I watched the last episode of Adventure Time because Marceline and Bonnie got to kiss on TV. And that’s a powerful feeling. But it had even more powerful feelings to give me before it was done, and I gotta get them out.



Adventure Time developed a rich symbolic language though it’s brief 10 minute tales, inviting us to become attached to it’s characters experiences and to associate the feelings we have while watching them with the objects and places involved with those events. All the while, it teases the idea that life is cyclical. Finn’s past lives are explored, as well as his life in an alternate timeline, and his life split into two people whose experiences diverge, and all are peppered with symbolic similarities to his own. Locations we become familiar with are shown on a few occasions an untold amount of time in the future, still there but no longer central to peoples lives, left to ruin or reclaimed by nature. The world of Ooo is littered with the now-meaningless detritus of our mundane world, eventually revealing that Ooo exists because a world very much like our own annihilated itself with war. And it concludes by suggesting that this world we have become so attached to may yet destroy itself in war as well.



These recurring motifs suggest that Adventure Time has a fundamental lesson to teach: that objects and symbols which bore life-changing importance and evoked heart-wrenching memories for one generation of life become mysteries or curiosities or things that were simply always there for another, and the events which marked their lives fall into skewed record or are ultimately forgotten. And that’s okay.



It’s painful for people to face the shortness of their lives, to imagine their most affecting memories lost, and the objects which signify them to be meaningless to future generations. But Adventure Time tells us, that is the blessing which time bestows on us, which prevents us from being paralyzed by the layers and layers of past meaning stuck on every crevice of reality which any conscious being has ever interacted with or been aware of. We don’t remember everything about the past that came before us, and that’s okay. And people in the future will forget much about us too, and that’s okay. Life is important not because it’s every detail is remembered, but because it occurred, because people’s lives were full of the instantly forgotten joyful minutia which fill our waking hours and make us happy.

Adventure Time is a series of joyous, heartwarming, colorful, G-rated memento mori. Everything ends, it tells us, so make up a song, spend time with your friends, pick up a hobby, ask someone out, ask someone else out, dance on the tombs of kings and use their jeweled crowns as doorstops. Your life is temporary, but life itself goes on forever both behind us and ahead of us, and the people that come after us may be different, but they’ll be familiar in the ways that matter. Even when your show is over, the fun really never ends.

