Season two of Fionna and Cake has arrived on HBO Max, taking Adventure Time fans into a new world—and it’s one that’s finally established as its own universe, thanks to Prismo breaking the rules and making the Ice King’s fan fiction real.
The first season’s ending metatextually had Fionna and friends fight to make their world canon, and there’s now more to explore in its earned existence and how it might cross over into Adventure Time‘s Land of Ooo.
But don’t get the premise twisted, Fionna and Cake isn’t just fan service to sneak back into Adventure Time territory completely. In a conversation io9 had with producer Adam Muto, we discussed how the creative teams aim to make their beloved character variants stand on their own and, yes, sometimes stand with the legacy faces to take on new interdimensional threats. Plus we got into looking back on the original show’s impact in animation and online meme culture as its evolved to its spin-off tales.
Sabina Graves, io9: Season one of Fionna and Cake really began to establish a new universe being built. As a longtime Adventure Time fan I’m so excited about seeing these characters who were once Ice King fan-fic come into their own. Can you talk a bit about taking those threads that were presented in Adventure Time as the sort of vignettes among all the wider adventures and deciding to revisit them as their own cohesive storyline?
Adam Muto: Yeah, I think when we were pitching ideas for [an] extension of the original series, it was a lot easier to start with characters that had an outside presence compared to how many actual episodes they had been in. And one of those sets was definitely Fionna and Cake because over the course of the show, they were only in like five or six episodes total. So yeah, it felt like there’s an opportunity because they had they obviously had recognizability. It was like, what could we do with them now that the show was over that wouldn’t feel like a repetition of Finn and Jake’s dynamic? So when there was an opportunity to pitch to HBO Max, part of it was like, here’s these characters. We think we can set it in a world that feels of a kind, but still different now that the original series is over. We don’t have to step on the original series. We can sort of find our own direction based on that as a starting point.
io9: Was it always a part of the plan to kind of marry that with the other really popular connected arc with Simon and Marcy? And kind of continue to give Ice King/Simon that redemption arc fully and see post-[Adventure Time] what his life is in that regard?
Muto: I think where he was left at the end of the series, it felt like this isn’t necessarily a happy ending. It’s a different phase for him now, but it’s not like being freed from the Ice King curse would suddenly make his life easier. But I think because we already had that, and a starting point for Simon and also the relationship to Fionna and Cake established, it felt pretty natural to incorporate where he’d be now—and even use that as a catalyst for what would happen to Fionna and Cake and how we could sort of shift their personality away from just being, you know, straight up adventurers. [They] kind of dovetailed into each other right there at the end.
io9: Yes, I love how relatable Fionna and Cake’s world is. Obviously, it’s vastly different than the world of Ooo. Can you talk a bit about the process behind establishing this universe for the folks who grew up with the show [and] how it gave you the chance to explore less big adventure fantasy stuff and more grounded fantasy?
Muto: I think being able to have a little bit more slice of life moments and actually less life and death stakes was also a draw. We can’t make every episode about either saving the world or saving the kingdom or saving the princess unless there’s something different about it this time around. So I think the challenge was to find stories we could tell in this version of the world that didn’t feel like a repetition of episodes we had done over the course of the original series. But because it was more grounded in some ways, it’s not realistically this world, obviously, right?
It’s very much set in a ’90s sitcom version of a world and that was purposefully tying into Simon extrapolating from what he would be imagining and consuming when his version of the world ended and a thousand years passed—it kind of would have been sort of crystallized at that moment. I think kind of making it half of a period thing makes it a bit easier because if we were trying to say this is a contemporaneous story about the issues of today, it would be really hard to do it in a way that didn’t come off as completely depressing or satirical. So even now it is a bit of an escapist thing where it’s this sort of mind-created ’90s version of the world of an anonymous city instead of like endless grasslands.
© HBO Maxio9: You mentioned how in Adventure Time we had the trope of princesses being saved. I really love that this first episode of Fionna and Cake establishes that Finn might need saving himself [with] Huntress starting to uncover the cause of his injuries. Does that give fans some crossover opportunities between Fionna and Cake into the world of Ooo, or is this just dual timelines happening?
Muto: I think there’s definitely a connection between the two, but that also felt like it’s so baked into the concept when your main characters are sort of AU trope versions of the original characters. So you either lean into that or deviate from it completely. It could have been Fionna and Cake in their own world with no mention of Ooo ever, but the thing that made it interesting to me personally was that there remains this connection to the original series and the original characters [as a] sort of a conversation like, “How could they affect each other? And how would seeing the Fionna versions of characters affect the original cast when they were interacting with them?” So trying to find ways to have them crossover without them literally being in the same room, finding ways that they could interact and why an answer to a problem in one world could be answered in the other—that was fun.
io9: Yes, you mentioned that all the characters are AU versions of the characters we’ve known and love but with the intention of making them their own here. How do you approach their significant canon events? Obviously you have Marshall Lee and Gary Prince ending up together sooner than Princess Bubblegum and Marceline do.
