Interview with author Lev Grossman

By Zack Smith, guest blogger for USA TODAY | USATODAY

And now for a little feature I like to call, "Two Grown Men and a Seven-Year-Old Discuss Adventure Time."

As you might have guessed from my interview with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward last time on Pop Candy, I am unhealthily obsessed with the hit Cartoon Network series – I even collect sketches from comic artists of the show's characters.

One person who's as obsessed as I am is Lev Grossman , author of the great fantasy novelsThe Magicians and The Magician King. Lev is a writer for Time magazine, and has done in-depth interviews with people like J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Franzen, and Mark Zuckerberg…but I've never seen him geek out over anything like Adventure Time.

Virtually every day, Lev and I trade a few e-mails about the show – which he regularly watches with his 7-year-old daughter Lily. We got together via Skype with Lily and Lev to dissect the nuances of the show…and in Lily's case, point out its appeal for its intended audience.

So let's talk about how we all got into the show. I got into it last year after seeing footage of the Adventure Time parade from San Diego Comic-Con, and then I remember you (Lev) were on tour and wanted something to watch, so I recommended some episodes…

Lev: I went through a huge sort of internal debate as to whether I was even going to expose Lily to the show, because I saw the very first one with the sugar-zombies ("Slumber Party Panic") and thought, "This is cool but scary," and then I saw "It Came From the Nightosphere," and thought, "All right, this is definitely not OK for kids," and – this is a classic parent story – I came home and mentioned the show to Lily, and she said, "I've been watching that at Grandma's house for months."

(to Lily) Doesn't it ever freak you out or give you nightmares?

Lily: No.

Lev: What about Marceline's dad, Hunson Abadeer?

Lily: He's creepy, but he's not scary. He doesn't bug me.

Lev: Who is scary?

Lily: The Lich. Duh.

Lev: The thing is, my favorite episodes are different from Lily's favorite episodes. I'm obsessed with the continuity and the episodes that reveal backstory –

Lily: Bo-RING!

Lev: I am completely obsessed with "I Remember You," where we find out Marceline and the Ice King knew each other. Did you like that one, Lily?

Lily: It's boring!

Lev: My all-time favorite, though, is the second Earl of Lemongrab episode ("You Made Me!"), where he comes back and they make an extra Lemongrab for him in his pantry.

Lily: (starts poking Lev) Poke-poke-poke-poke-poke!

Lev: It's also given rise to a terrible new tradition in our house, "Lemongrab Poking," from where they poke each other. (To Lily) And then they stop. I'm not a Lemongrab. Are you a Lemongrab?

That's a weird episode, because they kind of play Lemongrab as having Asperger's or being mildly autistic – but in a metaphorical way. He has trouble interacting with others, and he hates touching others in a traditional sense, and there's even that random moment where they enter a room in Castle Lemongrab and there's just a catcher's mitt by itself.

Lev (as Lemongrab): "Put you in my oven!" It sort of reminds me when Temple Grandin built the whole machine where she gets inside and it hugs her.

Lily: I would never do that.

Lev: But she needed that because she's autistic and she needed the feeling of that pressure on her, the hug, and that catcher's mitt reminds me of that. Wow. I need to watch that episode yet again.

Like, they're not really forcing a structure on the show. I'd like to see some kind of Avatar: The Last Airbender mega-arc, but it's fun that one week there's a Nightopshere super-adventure, and the next is just Finn and Jake hanging out playing a card game.

Lev: It sort of put me off at first, because it seemed like there was a lot of continuity at first, but it seems to oscillate between continuity and non-continuity. There aren't really episodes that contradict each other, though. They create these weird continuity problems by throwing out things like the Mushroom War, and the Land of Ooo is a post-apocalyptic Earth, and Finn might be the last human and was raised by Jake's parents, these giant dogs, but it's funny – the show seems to draw strength from these little problems.

They go back a lot and resolve these issues.

