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axleblaze posted:To me there's something almost Ghibli-esque about Maja's design, but I can't really pinpoint why I think that. It could be because of the design of her house.
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Aug 20, 2013 15:01
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 21:58 |
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I can't see this as a particularly healthy development for Flame Princess. Although she isn't literally exploding with rage, her reaction to being deceived was to overthrow a kingdom and declare that everybody must tell the truth - hardly a proportional response, and probably not a stable one either. More, she went along with Bubblegum's research because of the implied promise that she wouldn't feel anything any more, and it's rarely a good sign when someone thinks it would be worth it to stop feeling things. The exchange "Frost and Fire" about "Why does anybody do anything?" "Why do they?" is relevant to this as well: in this episode she was agonizing over the answer to that question, but in the end she still didn't have one. She was confused about why Finn lied to her and while she realized that everyone lies, that's not actually an explanation, just a situation she believes she's capable of changing (by declaring herself king and commanding her subjects to be honest). What she's doing now is trying to make it impossible for anyone to hurt her, and that's the sort of deeply defensive behavior you expect from someone who's still coming to terms with something painful. That she acts cordial with Finn - pointedly neither forgiving him nor even listening to his apology, just acting like nothing's wrong - is consistent with that. The irony is that she's not being honest with herself about how much the betrayals in her life still hurt her. On the other hand, that she demands honesty from Finn is already provoking introspection from him, which is an improvement over the last two episodes. A Lawful Good guy like Finn isn't gonna be thinking about a way to get around that rule; rather, if he's to comply with the demand for honesty, he has to know what he's being honest about. Even if all he was "hm"ing about was the paradox of having to admit his impure intentions in order to pursue them, that's still a step forward because he's thinking about what he wants instead of just wanting it. They're setting up all these dominoes for something... but what?
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Sep 3, 2013 06:59
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Those suits of armor are far more different than they are alike.
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Sep 3, 2013 22:49
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Of course it's significant. What, do you think this show was made by accident? The "windows to the soul" close off, and she sometimes has the eyes of a tyrant.
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Sep 5, 2013 03:53
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This season is going to unusual lengths to characterize her, so it stands to reason her flaws would be exposed in greater detail.
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Sep 18, 2013 00:13
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We'll see how well Adventure Time fits with longer forms at the end of this season, I suppose.
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Sep 18, 2013 04:26
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The internet was designed so that it would continue to function even after a nuclear attack, so that might be the real thing.
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Oct 1, 2013 14:43
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It was delightful in its uneventfulness. Nice to take breaks from character-defining moments and ongoing plotlines and such.
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Oct 8, 2013 06:02
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Looking at it from a monotheistic perspective may be the wrong way to go about it. A figure compared to the transcendent, ineffable, almighty, Abrahamic sort of lord of all creation necessarily falls short due to being fallible and having identifiable qualities, but more importantly, will, in falling short, be deemed more like a sort of Lucifer or Antichrist figure. Ooo already has such a transcendent divinity in the form of the Cosmic Owl, and her ambitions are quite a bit less mystical. If nothing else, I think we can all agree that Princess Bubblegum is not Satan. But she is clearly not like mortals either. She lives forever, gives law, knows secrets, speaks in riddles, works miracles (raising the dead, healing the sick, creating life, erasing memories, contending with sorcerers), and makes judgments that lesser beings would not dare. That's very much in keeping with (modern understandings of) polytheistic notions of divinity. She's the patron deity of her people - fallible, yes, but also the sort of god-king that ancient despots sometimes came to be remembered as: a young and immediate god who also dwells in a universe shaped by older, scarier, primeval forces. Even benevolent such figures seem unsettling at best when judged by humanistic morals. That, of course, is part of the effectiveness of the character - we see her from the perspective of Finn, who is not a candy person and not her subject, and so witnesses the founding myths of the Candy Kingdom from that (Finn the) humanistic viewpoint. That's just one of the many flavors of uncanniness that make the show so distinctive. To be a "Princess" obviously means something more special on Ooo than it does on Earth, and I don't think we have fully grasped the significance of it. Or of the crowns. Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 09:49
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Growth entails irreversible loss in the gaining of something greater. Root Beer Guy lost Joe Milkshake, but he gained self-actualization, and became better than Joe Milkshake could ever have been.Steve Yun posted:I think it was Bongo Bill who pointed out that there's some "big picture" characterization going on with PB this entire season, and he's looking more and more right all the time. It wouldn't be out of line with this show's ambitions to use Princess Bubblegum to demonstrate the difference between Machiavellianism and immorality. They haven't shied away from really complex ideas before, and "The best thing for a ruler to do is what's best for the state, regardless of their personal conscience" is one whose complexity has kept it in currency for 500 years. (Fun fact: exactly 500 years, as the earliest known version of Il Principe is dated to 1513.) But where does Root Beer Guy fit in to all of this? Well, it's another example of the problem Princess Bubblegum faces: her creations often fall short of her hopes for them, but she knows this and tests them (because she's a scientist at heart). The Banana Guards failed her more spectacularly than most, but she found she had a competent detective anyway in the form of Root Beer Guy. Maybe she's also expecting to need better security in the future. Also, Finn and Jake still trust her and she them, and she is capable of swimming in butterscotch. Not much new, but then, she wasn't in it much.
