s not reversed.
The Hanged Man is said to imply intuition, wisdom gained through hardship, and self-sacrifice. Interesting, given what BMO’s been through lately. The Three of Swords dovetails well with this, as it usually represents sorrow and loss– and now Moe and their siblings, even AMO, are gone. The Three of Pentacles is a much happier card, it symbolizes mastery, dignity, and perfection. Together all these say BMO is growing up. All in all, Charlie’s joke that the cards mean that BMO is a man now is more accurate than she realizes, for a given androgynous, robotic definition of manhood. But she concludes that it means they’re nice, which is certainly true. BMO’s reply, that they’re learning truths about themselves, is likewise quite intuitive.
Interesting to note, Charlie is one of the few people to refer to BMO in both the masculine and feminine forms (“She sank like a stone!” after BMO jumps for it.)
Jake’s monologue about aging also ties into BMO’s spread. 20s are for regretting (like the sorrow of the Three of Swords), 30s are for being dignified (like the Three of Pentacles), and 40s are older than he ever wants to be (perhaps the sacrifice and wisdom of the Hanged Man.)
I did my best to analyze Charlie’s cards during her own reading later in the episode but except for a couple, they use very unfamiliar imagery that seems to indicate that whatever form Tarot takes in Ooo, it’s changed beyond what I know enough about to read. The initial three I think could represent versions of The Empress (it doesn’t look much like a typical Empress, but the caduceus-like snakes beneath a sun make me think of Life, the most Empress-like character in this show), Death, and the One of Swords.
As Charlie draws these she has a vision of Jake in his toxic younger form, which chokes on a sandwich before turning into her and aging through the rest of her life a decade at a time and merging with herself. What are we seeing here? The Empress is a card of fruitful action but doubt and ignorance, often symbolically associated with Gan Eden. Death, of course, is well-known by even people with no interest in tarot as the card of rebirth and changed perspectives. And the Ace of Swords typically symbolizes triumph, the intellect, or triumph of the intellect. None appear reversed to me. All in all a good fit for the nature of the vision Charlie has, which includes her child, Gibbon, and her ultimate fate to be content and wise in her old age. Notably, much as Vision-Jake becomes her, and evnetually grants her the wisdom of her future, she passes that change in perspective to Jake, allowing him to lose gracefully.
Storyboarded by: Hanna K. Nystrom and Adam Muto
Originally aired: April 2, 2016 – September 2, 2016
Review by: CedricTheOwl
Once again Adventure Time inconsiderately throws us a season with an odd number of episodes, and once again I choose to balance things out by covering a collection of shorts the show created for the now-defunct Cartoon Network website. These episodes do not use the Graybles format, but instead use the theme of seasons, all centered around Finn and Jake following a frog around, waiting for it to put on a little crown. So get your rock facts straight, because it’s frog hunting season.
Frog Seasons: Spring
Written and Storyboarded by: Hanna K. Nystrom
Aired: April 2, 2016
Link: Frog Seasons: Spring | Adventure Time | Cartoon Network
Our first episode, like all the episodes in this season, opens with Finn and Jake following a frog carrying a crown. It’s a classic random adventure prompt of the kind the early seasons would often employ. In fact, the Crown Frog is a direct callback to one such episode opener: he first appears in the season 1 episode “The Witch’s Garden”, as the driving force that inspires the boys to intrude on the titular garden.
Crown Frog isn’t the only callback in this episode, as the boys soon encounter Breezy, still in her mecha-like queen form. She’s out teaching her swarm to gather pollen, but Finn and Jake don’t have much time to catch up, as they’re on a mission to pursue that frog. They follow him all the way to his lilypad palace. The boys enter the palace and spy on the frog as he dons his shoes and gloves, trying their patience as the anticipation builds towards him finally donning his royal headgear. Before the moment of truth, however, the guards spot our heroes and drag them off to the dungeon. As they’re led away to incarceration, the frog finally dons the crown, ending the episode in a blinding flash of light.
Frog Seasons: Summer
Written and Storyboarded by: Adam Muto
Aired: April 9, 2016
Link: Frog Seasons: Summer | Adventure Time | Cartoon Network
The summer episode opens with Finn and Jake once again following the frog, this time through a desert. There is no indication that this episode is a direct continuation of the last one, which makes these episodes seem like amusing riffs on a similar concept than a continuous story. Just as the heat is beginning to wear out our heroes’ patience, the water nymphs wave them down from the comfort of their inner tubes. But no amount of bikini babes can dissuade Finn from seeing the frog put on the crown, so he and Jake trudge onward.
The frog soon takes notice of Finn and Jake following him, and his reluctance to put on the crown turns into outright trolling. Jake officially loses his cool and places the crown on the frog’s head, preemptively ending their quest. Or does it?
You know what happens to a frog when you force it to wear a crown?
