What time is it? Well, as of Monday, it’s Adventure Time again! Season Six is now underway, which means it’s the perfect time to tell you all about one of the hottest cartoons currently on air.
This isn’t your average cartoon for 7-11 year olds, obviously. What seems to be giving it a wide appeal to older audiences is how it never shies away from darker issues. There’s the melancholy of the Ice King’s backstory, abandonment issues, the pain of failed relationships, and even storylines where Finn must accept Jake’s imminent death. Characters might explode without warning, or Finn must learn to live in a world empty of everyone except a crazy Jake.
The first season was pretty self-contained, with each 11-minute episode its own story with its own moral. But from the second season, Adventure Time has been bucking the trend of most cartoon series, with some important plot points and character developments carrying on across episodes. Rather than maintaining a status quo, Finn is aging at the same rate as his voice actor. This has meant, as Finn went through puberty, a greater emphasis on romance within the series. He's had to deal with getting over his first crush, finding a girlfriend, and all the problems that happen when you're young and in love (and your girlfriend is made out of fire).
One of the joys of Adventure Time is in its side characters, and more especially the villains. They shift around each episode. Sometimes the villain is out and out evil, like the Lich or Marceline’s dad. On occasion Marceline has been the villain, when she’s not Finn and Jake’s ally. And then there’s the Ice King. He goes around kidnapping princesses, but all he wants is to be loved and be friends with Finn and Jake. Throughout the seasons, his story is slowly revealed in melancholy chunks, as we find out who he was before the Mushroom War, how he became the Ice King, the reason he keeps kidnapping princesses, and his previous relationship with Marceline.
To be honest, though, probably the most popular character amongst the twenty-something audience members is Jake. Played by voice-actor extraordinaire John DiMaggio, Jake’s the spirit animal of a generation. Because he isn’t a hero, not in the way Finn is. He wants to do the best for his friend, but Jake constantly has to battle with the fact that he’s lazy, frequently selfish, and often more concerned with eating than doing the right thing. Whether he’s singing a song about bacon, or inspiring with quotes such as “sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something”, Jake is the big brother who just wants what’s best for you.