Reviews WesternAnimation / Adventure Time

Yep, I fully agree. Season 5 has been a mess. Many of the characters just seem to get more and more horrible, and the show keeps wasting it's plots. I didn't expect Jake's kids to have a constant presence in the show, but I expected them to have more importance than they ended up having. I've seen Adventure Time described as a kid's show that doesn't really want to be a kid's show, which might be why some of the more exciting plots fizzle out. I think the show's reluctance to do full length episodes is starting to hurt it too. "Earth and Water" and "Betty" really feel like they should have been longer.

I don't like them constantly going back to Finn's love life. He seemingly gets over Bubblegum, and then he tries to rebound with her after him and Flame Princess break. Flame Princess ends things relatively amicably with Finn, but then he's still hitting on her later. What's the point? Not only does it seem like he has little chance with either of them, but it makes Finn look bad as well.

While Adventure Time may not be the first series to have characters take a level in jerkass, I've never seen it become as bad of a problem as it has in this show. While Lemongrab was a divisive character, and for good reason, most of the writers expressed sympathy for him. So why write an episode that ensures that no one will ever be able to like him again? And Bubblegum...ooh boy, Bubblegum. She just gets worse and worse, and yet none of it actually ever seems to lead to anything. I don't even know how we're supposed to feel about her. Some episodes show her regretting some of her mistakes, and other episodes show her being apathetic to the damage she's caused. And there's about a 50/50 chance that the other characters will express discomfort at what she did, and others they'll just brush it off. Rattleballs is a perfect example. I thought we were finally going to get to see PB's atrocities acknowledged. I thought we might get some build up to a clash of morals between her and Finn. Instead, she helps Rattleballs, and her genocide is instantly forgiven, and the fact that what she did is just another incident in a very long trend for her is ignored.

I'd really like to know what's going on behind the scenes. The way things have been going either suggest Writer Revolt, or a very poorly coordinated writing team.

Thank god I'm not the only person who feels this way...

I'm really not surprised that of all the places on the internet, it's TV Tropes that I find informed and considered opinions like these. It's a good thing you decided to share yours, sure makes me feel better.

Well I wanted to be honest and express what I saw as Seasonal Rot... reading the AV Club reviews, I saw a worrying amount of brown-nosing.

I kinda wanna review Gumball next, especially with the next season coming soon.

This show is trying to go Darker and Edgier, but its going too dark for its own good. I just keep thinking "Adventure Time, you're a fantastical adventure cartoon, you are not Berserk!"

I agree completely with this stuff. This stupid show is driving me crazy, especially the fact that it's on Cartoon Network, a channel my little sister frequents. I don't want her to grow up exposed to this tripe.

"This tripe" where one woman kicked her boyfriend in the nuts for abusing her, and another fought off someone being sexually aggressive? Not to mention tons of female characters in general.

"Too dark?" Aaactually the darker elements drew me to this show in the first place and considering this or the next season will be its last, I won't be surprised if Adventure Time ends tragically/bittersweetly.

It's weird how this show seems to want to do long ranging plotlines, but just as often wraps them up before they get a chance to develop. This goes all the way back to Princess Bubblegum turning 13, then going back to her regular age in the next episode. Then there's was Jake's kids, introduced then largely forgotten about except for one. Now we have Finn's arm. I didn't have any particular expectations for how the show would handle that, but after teasing it for several seasons, we get only a couple of episodes with it before he gets his regular arm back without much fuss. What was the point?

I'm also dissatisfied with how they've been dealing with Finn's emotional issues. I feel like they're getting brushed off too easily. I remember back when Finn was dealing with his love life, he came off as aggressively upset. After the debacle with his dad, he came off to me as someone slowly losing his mind. In some episodes it practically seems like he's dead inside. Episodes like "The Tower" and "Breezy" has him telling us he's okay, but I don't find it convincing. I know Finn might not be good at expressing himself, but I wish the show would in some way go deeper into his various issues, and have Finn overcome them gradually.

I'm sure there was a thorn in his hand when he got his arm back, but I do hope they're doing something with that. And with Finn's issues, he's clearly not okay in those particular episodes, I related really hard to him in Breezy and he's still talking about putting bad memories in the vault.

To me, the show lost its sense of whimsy.

Like the show likes to subvert a lot of things like jokes and expected outcomes, and one thing it does is having some grim stuff happen in a world of rainbows and candy. Tree Trunks disappearing was a taste of how messed up things were gonna get, but even when the show got darker with The Lich, it was good. It had a new dimension to explore, and it began to get deeper - balancing the light stuff well with more mature subject matter as Finn grew up.

But at some point, it began to get tiring. Like I think one of my favorite episodes of season 5, before I quit the series, was the one with Pete Sassafras - it was goofy, it was off the wall, and it was one of the freshest episodes I'd seen in a long while. Likewise, I enjoyed the hell out of Puhoy - that was a hell of an episode, with layers like an onion. They were mature in the way Adventure Time had become, but felt fun and spirited like the earliest episodes, like the imagination episode from season 1.

But mixed with episodes like that were episodes like James. It's a murder-mystery sort of thing about someone sabotaging the ship, which ends in James, the respected candy citizen whom PB trusts to help with an important mission, being talked into sacrificing himself to save her, Finn and Jake - before coming back as a radioactive, goo-dripping abomination. It's dark, it's gritty, and if not for the goo zombies it'd be completely redundant. It seems to exist mainly to throw PB's morality into question.

More episodes are either unnecessarily dark (the season opener), gets strangely dark in a way which interferes with the episode (The Great Bird-Man, The Party's Over Isle De Senorita) or serve to throw Princess Bubblegum out as this ages old, morally questionable force (James, The Vault). It's a far cry from "my imagination is real and only I can see it", or even "we may have had fun when we were the same age, but you're too young to date me". Come season 5, the show's dark bents either got boring or felt unneccesary to the episode.

That's just how I see it though. The show has lost some of its best writers, and it's showing. For all I know, season 6 is doing better (despite Finn losing a fricking ARM in the opening episode, regardless of regaining it later on) - but it's just lost that magical feeling to me.

I actually did have a bit of hope return to me when I saw the Season 6 opener. Cause I mean shit, it was big, had some major stuff go down in it, and one of the better moments in the whole series when Finn lost his arm. Okay so it turned the Lich into an even bigger joke than the Ice King, but he long since lost the possibility of being a decent villain anyway.

During the opening I figured, this lack of an arm thing is something that they can't undo. There's no way they'll pull a new one out of his ass. And I actually did see it as a decent way for him to mature after becoming the worlds third biggest asshole (only to Jake and PB) in Season 5. The Tower seemed a step in the right direction...

...and then Breezy promptly undid everything in one fell swoop and showed that the writers are still spiraling into bad habits. Finn becoming an asshole again, and of course regrowing his arm in the most face-palm inducing moment in the series' lifespan. The writers don't want to change the status quo in any way that doesn't involve the cast being more dickish, and I sorely hope it crashes and burns before a godawful seventh season can be birthed.

I guess you could say...Status Quo Is Glob.

I love how you accuse anyone who still enjoys the show as "brown nosers"...

While I can't speak for Asger, he didn't accuse anyone who likes the show of brown nosing, he specifically accused AV Club's reviews. I've not read the reviews, and I don't know which ones in particular he has problems with, but if a reviewer seems to be ignoring blatant faults, or at least not explaining why they aren't bothered by them, then I think it's perfectly fair to accuse them of being overly reverent.

Grade A reading skills New Guy...