Adventure Time Series Finale
This week, Adventure Time had its series finale. Here's a link to an article on Vox about it.
One of the show's storytelling techniques is, we might say, "Ha Ha Only Serious". It grappled with painful and disturbing subjects, by placing them within in a juvenile setting which was difficult to take seriously, and then getting farther out in left field whenever it would start to lose a sense of fun.
To be clear, in case you start to watch the show and feel like I misled you: many episodes are simply a straight-up goofy kid's show with pretty much nothing behind it. These are not the episodes I rewatch, but they were necessary. They had to be sincere about the hyper-adolescent context, or the rest of it would have been hollow.
I suspect this approach set up its audience with a specific style of coping with burnout, in which we keep in touch with the spark of what we originally saw in the world, that got us excited in the first place. I appreciate the show for that.
Revisiting Pendleton Ward's original viral video (which was picked up by Cartoon Network to make into a show), it seems to me like this theme was buried in the subtext all along, beneath all that over-the-top hyper-adolescence. Beneath it, or because of it. It's a show about how to grow up without degenerating into a disillusioned husk. Or how to lose your mind when you need to, and get your mind back.
Thanks very much to Dana for turning me on to Adventure Time and overcoming my skepticism. I was glad we watched the series finale together.
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