Sexualized Saturdays: Fionna and the Ice King—Toxic Masculinity in Adventure Time

It seems in recent years as though a dam has broken and the notion of what is “acceptable content” for a kids or YA show thankfully now has an ever-increasing flow of support. While themes of inclusivity and equality have been a staple of the genre since the early days of Children’s Television Workshop, recent examples like Steven Universe have dealt with gender identity and sexuality in ways that would likely have been vetoed by the networks even a decade ago. One show that, in many ways at least, was at the forefront of that charge is Adventure Time. While by no means perfect, it gives us numerous examples of gender equality and represents a fairly wide range of gender, sexual, and romantic identities that fall outside the heteronormative narratives that many of the genre’s examples, even the best ones, have traditionally retold ad nauseum.

Grab your friends, we’re going to very distant lands. (screengrab from Adventure Time)

While Adventure Time does this in numerous ways and through numerous characters, there is one example that is among the most direct and the most enduringly popular: Fionna and Cake. In looking not only at these characters specifically, but also more broadly at what they show us about the Ice King and toxic masculinity, we can see one of the best examples of these themes being presented in subtle and complex ways that are accessible to the target age group and, ultimately, further that tradition of inclusiveness.

In Defense of “Fionna and Cake”

Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake is a nice addition to the standard Adventure Time formula. For those unaware, “Fionna and Cake” and its follow-up episode “Bad Little Boy” were Adventure Time episodes that portrayed a gender-flipped version of the original show. There are some other opposites involved, such as Cake being a cat to Jake’s dog, or Lord Monichromicorn being black and white to Lady Rainicorn’s rainbow. However, the stories about these other characters always revealed to simply be in-universe fanfiction written by one of the original universe’s characters. While the character designs are fun and it is interesting to see how the standard universe characters describe their counterparts, there is one glaring and recurring complaint with the flipped universe: both stories surrounding Fionna are about relationships.

Adventure Time: Fionna is Crushed

I was excited to finally get a new episode Adventure Time with my favorite genderbent fanfiction females, Ice King’s Fionna and Cake. I was ecstatic when I heard Marshall Lee the Vampire King would finally speak (voiced by Donald Glover). As the episode went on I became less and less happy until I was just agitated, especially with Slime Princess’s suggestion of “What if there was a little more romance in the story?”Damn it Adventure Time, didn’t we already go over this?

So You Want to Read Comic Books 2.0: Marceline Time—c’mon, grab your Scream Queens!

We usually use this column to recommend the superhero books that we think you should pick up. (At least I do.) And that trend is not likely to stop (I’ve just started reading the new Journey into Mystery arc with Sif and The All-New X-Men, so look forward to those in a potential future post). But today we’re not talking about superheroes.

We’re talking about cartoon characters.

“Isn’t there some overlap?” You ask. Well, yes, superheroes can be cartoon characters. But today I’m talking about characters that were animated first, and then expanded to comics instead of vice-versa—and in particular, I’m talking about Adventure Time.

Now Adventure Time currently has two titles out: a basic Adventure Time comic about Finn and Jake, and a separate book called Marceline and the Scream Queens. Because I find the actual Adventure Time show often hit or miss with its surrealist humor, I didn’t really want to spend my hard-earned cash on a comic I may or may not have liked, so I can’t tell you about the Adventure Time comic series. But Marceline is my favorite character, and she has a criminally low number of appearances in the actual show, so I snatched up the book she headlined as soon as I saw it.

Adventure Time S4 is Downright Algebraic

Well, my lovelies, the fourth season of Adventure Time rolled to a terrible cliffhangery close last week. But before we talk about that, let’s look at the rest of the season. There are always a few episodes in Adventure Time that edge past surrealist into annoying and just don’t do it for me, and this season was no exception—I particularly could have done without “Web Weirdos”, or a second Lemongrab episode… but actually, looking back over the episode list, AT had a lot of solid episodes this time around.

I really like the two major plot elements of this season, that is, the continuing introduction of and romance with Flame Princess and the ongoing peeks into the past of Ooo.