Lev: Pendleton Ward seems drawn to these contradictions that come up for aesthetic reasons or whatever, and he just finds gold in them. It makes me wonder what the demographics are for the show – is it half-children and half-adult? Because I think Lily doesn't get some of the more emotional components of some of the episodes. I liked the Lemongrab one because I remember feeling like that – "I was made by the sort of arbitrary, incompetent maker, and that's why I feel so upset all the time." But I don't think Lily sees herself in Lemongrab – I think she just sees someone who has a really annoying voice.

Lily: Yeah, he does!

Cartoon Network is always sending out press releases touting how popular Adventure Time is with kids, but most of the fans I know are adults – I'll go to a comic convention and see tons of kids in Finn hats, but I'll also see many adults dressed like Marceline.

Lev: And the thing is, it's drenched in this completely 1980s iconography that is just lost on someone like Lily. All the Dungeons & Dragons stuff…it doesn't exist for her.

Regular Show does that even more – but I have gotten the sense that for kids, they just perceive it as some weird, offbeat element of popular culture from this universe. Adults can get these references as something from growing up, but kids can accept it as just another oddball part of this world.

Lev: It's weird! It's kind of encoded in Adventure Time, in that post-apocalyptic theme. Finn and Jake interact with the pre-apocalyptic elements of Ooo much the same way Lily interacts with the 1980s references – they're fun, but she doesn't know what they're originally for, the way Finn and Jake have a stack of Mac Classics in their tree fort. They're cool, but they don't know what they're for, and that's kind of a metaphor for how Lily watches the show.

And that's so much of Adventure Time – the characters are these very imaginative, storybook types, but they have these deeper, more complex emotions they don't totally understand, and that's a big part of what drives the story lines.

Lev: It's funny – it resonates with me about what it was like to be a child and try to find the emotional core in some Atari 2600 game – there was so little there, because it was such a simplified universe. But you invest it with such cataclysmic meaning.

There's been a lot of discussion lately of the idea of role-playing games, video games, action figures, etc., being an escape from the emotional pressures of reality, but also kind of a trap. And I get that with some of the Adventure Time characters – there's a certain amount of self-delusion with characters like Lumpy Space Princess, or Ice King, or even Finn and Jake, that they're aspiring toward these kind of ideals in this world they're trying to understand.

Lev: They've all been given these very rudimentary scripts about what sort of roles they're supposed to play, and the world doesn't agree with them all the time. But they go ahead with it! They stick to their roles. They're literally role-playing. Whoa! This is getting deep.

Lev: The rabbit hole goes all the way down. I've no idea what people make of Ice King, because he's this old lecher, and he'll say things like, "Huh, I'm tied up in these chords – this is kind of freaky!"

He can fulfill so many roles – and when they explore his past as Simon Petrikov, it's heartbreaking. I've known people who've lost their parents to dementia, and that line in "I Remember You" – "Please forgive me for whatever I do/When I don't remember you"….that's probably something that everyone who's ever suffered from Alzheimer's has wanted to say to their loved ones. I actually cried at that episode.

Lev: Me too. It could not have more direct relevance to me, because we just put my dad in a nursing home because he has Alzheimer's. And I think to myself, in my self-pitying way, "What if I carry the gene for Alzheimer's? What am I going to tell my relatives?" So I think about that, a lot.

It's pretty deep for a show about a kid with a bear hat and a stretchy dog friend.

Lev: But that's what I like about it – the key for me is the show is un-ironic, it's post-ironic. The thing about Finn is he always goes for it 100 percent. It's funny and witty and random, but there's this un-ironic, unapologetic, nerd-like emotion. If nerds could physically do whatever they wanted, they'd probably do what Finn does, which is run around with a sword and hit things that probably need hitting.

Lily: I would!

Lev: It's not sly, it's not wink-wink. It's comfortable with these big emotions, and I find that endlessly appealing.

Lily: I like that Jake can stretch!

Lev: That too.

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Thanks to Lev and Lily for a great talk – and be sure to check out Lev's books and articles, and of course Adventure Time every Monday on Cartoon Network at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Are you as obsessed with Adventure Time as me and the Grossmans (I hope not, for your sakes), or is there another cartoon or TV series that you obsessively analyze? Sound off in the comments.

Follow @thezacksmith on Twitter, visit www.zswriter.com, or check out his comic The Stars Below on Comixology!