tvdinner&amovie

 

Sometimes you produce a monster, an abomination. And that abomination farts on your face because it’s a book with a developmental disorder. Or something.

Adventure Time has always been a show obsessed with the creative process. It’s meta-commentaries on what it means to write/create have always been particularly poignant for me, personally. This episode went in a slightly different direction than episodes past, while the work is still celebrated, it’s shown as being bastardized, broken even. The Ice King knows what the story is in his head, he can picture the characters as if they were real utilizing his imagination.

When given a shot at bringing his creation to life, he comes up with a Saw-esque kidnapping scheme in which the strengths of various characters are utilized in order to get to a mythical creature to literally give his characters to life. This is even more like Saw when you consider the mastermind’s single-minded devotion to making his dreams a reality.

This darkness is pervasive throughout the episode. A character is squeezed to “death, ” a character has to cut her way out of the belly of a horrible shark-monster, and a “child” is neglected so that the Ice King gets the mere chance at making his dream a reality. And that is the reality of the situation that the show is talking about here, you can’t really hope to give birth to something without sacrificing all else. It’s what made Steve Jobs a tremendous success while simultaneously being lower than pond scum. He was a morally reprehensible piece of shit who disavowed his own child so that he might have a shot at transforming a crappy garage-based start-up from an acid-based fever dream to the ubiquitous multimedia conglomerate that Apple Inc. is today.

But even after the long road full of sacrifice, his creation just farts on his face. The other characters just look on with pity and a bit of disgust. But the Ice King is happy as a clam. He could not be more thrilled with his creation.

If I can make things current event-driven for a moment, The Ice King’s look of relief was not totally dissimilar to that of Obama’s face after the inauguration.

It’s deep satisfaction. It’s been a long road getting there, full of sacrifice, betrayal, literal and figurative monsters, but at the end of the day they’ve given birth to something they find beautiful, even if not everyone else does.

 

Disorganized thoughts:

 

Lemongrab isn’t funny. I do not understand his shtick at all. He just yells… I think? Maybe there’s something there I’m not getting…

 

I think it’s so ballsy for a kid’s show to regularly ditch its main characters for the duration of an episode, or any show for that matter. Usually we’re stuck with the same 5 or so characters for the entire run of the show. That was something that I used to really love about The Simpsons. Even Apu had multiple episodes about him. 

 

Tom Kenny is a fabulous voice-actor.

 

Pie-flinging robots with parental issues; something all children can relate to. 

 

This is the specific face both Obama and the Ice King made: