Adventure Time and Philosophy

DANIEL VELLA

With a sad little frown the rounded, frumpled, blond and graying bearded man closes the notebook in front of him heavily. He looks over his rounded little glasses, cracks his knuckles, and the lines around his eyes deepen, just slightly.

“Well, I guess that’s a wrap.”

The eclectic group of men and women sitting at the table look, blinking, at each other and laugh. The sound is empty.

“Hey, we got that last fart joke in right? It was a good run . . . Wasn’t it?”

The flanneled man couldn’t remember his reply, waving behind him, his knit cap on his head, notebook under his arm, as he walked out of the building. “It was a good run. Wasn’t it?”

There, in that tattered notebook, are the final sketches and lines. The words engraved there will be the final words aired by Finn and Jake. Closing that notebook was like closing a coffin.

“What happens to the boys now, now that he’s grown up?”

“Will his adult life have room for any more adventure time?”

“Or are they all just gone . . . poof?”

As Pendleton Ward muses about the final episode of his beloved creation, he wonders what impact the world he created had. He can’t help but wonder, almost as if squinting hopefully across a great distance at his own lost youth, if anything of that adventure will live on. Did our game of Adventure Time change anything? Or was it just “play?” And now, we just go back to very mundane lands . . .

Something strange sets Adventure Time apart from most other examples of the sword-and-sorcery genre to which it appears to belong. Yes, all the elements are present and accounted for: We have the hero and his sidekick, princesses in distress, quests, fearsome monsters and perilous dungeons, magic swords and tomes. We can confidently place a big checkmark next to every single item on the Checklist of Generic Clichés—but something’s still not quite right.

It’s not just that the colors are a little brighter than we would expect, or the characters a little (or a lot) wackier. It’s not that all the generic elements of the fantasy quest are a little too perfectly arranged, so much so that the characters themselves seem to be aware that they’re performing the motions of an age-old generic formula, almost like a ritual. And it’s not even the fact that Finn, our hero, doesn’t behave quite like we would expect him to, usually embarking on his adventures not with trepidation and fear, nor even with courage and bravery in the face of danger, but with laughter and joy. These are all important details, but they are only symptoms of something bigger.

What is it, then? The clue is in the opening. Every episode of Adventure Time begins with an invitation to the viewer. “Come on and grab your friends,” the theme song beckons, “We go to very distant lands.” There’s a reason why this familiar call strikes a chord. It resonates with the nostalgic memory of childhood escapades: It’s the call to playtime, and the distant lands we’re being summoned to are the infinite realms of the imagination and make-believe.

Here’s what makes Adventure Time different. . . . Its stories are not just stories of adventure—even more importantly, they are stories of play. Play is everywhere in the series, whether it’s Finn and Jake engaging in a board game, picking up one of BMO’s controllers, a game of make-believe that gets out of hand, or battling with Prizmo’s. Adventure Time reminds us that play has a huge role in human existence. It shows us just how important it is to play—and how play can create new worlds that can reshape reality.

Miniature People, Real Problems

The “adult world” of work, routine, seriousness, and responsibility tends to sideline play. Still, if every adult remains, somewhere deep in their heart, the child they once were (and how sad it would be if they don’t!), then they will remember the fantastical worlds of the imagination into which they used to escape. With the opening up of a book, or the powering-up of a games console, or even the simple statement, “Let’s pretend!” we can recall the play-filled worlds of our childhood. These worlds might even have looked a lot like the Land of Ooo, which comes across as a supercharged combination of every realm of childhood adventure. Finn and Jake’s expansive tree house, and the traditional “boy and his dog” image that they live up to, bring to mind the freedom of carefree countryside escapades that apartment-bound city kids could only dream of. And there are other worlds of the imagination, too: the primary-colored worlds of sixteen-bit-era videogames and the treacherous, monster-filled dungeons of pen-and-paper role-playing games are all ingredients that go into the make-up of Ooo.

But this is all child’s play, right? When we grow up, we put away childish things. We live in the “real world” (whatever that is) and set aside the many worlds of play. Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) argued that, when people talk about play, they most often talk about it as something that is “not serious.” When we say we’re “only playing around,” or that someone is “just playing,” this is exactly what we mean, that it’s not serious. If Jake teases Finn too much and hurts Finn’s feelings, wouldn’t he say, “Relax! I was just playing around, dude!” What Jake is saying there is that it shouldn’t be taken personally . . . it was just “playful!”

