Watch Adventure Time’s best Marceline and Bubblegum romance episodes in order

Adventure Time’s influence on our modern crop of animated TV cannot be understated. Both as an incubator of talent — from its storyboarding room sprang the folks behind equally influential shows like Steven Universe and The Garden Wall — and an ever-mutating epic that used its success to experiment wildly. The many creatives involved in this project are many. Adventure TimeAs they learned, the modern serialized long-form comedy/puzzle package/fantasy animated series was created for children.

Adventure Time even lit the fuse on what’s snowballed into a genuine explosion of kids cartoons with queer romance plots or subplots — though like everything else in the show, it was produced of the slow accumulation of “yes, and”-style world-building, and like many shows after it, was hampered by network rules on queer content.

Fans that eagerly awaited tension of the next “Wait… do they have Histories?” moment between Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen were eventually rewarded with their relationship becoming an indelible part of Adventure Time canon. If you are a fan of older queer YA animation and want to follow the footsteps of those who came before, then this might be for you. Adventure TimeAs a result, it is very difficult to fall for the trap.

I know, because when I mentioned that I’d put together a Bubbline watch/skip list of JustThe Marceline and Bubblegum episodes Adventure TimeFor some of my friends, not less than two colleagues immediately asked me if I could take them to the movie. They love animated TV, but Finn and Jake — especially in the show’s early seasons — couldn’t quite maintain their interest.

It’s an understandable problem! You can’t do it all at once. Adventure Time Once you start to look into the Bubbline subtext consistently, it becomes difficult for the new viewer to understand the dense lore. Thanks to Adventure Time’s laissez-faire approach to taking one-off episodes and retconning them into load-bearing plot pillars, you can’t just skip back a few episodes from seasons 6 or 7 to figure out why Finn has a robot arm.

So we’ve decided to share this list with the world.

Bubbline Watch/Skip List: How to Use It

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Begin with Season 1. Adventure TimeWatch each episode here on HBO Max! Marceline and Princess Bubblegum don’t play the central characters in this series. Adventure Time, so following their appearances and only their appearances will exempt you from a lot of moving and shaking in the show’s main plot. For your convenience, we’ve summarized that lore here, under the heading of the episode where you’ll need to know it. You must read this note before you start watching an episode.

We’ve also offered commentary on the repeated motifs of Adventure Time that you’re missing out on by watching it in this way, just to create a more complete experience. Adventure TimeIt isn’t a long-form plotted story as many other shows. Steven Universe, Gravity FallsOr The Owl HouseIt is a collection of themes that are repeated in multiple installments.

Enjoy your adventures!

[Ed. note: From this point forward, this post contains big, big spoilers for Adventure Time.]

Ooo!

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The era is full of candy science and wizard magic. It’s also a time for legendary heroism. As the Cosmic Owl glides across the dreamscape, he marks the distinction between prophecy and dreams. Prismo, known as the Wish Master, lies at the centre of all things. The four-faced deity Grob Gob Glob Grod watches over the fields of Mars, and we never talk about their fearsome brother GOLB, whose last worshippers were surely eradicated during the ancient Mushroom Wars… but I’m getting off track.

Finn the Human, Jake the Dog and Finn are our heroes (Finn was adopted). Finn, as far as anybody knows is the only human. Jake’s magical powers come from an encounter his parents had with a blue, shapeshifting alien while his mom was pregnant (although nobody finds that out until very late in the series).

They often have to fight the evil Ice King who kidnaps and tries to make them marry him. (Ooo! The riddledWith princesses. Queen Bubblegum of Candy Kingdom is often the one sending them out on quests. Finn has a great crush on her. And that’s really all you need to know!

Season 1

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7: “Ricardio the Heart Guy”

12: “Evicted!” — Don’t worry about the worm; it comes back in a later episode that doesn’t have much to do with this one.

22: “Henchman”

23: “Rainy Day Daydream”

Season 2

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1: “It Came From the Nightosphere” — You should know, just for the proper appreciation of Lumpy Space Princess as a concept, This she is voiced by Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time.

17: “Death in Bloom”

20: “Go With Me” — Jake’s girlfriend is Lady Rainicorn, Princess Bubblegum’s best friend and steed.

24: “Mortal Folly” — There’s a whole episode that introduces you to Billy but it’s not thatIt’s great. The video below contains everything you need to know.