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Dec 5, 2013 03:39
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"Princess" is a special term in Ooo. Its full significance is not known at this time, but a princess isn't just a young female ruler there. Remember the crowns with the gemstones in?
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Dec 5, 2013 05:33
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Rather than Youtube rips, you should go to the source for this show's score.
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Dec 12, 2013 18:34
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It's Gauntlet. Do you like Gauntlet?
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Jan 1, 2014 00:56
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The most relevant aspect of Fionna and Cake is that they are fictitious. ...Doubly fictitious. You know what I mean. Their characterizations can - must - differ from those of their inspirations; the reversed genders primarily serve as a shorthand for the fact that they're different in other ways. They haven't really done anything interesting with them yet, but they've been in, what, two episodes? I think that that's a range in which it's appropriate for them to be nothing more than cute and funny. Remember how many Graybles there were before one revealed something interesting about a character?
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Jan 2, 2014 09:09
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Princess Bubblegum is Machiavellian. The fact that they'd demonstrate this quality in such detail with a major sympathetic character gives me confidence that they're not building up to the tired old (oversimplified, even - dare I say it - problematic) cliches of ambition leading to monstrosity, a respect for necessity leading to tyranny, intelligence and self-control indicating untrustworthiness, or any other such reactionary stereotypes. The same writers that made this complex character - and the complex show she exists in - aren't going to throw all that away, contradict their prior themes, and betray their artistic consciences by flattening her for the sake of drama. They might for the sake of a gag, though.
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Jan 17, 2014 09:57
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Adventure Time gets scary, but it is a wholesome kind of scary.
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Jan 18, 2014 22:21
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A sovereign state whose monarch is styled "Prince" or "Princess" is a principality. Principalities are usually smaller than kingdoms. Sometimes the term "kingdom" is used in a more generic sense to refer to a polity whose head of state is not a king or queen.
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Jan 20, 2014 21:58
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The phallic imagery is obvious, especially given how blatant the show has been in the past. That doesn't mean this show is about Finn discovering his penis. It's about Finn buying a new sword. But this is an intentionally constructed work of fiction, not a documentary, and that means that many of the concepts in it are similar to other, less specific concepts. Edit: it is okay & legitimate to notice things like that Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 22:39
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Steve Yun posted:Some of you guys are fixated on "this sword is a penis" when the more interesting thing is "puberty is something that adolescents are taught to be ashamed of, but accepting your own sexuality is a healthy attitude and will give you better control over yourself" Exactly this. If you stop at "the sword is a penis" because talking about penises is icky, you can't carry that line of reasoning forward and discover what they're actually saying about penises. Which in this case happens to be a good and reasonable thing to say. (And if you don't think it is, then for you it can be about swords and not about penises. That's okay too.)
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Jan 21, 2014 22:47
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What I'm more curious about is what's up with all the candle imagery.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:50
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Every single one of these 148 episodes has to be about something completely different from all the others.
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Jan 21, 2014 23:38
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mclast posted:I've actually been thinking about this, and I think Ooo from the viewer's point of view might be colored by Finn's subjectivity. So far, the deer is the only non-supernatural thing he's fought and it wrecked him, no contest. I'll try and make this penis-free but if we take the FP saga, Puhoy, and Dungeon Train as a loose arc of Finn starting to grow up, being his age and realizing he's not actually good at something he thought he was awesome really resonates. I don't think the payoff is going to be "The adventuresome hero of a show called Adventure Time isn't actually good at adventuring heroically."
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Jan 23, 2014 01:36
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Paladinus posted:Wait. Puhoy was just a retelling of an old Hindu story and Dungeon Train was about MMORPGs. What did I miss this time? Please, don't tell me it's another penis. In Puhoy, Finn lived out - at least in his imagination - the rest of his life. He literally thought about the fact that everything he has might not last, that he will one day die, that love can be found again, and therefore he put his relationship troubles into perspective. Dungeon Train made its moral extremely explicit: it's about addiction and escapism, and about how to enjoy things responsibly and not take for granted the love of those around you. Adventure Time, as a show, has a conscience; it depicts Finn growing up and learning the things that people need to learn as they grow up. Sometimes, but not always, that manifests itself as learning not to be afraid of puberty, because puberty is something of a pressing concern for many viewers in the show's target demographic.
