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.
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