Billy is an excellent example of how one can be early. Adventure Time’s most important quiet themes. Finn and Jake form part of an inexorable cycle of heroes that spans the ages, from the beginning of time to the future. Some of these adventurer pairings are unconnected people from another time, sometimes they seem like distant descendants or ancestors, sometimes they’re direct reincarnations of their souls.

It’s a way Adventure TimeEvery time is an opportunity to defeat evil and help the poor. A way it says that heroes — even Finn and Jake themselves — wear all genders, shapes, and guises. And it’s a way to say that the story of Finn and Jake never truly comes to an end, Even when it doesn’t. I LoveKids media for children that helps them to deal with their own story’s end.

But, let’s meet the Lich. A few Lich stories give a bit of perspective on Marceline and the Ice King, whose arc is a major pillar of the Marceline/Bubblegum storyline, so I’ve included them here.

25: “Mortal Recoil”

Season 3

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3: “Memory of a Memory” — If you watch closely, you can catch a picture of Finn and Jake’s other brother, Jermaine, in part of this episode. He’s a nonmagical talking yellow dog, voiced by Tom Scharpling (Steven Universe).

5: “Too Young”

10: “What Was Missing” — Congratulations, you’ve made it. Here’s the moment Adventure TimeThis is what it really means Adventure Time. It’s also the episode that spawned in earnest the Bubbline ship, for reasons that will be obvious the moment you finish it.

12: “The Creeps”

20: “Holly Jolly Secrets” part 2 — Don’t worry about part 1, it’s just FineThis is an easy summary of the contents. Part 2 is the load-bearing part. Adventure Time lore. Previous on Adventure Time: Finn and Jake found the Ice King’s secret tapes and they want to watch the secrets on them, but the secrets are hidden in hours of really boring home movies. That’s all you really need to know.

21: “Marceline’s Closet”

26: “Incendium” — Not a ton of Marcy and Peebs here, but watching this episode will help you stay abreast of the evolution of Finn’s crush on Princess Bubblegum and will also introduce you to Flame Princess.

Season 4

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5: “Return to the Nightosphere”

6: “Daddy’s Little Monster”

16: “Burning Low”

19: “Lady & Peebles” — This is what you should do after watching the episode.Later, Lady and Jake have their puppies! They’ve all got weird combos of rainicorn hologram powers and Jake’s shapeshifting and they all grow up very fast in a single episode and then occasionally show up to visit — you won’t really see any more of them on this list, but it’s important to know that they exist.

25: “I Remember You”

26: “The Lich”

Season 5

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1: “Finn the Human”

2: “Jake the Dog”

11: “Bad Little Boy” — You’ll notice that this episode isn’t about Finn and Jake — it’s about some other heroes called Fionna and Cake. F&C are the Ice King’s genderbent fanfiction about Finn and Jake, and the heroes of a whole genderbent version of Ooo. Is it possible they are real? Do they live in parallel universes? That’s up to your own interpretation.

This is Fionna’s best episode. It introduces Marshall Lee (Donald Glover). Also, Neil Patrick Harris reprises his Prince Gumball role.

14: “Simon & Marcy”

21: “The Suitor”

26: “Wizards Only, Fools”

29: “Sky Witch”

31: “Too Old” — OK, so… Lemongrab has been through some… things… since you last saw him. Because he was born with a desire for companionship as well as a hate for everything except his own obnoxiousness, Princess Bubblegum made another Lemongrab. In order to get international aid for lemon drops, the Lemongrabs declared their kingdom in famine. This allowed them to create lemon people and enslave hundreds. After the Lemongrabs began having problems with their relationships, the first Lemongrab ate a part of the second Lemongrab.

Finn was also involved in a messy split with Fire Princess that occurred between now-and the last time she saw her.

32: “Earth & Water”

34: “The Vault”

38: “Red Starved”

44: “Apple Wedding”

48: “Betty” — You’ll notice that in this episode, Finn has a green wrap on his sword-hand wrist. That’s his Grass Sword! It can cut through basically anything and it’s got a sentient curse living inside it that means he can never put it down. Finn accepted the Grass Sword after he stopped trying to rid it of and stopped trying. Now it’s just this neat retractable sword and It never brings about anything bad.It will not end in disaster.