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Jan 23, 2014 01:47
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There's a crown inside of BMO.
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Jan 24, 2014 04:08
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Paladinus posted:But then there are Lumpy Space King and Queen. Who are the principal antagonists in LSP's life!
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Jan 24, 2014 20:50
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Billy, Joshua, and now Rattleballs - mentor figures for Finn. Aren't they both knights? I guess that makes them peers (a term with a double meaning for knights), whereas Finn's view of the other two was much less equal.
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Jan 29, 2014 03:05
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XboxPants posted:Has Finn been knighted in the Candy Kingdom? Only one I remember is by the fight ghost or whatever. It's kind of ambiguous. In the pilot he was explicitly not one.
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Jan 29, 2014 04:00
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A convenient quality of media divided into episodes is that metaphors which are sustained strongly for the duration of one episode can be abandoned if they're inconvenient or distracting in others. That Finn's infatuation should be renewed now reinforces the puberty symbolism of the previous episode - but this time, a sword really is just a sword.
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Jan 29, 2014 11:15
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Princess Bubblegum cares more about omelettes than eggs.
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Jan 29, 2014 23:40
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Machiavelli. The best ruler is not the good person, but the person who will do whatever's best for the state even when it is contrary to individual ethics. It's better to be feared than loved but the ideal prince(ss) is both.
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Jan 30, 2014 03:34
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On the other hand, a sufficiently powerful refrigerator is probably the only thing that could keep Flame Princess out of the picture.
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Feb 2, 2014 08:56
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In that sense, Rattleballs is an exemplar to Finn in more than just swordsmanship, with his more mature understanding of what it means to be a knight. Still, there's the sense that although Finn and Rattleballs are knights, knights and knighthood are obsolete. Courtly love is no good model for a relationship in the 21st century, and Princess Bubblegum is no helpless political bargaining chip like the damsels of medieval romance. Indeed, when she apprehends Rattleballs, she's dressed as a conqueror and standing at the head of a column of banana guards. And the circumstances under which she disbanded that knightly order faintly echo the dilemma faced by King Arthur (especially T.H. White's depiction). Having unified Britain and won peace, Arthur worried that his Knights of the Round Table would dedicate their warlike energies to oppressing peasants and otherwise being too violent (as the successful rattle guards were). Indeed, as they competed in and out of tournaments to see who was the best knight, they already showed signs of having forgotten that their raison d'etre was the defense of the land, which had to bear the costs of their grandstanding. Arthur attempted to sublimate that drive to conquest into a sort of contest to do great deeds and go on righteous adventures, eventually culminating in the famous quest for the Holy Grail, but he ruminated fruitlessly on whether he would find a solution that would long survive his death. Princess Bubblegum, at once a visionary and a pragmatist, found an answer Arthur would never have entertained: abolish the knighthood and, incidentally, execute all the knights. But up until that point, they had a pretty similar situation. Rattleballs, of course, may have been a relic, but she allowed him to continue serving her, because the problems his brothers-in-arms caused for Ooo was not because of individual knights, but the existence of the system they constituted. It's good to be chivalrous, in other words, but chivalry is not adequate as the basis of an advanced candy civilization.
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Feb 2, 2014 12:16
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MindTheGap posted:I also didn't know that stuff about the Arthur legend. That's really cool. It's not present in all versions, of course. That particular quality was played up in T.H. White's novel The Once and Future King, which, being written mostly in the 1930s and taking substantial liberties with the source material, is hardly a legend. (You should read it though)
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Feb 2, 2014 19:54
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The road Finn's on leads nowhere.
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Feb 14, 2014 04:34
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It doesn't need an explanation. What it needs is a resolution.
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Feb 16, 2014 09:53
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Acquire Currency! posted:If there's one thing I learned from this link it's that season 5 has like 1/3 of the episodes of the whole series. This is not an exaggeration. Season 5 is double-length.
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Feb 24, 2014 16:42
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This was a good episode and I wish it had been two episodes. I'm guessing this was going to be the main part of the plot for the canceled TV movie thing?
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Feb 25, 2014 06:37
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Bella Noche promises "the lost system of antediluvian magic." There was no magic on Ooo in its distant past, so of course that makes perfect sense.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:56
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Das Boo posted:Betty's last name is "frog" spelled backwards. It isn't, but if it were, it would be a reference to this.
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Feb 25, 2014 07:27
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 21:58 |
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The Ice King is too entertaining to write out until the end is nigh. The mere possibility of a cure, to say nothing of the knowledge that Betty is out there, is enough to keep his scenarios fresh for another season or three, and his inappropriateness, spontaneity, cluelessness, and narcissism were a rare comedy dynamo even before he became tragic.
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Feb 25, 2014 08:32
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