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Adventure Time: Aiding in Life’s Hardest Adventures
“There is panic around death because it’s coming for you. But if you’re looking at it you
can settle down and feel relaxed because you know where it is, and it’s not going anywhere…I
really like that sad tingle” (Bustillos, 6). Pendleton Ward, creator and current executive producer
of the much-loved children’s cartoon Adventure Time released this sentiment in an interview.
The journalist conducting the interview was probing him about why a children’s cartoon contains
such a dark glimpse into death and decay. There is something innately cathartic and beautiful
about the graphics of the cartoon. The opening sequence shows dark, deadly images of a
radioactive, decaying earth and a mushroom cloud explosion directly juxtaposed with an
alarmingly colorful display of candy characters and a lollipop city. How better to soothe the
underlying panic we all experience when it comes to the darkest topics of life than to produce it
alongside silly humor, goofy characters, clever dialogue, and a protagonist with an unending
yearning to do nothing but good for others? Adventure Time is a powerful instrument both for
children and the inner-children that coexists in adult bodies to assist in coming to terms with all
of the cruelest realities of life; death, loss, abandonment, topics that children are typically
shielded from; the issues that as adults we still do not know how to cope with.
The most fitting way to describe the animation style of Adventure Time is helter-skelter
meets a comic book. There is a wealth of beautiful popping color and imaginative characters in a
myriad of creative and ridiculous kingdoms. Characters have lanky arms and legs that move in a
manner contrary to all known laws of physics. This exudes “fun”. After what is mysteriously
referred to in the show as the “great mushrooms war” it seems magic has returned to earth in full
force. Many animals talk, candy and breakfast items have become sentient and the land’s greatest
ruler is made of bubble gum. Humans are generally known to be extinct save one human boy,
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the show’s great protagonist, Finn the human. Clad in shorts, a bear hat, and a backpack Finn is
adorable, and his fight to only do good for others and remain pure continues throughout the
course of the show. His loyal companion is Jake the dog, and yes, he can talk and has magical
powers. Upon consideration of the above description one’s eyes may roll at the thought of yet
another mindlessly stupid cartoon with pretty colors designed to keep kids glued to the
television, however, Adventure Time is so much more than that (Strauss, 2014).
Contrasted with this bright, bubbling positivity is an underlying darkness. Due to some
radioactive tragedy, much of the earth is a wasteland. An ungodly evil presence is lurking under
the earth’s crust. Images of gnarly monsters, maggots, and worms decomposing on trees are
shown in the title sequence (Strauss, 2014). There is an infinite number of dead worlds in which
the devil rules over suffering skeletons in a lava pit. These dead worlds are dark, mainly black
and red, and show the afterlife as a pit of despair. The Candy Kingdom is constantly under
attack, and mutants, zombies, werewolves, vampires, etc. are always attempting to ravage the
city and eat the candy citizens. There are bloody wars and tragic deaths, but it seems so much
more approachable and almost comedic when the crime is happening to a peppermint.
The show’s main characters are the crime fighting, evil stomping duo Finn the human
and Jake the dog, and although they are represented as being juvenile figures, they have many
confrontations with death and abandonment. Finn was left in the woods as a baby and would
have certainly perished if not for the kindness of Jake’s mother, Margaret, who insists on
rescuing the baby and kissing him on the forehead. Jake’s parents adopt the abandoned baby and
Finn and Jake grow up as brothers. In the first season of the show Finn grapples with the reality
of his abandonment and states that this betrayal and his sadness as a baby are his prime
motivations for always trying to do good deeds for others and fight evil. There is a painful,
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beautiful moment in the episode Sons of Mars when Jake is mistakenly identified as a villain,
and sentenced to death. Finn races through time and space to valiantly save his friend using
methods he would normally find morally reprehensible, like extortion and threats. This shows
the panic we all feel when someone we love is in imminent danger. Finn does not make it there
in time and Jake is executed. When the Martian king realizes he has killed an innocent dog, he
travels to the lair of death and trades his immortality for Jake’s life, but in the meantime Finn
clutches the lifeless body of his best friend, crying out in anguish, angry tears stream from his
face until life is returned to Jake.
