Adventure Time: A Story of Impermanence.

An Ro
An Ro
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

Adventure Time ended, on Monday, after eight rocky years of tales, adventures, emotions and experiments. I don’t think i’ve quite yet processed that a story i’ve grown so attached to has actually ended and in all honesty, i don’t think i’m supposed to.

Ultimatley, at the literal End of all Things, Adventure Time sent us off with one important, last message, last tidbit of wisdom to impart on us: impermanence.

If there was one constant, consistent string dragging itself throughout Adventure Time (at least from the point where it abandoned it’s original lackadaysical motivations and began telling a larger, more cohesive narrative with dozens of diferent characters and events, often times in different places, timelines and dimensions), is that of the cyclical nature of life, constant change, time, living within our memories and how nothing every truly ends, but changes.

Taken to it’s obvious and most literal form, it is established that reincarnation is a thing in this universe, with Finn at one time or another being a comet, a butterfly, and a rougish wasteland survivor named Shoko.

But in more metaphyiscal and more emotional terms, Adventure Time stressed that even though you or your story might end, the ‘end’ really isn’t anything of substance. It’s not even a stopping point, because YOU alone were never the point to begin with.

You were one small part of a beautiful, grander whole, and you did your part in it, no matter what it is, great or small. And when you’re gone, things will change, and shift but they will remain. As Marceline put it:

Everything stays, right where you left it, everything stays, but it still changes

Near the end of the episode, in the clymactic battle against the God of Discord and Chaos, Golb, BMO soothes the traumatised Jake by singing what i consider to be the most important song in the show, next to ‘Everything Stays’. A song about memories, how we always live within them and the unyielding movement of time.

BMO sings to Jake, and to us, in a song titled ‘Time Adventure’, that time is simply an illusion we create in order for things in the present to make sense for us, as the world around us seems unforgiving when eventually it forces something to end.

But in the end it doesn’t matter because they never trully ended, as they exist within us and within the people we share them with.

Will happen, happening, happen, again and again, ’cause you and i will always be back then.

Right here, BMO reiterates the themes of repetition, reincarnation and cycles within Adventure Time, but on a more intimate and sincere level.

At the end of the episode BMO simply says that Finn, Jake and Bubblegum simply kept on living their lives, and there’s a comforting poignancy and wistful melancholy in that sentence. Of course they would, what else would they be doing?

There was no grand end, no grand point to it all, and arguably you can say that another ultimate message was that Finn and Jake were never the main characters to begin with. Directly, in the episode at one point one of the characters sidesteps his offer of heroic sacrifice to ask a different character for assistance, as they were the only one with the power to do so

Finn was just ONE person out of a whole, all of them unique individuals in their own right, all of them powerful and capable.

We were merely glimpsing into a small part of a thriving, living universe that has and will exist without their input… to the story, this was merely a convenient stopping point to get off and let the reigns be held by other hands.

When the episode starts and when it ends we’re given brief glimpses into the universe of Ooo a thousand years after the events of the show, and to many people the vision of Ooo changed so drastically from what we’ve come to know strikes as a gut punch. And that’s entirely fair because it still is. But nevertheless, it sticks with the core messaging of the show: life goes on and so will you. The new Ooo evolved and changed from the old. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

I don’t think it could have ended any other way and more importantly, i wouldn’t want it to.

Adventure Time always had deep connections to nostalgia and childhood, and having their final imparting wisdom be that everything goes on and that memories are a form of actualisation and existance in and of themselves, seems to be the most heartfelt thing they could’ve said.

And so in a fittingly strange way, the end was never trully the end because there never is any end to begin with.

How can something ever really trully end when time is endless? What is ‘the End’ if not just the new replacing the old, asserting itself and designating it’s existance in our reality and in our minds? How does something end when it replays in our memories, when we can experience that what we’ve lost again and again, time and time again?

So cheer up. Finn, Jake, everything will eventually shift into something new, and their stories and lives will go on, because that’s all life can ever do.

Shermy and Beth are now the new Finn and Jake, taking up the mantle and showing all of us how everything stays and yet how everything changes and how everything will always happen, is happening and will happen. This then was the final message Adventure Time wanted to leave us with.

Time is an adventure, and the fun will never end.

An Ro

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I’ll post stuff when i feel like it.

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