Stakes Is a Welcome Reversal and a Step Forward

For much the same reasons as Moe explained earlier this summer, I have kind of grown away from Adventure Time. While an eleven minute episode once a week isn’t a huge time commitment, I felt that the show had lost its idea of who its audience was and had abandoned the latter half of its “here’s a weird premise with a good message” mentality for utter absurdism and often unpleasant conclusions. Also, I’m still pissed that Finn’s arm grew back.

Because of this, I didn’t know about the Stakes miniseries, which comprises several episodes out of the still-ongoing Season 7, until after it had finished airing. Thankfully, a Bubbline blog that I still follow on Tumblr reblogged a rash of posts about it, or I’d still be in the dark. I began watching it out of loyalty to Marceline more than anything—she’s always been my favorite character—but I finished it unexpectedly excited to see what will happen next in the Land of Ooo.

Spoilers through the end of Stakes after the jump.

Fanfiction Fridays: There’s No Spark On A Dampened Floor

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been making an effort recently to spotlight femslash fanfics. It’s a tricky business, if only because we have tremendous difficulty finding good fics of the quantity and quality that exists in m/m slash fics. As just one example, Archive of Our Own has over 7.5k fics in the Tony Stark/Steve Rogers section, the most popular of which has over 230,000 hits. If you look at the same stats for the Carol Danvers/Jessica Drew ship, a pairing with a similar dynamic (military blonde Avenger and snarky brunette Avenger with a troubled past), there are only 83 fanfics, with the most popular receiving just under 30k hits. It’s a damn shame and so we’ve set out to bring attention to the notable lady-lovin’ fanfics we’ve found.

This week’s is an Adventure Time story, entitled There’s No Spark On A Dampened Floor, by shoutoutout. It’s set after the season six episode “Sky Witch”, in which the Princess Bubblegum/Marceline relationship was so clearly romantic that it could barely be called subtext, and I was delighted to find a followup to the story.

Gayyyyy.

Spoilers for “Sky Witch” ahead.

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.

Sexualized Saturdays: Strong Women are Lesbians

Long ago, all the way back to last January, Lady Saika wrote a post about Homophobia and Slash Fanfiction. At one point she discussed why people have a difficulty imagining some of their favorite characters as a sexuality other than straight. She wrote:

Part of this is rooted in persistent and terrible stereotypes.  If, when you think ‘gay’, you think ‘faaaabulous’, you’d never imagine Dean Winchester getting into a relationship with a guy.  If when you think bi, you think ‘slut’, you never would imagine someone like Durarara‘s Mikado as bi.  If you think ‘butch’ when you hear ‘lesbian’, you’d never in a million years think of, say, Luna Lovegood as a lesbian.

The same is true in the reverse. If a woman doesn’t want to get married, is into sports, is a warrior, is basically not stereotypically feminine, then automatically people assume that woman is a lesbian. Now don’t get me wrong, these characters could very well be lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals, straight, or whatever; my problem is assuming someone is homosexual based on gender stereotypes.

Not Just Your Problem Anymore

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s quite a controversy going on in the cartoon world. A controversy that has to do with a certain female cast member and her sexuality.  I am, of course, talking about the lovely Marceline, the vampire queen from the Cartoon Network series, Adventure Time.