My thoughts on Adventure Time’s legacy.
Now that Adventure Time is over, and we can look back on the collective work as a whole, there’s one message that really stood out to me about the show. Optimistic Nihilism.
“Optimistic nihilism is acknowledging the lack of meaning and purpose. It’s understanding that universe doesn’t care about you and you’re just a speck of dust in cosmic vastness and that you weren’t assigned any meaning at birth. But it also acknowledges that this is doesn’t have to be depressing, on the contrary, it’s liberating. It opens you to find a meaning for yourself, it allows you to choose your meaning. Your purpose.”
And Adventure Time is chock FULL of this message. After all, the entire show takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. So much of what we think of as meaningful today rendered immediately meaningless. The series follows slice-of-life stories about random characters as they go about their routines in this fantastical universe. And right up until the ending montage in the season finally, it continued to do this. Checking in on them (even if it’s just through a background cameo) and seeing how far they’ve come or where they are now.
In some ways this could be seen as a detriment. While most other shows try to build up long over-arcing stories… Adventure Time will do that, and then just END them haphazardly. Remember all that build up to Finn losing his arm? 2-3 episodes later he gets one back. Remember how long we feared the Litch? BOOM! He’s a cute baby.
Heck, the last episode takes place hundreds of years AFTER the setting of the show, where by all accounts the majority of the characters we’ve come to love are DEAD. Yet ultimately the message is not a depressing one or a fatalistic one. But instead one of hope and acknowledgement that life goes on. And that that’s okay.
Nowhere clearer is this seen than in the song BMO sings to Jake in the last episode:
“Time is an illusion that helps things make sense
So we are always living in the present tense
It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends
But you and I will always be back then”
Even as a staunch atheist such as myself, that really resonated with me and brought me to tears. And in our current economical, political, sociological climate… that’s a very POWERFUL and POSITIVE message to convey to both kids and adults.
While Adventure Time didn’t shy away from darker and more mature themes, I think if you distilled Adventure Time down to it’s core message, I think this would be it.
Anyway, that’s my current thoughts on the show. There’s so much that Adventure Time did to progress modern cartoon narratives, we could be here all day. But this is one aspect of the show I don’t see being brought up much by people and I thought it was worth mentioning.
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