Adventure Time and the Subversion of Whimsy, or How The Rightwing Lost Their Children

Part 1: On the Justification of Children’s Stories

The realm of the fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.

--J.R.R. Tolkien

Conservatives lost the culture war when it forgot how to tell stories, or more accurately, when it forgot how to tell children’s stories. Perhaps that’s a bold statement, and there certainly were other death blows. Contraception and no-fault divorce began the long disintegration of sexual norms. Public schools undermined Christianity at every opportunity, and let’s not forget the obliteration of the family unit in exchange for atomized bugmen and neurotic women. 

But the Right Wing truly lost when it became unable to transmit itself to the youth. Religion and ideas survive through propagation. Each generation instructs, maintains, and iterates what was handed down to them. Civilizations die when the virtues of fathers fail to pass onto their sons, and then begins the decline. 

It is now well understood by the mainstream (I hope) that Hollywood had no small part to play in this affair. From its nihilistic storytelling, to its blatant pornography, to its emasculation of virtue, this was all beamed directly into Western minds from the comfort of the living room. This has all been thoroughly documented and criticized by better authors than I on the Dissident Right. Better still, many indie creators have risen to the task of producing our own entertainment outside of Hollywood’s purview. 

However, I find a glaring absence in this burgeoning sphere. The new stories being written now are almost exclusively for adults. They are for the people who have already learned to swim in the great deluge of woke entertainment. But if we wish to upend the incessant propaganda, we will have to create a scene for those taking their first steps in culture. Already, the Zoomer generation has been sheared in two between those who had a healthy childhood and those who did not. Generation Alpha is looking even worse, and we frankly cannot afford these losses in the long term. And while children’s stories aren’t the complete answer to this conundrum, they are a big part of the solution. 

This brings me to the perception of children’s entertainment in the mainstream and probably the first objection to my argument. The longstanding view of Conservatives is that children’s stories are nothing more than silly nonsense and a fundamentally unserious affair. If anyone still has that perception in 2023, then I don’t know what will snap them out of that delusion. Maybe for that particular Conservative, I just wish he would take pause and realize that his view has been the rallying cry of the Left in the culture war. 

Every IP that the mainstream Conservative claims to cherish was destroyed under the banner of calling it children’s entertainment. After all, if children’s stories are unserious, then what’s the point in what goes on in them? But this begs the question, where’s the line between unserious and serious entertainment? Somewhere between Bluey and The Brothers Karamazov, surely, but the astute man quickly realizes this line is wherever we find convenient to draw. 

The Left’s trick is a simple one. When you deconstruct their arguments, when you point out the critical flaws in storytelling, when you get past the name-calling and slander, you’ll find the foot they fall back on is that fiction is an unserious endeavor. For every franchise they burned, they quickly turned around and said, “So what? It’s just fiction, grow up.”

The Conservative has found himself hoodwinked. In reframing all IPs as children’s stories, the Left now has a monopoly on entertainment. In making a distinction between unserious and serious stories, the Conservative suddenly finds he can watch nothing but children’s stories and mature media is nowhere to be found. 

What’s worse is that he can only watch the worst form of children’s stories. I’m talking of the ones with the moralizing of condescending parents, the narcissism of a midwit, and the shallowness of a puddle. Nothing is more repugnant than a story that lectures to you, and as much as the Evangelical movies get a bad rap, they at least had the temerity to be honest about what they were. The woke will accuse you in a second if you dare call their stories bad. 

The only way one might extract themselves out of this trap is to acknowledge that all stories are a serious matter. If not in content, then in the spiritual disposition of those who write and consume them. Above all, stories are a profession of faith. 

But I can hear another objection. There clearly is a distinction between the stories intended for children and the ones for adults. No one is arguing that Avatar: The Last Airbender has all the grit and philosophical pondering as No Country For Old Men. However, as is obvious to everyone, you can’t show No Country to a seven-year-old. 

Children’s stories deal in serious matters, but they are stories with the guard rails on so as to be most productive to children. The substance is trimmed and simplified to be more understandable to the youth, but the substance is still there. And in children’s stories that are told well, they entertain both children and adults. Case in point, I would like to bring up Avatar: The Last Airbender. The problem with the woke is that they have nothing to offer, and so all their entertainment is bad. 