Muto: Right. It feels like there’s two ways to approach it. One is that, oh, there’s this repeated sort of destiny that happens or just like a repeated element. But that starts feeling very Star Wars to me where “it’s poetry and it rhymes.” I think trying to set it in different phases of the relationship would made it a bit more interesting. Like we’ve seen Marceline and Bubblegum now, but that’s with 800 years of backstory between them, which is very different than people meeting for the first time and not being immortals.
© HBO MaxSo we try to find ways to play off the same dynamic without repeating it one to one, but also kind of describing how it could work. I think those sort of echoes are a bit more interesting than “This happened in this world so this exactly has to happen [in] the other.” I think you can sort of play with that and have some things that feel like they might happen just based on like past events. But it gets very easy to start trolling with that and threatening to chop off the character’s arm or like the lich appearing. There’s a lot of things that could recur and it wouldn’t feel out of place, but it might also feel like you’re just kind of playing the hits.
io9: Adventure Time’s legacy is such a formative part of animation in pop culture today from Halloween costumes to memes. What has that been like for you to see the new life they take on? Does that inspire you seeing this fan reception as older fans continue to grow with it, but also now there’s newer fans? I have a one-year-old and I started putting on Adventure Time to have something on in the background that wasn’t Bluey all the time—I love Bluey.
Muto: No, me too. Yeah, we got Dave McCormack back and he’s the voice of Bandit [on Bluey]. That was one reason we got him was like, this voice is very cool and this performance is very cool—let’s try to get Bluey’s dad. He played Orbo in the first season [of Fionna and Cake]. It’s a pretty distinct voice, you can try to disguise his Australianness.
It’s very humbling to be involved with something like [Adventure Time] and to have it still be something that can be a presence in people’s lives. I’m always surprised when I hear kids are picking up now because it’s like, it’s not really on. Where are you watching this? I guess you’re seeking out library stuff.
io9: Or streaming!
Muto: Yeah, think one thing that [Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward] did when he approached the show, he never wanted to make it reflect memes of the day. [We were] like, “Let’s try to avoid incorporating pop culture and meme stuff” because it would age out almost instantly. So when it flows outwards, it’s always cooler. Like if some weird drawing or reaction gif happens that you didn’t plan and it’s just something that organically happens that’s cool to see for sure.
io9: I love seeing the buff baby Finn [meme] pop out of nowhere on the timeline.
Muto: Yeah. And that was just a song, I think Pen wrote that. It’s just kind of the internet stickiness of the stuff he would come up with, which just felt very unforced. It was just sort of whatever kind of flowed out of him and he wasn’t trying to make something like that. It was just people gravitated toward it. And I think that’s sort of the thing about the show, especially early on, it just resonated with people and you couldn’t actually put your finger on why… it just did.
© HBO MaxBecause the elements of it, like a boy and his dog and a hero and a princess—all these elements were not new—I think it was just how they were being presented and how they were being written. All this kind of confluence of choices and timing and zeitgeist and all these things that you have no control over. So it’s very, it’s very cool to see that it still exists now and that it seems like it will continue in the future.
And that’s also something that I liked about the original series. It kind of avoided prescriptive sort of stories. It was more presenting sort of these ideas and, you know, having characters ponder it, but not always come to a firm conclusion.
io9: Exactly, there was more depth to having a lot unanswered or not so clean cut happily ever afters. Especially in regard to Simon and Betty for example. I really loved how [in Fionna and Cake] we get to explore what happened to Betty, her sacrifice and how that there wasn’t necessarily a shiny happy resolution.
Muto: And that was something we were able to do in the series where it’s like, there was probably some stuff that was weird about that relationship too. And that didn’t negate that it was a love story, but it also made it a bit more interesting and less straightforward. I think sort of acknowledging something that happens over time too is you get multiple perspectives on some of the events that happened in your past and how you viewed it might not be the way another person viewed it or how an outsider would view it. So I think being able to incorporate those things into this version of the show is, is definitely something that was appealing about it because that was all there in the original show, but maybe it kind of got glossed over.
© HBO MaxSo it’s very tricky. We’ve kind of watched Adventure Time grow from, you know, a pilot at Nickelodeon to a series with new management at Cartoon Network, to the rise of that studio during that time period, to the pivot into streaming and becoming sort of an IP. Now, we never thought of ourselves as an IP when we were at Cartoon Network, but now that it can actually be multiple things and multiple shows and multiple entities, it feels very different. And that’s something that we try to also reflect on the show, I feel like, and in a way without making it about itself, it has to also include sort of the reality of what the show has gone through over time. Definitely.
Fionna and Cake is now streaming weekly on HBO Max.
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