Huizinga thought that it is this “separateness” from the ordinary world that defines the meaning of play. Play is not “serious,” not “real”—it’s something separate from the everyday world, and it’s exactly because it is separate that it is play. But this doesn’t mean that play is just a pointless bit of fun. On the contrary! Huizinga insisted that play was of the utmost importance. Play, he said, lies at the basis of all human culture: art, religion, ritual, and law are all result of our ability to play!

What gives play this amazing power? Huizinga wrote that “all play presents something.” In other words: careful! Play is never as innocent as it seems, and it’s never just playing around about nothing: all play is about something. When we play, something is being played, and the act of playing creates something that wasn’t there before. Many people experience this with Adventure Time. At first they may take it really lightly. It’s just a playful cartoon, right? But when you really spend some time with it, Pendleton Ward’s playful creation makes something really different and powerful.

Hans-Georg Gadamer said something similar about play. Play is always a “presentation.” When we play, we are presenting something—to our fellow players, to anyone watching us, but, most importantly, to ourselves. When Finn struggles with growing up or Jake struggles with being a parent, part of what we’re seeing is the play of cartoonists and writers, but it’s also presenting something that reflects us, that reminds us about the difficult of growing up and the difficulty of raising children.

And what is it that we are presenting? When we “play” something, Gadamer believed, what we are presenting is its “truth.” This seems very strange—in fact, it seems like the exact opposite of what we would normally think. Don’t we usually think that play is what is not true? Finn and Jake are fake, right? What can they tell us about ourselves and the real world?

When we play, we have to follow the rules of the game. These rules shape our behavior, leading us to move and act according to the patterns of the game. Play is a “patterned movement,” something like a dance. When we play something—for example, when we play a role in a game of make-believe—we express it in fixed, rule-bound patterns. Because of this, we transform it into a clear structure that allows its true, essential nature to be revealed.

Finn, the protagonist of these tales of adventure, clearly desires to be a legendary hero. But what does it mean to be a hero? Finn has to work it out for himself, but, luckily, he has a very clear idea: being a hero means embarking on dangerous quests, raiding dungeons, facing monsters and devious traps, obtaining loot and rare magical items, helping innocents and rescuing princesses. This hero’s code of conduct that Finn follows determines every aspect of his behavior while he’s in hero mode, and he sticks to it religiously. In fact, when Flame Princess refuses to stick to the rules of how a hero should bust out of a dungeon in “Vault of Bones”—flaming her way through traps, obstacles and enemies, rather than patiently trying to find the “right” solution, Finn gets really upset!

Finn is playing a hero in much the same way that anyone might create a hero in a tabletop role-playing game. It’s by “playing as” a hero that Finn can genuinely act as a hero, and make himself into one. “Playing” hero reveals to Finn and to us truths about what it means to be a hero. As he plays hero he learns more and more about what it means to be a hero. And the fact that he is playing allows for him to make changes and adjustments to his game, as long as he doesn’t break the rules!

The same is true whenever the situation calls for a different approach. As all youths do, Finn tries out the roles he has learned and “plays” them according to their fixed rules, following the established patterns of behavior set down by these directions and limitations. When Finn is faced with mysterious events, as in “Mystery Train” or “The Creeps,” he drops the role of the questing hero and adopts another, equally familiar, role: that of the detective in a murder-mystery, hunting out clues, interrogating suspects and forming hypotheses. Again, rules determine the situation down to every detail: in “Mystery Train,” Finn rejects the first, most obvious suspect, just because, in murder-mysteries, the first suspect never turns out to be the murderer. That’s not how the game works.

How Can Something Be What It’s Not?

So far, Huizinga and Gadamer have helped us understand that all play is about something, and that something is presented whenever we play. But the philosopher who will be the best help to us in looking at what play means in Adventure Time is Eugen Fink (1905–1975). Fink said that play has a very special role in human life. Everything we do, as humans, has a purpose. We study in order to pass our exams. We work because we need to earn a living. We eat and drink to sustain ourselves. We sleep in order to rest for the next day.

Play, however, is different. Play has no purpose—or, rather, it has no purpose outside itself. It is its own purpose. We do not play because we want to get something out of it, but simply because we want to play—the activity of play is its own purpose. This special quality of play makes it stand apart from all other areas of human life, and, because of this, it has the power to help us reflect on our lives and see things differently.

How does this happen? Let’s look at a basic example of play in action: what happens when Beemo plays detective? Looking at the scene with our spoilsport common-sense glasses, what we see is a machine walking around as if it is a human talking to chickens who have no idea what the heck is going on! This is undeniably true, but the child in us is already screaming in defiance: “It’s not just a chicken, she’s Beemo’s suspect!” And the good news is: our inner child is completely right

Fink tells us that, when we play, the plaything has “another, mysterious reality.” The chicken stops being only an animal that doesn’t understand—in Beemo’s imagination she becomes Lorraine, a real dangerous suspect with motives and even malice!

