Fionna and Cake is Adventure Time for depressed adults — a perfect evolution

Watching Fionna and CakeIt’s like watching an 80-year old woman play ball with her grandchildren. They’re comparatively limber, but she’s holding her own — and you realize most of what they know they must have learned from her, and while little Billy and Jessica were playing, she was up in the stands learning from You can also find out more about the following:, too.

The 13-year anniversary of the launch of Adventure Time’s first episode, the world of fantastical adventure-comedy cartoons for kids has radically changed — and Adventure TimeIt was important to create space for the most influential changemakers. What Fionna and Cake It shows that this venerable franchise can go head-to-head with younger competition by reinterpreting its themes and incorporating them in new ways. What’s more, and perhaps most impressively, it can do it while reinventing itself for its adult fans. The show has grown up and not just leveled up.

What then? Adventure TimeIt has always been about finding the balance between the endless repetition of a form and the endless reinvention. The series is a 283-episode colossus standing astride the gap between the short, episodic action-comedy fare that defined the biggest successes of American Saturday-morning cartoons in the ’80s and ’90s, and the long-form, world-building, wiki-spawning epics that define that niche now.

Adventure Time began with Pendleton Ward’s student work about a princess-rescuing boy adventurer with a sword, a talking dog, and an ice-slinging nemesis. But thanks to Ward’s creative generosity, it gradually morphed into television’s equivalent of an exquisite corpse — and a truly exquisite one at that. By season 3, the show discovered how gratifying it was to build out expansive backstories for its secondary characters, but not for any overarching plot, just ’cause it was fun. Season 5 went cosmic for the first time, and was also when Ward stepped down as showrunner; season 7 started experimenting with the setting’s ancient history; season 9 with radical changes to the world; season 10 with the apocalypse. The show managed to maintain its coherence despite the changes. Yes, you canThe story re-emerged as a repetitive tale, yet the message was rooted in embracing change.

The franchise’s post-finale continuations (released on HBO Max, and later Max) have been an evolution of a new kind, giving Adventure Time that rarified status — achieved by Star Trek, Doctor Who, Law & Order, and others — where the appeal of a franchise’s setting and themes becomes as much of a draw as its original main characters. Since the end of Adventure Time proper in 2018, executive producer Adam Muto and company have gone fully independent from Finn and Jake — except for the exception that proves the rule, the Adventure Time: Distant Lands episode “Together Again,” which is, without spoiling too much, the final Finn-and-Jake story there could ever possibly be. Adventure TimeThe original Bro duo has been demoted to cameos in the franchise and this is teaching an audience that’s aging to accept change.

So it makes sense that its next stop would be something familiar, viewed from a different angle: the franchise’s infamous sister duo.

Created by Adventure TimeNatasha Allegri is a storyboard artist (Bee and puppycatFionna, Cake and other genderbent characters were given their own episodes. Adventure Time. Their nebulous state of “canon” was cheekily loaded into the show itself: See, the thing about Fionna and Cake is that they aren’t “real” Adventure Time characters. They’re the Ice King’s fanfiction about his frenemies Finn and Jake. They’re familiar, but different! They still go on adventures, but there’s more smooching, and dates, and trying to figure out whether that bad boy actually means it when he flirts with you or if he’s just being kind of a bully — you know, because it’s fanfiction!

If you are unsure, please ask. Adventure Time Fionna and Cake — a story about Fionna and Cake’s entire universe coming under threat of deletion for being (twist!) the accidental fanfiction of a cosmic being that was written on company time using company equipment — says anything, it’s that Muto and co. have been thinking a lot about the unintentional subtext of Fionna and Cake.

[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains spoilers for Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake up through its final episodes.]

It’s a little You can also find out more aboutIt is not acceptable for a series with male leads, male showrunners, and a male-dominated field to consider the work of a female employee as uncanonical. Fionna and Cake episodes Adventure Time were much anticipated and much beloved, featuring some of the series’ biggest guest performers, like Donald Glover and Neil Patrick Harris. They were all a result of a concerted effort by the cast. Adventure Time’s creators to use the alternate setting to experiment in character design, tone, and format. It is interesting to note that their combination of unrealistic teenage romantic comedy and fantastical adventure looks very similar. Adventure Time’s successors. But Fionna and Cake’s status as fictional distaff counterparts of Finn and Jake made them an accidental statement on “girl stuff.” And their origin in the mind of Adventure Time’s saddest creep made them an accidental statement on “stuff that’s icky.”

Cartoon Network

Fionna and CakeHere to Take Adventure Time’s watery flaws and turn them into wine — not vengefully, but with the same Yes, you canThe show’s success has been based on the enthusiasm of its cast. With the rescue of Fionna and Cake’s world, a franchise once locked into its buddy-bro leads gives their gender-swapped counterparts an enduring legitimacy. With the attention paid to Gary and Marshall Lee’s romance (and vampire world’s Bubblegum and Marcy’s electric rivalry), a franchise once imprisoned by heteronormative censorship gave its fan-beloved queer couple multiversal staying power.

You should not get the impression that this has been done as an unrepentant mea culpa. Fionna and CakeAlso closes the circle on Adventure Time’s most pathetic and complex character, Simon Petrikov, with the reveal that his relationship with his soulmate, Betty, was never as perfect as they both thought — and that’s OK. Just because we realized we made a few mistakes while doing it doesn’t mean we have to hate that it happened“, says Fionna and Cake.

Max

It’s a grown-up message about a grown-up experience of regret — just another part of how Adventure Time Continues to evolve and calls on its audience to do the same. Fionna and Cake is a series speaking explicitly to an older audience that’s ready to receive different messages from a familiar source. And it’s a series learning from the series that learned from it: Adventure Time Shows like Gravity FallsThe following are some examples of how to get started: Owl HouseGleefully engaged. Adventure Time is a new show that focuses on adults who yearn for a return to the magical in their otherwise mundane, unchanging lives.

At the end of the series, Fionna chooses to preserve her own mundane version of Ooo, with crappy minimum wage jobs and post offices and rent protests — but it’s slowly rebuilt with touches of fantasy, derived from the more “fictional” worlds she and Cake visited over the series. Children might find it hard to accept anything but Narnia. But Adventure Time’s adult fans have been served a show about how fiction supports and enlivens reality, with a finale about the vital human experience of finding the meaning and excitement of the fantastic in mundane life.

A familiar object is magical when viewed in a new way.