Rabbit holes all the way down
Adventure Time and the First Church of Fandom
Longtime readers of this newsletter may recall that the name, Very Distant Lands, comes from Adventure Time, the Cartoon Network juggernaut. An early post looked at the show’s deft use of pop culture references, and how differently they can resonate in different contexts. I wanted to revisit the show under VDL’s sharpened focus on religion and pop culture. What does a cartoon made for children have to say about belief and the way it shapes society? More than you might expect!
I actually first watched Adventure Time before I became a parent. I saw it at when we were staying at a hotel somewhere, luxuriating in the bountiful cable options. Mostly I recall the sense of recognition. I could tell exactly where the show’s creators were coming from. I too grew up on a steady diet of Looney Tunes, video games, and fantasy novels. The very building blocks of the show’s world. Once my kids came along, and our house became inundated with the fire hose stream of children’s media (I’m looking at you, Blippi), Adventure Time became something me and my kids enjoyed equally. During the depths of lockdown, we cycled through the entire 10 season run of the show, oh, half-a-dozen times, at least. There’s major rewatch value there, each episode offering a glimpse into the show’s densely imagined world.
Today we’re looking at episode 25 of the 7th season, titled “The Thin Yellow Line.” Our heroes Finn and Jake are strolling through the streets of the Candy Kingdom at night when they encounter a banana guard vandalizing a building, spraying graffiti. (Banana guards are Princess Bubblegum’s retinue of personal security, obviously. They’re loyal, good-hearted, and dim-witted.) This is unusual behavior for a banana guard, who are generally rule-followers. The banana guard evades capture, leaving Finn and Jake to puzzle over the graffiti he painted on the wall. It’s not some random tag, they discover. It’s an elaborate depiction of Princess Bubblegum, ruler of the Candy Kingdom. Her exploits, her life history, her feuds with other kingdoms.
Of course there’s an overly-detailed YouTube video that pores over the mural.
Now, even if you don’t understand all the references (the Mother Gum? Uncle Gumbald? What kind of family is this?), you can still get the basic dynamic of what’s going on with this video, and its creator’s relationship to the show. It’s a discrete instance of a wider phenomenon one could call Lore Brain. Lore generally means all the backstory and world-building taking place in the background of some show or book series or other media property. For instance, over the course of Adventure Time’s 10 seasons, you learn that this magical world full of flying wolves and slime princesses actually is our own world, the real planet earth. The modern world as we know it came to an end during the Great Mushroom War, an apocalyptic event that largely ended human life as we know it, eventually, over the course of 1,000 years, giving rise to the magical creatures and realities that had lain dormant for so long. It’s a post-apocalyptic story. Indeed, certain episodes that look back at the immediate fallout of the Mushroom War follow two characters, Simon/Ice King and Marceline the Vampire Queen as a child, navigating the ruins of civilization, fleeing mutants, trying to stay alive. It’s The Last of Us with a sense of humor.
Clearly, Adventure Time provides fans with heaping amounts of lore to tinker with, puzzle over, and refashion. “The Thin Yellow Line” is an incorporation of the phenomenon, an in-world acknowledgment of the diligent, exegetic effort fans bring to the show. Banana Guard 16, the artist behind the graffiti mural, is a super fan, a Lore-Brained ultra-nerd, the equivalent of a Reddit poster decoding the minutiae in the background of his favorite show.
I admit, I’m ambivalent about lore and its prevalence in popular culture. On the one hand, I love me some good lore. I have an obsessive nature, if you didn’t notice, and the density that a good trove of lore offers is just the sort of mental puzzles I love working over. Alternate timelines? Character backstories? Gimme gimme gimme. But in the midst of my obsessiveness, sometimes I wonder if I’m missing the point. I wonder if, by diving down rabbit hole after hole, I’m missing the simple sunshiney feeling of just…watching a show, or a movie, or reading a book, and just letting the experience wash over me, without turning the whole thing into homework.
You see the parallel with religious practice. Visit any religious community, particularly one structured around an agreed-upon set of holy books and scriptures, and it’s rabbit holes all the way down. Triune immersion versus singular, Amish vs Mennonite, Desert Islam vs Water Islam—sometimes it seems like religions are nothing more than fractious fan communities, and fan communities are trying to fill the void in an increasingly secular world by treating their favorite shows as holy writ, and waging holy war in their name.
Adventure Time knows this. In the episode, Banana Guard paints a whole mural about Princess Bubblegum, getting deep into the lore, portraying as a goddess mighty and terrible. “All shall love me and despair,” as Galadriel says in The Lord of the Rings. But what does Bubblegum think of this? She’s weirded out by it. Such devotion, pledged in her name, is unnerving. Which is saying something. Don’t let the sweetness fool you. Princess Bubblegum is a tyrant, albeit a rather benevolent one, spying on her subjects, tampering with their lives, erasing their very identities if it suits her purposes. And yet she still finds Banana Guard 16’s devotion destabilizing. He is telling her story without her authorization, after all. Through praising her, he is attempting to usurp some of her divinity for his own ends. Visit one of those same religious communities and you just might find some overzealous faith leader, insisting upon a given interpretation of a given text as a means of propping up his own authority, and deflecting it from the supposed object of his adoration.
Meaning is power, whether it’s a pastor wielding it, or a forum poster named like LemonGrab420. Remember that.
The turn to authoritarianism at the end here is🤌 I love the way this jackknifes into increasingly higher-stakes connections without it being disorienting.