I don’t say that just in terms of the quality of the writing, though that certainly has crashed. I am talking about bad as in morally. The Left’s stories promote vice, encourage destructive behaviors, and facilitate the breakdown of human bonds. And in children’s entertainment, they do this perniciously. 

However, we’re just at the end stage of the woke machine. The propaganda is obvious now, but I want to look back to how we got here. Because in the stories we tell, we must be careful not to fall into the same errors that brought us to where we are now. In this spirit, I will approach the quintessential Millennial story, a franchise that garnered millions of viewers and is still going strong today. 

Part 2: Adventure Time

Ya’ll just hating on my steez. I’m not listening to haters. --Ice King

Created by Pendleton Ward, Adventure Time premiered on April 5^th in 2010. It was a smashing success and would go on to have ten seasons with two hundred and thirty-eight episodes. The show would also go on to have two spin-off shows called Adventure Time: Distant Lands, and Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake. 

The premise was a simple one. A young boy named Finn and a shapeshifting dog named Jake go on adventures in the land of Ooo. Along the way, they encounter friends and allies like Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen and villains such as the Ice King and Hunson Abadeer. 

The mythos of this children’s show goes surprisingly deep. The land of Ooo is actually a post-apocalyptic Earth. There are multiple cosmic entities who function as gods. Characters who seem one-dimensional have their backstories unravel slowly, eventually becoming some of the most complex figures in the show. I will touch on Simon Petrikov aka Ice King later. 

For now, let’s focus on the first episode, Slumber Party Panic. This episode attracted 2.5 million viewers and marked the beginning of Adventure Time’s long success. 

We start out in a graveyard with Finn and Princess Bubblegum. Shenanigans ensue and the dead are raised back to life. They both flee to the castle of the candy kingdom, where the princess announces a slumber party to conceal the danger of the zombie horde. She makes Finn swear a royal promise not to tell the candy people anything lest they get frightened and explode. 

A series of ridiculous events occur as Finn grows more and more desperate to stave off the zombies. Yet, he eventually prevails, and the kingdom is saved. Thinking everything is safe now, he reveals the secret to Jake at the last moment, breaking the promise. This results in time freezing and Finn being judged by the gumball guardians. He must solve the difficult question of 2+2 or be horribly punished. He manages, and the story ends joyously.

That was the summary, but let’s break down what’s actually going on in the archetypes. A hero is tasked with a seemingly impossible oath. He accomplishes it, but he breaks the promise accidentally. Divine judgement intervenes as justice must be done, but God lets the hero off easily. Despite breaking the letter of the promise, the spirit of the oath was kept. 

This is an ancient story that goes back to the roots of Christianity itself. Underneath the whacky veneer, you have a narrative as old as the West. The writers certainly weren’t thinking in that manner when they wrote this, but they don’t need to. Myth speaks through the person, not the other way around. The ancient tales are a part of us as much as we are of them, and we act out these stories with our own lives. 

I don’t have much against this particular episode, but I wanted to start here so that Conservatives understand the language of their defeat. Subversion doesn’t work when there’s not some good within the product. Adventure Time didn’t capture children’s imaginations by being just devious Leftwing propaganda. There is occasional good and even genius in this show, but the myths are strangled by the writers’ political views. 

This is what makes Leftwing shows so insidious. People are hooked on glimpses of greatness or quality underlying mountains of trash, and they become addicted because the entertainment is cheap. This is the power of the Left, and the RW needs to be wary of it. 

But as an aside, can you even imagine anyone on the RW today creating something with the style and aesthetics of Adventure Time? The world is brimming with color. Wackiness is found in every corner. Every part of this show screams whimsy. Where are our guys who write with the same energy as C.S. Lewis, in which Santa Clause rides on his sleigh and hands medieval weapons to children? It is this spirit, not the depressing drole made too often, that will win the hearts of the young. 

Let’s move on. The Witch’s Garden is the fourteenth episode of the 1^st season and garnered 1.8 million viewers. Jake the Dog eats a doughnut, which was growing in a bush. This angers the witch as the plants belong to her and she curses Jake, so he loses his powers. He and Finn continue on their adventures, but danger strikes and Finn is about to die. Jake begs the witch for forgiveness, and she restores his powers. 