The same thing that happens to everything else
The unassuming frog mutates into an enormous frog monster. It quickly squashes our heroes with its gut and swallows them whole, the water nymphs cheering on the carnage all the way. Our episode closes on Finn and Jake in the frog’s stomach, deciding that it’s not so bad so long as they’re out of the heat.
Frog Seasons: Autumn
Written and Storyboarded by: Hanna K. Nystrom
Aired: April 16, 2016
Link: Frog Seasons: Autumn | Adventure Time | Cartoon Network
Autumn is upon Ooo, and our episode opens with Raggedy Princess hard at work being a scarecrow. She doesn’t so much scare them as she does recite her poetry at them until they leave. She attempts to do the same for the Crown Frog as it passes, but he declines to slow his roll for her sake. Finn and Jake’s roll is similarly unflagging, leaving Raggedy with only the wind as her audience.
Near a mud hole, the frog is finally prepared to wear the crown. However, a gust of wind blows the crown over to Jake, and in a fit of impulsiveness he decides to wear it instead. The other frogs immediately emerge from hibernation and bow to Jake, carrying him off to be their new monarch. Finn tries to convince Jake to return the crown, but Jake is committed to following this new path in life to its conclusion. The episode ends with the frog in Finn’s treehouse, taking Jake’s place as the other half of our favorite adventuring duo.
Frog Seasons: Winter
Written and Storyboarded by: Adam Muto
Aired: April 23, 2016
Link: Frog Seasons: Winter | Adventure Time | Cartoon Network
The next minisode opens with the frog traipsing across a snowy landscape, soon revealed to be a steep mountain climb. Finn’s determination to see the frog wear the crown is unwavering, but Jake is starting to have doubts. Why is it so important to see the frog wear the crown? Why expend all this effort on something so silly and trivial? Finn just wants the peace of mind that comes with satisfying his curiosity, with starting something and seeing it through to the end.
Their philosophical debate is interrupted by the Ice King appearing to shout threats at them for trespassing in the Ice Kingdom. He quickly reveals that he’s joking with them, instead joining them in their quest while proclaiming how much he enjoys the pastime of frog following. As it does with most people, spending a little time with the Ice King gets the boys to rethink their life choices, and Finn finally concedes that following the frog just isn’t worth it anymore. As they head down the mountain, the frog finally decides to put the crown on of his own accord. Doing so transforms him into Life, the serpent-like primal being and opposite of Death introduced in the last set of minisodes, “Graybles Allsorts”. She dispels the snow from the entire mountain and causes it to burst into bloom before fading away, with only the Ice King as witness.
Frog Seasons: Spring (Again)
Written and Storyboarded by: Hanna K. Nystrom
Aired: September 2, 2016
Link: Frog Seasons: Spring again | Adventure Time | Cartoon Network
Spring has returned to Ooo, and our boys are no longer in pursuit of the frog. Instead, they’re floating down a shimmering creek, trading stories and musing about why the water is sparkling so much. Their question is soon answered by a returning Breezy, who is panning the river for gold to give to Honey Man. Finn and Jake eagerly agree to help. Breezy will soon come to regret her invitation though, as Finn and Jake pass the time panning with increasingly terrible puns.
Finally, the trio have amassed enough gold to pay Honey Man, who favors them with a honey-spattering interpretive dance. At the dance’s conclusion, Honey Man generates a brand new crown, and gifts it to a passing frog. Our boys follow the frog, once again excited to see what will happen when he finally puts it on, and thus the cycle begins again.
The Frog Seasons minisodes seem to outright reject the notion of connecting these episodes into a cohesive narrative. None of the outros or cliffhangers lead into the next episode, or are even referenced again. Season 8 (when the minisodes aired) is deep into Adventure Time’s narrative era, where episodes build off of narrative hooks left down episodes or entire seasons ago. To have a side project like this that’s purposefully devoid of coherent storytelling, and is just about letting characters bounce off each other in fun ways, must be a fun outlet for the writers to get some of that anarchic cartoon energy out of them.
And yet, I can’t help but feel some kinship with Finn in wanting to see the conclusion of his frog following journey. It’s a self-admittedly silly goal, but there’s a satisfaction to starting a task and seeing it through to its conclusion, regardless of whatever setbacks or hardships befall you. This very review series is equally silly, a collaborative set of reviews of a decade-old cartoon made pretty much just for us alone. And yet, I wouldn’t dream of giving it up until it’s complete. And so we press on through the last three seasons of the show. For the joy of sharing an appreciation for this show with everyone, for the perspectives everyone else brings to the show and how it enriches my own appreciation for what Adventure Time is.
And for the ladies.
Notable Quotes –
- “I’m doing it for the sake of discovery. And the ladies.” “There are no ladies!”
- “Ohhh! He’s about to drop a gut!”
- “Gee, is that what I sound like?”
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