One of the most tragic science fiction stories, and why I’m making a comic to continue it
Art by PopLopChop
Storytelling gives a sense of coherence to life. It creates narratives out of what appears at first to not make sense. So it’s only natural that throughout the entire time I’ve been writing about current events, I’ve also been constructing a story in my head. You can read everything I have of it so far here on my Tumblr, because I can’t make any money off of it and have to offer it for free. It’s a continuation of the story from the series Adventure Time, which sounds odd unless you understand exactly what kind of story the show’s writers created.
To Guillermo Del Toro, the beauty of this series stands out enough for him to comment on it in detail. In his forward to a book about the show’s art, he writes that Adventure Time is: “a world to get lost in, one that is, like ours, both simple and deep, tragic and full of wonder. It stands tall and alone in our audio-visual landscape. It is a landmark, a watershed, and above all, it is my favorite flavor in the ice cream bin of our world. And like any good pint of ice cream, you cry puzzling tears of joy while you eat it, because it nourishes you, and embraces you, and drives you to hope, and because nothing, nothing, can be this good. But it is.”
If this is true, why do I call the narrative of the series one of the most tragic stories in science fiction? Because when looking closely at the show’s expanded timeline, it becomes apparent just how profound the tragedy Del Toro talks about is. This aspect of the show’s chronology can be understood in terms of a dilemma that characters within it face, and the solutions (or perceived solutions) to this dilemma that they come to.
The dilemma
Sometime during the early 21st century in the show’s universe, humanity wiped out the vast majority of its own species by having a nuclear war. Many of those who didn’t perish had little time left to live amid the radiation poisoning, which would make the few who survived into the coming years even more lonely. This was what happened to Marceline, who was only seven when she had to experience the blast and then watch her mother Elise get progressively weaker. Elise pretends that her condition isn’t serious, and tricks Marcy into heading towards a shelter alone by pretending to be angry at her. After Marcy finds that everyone at the shelter is already dead, and that no one is coming to maintain the supplies, she presumably makes her way back to the last location her mother was at. After finding Elise dead as well, she has no choice but to head into the remains of the nearest city.
As Marcy is wandering around in the streets with no one to turn to, and seemingly nothing to find in the chaos that can help her survive, she breaks into uncontrollable sobs. She’s lost everything, and it’s too confusing to bear. During that moment, Marcy is spotted by Simon Petrikov, a man who’s been experiencing a process of irreversible cognitive decline that’s pushed everyone from his old life away. They both need a friend, and they get one. At least until Simon has to leave Marcy to avoid accidentally harming her.
Art by K for Koala
After years of again fending for herself alone, Marcy comes across a band of survivors. She forms a relationship with them, even taking on Simon’s role as a guider by making friends with one of their children. But this bond too has to end, because Marcy also repeats Simon’s fate by herself undergoing a transformation that makes others unsafe. After this, she can’t go with them on their journey away from the continent.
The afflictions of both characters are based in the magical component of the show’s universe, with Simon falling victim to a crown that poisons his mind and Marcy being coerced into becoming a vampire. But these events are portrayed as no less horrific for the characters who experience them (dementia and sexual assault are respectively what they’re directed to look like). And they fit with the reality which this entire narrative speaks to: that loss can’t be avoided, as unpredictability and all of its cruelties are immutable parts of the way the universe works.
Faced with this reality, the survivors decide to create a mechanism that supposedly will eliminate all variables which can lead to loss. According to the headcanon of the fan Ashley Burch, the group’s original leader was the first one to have this idea of a totalizing solution against unpredictability. And even if he was persuaded against it by Marcy’s friend Jo, the future generations of the islands he helped settle absolutely pursue such a goal.
Illustrated by Diigii Daguna, story by Ashley Burch
They create a repressive state that targets everybody who indicates they might even be thinking about leaving the islands. They have forced “re-ed” programs for correcting these dissenting minds, which don’t reach MKultra levels of bodily violation but do successfully break the people who are the most emotionally vulnerable. These anti-human policies are motivated by love for humanity, except a twisted kind of love. The government believes that if the planet is ever allowed to be repopulated, human beings will repeat the mistakes of their past. Driven by this dogma, the fanatical scientist Dr. Gross devolves into obsession, carrying out reckless biological experiments out of a desire to eliminate every possibility of the situation getting beyond control. Ironically, these experiments end up creating a virus that wipes out 60% of the population.
