finished up adventure time this morning

talked with Jason about this for a while and it helped crystallize some thoughts so uhh I guess ignore this if you want to avoid adventure time spoilers

so i picked up where i left off years ago which was midway through season 5 and that's around what feels like a turning point in the show where it becomes less episodic and more serial and that feels representative of a larger tension in western animation

i'm sure this has been studied and explained way better than i care to but it's been interesting to see cartoons in general make that shift. i think both approaches have their merits and the best shows combine them in order to balance telling a story and shaping a world

i think adventure time lucked out by shifting more substantially from one to the other than most shows seem to do, because i think the story of it is not so much about finn and jake learning about the world but about the viewer learning about the world

it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, where you start slowly with tiny bits of info and piece them together into larger and larger stories with increasing speed. it's cool when a story can give you that feeling, and it reminds me a lot of what i loved about outer wilds

which was the excitement of seeing the full picture come into view (and the tension of playing out the final sequence).

i also liked that it's not really the story of finn and jake, even though they do develop as characters and are integral to the events of the show, esp finn -- they're forces of nature, not heroes because they want to do good, but because they DO good because that's what they do.

not that they don't want to do good but it is rarely about want because like, most everyone wants to do what they think is good, so it feels more meaningful when they choose to do the right thing. if that makes sense.

Jason compared this to the Witcher and I haven't really played much Witcher so my read was like, some aspects of westerns. trigun springs to mind. idk

what's funny to me about this thread is that i went back to the show mostly for pb, marceline, and simon and i have very little to actually say about them, not in a bad way, i just have nothing to add