Adventure Time may have started as an absurdist fever dream wrapped in a moth-ridden cloak of traditional fantasy trappings, but it was always destined for a greater purpose. Even from its humble beginnings as an Adult Swim series for the tween set, Adventure Time had the potential to become something more substantial, something — and I apologize if this sounds pretentious — more important. If you read that and immediately wondered how I could give so much artistic weight to a “kids show,” then you’ve never had one of Rebecca Sugar’s original songs take your heart in its delicate, haunted grasp and snap it in half like a twig.
I have. Several times, actually, but you always remember your first, and for me, that was the 2012 episode “I Remember You.” It’s the first time I remember as an adult having my heart broken by a cartoon, and I’m still not over it, more than a decade later.
“Marceline, is it just you and me in the wreckage of the world?” With those words, Adventure Time went from being just a quirky, acid-trip D&D adventure to something with more substance. Season 4, Episode 25, “I Remember You,” exposed the deep — and fractured — emotional core that pulsed beneath The Land of Ooo’s wacky exterior. There had been brushes with emotional complexity, hints about a great “mushroom war,” and the possibility that Ooo was a post-apocalyptic Earth. But Adventure Time didn’t become about something until “I Remember You.”
The episode starts goofily enough with The Ice King (Tom Kenny) singing a cover of the “Fry Song” to his penguin lackey, Gunter. The deranged freezer fiend then gets the idea to ask the song’s author, Marceline the Vampire Queen, to help him write a ditty that will attract a princess, setting the episode’s plot into motion. On his way to Marceline’s house, he attracts the attention of Adventure Time’s stalwart heroes Finn the Human and Jake the Dog, who decide to follow their old foe and see what he’s up to.
Upon reaching Marceline’s house, Ice King approaches the half-demon/half-vampire musician with his usual chaotic lunacy. Up to this point, the episode feels like any other zany Adventure Time outing, that is, until Marceline shocks everyone, including the Ice King himself, by agreeing to help him write his song. When he confuses her willingness to help with romantic interest, Marceline is forced to rebuke the mad monarch, calling him Simon and hinting that the two have a shared past of some sort.
It’s here where “I Remember You” takes a gutwrenching turn. Marceline lets slip that she has known Simon since before he became the Ice King, before even the Mushroom War. Sadly, Simon, whose mind has been slowly corrupted over time by his magic crown, remembers none of this. Marceline even shows him old pictures from before his transformation, but to no avail.
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words (Printed On The Back)
On the back of one of the photos — a picture of Marceline as a young child — is a message that the Ice King wrote her before he completely lost all sense of who he was. The message becomes a song, the aforementioned Rebecca Sugar tearjerker, whose words reveal that long ago, Simon found a young, possibly toddler-aged Marceline all alone in the “wreckage of the world.”
The two became a regular Joel and Ellie as Simon attempted to protect Marceline while they traveled the apocalyptic wasteland together. Unfortunately, Simon is forced to rely more and more on the magic crown he possesses to help him survive. Knowing that every time he wears the crown, it brings him closer to madness, he writes one last message for Marceline before he completely forgets who she is.
With lines like “I’m losing myself and I’m afraid you’re going to lose me too,” and “please forgive me for what I do when I don’t remember you,” the message/song becomes a soul-crushing plea from someone tragically aware that they’re slowly losing their mind. Seriously, if you don’t bawl your eyes out at the end of “I Remember You,” then you’re probably a robot, and I would suggest you get that checked out posthaste. For the rest of us humans, the episode evokes parallels to real-world illnesses like Alzheimer’s and Dementia, illnesses where the afflicted are cruelly aware of their ultimate fate but are powerless to do anything as their agency is slowly stripped away.
And while that’s tragic, in and of itself, possibly worse is the pain their loved ones feel as they’re gradually forgotten. In some ways, being forgotten is a fate worse than death. The dead can be mourned, but the forgotten never existed in the first place. Every time I imagine how much it hurts Marceline to know that one of the most important people in her life has no idea who she really is to him, it breaks my heart all over again.
I may eventually stop humming the “Bacon Pancakes” song to myself randomly, or forget about Lumpy Space Princess and her exaggerated valley girl speech that’s like, sooooo out of place in a post-apocalyptic futurescape, but I’ll never get over “I Remember You.” As long as I live, though the sands of time may erode every memory of Adventure Time once stored in my brain, I will always remember one line…
“Marceline, is it just you and me in the wreckage of the world?”
