‘Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake’ Is a Gift for Current and Former Moody Queer Teens

Even if you weren’t clued into Adventure Time during its original run, if you were gay and on the internet during that time, you arre probably familiar with the romance between Marceline the Vampire Queen and Princess Bubblegum (popularly shortened to “Bubbline”). The relationship was very strongly implied throughout the show’s eight years on air, although never explicitly acknowledged until the literal last episode. That was revolutionary for its time, though; series writer and storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar has spoken about how “it was pretty much impossible to have characters in an animated show that were openly LGBTQIA,” and that they faced years of pushback from Cartoon Network. (Sugar eventually left Adventure Time to create Steven Universe, where they similarly had to fight for explicit queer representation, and made history in the process with multiple queer precedents in children’s animation.)

Thankfully, we live in very different times now. Similarly, Marshall Lee and Gary Prince inhabit a reality distinct from the one in which Marceline and Bubblegum shared that pivotal kiss. But as Fionna and Cake makes clear, their love transcends universes. In the sixth episode of the series, Marshall and Gary go on an impromptu date, wandering through the stalls at a holiday market, sipping lattes, and browsing crates of used records. And yes, the scene has already gotten the Tumblr gifset treatment, even in 2023. I won’t spoil further, but it was such a delight to see all the ways, big and small, that Fionna and Cake refuses to shy away from depicting queer relationships.

The scene was especially meaningful to me, given how important Adventure Time was when I was a queer teen. I identified strongly with the moody, extremely bi-coded Marceline, who often seemed as though she could only express her emotions through music. The show introduced the gender-swapped universe right around the same time that I started to understand that I had some weird gender feelings of my own. In fact, in an Instagram caption of mine from 2013, Marshall Lee and Fionna’s taunting back and forth of “good little girl, bad little boy” became recontextualized as a metaphor for my budding genderfluidity.