One of the shows key writers, Kent Osbourne in an interview last year said, “Hearing
Jake talk about his perception of death and dying, I remember when that was pitched, it made me
feel better about my own mortality…It prepared me for death better” (Bustillos, 6). That quote is
in reference to the episode The New Frontier in which Jake has what is referred to as a “croak
dream.” His own death is played out before him, and the sequence is accompanied by the
ethereal entity the Cosmic Owl, who is said to only make an appearance when there is supreme
cosmic significance. Rather than reacting with fear, Jake is at peace. He explains to Finn that his
individual earth consciousness will be spread everywhere throughout the cosmos. Trying to be
reassuring he says, “I’m going to be all around you; in your nose, in your dreams, in your socksI’ll be a part of you in your earth mind-it’s going to be great.” Finn reacts as most of us would
react. He tells him to stop talking about the possibility of death. He exclaims, “Dude, I’m 13.
Stop it, you’re messing me up.” Finn responds with denial and contempt when Jake seems
reassuring, almost consenting. Here, Finn represents typical human reaction to the mortality of a
loved one, and the contrast between the two characters shows the progression of the stages of
grief.
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Adventure Time conquers topics most children’s television avoids religiously. The show
is post-apocalyptic, the world is riddled with nuclear decay and mutated monsters. Finn is a
mere child and has no stable support system, no parents, no rules, and yet he chooses to never
cease the fight to conquer evil. Aside from Finn the only humans that exist from the premushroom war era are the Ice King and Marceline the Vampire Queen. The Ice King is a villain
and a shut-in, and has a general disregard for other people’s feelings and Marceline has no
problem with the theft of innocent souls and meaningless killing. In this way the show almost
suggests that people before the apocalypse had already been corrupted, that perhaps this nuclear
cleansing was necessary for true good to exist once again. Unlike in other children’s cartoons, in
which cartoon cats can survive an alarmingly high amount of traumatic deaths and continue to
survive in every episode, death in Adventure Time is final. Once characters die they do not
return, and the remaining characters mourn them. This shows children a more realistic view of
what death is and what it means to die.
While no single medium, be it poetry, song, novel, painting, comic may take away the
pain, confusion, and anger of loss, creating a safe space for the vocalization of children’s feelings
and thoughts is important. Sometimes that safe space means one that is separated from the
child’s own experience (Maguth, 85-86). It has been shown that children need more emotional
space than adults to acknowledge pain (Wiseman, 10). A platform like that of Adventure Time
causes a good amount of safe space away from personal pain in which to have a platform for a
conversation about grief, a platform in which the loss is happening to a fictional kingdom of
characters that are clearly separated from our real life experiences, thus making it much easier to
open up without feelings of threat or insecurity (Maguth, 83-84).
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When my mother died and my family was waiting for the hospice nurses to arrive I sat
with my seven-year-old brother on the couch upstairs. Hoping for a distraction, I turned on the
television. Adventure Time happened to be replaying an old episode. This particular episode
showed Jake’s parents Joshua and Margaret before their deaths. My mother’s name is also
Margaret. The episode went on to show Finn and Jake missing their parents and reminiscing
about when they were still alive. Always logical, quietly, my brother said, “well, Finn and Jake
don’t have a mom and they’re still fighting evil.” He then went on to think of all of the historical
figures and Nobel prize winners he could think of who grew up without mothers, reassuring
himself that he would be okay. This child’s reaction to exposing his own grief, and relating
himself to a bereaved character mirrors a study conducted on the importance of children’s picture
books and narratives in the educational realm of childhood mourning. The study further
concluded that biobibliotherapy, in which children relate their own experiences to that of a
fictional character, helps validate the emotions of children who would otherwise self-blame, and
gives them valuable coping tools to deal with their own grief and pain (Wiseman, 3-5). It is my
surmise that this early exposure to the reality of death and decay; this glimpse into how mortality
can be addressed in many creative ways, can aid in emotional development.