This is another archetypal tale. It should be easy to read through the lines here and see what is going on. Or it would be, if Jake the Dog didn’t next knock the witch over and triumphantly says he didn’t learn a thing. The lesson is subverted, nothing is gained or reflected upon, everything returns to the status quo. 

Now, I am not necessarily against a cynical gag now and then. It’s funny when the main characters are jerks sometimes. The problem is when it becomes endemic to the culture. Everything is cynical. Nothing is sincere. This one instance is not egregious on its own, but when it happens again and again, it becomes something more sinister. Adventure Time is full of little subversions, gags or not. Each one not necessarily serious on their own, but taken as a whole, the show becomes dark. 

To list them all would be a waste of time, but I will make a brief detour for the sake of my point. Episode 11 of season 1 had 1.8 million viewers and was about how young people are smarter than their elders and will fix all problems. Episode 16 of season two had 1.7 million viewers and was about banishing apparently innocent creatures to a digital hellscape. Episode 13 of season four was a trans allegory complete with a suicide attempt. Shall we continue? 

Then there are the episodes that are just frankly bizarre nonsense. Episode 4 of season 1 had 1.8 million viewers and involved the characters learning they had to put on makeup so that grandma feels better and can be transported to the crystal dimension. I’m sure that plot continued somewhere, but I’m not going to search for it. 

Underneath this seemingly harmless children’s show, you have a distorted and warped story. Even episode one had the candy people feasting on the remains of the dead. Again, I’m not against this kind of humor, but stories have to be getting at a point. There has to be something communicated, something that the story is in service of. And that destination has to be a good one. 

So how does Adventure Time end? Let’s put aside the subversion and the perversity and all the criticisms I have so far. This leads me to Adventure Time’s greatest triumph and its greatest failure: Simon Petrikov. 

The story of Simon is a tragic one from beginning to finish. He was an archeologist who discovered a cursed crown. Wearing it gave him ice powers, but it slowly robbed him of his sanity, causing him to lose all the people he loves. What’s worse is the coming nuclear war, and he is forced to wear the crown constantly to protect himself and his surrogate daughter Marceline. Their time together is sweet but cut short. Fearing he may one day hurt Marceline, he abandons her to Hunsun Abadeer, a neglectful and frankly disgusting waste of a parent. 

None of this is told to the audience outright, and is instead slowly revealed over the course of the series. One very touching episode is Remember You, where a fully insane Ice King approaches Marceline to make some music. His insanity is used as a metaphor for dementia and how people try to cope seeing their loved ones gone. It was episodes like these that won Adventure Time’s throne. 

But hope comes once again. Betty Grof, his former girlfriend, travels to the future to cure him. This sets off a series of promethean overreaches where Simon and Betty routinely try to save one another, only managing to do so for short amounts before the other is taken away. In the finale of the original series, Betty does indeed save Simon, but at the cost of merging with a god of chaos. 

This story is continued in the spin-off Fionna and Cake. Simon is a man out of time, a stranger in a strange land. His only tie to normalcy is Betty, and she was taken from him. He becomes depressed and a recluse, but after a series of adventures, he does meet her again. This time they share a proper goodbye, and Simon departs, content to live his life with the hand he was dealt. 

This was a masterfully executed story from start to finish. It’s just everything around it that disgusts me. 

The final scene with Simon is not the departure nor him happily living his life, but in a therapist's room barely a step up from wallowing in self pity. It’s implied that he’s going to keep going through these depressive episodes again and again. All the while throughout the story, he’s often the butt of jokes or treated cruelly. 

What strikes me most about his character and this story is how it just never stops. Simon Petrikov is always going to be a broken man because the writers cannot conceive a way he can be fully healed. Each and every epiphany in this story is ultimately cope to hide a pain that never goes away. And that applies a lot more than Simon. 

Returning to Finn and Jake, the show somehow gets darker with its two protagonists. Jake dies sometime early, and Finn is left living his entire life never fully recovering from this tragedy. At the end of Together Again, the two are reconciled in the afterlife and Finn tries a second chance at life through reincarnation. 

