Gender Roles and Adult Humor in Children's Shows "Adventure Time"

Adventure Time is a popular show on Cartoon Network about a human boy in a post-apocalyptic magical world. What's surprising is how many deeper and more adult themes there are for a "children's" show. There's more adult humor sometimes and the show has received a lot of praise for it's unique characters and plots. I was watching an episode recently and I thought about how interesting the character dynamics are compared to the real world. While this show is purely fantasy they do tackle real world problems, such as self-respect, love, and other morals. I wanted to focus on moral lessons and adult humor in an episode I was watching called "I Remember You" (2012). You can the episode above on Youtube.

Because this is obviously a kid's show, there isn't any explicit mention or visuals of sexual content, but I think that it's important to see what the shows that kids are watching are teaching them. This episode starts out with some interesting interactions between the Ice King and Marceline. There are adult jokes such as when Ice King gets tangled in cords talks about he likes it. They briefly deal with abuse when Ice King pushes Marceline onto the ground and he immediately apologizes and the mood changes. I wanted to relate this episode to the article on social cognitive theory and moral judgments by  Eyal and Kunkel (2008). While it doesn't relate directly, I found that their findings could transfer over to other moral judgments between people. The Ice King is frequently criticized for blatantly hitting on women who mostly don't give consent. Jake tells him, "your harassment of the female gender makes me sick." This could go along with their findings that negative portrayals of sex also lead to negative attitudes about premarital sex. I think Adventure Time's view on female harassment and consent could have the same social effects and that would be good for kids. Viewers will understand that there are consequences to these gendered acts and it will effect their moral judgments.  

It's a little hard to compare this show to the readings we've done in class, but I think that it has a lot of implications for what we talk about in class. But the show has a lot of different character types and relationships that would be worth looking into. Gender is pretty fluid in this show, there are both straight and heterosexual relationships, and they talk about consent.