I Don't Know, I'm Complicated: When Wedding Bells Thaw

When Wedding Bells Thaw aired on June 28, 2010, and was boarded by Kent Osborne and Niki Yang, who had previously co-storyboarded The Witch's Garden with Adam Muto.

Here we have an episode in a micro-genre that Adventure Time has already carved out for itself: an Ice King episode.  As the show's primary antagonist at this point, he's the character who gets the most development outside of Finn and Jake, and his episodes all share certain common features, most prominently that the audience basically just feels bad for the Ice King.  While he's certainly a villain, in that he does bad things and serves as the antagonist in the plot, he's a character the audience has cultivated a lot of sympathy for.

This episode pushes the audience's sympathy for the Ice King to the brink.  Sure, he's as pathetic here as ever, but unlike in other episodes, there's not much focus on his emotional state.  Instead, the episode focuses on his mental state.  He appears to not really understand that he tricked his fiancee into marriage via brainwashing, and goes through a brief period where he almost reneges on the marriage altogether.  It's very difficult to determine if the Ice King is telling the truth from his own warped perspective or if he's just lying to suit himself.

Similarly, the Ice King is also more villainous in this episode than he has been previously.  While he kidnapped a large group of princesses in Prisoners of Love, that didn't have the creepiness of mind-control, and he never got even slightly close to marrying any of his captives.

And yet, this episode also counterbalances this creepiness by showing the Ice King in a positive light for a large chunk of the episode.  It does genuinely appear throughout most of the running time that he has successfully convinced this princess to marry him.

There's also the fact that he genuinely wants Finn and Jake to be friends with him.  He's incredibly desperate for companionship, and not just from princesses; the Ice King wants desperately to be a bro.

All of this stuff stews together to make a staggeringly complex and hard to pin down character who is rigorously documented in this episode, to the point that Finn and Jake are effectively sidelined here.  We just get the most basic of characterization for the two of them - Jake being more cool-headed, Finn being desperate to protect princesses.

This episode goes the farthest into developing the Ice King as a sympathetic character and it also goes the farthest into making him seem straightforwardly villainous, which is a very impressive accomplishment.

Next time:  Dungeon.

My Bread and Butter: Ocean of Fear

Ocean of Fear aired on June 21, 2010, and was storyboarded by JG Quintel and Cole Sanchez.  This is the debut of both boarders and the only time Quintel worked on the show.

JG Quintel is better known for creating Regular Show, which debuted the season following this one; Regular Show and Adventure Time are often compared for their basic aesthetic similarities.  It's certainly worth pointing out that Quintel and Pen Ward were friends at CalArts and coworkers on Flapjack.  However, Quintel and Ward have an extremely different set of aesthetic priorities, and this episode is extremely useful in determining what those priorities are.

Ocean of Fear is successful for the same reason Regular Show is successful - it takes a relatively minor conflict (Finn's fear of the ocean) and plays it as a full-scale epic.  Thus, we get ominous synth swells, color palette shifts, extreme close-ups, distorted animation - all the things that would be expected of an episode with suitably outsized conflict, but taken out of their natural context and applied to something much smaller-scale.

The episode accomplishes the same thing through its plot.  Although the basic premise is extremely simple - Jake attempts to cure Finn of his fear of the ocean - the episode moves through a variety of different settings at quite a clip and, unusually tosses, off a lot of gags, such as Finn speaking only in rhymes or the complex hierarchy of manifestations that appear to live in Finn's digestive tract.  In this way, the episode makes its premise feel larger than it actually is.

Ocean of Fear also has some interesting wrinkles to add to the already very well worked out Finn/Jake relationship.  As usual, Finn sees Jake as a source of wisdom and advice.  However, upon having Finn's trust put in his hands, Jake proceeds to come up with an incredibly complex and devious plan to cure Finn's fear through intense exposure therapy.  Ultimately, this doesn't work as well as planned - Finn ends up accidentally trapping Jake at the bottom of the ocean.

This is where the episode pulls off its best piece of character work.  Finn realizes that his and Jake's attempts to cure his fear through their usual action-based, confrontational, heroic methods simply won't work, and he has to outwit himself in a fairly unheroic way in order to do the heroic thing.  This shows off Finn's critical thinking ability - something the show hasn't shown a lot of up to this point.

The episode ends with on of Adventure Time's stock faux-morals about flaws; however, that's not the episode's real purpose.  Ultimately, this is the most intimate character piece about Finn and Jake that the show has pulled off so far.

Next time:  When Wedding Bells Thaw

Quick Update 3

Sorry for the slow post schedule.  Last week I was busy working on other stuff, and I meant to write a new post yesterday, but I stapled my hand with an industrial stapler at work and was unable to.  Posts resume tomorrow at a slightly reduced schedule.

Quick Update 2

No weekend post again as I'm extremely busy, so apologies for that.

Also, apologies for literally falling asleep while writing last night's post and publishing something that disintegrated into complete nonsense.  Work's been very hectic this week and I'm behind on my sleep.  I've since cleaned up the ending and made it coherent and not utterly shameful.