







The Mushroom War, as seen in the episode "Finn the Human"





While the disaster in Adventure Time is specifically the result of chemical warfare and not from the slow destructive crawl of capitalism, the human nature of the conflict is very carefully shown. In fact, what precisely "human" means is interesting in the context of Simon and Marcy.









The titular Simon is somewhere between the categories of "human" and "other," having certainly started off as a human but, because of a magical crown, is in the process of mutating into an immortal and decidedly non-human wizard. Marceline is a half-demon whose father is the ruler of the Nightosphere, a place very much like hell. If we go by strict definitions, no humans appear in this episode whatsoever. Already, humanity has been largely tossed aside, having lost its claim to the earth, making space for a post-human epoch.





A gum creature that seems to be an early form of Princess Bubblegum





Again, this stands in stark contrast to the two movies being discussed. As Kääpä says: "instances of criticism [of US-led international politics] are conducted within an implicit and unmentioned assumption of the natural leadership of Western, pro-US democracy... this uncomfortable reconnection extends the Fukuyamaian end of history to ecological thinking as the films are entirely hesitant to do away with old political-cultural structures."





While The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 might figure liberal democracy and capitalism as the twin endpoints of history regardless of ecological catastrophe, Simon and Marcy turns the whole Fukuyamaian notion of "the end of history" on its head by figuring the human apocalypse as the earliest point in the show's mythos. The apocalyptic landscape, used in the two Emmerich films to signify the crisis facing capitalism, becomes for Adventure Time the place in which the seeds of the future are planted. The three characters in the episode – Simon, Marceline, and the embryonic form of Princess Bubblegum that appears in the final scene – all exist in drastically different forms a millennium on from this episode taking place, and the world around them has grown and evolved as well.





In this way, Adventure Time, through it's inversion of Fukuyama's formulation and explicit rejection of existing human institutions, is exactly the radical break that Kääpä is calling for.

Theepisodeis in some ways similar to a host of blockbusters that have come out in recent years. These are things like, or. In both of these movies – as well as in theepisode – the world has been destroyed by some kind of ecological catastrophe, and they focus on a small group of survivors that must carry on in this new broken world.Of course,is framed in a profoundly different way than either of the two eco-disaster films mentioned here. Bothanduse the present epoch as their basis – both films are in large part about how the American government is reacting to ecological disasters., as the card shown suggests, instead is told from a future perspective – its function in the broader series is to illuminate the past and flesh out the history of the episode's two protagonists.On the topic of the films under discussion here, Pietari Kääpä writes: "in films such as(2004) and(2009), ecospectacle provides an easy access point for spectators interested in green politics... here, the highs and lows of a blockbuster narrative allow the spectator to live through the ecocatastrophe in as entertaining and easily-digestible ways as possible. This provides a safety net for avoiding asking real questions about environmental degradation and the role of humanity in disasters" (Kääpä,). This is an interesting line of critique to extend to; it goes a long way towards illuminating wherefalls in relation to these blockbusters.First of all,is, in general, very conscious of the human roots of any potential disaster.