Oh God, Where the Glob Art Thou?
POOM NAMVOL
“You are Ooo’s greatest hero, Finn; no evil can stop you!”
“Haha, yeah, I guess that’s true. Mathematical!”
“Seriously Dude, with all the awesome loot you’ve won over the years, I don’t think even I could stop you. And I’m pretty awesome!”
“Yeah, I am pretty math . . . I mean we’ve slain a lot of monsters. And we’ve taken all their loot and stuff. I guess I could kill anyone I wanted and take anything I wanted; no one could stop me . . .”
“Haha! Yeah, Dude, good thing we only slay monsters, right Finn? . . . Finn?”
It was then that a shadow passed over Finn’s innocent eyes. . . . There were no rules, no consequences: he could do what he wanted, take what he wanted, kill as he wanted. The inhabitants of Ooo cried out for mercy. And the world burned a second time. Melted sugar spilt out into the streets. . . . Caramel.
They called out to Glob. But there was no Answer.
There is no God in Adventure Time! . . . Or is there?
I’m not referring to any “god” like Zeus, Thor, Cthulhu, or the Party God (who appears to be the only god the people of Ooo know of). The god I’m talking about is the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good “God” of Christianity. That god’s doctrines have become one of the most practiced religions of our time. It is said that his judgment on all of our deeds determines whether we go to Heaven or Hell. This god’s name finds its way into our daily conversations. After all, how many times do we find ourselves saying, “Oh my God!”? True, there are a few characters in Adventure Time whose natures and powers are “godlike,” namely Prismo and the Cosmic Owl, but none of them, so far, fit all of the requirements to be like God (basically perfect in every way!)
Instead, the people of Ooo have “Grob Gob Glob Grod”—whom, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just call “Glob.” They worship him in church, at least so Finn assumes. They pray to him for everything from a safe, monster-free journey back home to a bride of royal bloodline. They believe he’ll tally their deeds after they die. They even exclaim “Oh my Glob!” or “Oh Glob!” every once in a while.
So, Glob is the Oooian equivalent of God. And if the world Finn and his friends live on is either a post-apocalyptic version of ours or a parallel universe to our Earth, it can be assumed that “Glob” is indeed our “God.” Funnily, there is a difference, at least it seems between their belief in an almighty Glob who answers their prayers and protects them, and the four faced Martian entity who takes selfies with the Lich.
I can’t help but wonder if we suffer a similar cosmic irony. We assume that God is all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing, but what, if like Glob, God is powerful, but just as fallible as we are (not to mention prone to selfies and vanity) as we are. And for the worst-case scenario: should it turn out God is no more, and the almighty Glob that the people of Ooo put their faith in, is just a senseless word? What if he’s too busy taking care of business on Mars to pay attention to the needs and prayers of the people of Ooo? Even worse, it seems entirely possible that the God who is so popular in our world might similarly be busy elsewhere. In fact, couldn’t our concept “God” after a thousand years and World War Three, have morphed into the Oooian “Glob?”
In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word Was “Glob”
First of all, what is it that turned God, the all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, into “Glob,” a name which, if I may repeat myself, up until now represents no one or nothing physical at all?
Well, we all know that it was the event called the Great Mushroom War that brought an end to the previous civilization of humans and paved the way for the Land of Ooo and its magical inhabitants to come into existence. So, then the Mushroom War might be responsible for how God changed into Glob too.
You see, “Glob” is used commonly in the age when Finn and Jake live, which is approximately a millennium after the Mushroom War was over. However, in the events that occurred in the short period after the Mushroom War ended, which we see in “Simon and Marcy” and the alternate reality in which the bomb from the Mushroom War never exploded in “Finn the Human” and “Jake the Dog,” the word “Glob” is never mentioned, not once! Simon Petrikov and young Marceline didn’t pray to Glob for their daily safety, neither did the farmboy Finn Mertens exclaim “Oh my Glob!” when he found the deadly bomb frozen in an underground cave. “Glob” didn’t come up in their conversation or monologue because some other word, other religious being, was used instead—“God”, maybe?