No wonder that Fink calls play “magic”: it has the capacity to focus the powers of the imagination into the creation of new beings and things that seem to come alive before our eyes as we play. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for one, considered the imagination, or “image-making” to be one of the vital ways we make sense of the world, since it allows us to create mental representations of things we perceive in the world. And, influenced by Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1824) spoke of the productions of the imagination as a “secondary act of creation,” a reflection in our minds of the creation of the universe in the mind of God. Is it really that much to think of Ward’s creation of Adventure Time and all of its facets and intricacies as something like the creation of our universe itself?

It is by drawing on this creative capacity of the imagination that, according to Fink, playthings earn their own particular, troublesome kind of reality. What starts off as play can soon become all too real. When Finn and Jake sit down to play a board game in “Card Wars,” the game comes to life before their eyes, their card moves playing out as an animated, magical battle on the table at which they sit. And, in “Guardians of Sunshine,” the dangers and enemies in the title’s action-adventure videogame become genuinely life-threatening when Finn and Jake enter the world of the game.

But we’ll save the most powerful example for last. In “Rainy Day Daydream,” Finn and Jake, stuck in their tree house because of a knife storm, fall back on their imagination to come up with a new adventure. Everything seems perfectly fine until the products of Jake’s imagination become a little too convincing. Despite Finn’s bold proclamations that he can “master reality,” and tell the difference between what is real and what is “only play,” he soon realizes that Jake’s imaginings cannot be so easily dismissed. When Jake imagines that the floor is covered with lava, it genuinely burns Finn, “pretend” though it may be. When we face playthings, we know perfectly well that they are only products of the imagination, that they are not “real,” but they can take on a life of their own.

This leaves us with a very strange understanding of play! When we hold a plaything in our hands, we’re holding something that is two things at once. Fink was not the first to notice this. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) wrote that, when we observe animals playing, we see something that’s difficult to explain. Two dogs might appear to be fighting, and we might see one dog biting the other dog, until we realize that they were actually play-fighting. This means that the bite we saw was actually only a play-bite—not really a bite at all.

That is the paradox of play. What we are seeing is both a bite and not a bite at the same time. In the same way, when we’re children and play with a doll, we believe it to be a real, living child. But at the same time we’re also fully aware that it is only a piece of plastic. The fact that it stands apart from ordinary life, by being “not real,” means that it is “safe.” If something bad happens when we’re playing, like if we neglect the doll, and it gets hurt, then we can always say that it’s only play and it doesn’t really matter. But the fact that we also, on some deep level, genuinely believe the doll to be a real child (despite knowing it’s really not) gives play its unique power to hold up a mirror to our life, which is we still feel guilty if we let something bad happen to our toys!

In “All the Little People,” Finn is given a magic bag containing miniature, but apparently living, play-versions of the show’s cast of characters. At the start of the episode, Finn is lost in thought. Having experienced the woes of unrequited love and the difficulties of maintaining a romantic relationship in his dealings with Princess Bubblegum and the Flame Princess, Finn is perplexed about matters of the heart. As he sits on a cliff with Jake, he is troubled by big questions: what is love? How do you know who’s the one?

These are important questions that many teenagers—and adults—will have to tackle. When he starts playing with the lives of the little people, he realizes he can use them to try to find answers to his questions. They represent all the characters in Finn’s life, including himself, but, because they’re “not real,” Finn feels that he can manipulate them as he wishes, playing out all the relationship permutations he can imagine in his attempt to find an answer to the questions that have been troubling him. After all, mini-Finn is not Finn, so it doesn’t matter if his heart gets broken.

Still, as we’ve already said, play has its own, strange reality, and we can’t just dismiss it as being “not real” and consequence-free. When Finn makes mini–Lady Rainicorn break up with mini-Jake and fall for mini–Mr. Cupcake, Jake is understandably upset despite Finn’s assurances that it’s all just a bit of harmless play. Even though the play-version of Lady Rainicorn is not the real Lady Rainicorn, it represents her, and in playing out the break-up of her long-term relationship with Jake, Finn is presenting his friend with some pretty troubling imagery. No wonder Jake decides he needs to go away and spend some time with the real Lady Rainicorn. Play showed Jake some very possible consequences before they actually happened.

The Worlds of Play

Play has the power to give a peculiar kind of life to playthings—to make them something they’re not. But the magic of play doesn’t stop there. Fink tells us that play goes one step further, and it’s with this step that its greatest power comes to light. The plaything doesn’t just bring this imaginary being into existence, it brings with it a whole other imaginary world.