Season 6

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14: “Princess Day”

22: “The Cooler”

23: “The Pajama War”

24: “Evergreen”

42: “Hot Diggity Doom” — OK, so, there’s a lot of Main Plot stuff going on here, but for our purposes it’s important to clock these developments with the King of Ooo and Princess Bubblegum.

Season 7

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1: “Bonnie & Neddy”

2: “Varmints”

6-13: The “Stakes” miniseries — You may have noticed Finn no longer has his Grass Sword! Finn overextended the Grass Sword between now and when we last saw him. It exploded, and he lost his right forearm. It was a long time that he got really upset over it. Then some other stuff happened, and the remnants of the Grass Sword in Finn’s arm regrew his arm, with no trace of the Grass Sword, except for a green thorn that comes out of his palm sometimes. This sword- and arm stuff will be important later.

26: “The Thin Yellow Line”

Season 8

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1: “Broke His Crown” — Remember Betty’s quest to save the Ice King from his madness? Well, so far in the course of her studies she’s determined that all wizardry demands/causes a degree of madness and sadness in the wizard. Between last we saw her and now, she stole the powers of the trickster Magic Man (thereby taking on his rather extreme level of madness, and his yellow pointed hat), and briefly stole the Ice King’s crown, altered it somehow, and gave it back.

8: “Elemental”

17: “High Strangeness”

19: “Jelly Beans Have Power”

Season 9

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11: “Ketchup” — In this episode, BMO and Marceline recap the events of two back-to-back Adventure Time miniseries, “Islands” and “Elements.” Neither of them have much to do with Bubbline so I have not included them, but the gist is:

In “Islands,” Finn, Jake, and BMO went on an adventure across the sea where they found other humans and met Finn’s biological mom! Wow! The other humans are sailing back to the main Ooo landmass but it’s gonna take them a while.

Meanwhile, in “Elements,” Patience St. Pim supercharged the elemental princesses, overriding their personalities with pure elemental impulses and transforming the continent into four elemental quarters. Anyone touching the ground turned elemental too: Princess Bubblegum became a giant gum entity, and in her quarter of Ooo all living things that touched the ground were transformed into creepily cheerful candy versions of themselves (even the ones that weren’t candy). The only thing that winds up having the power to turn everyone back to normal is Lumpy Space Princess, because she’s not from Ooo at all, but rather the extradimensional realm of Lumpy Space.

The most important detail of all that, for those following this list, is that LSP’s powers returned everything and everyone in Ooo not just to the way they were before the elementals transformed them, but to their Original forms.

Also important: At the beginning of “Islands,” Finn’s Grass Sword reemerged and came into contact with his Finn-Sword (a sword created by a paradox when Finn went back in time and met himself) and formed an entire new being called Fern. Fern will play a significant role in the ending of The Witcher 3. Adventure Time.

You see, Finn’s late-game character arc is all about confronting bad ways to be a hero by meeting warped reflections of himself — other lives, other timelines, other characters who want to be like him but don’t measure up, his own deadbeat dad… and Fern.

Fern has all of Finn’s memories (it took a lot of lifting to convince Fern he wasn’tFinn at the time he was born. Fern was 100% grass, which is the key difference. Fern also has the sentient curse called the Grass Sword. This gives Fern evil instincts and impulses. He is unable to fulfill his Finn-like dream to be a hero.

When the Grass Sword left Finn’s body, he was left without a right forearm again, so Princess Bubblegum made him a robot prosthetic.

Season 10

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4: “Bonnibel Bubblegum”

5: “Seventeen”

7: “Marcy & Hunson”

12: “Gumbaldia”

13: “The Ultimate Adventure: Come Along With Me” — Betty, still twisted by madness and sadness, has teamed up with Normal Man (formerly Magic Man) to bring back Normal Man’s long-lost love, Margles, and Simon. Also, at the end of “Islands,” Finn had an adventure where he met the Nightmare Princess and traded her some bananas for a red bottle of… something.

Obsidian

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You’ll find this long episode under Adventure Time: Distant LandsHBO Max.

You made it! You made it! Adventure TimeMarcy, Peebles and their full-on girls are Marcy & Peebles. We are glad you had a wonderful trip around the globe. Adventure Time. Whether or not it inspires you to go back and watch the full show from the beginning, you’ve gotten a look inside one of the most influential and envelope-pushing animated TV shows of our modern era — and that’s nothing to sneeze at.