Of course, it could be other names, like Yod or Brog, or it could be nothing at all. But as evidenced by various remnants of the past civilization throughout Ooo, such as cars, sunken cities, the Korean language, and even the King of Mars—Abe Lincoln, it might not hurt to think that Finn’s world used to be ours, or was a parallel world of ours until the Mushroom War broke out. And since people of our world worship God, then Finn’s Glob might once have been our God as well.
Aside from blowing up a chunk of Earth’s crust and somehow filling the world with magic, literally, what the Great Mushroom War did was wipe out a major part of humanity and mutate many of the survivors, giving them extra organs like glands and fusing their consciousness into inorganic matters such as candy, food, rocks, wood, and fire. Through these survivors, some human cultures, mainly languages, were preserved, but some, like humanity itself, may have been lost forever or transformed through time. How “God” became known as “Glob” is in the latter case.
But that‘s not all. Over a thousand years, post–Mushroom War Earth has been populated with magical and bizarre creatures, some of which used to be only fictional or mythical. Even Abadeer, the Lord of Evil, the absolute bad guy who’s reckoned to be the polar opposite of God, the absolute good guy, appears to be clearly alive and kicking. Yet Glob, formerly known as God, only appears in words but never as a person. It seems that God’s existence, should He have existed before the Mushroom War, has been reduced to Glob. The Mushroom War not only killed mankind; it killed God too.
God Is Dead. What Remains Is Glob!
Okay, so when we say that something is “dead,” we mean that it is not alive anymore. But what does that mean for something that is more powerful than mere mortals and supposed to be eternal and infinite?
To answer this, we need to consider the nature of God outside of religious explanations. Don Cupitt suggested in his book The Time Being that gods (including our God) “are just what people can be seen to be worshiping” and “have no existence outside our faith and practice.” What this could mean is that as long as belief in a god remains intact, and all the rites and rituals in its name or to worship it are performed according to the traditional beliefs, then the god is considered to be “alive.” Otherwise, the God is likely forgotten and nonexistent, or, more precisely, “dead,” which is what seems to have happened to gods and goddesses from the classic stories about gods and goddesses.
People nowadays don’t see the Greek, Roman, or Norse pantheon as religious figures who look after every aspect of our lives. There’s no human or livestock sacrificing as an offering to please Zeus or Odin anymore (well that we know of!). The temples of the gods were left in ruins and became tourist attractions. Their stories became lessons in Mythology 101 and have been adapted into games, movies, and popular literature.
A similar yet slightly different fate befell the Christian God in the era of Ooo. Most of His followers might have perished sometime around the Mushroom War along with the majority of humankind. And those who survived, mutated or not, were undoubtedly too busy adjusting to their post-apocalyptic lives and trying to stay alive to concern themselves with preserving culture. In fact, and this has been known to happen on occasion, if things get really bad, people might stop believing in their God and abandon the religious beliefs and practices from their former, glorious time. At the very least, people in a post-apocalyptic state are unlikely to concern themselves with the nit-picky details of worshiping a god. It would be awfully difficult to pray “in the right way” when there are few if any physical churches left, most of the people (including priests and pastors) are dead, and the most of the items needed for “correct practice” like Bibles, rosaries, and prayer manuals are lost or destroyed!
Over the course of a thousand and odd years, like humans, the notion of God could be altered into that of a separate entity. And though the people of Ooo still worship Glob at church the same way Christians do now, I doubt whatever ceremony they perform resembles much of what we see in our current ceremonies. The only living person who may have remembered the original concepts and practices of God in the Christian way is Simon Pretrikov, and his mind and memories have been screwed up by the curse of the Crown of Ice! (Marceline doesn’t count because, according to her father, she’s not alive to begin with, and being the daughter of the Lord of the Nightosphere herself, I honestly don’t think she gives a damn about God or Glob). Having no one left to remember or believe in Him, the forgotten God lost his existence and died off. What the people of Ooo call “Glob” is likely a radically different god born from the remains of the long dead “God.”
Thou Shalt Not Kill God
A German dude who happened to be one of the most controversial philosophers of the nineteenth century (and still one to this day) declared God dead. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” He wasn’t referring to any god like Cupitt does. Nietzsche was talking about, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good Christian God. Yet Nietzsche claimed God is dead despite having over a billion active followers all over the world. What gave him the guts to pronounce such a controversial statement!?
Well, good ol’ Friedrich never made it clear what it is that killed God exactly. It seems like he means that because of the knowledge we have now, the knowledge of science, particularly, we no longer need God to explain the world. It can be gathered from his various writings that he meant God doesn’t play as important a role in human life as it did in the Biblical or the Medieval Ages. God is no longer the Supreme Almighty up there whose eyes see through every deed and misdeed, and whose wrath makes every mere mortal tremble in fear of eternal damnation.
Rather, God seems like a senile grandfather whom we pay a visit on Sunday, sometimes out of love, but mostly out of a feeling of duty. We half-heartedly beg him for every bit of luck we can muster in a day, and we are more than willing to curse him with the rudest phrases our brains we can come up with. Even God’s name loses its sacredness, as evidenced by how much the word “God” shows up in random chitchats, swearing, and exclamations, despite the prohibition in the Ten Commandments demanding that we don’t do that! To Nietzsche, and to many of us today, God is but an obsolete “dead” concept, just like those classic myth gods and goddesses.
By combining Cupitt’s theory with what we’ve managed to squeeze out of Nietzsche’s famous quote, we have a glimpse of the notion of God before the Great Mushroom War. Surely, how humanity was capable of inventing a weapon of mass destruction so critically lethal that it took almost the entire species of theirs is a blatant sign of mankind’s high devotion to sciences and technology, and not giving a heed to God at all. God had been dead before the War broke out, and he remains dead as Glob.
But is He really dead?
Oh, Nature, Nature, Why Art Thou So Godless?
Among different beliefs about God, there is one theory proposing that God resides neither in nor outside the universe; He is the universe and everything within it: Sun, Moon, stars, dirt, trees, animals, humans. In short, God is one with nature. This belief system is known as pantheism.
Looked at from a non-religious perspective, pantheism is kind of a compromise between traditional religious and natural scientific worldviews. Look at nature; it’s one tremendous web of interrelated complex systems working in sync and harmony with each other: the solar system, the ecosystem, even all the organic systems inside every living thing’s body. Everything in nature, down to the least atom, is seemingly purposefully designed, and each is good in its own way.
Take the pantheistic view up one level, and we might get an idea of God’s state in Adventure Time. Glob could be understood as the magical force that’s dispersed not only all over the world, but also all over the universe, or even the multiverse, allowing all the magical and bizarre creatures we’ve encountered throughout the series. As nature in Adventure Time is full of miraculous beings and environments, it might not be an absurd idea at all to suggest that the presence of those things is how God or Glob takes form after the Mushroom War ended. In this sense, God has become the whole of nature.
Unfortunately, there are some problems to that idea. If we accept that what the Oooians refer to as “Glob” is actually God materializing in the shape of every surreal life form and scenery, then we have no choice but to accept the parts of nature which seem crazier, creepier, or more awkward than others are also Glob! Like the tribe of naked humanoid inhabitants of the Swamp of Embarrassment in “Blood Under the Skin” who seem to be doing nothing at all but taking showers and getting freaked out every time someone spots them doing so, or the demons in “Return to the Nightosphere” whose certain orifices excrete bananas instead of . . . well, you get the picture. Those things might be good in their own ways, but to think that they could be some forms of God in the physical world? Doesn’t that mean that Glob, who is supposed to be good, also exists in evil or seemingly evil forms?
And if you think that’s not bad enough, then let’s talk about the worst. In Adventure Time, evil is evidently inherent to nature; it’s part of nature. Of course, some ‘evils’ in the series were artificially born: the obnoxious, selfish Earl of Lemongrab was created in Frankensteinian style by Princess Bubblegum, and the diabolical, life-abhorring Lich first came into existence out of destructive energy radiating from the Mushroom War bomb.
But there are some “evils” that were naturally born. Gunter, the Ice King’s right-hand penguin, Abadeer admits is the most evil thing he’s encountered “of all history’s greatest monsters.” In “Reign of Gunters,” this seemingly innocent penguin even stole the Ice King’s magic artifact to create an army of replicas and attempted to conquer Ooo. Also, it appears that Hunson Abadeer, the Lord of Evil himself, has always existed, unlike Satan, the Big Bad of Christianity, who was once a creation of God as his finest angel. According to his claim in The Adventure Time Encyclopedia, Abadeer doesn’t know how he came into being, but he only knows before “the Vast and Ineluctable Scope” of his memory began that he “existed Forever,” and his earliest memory is of him sitting atop a mountain and eating a ham sandwich eons before the Mushroom War began. The credibility of this claim may be doubtful, as the whole Encyclopedia was written by Abadeer himself. But given that he’s the Lord of Evil, not Lord of Deceit, then it may not hurt to hold him as a reliable source.
Evil seems to be in nature all along, whether before or after the War. This notion alone is enough to make the idea of God being nature tricky, because it would be impossible for evil to be a part of something or someone that’s all good. So God or Glob couldn’t be nature, and again we come to the conclusion that He is dead. What hope is left for the people of Ooo then?
I suggest that they, as well as we, can put their hope in the only surviving member of the same race who murdered God: Finn the Human.
Who Cares about Glob? We Have Finn Anyway
What does it mean for God to be dead? What effect would His death have on the people who believe in him or used to believe in him?
In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky gave his opinion about belief in God through the words of one of the main characters, Dmitri—without God, “all things are permitted.” What he meant is that God, or at least the belief in His existence, is deeply linked with many rules and restrictions, like the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins; and once God is gone, or people don’t care anymore if He really exists or not, then those rules and prohibitions can easily be rejected. People would no longer have to do unto others as they wish to be done unto themselves; people could do whatever they would like to do. Forget the others!
A world like that would be in perfect chaos, wouldn’t it? In it men and women with a little bit of conscience left would live in daily fear of getting killed and having their possessions stolen! Honestly speaking, that’s not quite different from life in Ooo—when ya’ll run into a soul-sucking demon lord, an undead sorcerer whose wish is to exterminate all life, or a cheeky Martian who can turn your body inside out, and this Glob you often dearly pray to seems to have better things to do than respond to prayers!
Dostoevsky’s view, though it sounds convincing, has been disputed by a Slovenian philosopher named Slavoj Žižek. Žižek argues that if there is no God, then all things would be prohibited rather than permitted. He explains that although God is dead, as Nietzsche had declared, His shadow, taking the forms of all the moral rules and regulations made under His name, lingers on. Little by little throughout history, those rules and regulations have plunged their roots deep into man’s hearts until they stayed firmly there despite the decline in faith in God.
Most people today, whether they believe in God or not, would feel guilty if they stabbed someone to death! This guilt would then force them to behave themselves in ways others want them to! If anything, there might be more reason to be “good”—after all if there is no Glob to join in the afterlife, wouldn’t we be careful not to waste our lives in prison for breaking the rules?