After that point, virtually everybody is living on only one island. The inhabitants of the other islands have either retreated into a technological fantasy world, or carried out geoengineering attempts that bring the deaths of entire colonies. The task of governing these inhabitants falls to Minerva, whose body was destroyed by the plague and who managed to live on by uploading her consciousness. Minerva’s death couldn’t have been more heroic, as she was a doctor who got infected while working to save the community from the disease. She had seen every one of her colleagues succumb to the plague. She’s been so damaged by the reality of unpredictability that in reaction, she creates a system even more constraining than the last one.
Given the pattern we’ve been seeing of attempts to defeat chaos only producing even more cruel incidents of chaos, there’s no doubt that Minerva would have at some point ended up destroying all she sought to protect. Indeed, at one point she comes close to deciding that everyone on the island needs to have their physical bodies decommissioned, so that their minds can live on in an eternal digital purgatory. But she then repents for the damaging way she’s reacted to her trauma, and decides to lead a return journey to the mainland after a thousand years of human isolation. Minerva avoids the tragedy that others have created for themselves, responding to her fears of chaos in a way that nurtures instead of destroys.
This would have been the happy ending, if not for the incontrovertible evidence that it wasn’t.
The solution
Art by Luciana Mattiello
This is where the main character of my own narrative comes in. As Tim Foley says in his comprehensive analysis of the series, the reality of who this character is creeps up on us, before it becomes clear that she’s capable of evils on the level of Dr. Gross:
PB is a great example of how to develop a character with utmost subtlety: there was barely a hint of her more authoritarian side in her first several appearances, and the glimpses we got of it later were often so brief that we could easily write them off as jokes. Like Breaking Bad's Walter White, however, she eventually reaches a point where her actions can no longer be viewed as inherently justified, even if her intentions are always good. All throughout the second half of the previous season, we saw her behave more and more ruthlessly, to the point of her becoming the effective antagonist in several episodes. These conflicts were always resolved in such a way that only pertained to the inciting incident, however, so this overall trajectory that her character was clearly on was still never really addressed by the characters themselves.
The hope for Bonnibel, as she’s known by those close to her, comes from how there isn’t an insane lack of conflict within her like there was for Dr. Gross. Like Minerva, she repents by the end of the series, and stops violating the rights of others in an effort to prevent some hypothetical catastrophe. But Bonnibel became corrupted for a reason: she knows that there really is a risk of everything going wrong. It’s not an imaginary problem that fills her with this poisonous fear. And in the glimpses of the far future that we see, it’s apparent that everything Bonnibel dreaded has come true. Her city, despite having come to be inhabited by a thriving society of humans after the return journey, has had to be abandoned. The reason for this is made deliberately unclear by the creators, but we see hints. The sky is perpetually overcast; the sea levels are several feet higher; the snowy areas have expanded; the sky is stalked by the aircrafts of a cruel new ruler.
Did this catastrophe happen on its own, or is it the latest part of a thematic trend within the show’s chronology? A trend where those who care the most about preserving life violate the rules of nature in their futile quest for eliminating entropy, and then bring about the same nightmare that they tried so hard to prevent?
The essence of a tragic narrative, at least of the kind I’m interested in writing, is irony. The characters compromise their morals in the belief that this will bring an overall positive outcome, then they’re punished with an outcome horrifically worse than would have been the case if they had remained heroic. It’s characters like Minerva and Bonnibel who are the most at risk of suffering this kind of fate. If the circumstances challenge them, they could fail again, and react in a way that makes their worst fears realized. Foley writes that “Minerva, stepping up to Petrikovian levels of self-sacrifice, abandoned her body and began commanding a robotic medical squad, and her efforts made Founders' island safe to inhabit once again. Minerva here embodies the best of this reeling race, that which is selfless, compassionate, and empathetic to the point of profound self-denial for the sake of others. Much of the history of humanity, however, is the history of its worst wreaking havoc while its best is admirable but tragically insufficient.” What will Minerva and Bonnibel do the next time this pattern asserts itself?
It’s possible that Bonnibel will bring back her practice of surveilling anyone and everyone, that Minerva will go back to keeping her people isolated, and that both will resort to even darker policies. The government of the islands set the precedent for mind control tactics, ones that were relatively mild but that could easily be innovated on to resemble those of the CIA. If humanity ever again comes to be at war with itself, or jeopardize the environment, or (more likely) a combination of the two, the crises the globe faces will make these two leaders tempted to fall back into villainy. And we all know what will happen if they compromise their integrity: it will bring about an even crueler outcome.
Given the picture we’re shown of the far future, which inescapably reminds me of the Snowpiercer scenario where the capitalist class has used destructive cloud seeding measures as a quick fix to global warming, this tragedy feels like it’s already been told within the series. All we have to do is fill in the information we’ve been provided. It might be that a new rise and fall of capitalism has come about due to one of Bonnibel’s own life-creating experiments, which have produced a character who successfully revives capitalist development by the end of the series.
This character has been defeated because he’s pathetic, but the idea of limitless and parasitic growth that he reintroduced into the show’s world could in time destroy everything. As Foley describes this character and his twisted way of thinking: “Gumbald is not supposed to be scary, he’s supposed to be sad. Not sad in the tragic sense that Ice King [Simon’s name after he fully succumbs to the crown] is sad; sad in that it is a sad thing that people like him exist, sad that they want the things he wants, sad that they will do the things he does to get them.” Because Bonnibel was confronted with this sadness, writes Foley, she took on her destructive traits:
Right away, Gumbald shows some unhealthy ambitions towards industrialism, wanting to take over her tentative plans for a candy town and expand them into a kingdom, motivated by territorialism, greed, pettiness and spite. When Bonnie confronts him on being bad and nothing like her, he growls “I am the future.” Yes, two hundred odd years after the Mushroom War, the worst of humanity has resurfaced to start the process over again. As young PB innocently attempts to start a society amid the rubble, Gumbald appears like a snake in the garden with all the bad ideas from the self-destructive old world to poison her dream of a utopia. It is his fecklessness that leads PB to use some troublesome tactics to overcome him, using the pacifying mental regression serum he had planned for her, leaving her with the first three dumb, subservient candy people, having made the first in a long line of questionable choices. That tinge of human failing has survived in PB ever since, becoming her distrust of others and her quickness to aggression, everything that has kept her from being a total shining beacon of enlightened leadership. By the caprices of one egotistical schmuck, the hubris that destroyed the human race is smuggled through time.
For somebody like Gibbon, the cruel king from the future era, this predatory ideology must look attractive. When you’re trapped in a cycle of hurt, and have already committed sins that you can’t reverse the effects of like he has, it can feel like becoming a predator is the only way to get the strength you need. Yet as my narrative will show, this “solution” only seals his fate.
Art by showrunner Steve Wolfhard
So what is the real solution? How to respond to the realities of impermanence, loss, and disorder? What I feel the series says through Marceline’s story is that these things should be responded to by becoming truly strong. Strong in one’s will to nurture others, to forgive, to keep going. This is the conclusion that Marcy comes to after confronting the memories of her mother and of Simon, who before leaving her both imparted the same idea: that she’s fearless, that she’ll continue on even after everything.
It’s this realization by Marcy that may become what saves the devastated world that the canon of the series ends on, and that my narrative is expanding. Because Marcy not only has the will to fight whatever evils are poisoning the land during that era, but she has the potential to inspire her life partner Bonnibel towards doing the same thing. The story I’m telling takes example from both the darkest aspects of the original series, as well as the most hopeful ones. It delves into the evils that humanity is capable of, yet it also illustrates how those evils can be overcome by somebody with the will to fight through any trial.
Art by character and prop supervisor Derek Kirk Kim
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