When the child moves the doll across a table, the table can become a sunny park, or a busy street. Whenever we play, we create a play-world of the imagination, different and separate from the “real” world in which all our other actions take place, but that represents it and comments on it. We can learn things about ourselves, whether we’re poor losers, what our fears are, and what we believe a hero should really be like. After all, wasn’t it Finn’s own imaginings of what Billy the Hero should be like that lead to his disappointment when he met the real Billy, and led Finn to inspire Billy to heroic deeds again?

This means that the play-world holds up a mirror to the real world. That’s why, as Fink knew, play is one of the most powerful tools we have for making sense of the world. Play can make us see things in the “real” world in a new way, and can even make us aware of things we never knew about the world—and, crucially, about ourselves. Our play-worlds, like the Land of Ooo, reflect the “real” world. In Ooo, we can trace the mark of aspects of our daily life. But it’s not a simple imitation—often, our play-worlds show us how things could be different.

When we play, we don’t just play with our toys, we also become a part of the act of play. The player is a member of the play-world. When Beemo plays with the chicken, the chicken changes into Lorraine, and the world around them becomes a truly dangerous and mysterious place, but it’s also Beemo who transforms herself. Beemo pretends that she’s human and is learning to understand the complexities of human relationships, romances, and deceits in the same way human children take an imaginary role and become themselves a part of the play-world.

We see this when Finn takes on the role of the hero when he plays out his adventures, and how this shapes his understanding of what it means to be a hero. But, there is a particular Adventure Time episode which really showcases the power of the play-world, and the ease with which the player can fall down the rabbit-hole of the imagination.

“Puhoy” begins with Finn and Jake building a pillow fort, and it’s harder to think of a more emblematic image of the safe, concealed, sheltered space of childhood imagination than a pillow-fort. As in “All the Little People,” it’s Finn’s relationship issues that spur this escape into make-believe, with our protagonist having realized, through obsessing over a seemingly unimportant event, that maintaining a relationship takes a lot of work, and causes a heavy emotional toll.

This time, the escape into the other-world of play becomes even more total and radical. When Finn is alone in the pillow fort, he finds a doorway that leads, Narnia-style, into a whole new imagined world—a Pillow World, complete with pillow-people and a blanket dragon. The humble pillow-fort has become the gateway to a complete play-world that stretches as far as the eye can see. Finn’s immersion in this secondary world is complete—with the door back to Ooo vanishing behind him, he has no way of returning to the “real” world. For the rest of the episode, Finn lives out a complete alternate life in the Pillow World, growing up into a man, marrying Rosalinen, the mayor’s daughter, having two pillow-children and, gradually, growing old and arriving at his deathbed surrounded by his loving family. He even renounces the “real” world in his old age, deciding that his place is with this Pillow World family.

The Pillow World is a dizzying example of how immersive play can prove to be when taken to its fullest extreme. Finn lives out a complete, secondary alternate life, one that, for the duration of play, entirely eclipses his “real” life and becomes primary. You might say, “But Pillow World was real!” And to that I reply, “Yes!” But not just because it might actually be an alternate dimension, because, even if Finn “only” imagined it up, it was real enough, he learned from it, and even if he doesn’t remember it, his experiences with Pillow World changed him.

All Played Out

“Puhoy” paints a vivid image of everything we’ve said about the meaning and importance of play. When it ends, we’re left with many troubling questions, and no easy answers. How real are Rosalinen and Finn’s pillow-family? What happens to them when Finn leaves the Pillow World and returns to the “real” world? How does Finn’s playing-out this play-narrative of committed love reflect his real-world emotional difficulties in his relationship with Flame Princess? How is Finn changed when he returns to the “real” world at the end of the episode, having lived out a full play-world life? Does he bear the mark of his play experiences?

One thing is certain. After watching Adventure Time, it’s very hard to keep thinking of play as something that’s “not serious” and that has no purpose or consequence. Finn and Jake’s escapades show us what Huizinga, Gadamer, Bateson, and Fink spoke about. In them, we see the unique power of play in action. We see how play is always about something, and that whatever play touches is touched by a strange kind of magic. Whenever we play something, we see it in a new light, and learn things about it we never knew before. And this is because the productions of our imagination in the act of playing, the wonderful people and endless worlds of play, are not real, but they are also not not real. They have their own, special play-existence, and they can change our understanding of the “real” world. Finn and Jake’s playful adventures teach us many things that we should take with real seriousness, like what it means to be a good parent, a true hero, and a lonely child, and those are lessons we take with us when the TV turns off, we leave Ooo, and return home.