The land of Ooo, though at times very dangerous, is a place where there is virtually no limit. If you know how to protect yourself, have the guts, and live independently from any kingdom, then you’re more than free to travel into the wild, explore dungeons, fight monsters, and loot treasures as much as you like. As the theme song says, Adventure Time is filled with “very distant lands” where “the fun will never end.” But since life is almost limitless in Ooo, the adventurers are in danger of crossing the line of morality. You could become so addicted to fighting and looting that you end up enjoying stealing and killing others. And as Glob is but a word, you can’t expect Him to show up and miraculously stop you. All you can rely on is your self-regulation and the ability to feel guilty.
Finn, being a teenager—an age torn between living to the limit and living responsibly—has to face this same problem with double pressure. No doubt the most influential person in Finn’s life is Jake. And as we all see, Jake, while being a good friend and a supportive big brother, is not much of a reliable adult. Sometimes, by following Jake’s lead, Finn gets himself into trouble. A good example occurs in the Marceline and the Scream Queens comics, where Princess Bubblegum appoints Jake as an interim king of Candy Kingdom while she’s accompanying Marceline and her rock band on their tour. Instead of doing the royal deeds, Jake holds the Rule Burning Ceremony which withdraws all the laws of Candy Kingdom, allowing the citizens to act crazy, get naked, and cause havoc as much as they like. They even tie a pig to a tree and dress it up to look like PB! On her return to duty, she has Jake and Finn, as his accomplice, locked up in a dungeon for a month. Quite a valuable lesson for Finn on living outside of the rules.
Finn often comes across situations that tempt him to enjoy himself to the extreme, and he has slowly learned that his lack of self-regulation can do harm to others as well as himself. In “All the Little People,” Finn is given, unknowingly from Magic Man, a bag full of miniature versions of many people of Ooo, including himself. He enjoys playing with them so much that he spends sixteen weeks straight obsessed with them, developing a messed-up web of relationships between each of them and watching it go from bad to chaotic. In the end, Finn realizes how much evil he has done to their lives and attempts to apologize to them. And in “Dungeon Train,” Finn fights on a train that runs endlessly, with new enemies to fight and cool items to collect. Finn loves the train so much that he decides not to leave, but as soon as he knows Jake will stay on board with him forever out of worry and care for him, he begins to feel sorry for his canine(ish) pal and changes his mind. Just as Žižek’s argues, it’s guilt that urges Finn to see the need for self-regulation.
As Adventure Time is not going to end any time soon, Finn still has a long time to grow up, physically and mentally. And there’ll be many more situations where his self-discipline will be tested and given the chance to improve. If Finn continues to keep in mind how important it is to always keep himself in control, he’s sure to become a messianic hero for the whole land of Ooo, and whether Glob or God still exists will no longer be of any importance.
An Adventure Time of Our Own in a Globless World
There’s a good reason behind choosing a human to be the hero of a show that takes place in a fantasy world teeming with peculiar creatures—because we, human audiences, can easily identify with him. And although Adventure Time, being a remarkable piece of art, is apt to be interpreted in many ways, I propose to view the series as a retelling of our real life, of how we can survive in the world where God’s existence is still in question.
Just like Finn, each of us encounters adventures in different levels on a daily basis. There are no fire-breathing dragons for us to slay or hidden treasures for us to find, but there are bosses whose fiery rage will burn us alive if we make mistakes in our jobs, and a hefty bonus at the end of the year if we perform outstandingly. We know how our prayers to God often go unheard as much as Ice King’s pleas for Glob to give him a princess bride. And most of the time, we realize that good things can happen because of our self-discipline and sympathy towards others, not because of a miracle. In the end, it’s always Finn, not Glob, who saves the day.
Okay, so maybe Glob is the four-faced Martian God-brother of Magic Man and doesn’t seem all that much like the bearded old man we often talk about. But even so, the important issue is not whether or not God and Glob exist; it’s how humans continue to sympathize with each other and be good to each other, regardless of any higher spiritual power. That’s how mankind could hope to improve as a whole.
After all, the death of God could lead to the birth of a true Hero.