Of the many unforgettable characters on Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, which ended in 2018, none have a more fascinating backstory than Fionna and Cake. It’s not just that they’re a gender-swapped pair of characters inspired directly by Adventure Time heroes Finn the Human and Jake the Dog; it’s that Fionna and Cake’s origins stem from fan art. Considering how ebullient the Adventure Time fandom remains, it tracks that their love for the show would imprint upon it directly.
But since the characters made their onscreen debut in a fluffy installment of Adventure Time’s third season, Fionna and Cake have evolved beyond fun nods to the rabid fanbase. With their new Max series, Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, the pair have become lead characters in their own right—in a story that has a shockingly direct impact on Adventure Time itself.
From Tumblr to TV
Natasha Allegri was in college when Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward asked her to come work on his then-new animated series. The budding artist and animator joined the crew as a storyboard artist, helping to shape the colorful cartoon land of Ooo. But despite getting paid to work on the show, Allegri had a lot in common with the fandom—including being part of it.
Adventure Time readily lent itself to obsession. When it premiered in 2010, it arrived fully formed: Finn was an excitable, precocious kid with sword skills and a thirst for—duh—adventure. Alongside his older brother Jake, whose family adopted him as a baby, Finn met all kinds of allies and enemies, all of which were imaginatively designed with their own backstories and behaviors. From tiny talking elephants to a sentient shadow, everyone that the brothers met filled out the world of Ooo in ways that made us want to learn more about it. All the lore built up beautifully over the course of its 10 seasons, and Ward and the rest of the team seeded it from the very start.
In the early 2010s, when Adventure Time was a freshly huge success, fans on Tumblr would regularly drop by Allegri’s blog to see her own unofficial artwork based on the characters. Most popular among them were Fionna and Cake: a teen girl in a bunny hood and her roly-poly sidekick, a talking cat. The reception to her Fionna and Cake doodles was immediate and effusively positive.
“I thought the characters were so fun and cute that I kept drawing them,” Allegri told Comic Book Resources in a 2012 interview. “I sent it to Frederator [the show’s production company]—and I think from there, it was on the Adventure Time [Tumblr] blog—and from there it became its own thing.”
By “its own thing,” Allegri means that by September 2011, her characters starred in their own Adventure Time episode. “Fionna and Cake” was highly anticipated upon its debut, as the pair came to life in a story that found them pitted against the Ice Queen, who kidnaps Fionna’s beloved Prince Gumball right after he asks her on a date. Unlike Finn, who’s an energetic preteen nursing kiddy crushes at best, Fionna is a teen girl actively looking for a boyfriend. Both she and Cake are thirsty, except Cake, as Fionna’s adopted older sister, has a boyfriend of her own. When Ice Queen shows up threatening to rob a girl of her chance at a night out with her crush, Fionna obviously does not take it well.
The episode was hilarious and action-packed and a smash success, reportedly earning Adventure Time its best ratings ever. (That Neil Patrick Harris voiced Prince Gumball helped earn it extra buzz.) Playing directly toward the show’s fandom—and especially the sizable female audience—“Fionna and Cake” was an ode to the people who made the show such a big success. It even ended with a reveal that the entire story was just a piece of gender-swapped Finn and Jake fan fiction written by their nemesis, the Ice King.
An AV Club review of the second (of three) Fionna and Cake-led installment—an episode in which Marceline the Vampire Queen’s male counterpart appears and is voiced by Donald Glover (!!!)—nails what made these episodes so good. “It’s a story that fully evokes the sunny whimsy of this show’s early seasons,” wrote critic Oliver Sava. “The animation is bright, the plot is packed, and the fantasy action is balanced with comedy, music and character-based emotional drama.” Each Fionna and Cake story, Sava goes on to say, encapsulated Adventure Time’s greatness in just 10 minutes.
Fionna and Cake Is Full of Surprises
Premiering almost exactly five years after Adventure Time ended, it’s easy to think Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake is an easy, if overdue, way to reboot the franchise. But that’s wrong for several reasons. First is that a handful of stand-alone specials helped further extend and ultimately wrap up the Adventure Time story in 2021. Called Adventure Time: Distant Lands, these specials proved that there was still more story to tap from the universe; even though they offered a satisfying conclusion, it was obvious that the Land of Ooo remains alive and well.
Second is that Fionna and Cake have shown their individuality and flexibility outside of just their Adventure Time episodes and Allegri’s internet drawings. They went on to star in their own series of comics, written and illustrated by Allegri. (Allegri further showed off her storytelling chops with her original, if clearly Fionna and Cake-inspired, series Bee and PuppyCat, which made its long-awaited Netflix debut last year.) Their version of Ooo, with everything flipped, gave way to many unique storytelling possibilities. And that they were both older and feistier than Finn and Jake gave the whole story a different, still enjoyable tone than Adventure Time.
[Warning: Spoilers for Adventure Time and Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake below.]
But the most notable thing about Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake is that it dramatically expands upon and collides with its predecessor. The series premiere opens in a world remarkably similar to ours. Fionna is older, living an aimless life in the city with her cat Cake (who can’t speak!). By day, she works odd jobs to make ends meet; by night, she is plagued by strange dreams in which she and Cake go on magical adventures in a world covered with ice. Sound familiar? To us, it does, but not to Fionna—not even her aspiring-musician friend Marshall Lee, whose mom is her landlord, can tell her what these visions are about.
But when Cake runs off into a strange portal, Fionna’s pedestrian present collides with her fantastical past and future. But before we can see Fionna resume her role protecting Ooo, Fionna and Cake reunites us with our old friends from Adventure Time. Episode 2 pivots away from Fionna and Cake entirely to focus on Simon Petrikov, the man once called the Ice King. The final season of Adventure Time focused largely around Simon’s journey to find himself, having become the Ice King under dramatic and depressing circumstances. He ends the series not as a villain, but one of the good guys, right alongside Finn, Jake, Bubblegum, and Marceline. We also learned that he had a close-knit relationship with Marceline, in particular, which remains true in this show.
Simon no longer wants to have anything to do with ice; the word alone makes him cringe. But without magic, his life feels meaningless and depressing. Enter a bearded, buff, adult Finn, who we last saw in the final Distant Lands special. In that episode, his best bro Jake ends up dying, which fundamentally changes him forever. But what was beautiful about that special was that Jake encourages Finn to keep on living and doing hero stuff; it’s clear he took that to heart, because Finn suggests that Simon join him on an adventure to get his spirits back up.
That Episode 2 shifts away from the Fionna and Cake storyline, which seemed to offer a much more slice-of-life take on the Adventure Time model, comes fully unexpected. Yes, we knew from early previews that Simon would be a key figure in Fionna and Cake’s journey. But Max hadn’t made it clear that Fionna and Cake would be a direct sequel to Adventure Time, leaving Episode 2 as a jaw-dropping second installment.
If this is disappointing to those who wanted to see a more grounded version of Adventure Time’s classic humor and character design, well, it’s important to remember that this was always an Adventure Time story. And it’s certainly exciting to see Fionna and Cake finally interact with the characters from Finn’s universe, which they didn’t get to do in their original episodes. While Episode 2 ends without Fionna and Cake meeting up again, it’s obvious that their paths will again cross, leading them straight to Simon, Finn, and our other faves. Frankly, this is a fitting next step for fan-favorites Fionna and Cake—consider it the ultimate fandom mash-up.
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