The Real Girls of Adventure Time

Heavy spoilers

Adventure Time, the Cartoon Network darling beloved by kindergartners and stoner college kids alike, was a living being. As Jeremy Shada’s voice grew deep with age, so too did Finn the Human’s. We meet Finn at 12, a crudely drawn boy fighting zombies with his brother, the talking and often shape-shifting Jake The Dog. By the tenth and final season, Finn is 17, a smoother, rounder version of his young self; he’s on friendly terms with his ex-girlfriend Flame Princess, and has finally come to accept the uselessness of his father. Jake’s long been outed as an ex-con, and is married with adult children. Their world, like ours, crawls toward apocalypse.

Plot would have been a strong word to use for Adventure Time. Like Glee, inciting incidents sprang up haphazardly, and always, excruciatingly, in service of character. One never knew which wars would muddy stuff up for a couple of episodes or impact the arcs of seasons to come. Pendleton Ward, the creator, designed it this way. In a 2012 interview, when asked about his plan for Season 5, he said, “It’s just like playing D&D, where I’m role-playing these characters. I don’t know where they are going to go yet, but I am them when I am writing it.”

When the women in question first share the screen, you feel this. Perhaps only looking back did the writers realize what they’d done. ‘Go With Me’ presents as an unremarkable episode: Young Finn remains deep in the throes of his crush on teenager/ancient wad of Juicy Fruit, Princess Bubblegum. Jake begs Marceline the Vampire Queen, a mean, punky megababe with daddy issues, to make Bubblegum jealous. “Yeah, I’ll help. It’ll be funny,” Marceline says, gleaming.

At first watch, it did not occur to me that Bubblegum and Marceline had not yet spoken onscreen. Marceline is fake-laughing at one of Finn’s non-jokes just beneath a Candy Castle window when Bubblegum appears. She’s happy to see Finn, unjealous and unfazed, the awful cheerfulness of the oblivious and desired. But when she sees Marceline, her tone changes, her brow furrows. “Hey, Marceline.” The vampire sings back, oozing sugar, fingers fluttering in a wave, “Helloooo Bonnibel.” Just like that, we learn her first name. We suddenly can’t believe we had not thought to ask.

I wasn’t like the vampire or the princess. I was butch, uncomfortable, all hard, strange angles where they were soft and defined. I looked more like a character from Rocket Power, or Hey Arnold. But I was always trying to get into womanhood, trying to out-femme my girlfriends every other Saturday night with bad Forever 21 sundresses until the relationships inevitably dried up (reader, I am a common masc; I thought this was all it took).  All pictures of me from that time are earnest and upsetting, Finn at the princess’s window, desperate to succeed. Gender was a thousand year old vampire queen with an undercut patting my head. “Leave it to the real girls,” she whispered, fangs bared.

Bonnibel and Marceline don’t talk again until Season 3, in the episode I know by heart, ‘What Was Missing’. I started watching it every day, after a particularly bad breakup with a woman I’d genuinely loved. The premise: The Door Lord, a lumpy, yellow narc with too many joints, takes something of value from Finn, Jake, BMO, PB and Marcy. The gang chases down the Door Lord until he escapes into just-materialized French doors that quickly shut behind him. In order to open the door and retrieve their valuables, the group must form a band and sing together in harmony. Often, when the episode was finished, I’d just start it over again.

But back to vampire queens: If you know Olivia Olson, you probably know her from her prodigious rendition of ‘All I Want For Christmas is You’ in Love Actually, back when she was just ten years old. Richard Curtis, the director of Love Actually, has said that Olson’s singing was so flawless, they trained her to add inhalations to the track so people wouldn’t assume she was lip-synching to Mariah Carey. All grown up, she’s the voice of Marceline, hovering above the Door Lord’s portal at high noon with her axe turned bass guitar, a sunhat keeping her safe from the ultraviolet rays. “Sorry I don’t treat you like a goddess, is that what you want me to do?” Olson’s voice is sweet, glittering smoke; if it were noxious gas, you’d still breathe deep. Marceline shuts her eyes and want sprawls over the bassline. The door begins to glow, in the presence of real feeling. Princess Bubblegum looks less surprised than pissed at being so blatantly outed. Marceline gets self-conscious after a minute; the door goes dark as she starts to sing about wanting Bubblegum dead. “La petite mort, MAYBE!” I’d scream from my Dorito-littered cave.

After some unimportant squabbling that does not involve Olivia Olson singing, the five heroes get it together: Finn leads the band in a chaste song about friendship and the door opens. BMO gets his controller back, Jake his blankey, Finn his wad of Bubblegum’s hair (“Oh, you,” Bubblegum says affectionately. Men are always the last to know), and Bubblegum gets… a t-shirt?

Let’s be clear: the shirt is ugly. I know, because I bought one from the Cartoon Network website. It’s a snake in some mud, and two Candy People’s heads on sticks. It’s ugly-cute, at best, even though it suggests the Adventure Time equivalent of Pierce The Veil. Still, Bubblegum jumps to the shirt like a vibrator that’s just fallen out of her purse.

“You… kept the shirt I gave you?”

“Yeah, it uh… means a lot to me.”

“But you never wore it…”

“Dude, I wear it all the time… as pajamas!”

It is nothing short of science, the way the Adventure Time writers chop up desire. Seemingly impossible, to de-gay Marceline’s blushing, hungry plea. You kept the shirt I gave you? But Princess has been passing as straight for centuries, and any woman knows a well-placed ‘dude’ can double as a breakup. It’s the same inflection she uses to dismiss Finn, but this time, it’s gaslighting; not so much Marceline, who KNOWS, but the joyless parents who would later instigate the Mathematical controversy that kept the two from appearing in scenes together until Season 5. When the monarchs finally do reunite in ‘Sky Witch,’ we see Princess Bubblegum wake up on an ordinary morning, and she’s wearing the shirt. She leaves it on as she gets dressed, yes, because she is always wearing it underneath all of her clothes. Female friendship, right? Your gal pal could never.

I didn’t need to rewatch ‘What Was Missing’ to write this piece. Before transition, before therapy, before the earth-shattering (literally!) Bubblegum and Marceline kiss in the Adventure Time finale, I had this episode. ‘Sky Witch’ wasn’t out yet, but I was still here, more of a knight than a princess, or maybe a jester, my love stuck in a cartoon. For a year I lived in that first bloom of need between two gorgeous, deathless women, as I stayed depressed, alone, ambivalent, and so afraid of myself. The truth is, none of that got better. I just found more places to live.