It’s a good thing every aspect of him will be erased because I don’t know how else the writers reverse trauma except with a magic wand. I don’t buy Finn’s epiphany at this conclusion because I’ve just seen the man triumphantly shout for joy when he died because he got to see his friend again. Sure, he feels good now, but in six months to a year? I have no doubt that the ache would still be there. 

Jake does jump in the reincarnation tube as well, and presumably they’re off to continue their adventures indefinitely with a blank slate. And this just puts the perfect bow on everything. Adventure Time’s answer to the questions it poses is to double down on itself. Finn and Jake are destined to be separated, rejoined, and separated again ad infinitum. That same pain is going to happen again and again every time one of them dies, a never ending tragedy that unfolds not only across this timeline but the multiverse. No matter how good the times are, we’ve already seen that the hurt is so much worse. And the only comfort they have is that at least they won’t remember any of it. 

That’s… bleak, especially when you consider their version of heaven is to just vibe. Jake did not know or care that his friend missed him. He couldn’t be bothered until Finn kicked in the door. 

This show is eternal childhood. Finn is never going to grow up because he’s going to keep hitting that reset button forever. How can he not? There’s nothing worth sticking around for. All he wants is to have adventures with his magic dog and damn anyone else who gets in the way. 

Part 3: Growing Up

I don’t need to feel like I’m waiting to be noticed. I know who I am, and I’ll know what I want if and when it ever comes along. --Fionna

There’s a trend among Millennials to update children’s shows for a more mature audience. From horror adaptions of Winnie the Pooh to the bisexual romance of Velma, what was innocent now has to be as decrepit and fake as the rest of the world. 

Adventure Time is one such show, although I would argue it’s simply becoming more of what it always was. The adult cartoon was always masquerading as a children’s story, but now the pretense has dropped. The recent Fionna and Cake spin-off featured swearing and alcohol and some soft nudity. There are already scenes I would consider borderline pornographic. Truly, this is the epitome of the adult’s children show. 

Many attribute this phenomenon to an infantilization of this generation. The children who got sent to daycare never grew up, and so they still want to play with their toys even when it’s time to hand them down to their own kids. 

I will be more lenient on the Millennials than others in this sphere. I think the reaction to a disenchanted and asphalt world has merit, but it is in the execution that things go terribly wrong. The problem is Millennials want to live through these shows. Creation has been traded for subcreation, and the Millennials are bringing all their baggage with them. This is the ultimate escape attempt, to depart from reality into fiction itself. 

When Tolkien wrote of escapism, I don’t think he imagined this. The prison is squalid, yes, but the prisoners have forgotten what it is like to live without squalor. They wish to escape, but they can only escape into the next cell with painted walls, a train set, and a phone with pornhub. And what’s worse is that they mock anyone who sees this room for what it is: a play pen. 

What it takes to turn away from this room, to turn away from this never ending Adventure Time, is to do the one thing the show’s creators refuse to do, to stop running from suffering and embrace it. 

Simon Petrikov may never get over losing Betty, but we don’t need to be strung along by incompetent writers. What separates adults from children is the burden they are willing to carry, and that burden comes with real costs. We all have our flaws and vices, but with work, we can become better. What is asked of us in this age is to turn away from cheap corporate entertainment into the desert of the real. That world is terrifying and dangerous and is full of dragons, but it is not without reward. 

The person who can brave this world and overcome it, that is the person who will conquer. And for future writers learning their craft, I wish to end this essay with an exhortation. 

You might think I’m condemning entertainment itself with this essay, but what I’m condemning is cynicism and cheap product. The fantastical should leave you energized and motivated or at least inspired. When you return from wonderland, you should be brimming with a thousand new ideas and possibilities. 

I want writers who jump and dance with the ecstatic jubilee of a young child. I want stories of triumphant victories and harrowing defeats. I want you to take me from the hallowed forests to the great depths of the ocean to the surface of Mars. I want all these things, and I want writers who shout with conviction and pound their chests. Nothing else will suffice in the gloom we have found ourselves in. 

Don’t wallow in self pity for the times we have found ourselves in. Though hard they may be, the ground is fertile for the men who wish for something more than the slop dumped on our plates. At long last, write the stories men haven’t been able to tell for nearly sixty years. Tell the Truth. 

And above all, when you write your stories of brave heroes and tragic villains, do better than putting Simon Petrikov on a therapist’s couch.