Bruno Bettelheim is a revered child psychologist who wrote The Uses of Enchantment,
which speaks to the importance and significance of fairy tales in child development. And what is
Adventure Time if not a fairy tale? In this examination, Bettelheim writes that since the content
of the fairy tale is clearly not true, then children can surmise that the significance of the tale lies
elsewhere, that they are “unreal, not untrue”. They show that the information that is external is
irrelevant, rather, the relevance exists in the inner processes that take place, and can lead to an
inward examination. Consciousness of reality, consciousness of hardship, heartache, and loss are
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important because these realities comprise the entirety of the human experience, and they must
be acknowledged and faced in order to find some sort of purpose; some sort of meaning
interlaced in the chaos of life (Bettelheim, 7-10). Just as my little brother can clearly see the
underlying pain Finn feels when he misses his adoptive mom, he can connect his own pain in
losing his mother, even though the premise of a talking dog adopting a human baby in the woods
is ridiculous. The circumstances are completely unreal, but the sadness; the remembrance, those
things are not untrue.
In regards to television and film, Ridvan Senturk, visual communication researcher and
professor of cinematic film studies, argues that violence, anxiety, high stress, and fear in
children’s television programming may be damaging, lead to emotional stunting, and make it
more difficult for children to fit in with their larger cultural and sociological groups as a whole.
The big word Senturk uses is “anxiety.” He repeats the word anxiety time and time again in his
work. He writes that the coupling of visual violence with the anxiety it produces in the child
audience can cause psychological trauma that cannot be undone (1129-1131). I have already
clearly painted the darkness of Adventure Time, yet how can I support its aid in childhood
development if I take the research of Senturk into consideration? The key word is anxiety.
Adventure Time has moments that feel intense, particularly when there is some big conflict or
maybe a beloved character in peril, and it is emotionally charged. However, there is never any
underlying anxiety. The audience knows that ultimately good will conquer, because the entire
message revolves around the fact that while characters may be flawed, there is an underlying
inner struggle between good and evil inside even the worst characters, and eventually the good
side will win. Anxiety induced by violence can be traumatic, but the bright silliness of
Adventure Time does not render itself to anxiety, nor is there any “serious” violence or the
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presence of gore. In this way it is a perfect tool to make children more understanding of death
and loss, but not panicked, anxious, or traumatized.
The balance in the emotional inner-workings of children is delicate. Many American
parents try as hard as humanly possible to shield children from difficult topics, and refuse to
discuss death with their children. But the reality of the human condition is that death exists. It
may start with something small, like the death of a pet, or children may be exposed harshly to it
very early. Regardless, assuredly there will come a time when everyone will be exposed to death,
and it is helpful if some emotional development and cognitive action has already been
undertaken when this happens. Adventure Time as children’s television programming is a truly
unique entity. Somehow this creative team has been able to access the inner child; making
something completely fun and innocent, colorful and goofy, clever and heart-warming, while
simultaneously tackling what is hard about being an adult; moral dilemma, moral ambiguity,
complicated relationships, and most of all the reality of the finality of death. Thus, it achieves a
very curious goal. Adventure Time reaches out to the part in all of us that is petrifyingly scared,
like children. It touches that soft spot that is terrified of death, panicked by finality, uprooted by
loss, and gives us a little soft pat. It plops death down in front of us and says, “don’t worry, he’s
not going anywhere.”
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Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. Vintage, 1989.
Bustillos, Maria. “It’s Adventure Time!”. The Awl. 2014.
<http://theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com/>.
Maguth, Brad, et al. “Grappling With Death and Loss Through Children’s Literature in the
Social Studies”. Social Studies Research & Practice 10.3 (2015): 80-87. Education
Research Complete.
Senturk, Ridyan. “Anxiety and Fear in Children’s Films”. Educational Sciences: Theory and
Practice 11.3 (2011): 1122-1132. ERIC.
Strauss, Neil. “Adventure Time: The Trippiest Show On Television”. Rolling Stone. 2014.
<http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/adventure-time-the-trippiest-show-ontelevision.>.
Wiseman, Angela. “Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death
and Dying”. Children’s Literature in Education 44.1 (2013): 1-14. Professional
Development Collection.