Graphic by Kayleigh Woltal
“You see this cup?” Jake — a shape-shifting dog — reaches somewhere outside of the frame to retrieve a little white mug with a tiny orange flower painted on it. It is a very cute cup. A troubled Finn looks at the mug, impervious to Jake’s attempt to improve his mood. Jake continues, “This is literally my favorite cup.” He proceeds to chuck the cup out of a glass window. “Now it’s gone forever. So it’s not real, and I don’t care about it anymore.”
Season 5, Episode 16 of Adventure Time consistently delivers this kind of blunt and unflinching — yet infuriatingly cool — profundity. It continues to stick with me in a way that moments much more significant than this cup-flinging have not. I reflect on this episode, “Puhoy,” more than the moment when the orphaned protagonist meets his human parents (despite believing that he was the last human), or when we learn of the origin of his mysterious robot companion, or even when one of the most highly anticipated and unlikely queer pairings of our Gen Z time was actually fulfilled.
Maybe you’ve never seen Adventure Time (your wrist, please, to be slapped), so, for orientation’s sake: Adventure Time is a cartoon series that follows the adventures of adoptive brothers Finn (the last surviving human) and Jake (a shape-shifting dog) on the planet Ooo, a post-apocalypse Earth. Lots of wacky hijinks ensue. Anyway. Why is this episode so significant? With the defenestration of the cup? “Puhoy” is a colorful and devastating exploration of dissonant aspects of the human condition; specifically, the interaction of the expansive quality of our consciousness with our need to consolidate our truths into a neat, singular reality. We are able to construct alternate and contradicting worlds within us, and yet we inevitably will these worlds into and out of existence, for better or for worse. Wacky hijinks, indeed!
The episode opens with Finn and Jake’s treehouse transformed into a pillow fort. Finn is sulking in a corner. Jake is trying to lift his spirits. Outside is a dreary knife storm (knives falling from the sky is a common meteorological phenomenon in Ooo). Finn’s relationship is apparently in shambles after he told a joke that his girlfriend, Flame Princess, did not laugh at. Ever the big brother, Jake comes to Finn with his usual brand of sage advice: “You’re all hung up — all hung up on imaginary problems, man. You’ve gotta focus on what’s real.” And this is where he does that majestically unbothered cup thing and expresses his philosophy that if It is not staring you in the face, if It is not a concrete and unavoidable fact, It is not worth thinking about. The things that exist outside of and away from us are out of our control, so we should not dwell on what could have been — or risk tying ourselves in mental knots.
Finn just wants to “fester,” as he puts it — healthy coping skills be damned. He wanders deep into the fort, finding a door that leads to an alternate pillow-universe complete with a pillow-village about to be ravaged by a pillow-dragon. Naturally, Finn earns the “hero of the village” title with his dragon-slaying capabilities — there’s even a pillow-mayor’s daughter (Roselinen) who later becomes mother to Finn’s pillow children. (At this point, Finn has a beard, because how else would we know that time has passed?) In crossing into Pillow World and cultivating a life in it, Finn literally enters another dimension, yes, but it is with him reorienting his focus that his previous reality — the one in which his relationship is deteriorating — vanishes. Flame Princess, who?
Finn is content to exist in this blissful universe until the mayor returns with news of a mysterious door, the same one that would return him to his former life in Ooo. Finn combs through the world until his beard turns gray, but not after Roselinen inadvertently prompts Finn to remember the advice Jake gave him before he stumbled upon Pillow World: That he shouldn’t waste time on imaginary problems. Finn realizes that reality only goes as far as our minds go; that his experiences aren’t these concrete things that construct an unchanging universe. While his life and problems in Ooo certainly happened at some point, they need not continue to define his present reality. It dawns on Finn that, while he built a flourishing life in Pillow World, he tethered himself to a hazy memory of his past and burdened his present with it. Finn decides to call off the door-search, and in the next scene, he is on his deathbed later in his life (grayer beard), surrounded by his family, having decisively left his past behind with the door.
But the boy lives! Finn’s death transports him back to Ooo, and he pokes his head (neither dead nor bearded, as little time has actually passed) out from a pile of pillows in the pillow fort, his festering complete. He begins telling Jake about the mental knot so crazy that it distorted itself into an alternate universe, but he’s interrupted by a call from Flame Princess. (She just now got his joke — heck, she sure thought it was funny.) When Jake asks Finn to continue explaining his “dream,” Finn says, “what dream?” and shrugs. His life in Pillow World disappears without a trace as he turns to face his new, more pleasant truth. An entire universe wiped from his mind.
Finn’s journey demonstrates the creative and destructive powers of our minds. Thinking, reflecting, remembering — these acts are what makes things real, not whether or not they ever happened. Finn — both literally and internally — jumps between alternate realities with such decisive force that, in doing so, he eradicates the other and alters the contents of his life. Finn first abandons his life and relationship in Ooo, then ultimately turns away from an entire lifetime in Pillow World, because he had something better to look at. Jake’s cup-shatters-the-window moment was a hint toward what was to be fully realized in Finn’s journey: The rapidity with which something that was once essential to your existence can cease to have any meaning at all.
I realize I’m being dramatic, especially when considering Jake’s cup bit — I mean, what went down in this episode is something innate to human existence. I am quite literally just freaking out over how we have autonomy over our consciousness and how we can make choices, such as choosing to move on from our pasts. And I guess it’s also correct to view that faculty as simply a faculty. I probably thought that way before seeing the episode nearly 10 years ago; a person can change their mind in order to alter the course of their life — big deal.
But the fantasy of Adventure Time illuminates the tragedy and miraculousness in occurrences like these. It tells us that it is a miracle that our minds can conceive of multiple truths and a tragedy when those truths can’t exist at once. In witnessing Finn’s journey to Pillow World, we learn that choosing — or simply forgetting — a truth is tantamount to destroying entire universes. I suppose, though, that our ability to forget is the only way we can move forward and survive. While Finn was on his door-expedition, the accompanying Roselinen expressed her hope that Finn would remember his life with her after he finds the door and returns to Ooo — but how the hell would Finn be able to live in his present while holding on to this entire lifetime that was ripped away from him? I guess it was right for him to let it die.
None of that changes the fact that my silly heart breaks every time I watch Finn forget about his family in Pillow World. Yours would, too. Jake’s b-plot actually addresses this conundrum — did I mention that Jake eventually retrieved his cup from the knife storm? He had to be pretty lucky to be able to get his cup back despite the literal raging knife storm outside, but not all of us can be so fortunate in our own retrievals. Most of us wouldn’t even be willing to risk getting emotionally knifed for trying. We exist in this incredible pain, living in this specific state of being: experiencing pain for being unable to hold on to all of these worlds within us at once while also potentially knowing that they’re out there. Pain for wanting to hold onto realities you love but will inevitably lose, as Finn did. There’s only so much you can carry before you’ll see the overflow fall out of your arms.
So, “Puhoy” leaves me questioning: How the fuck do we reconcile the part of us that needs to forget in order to survive with the part that wants to feel, the part that wants to get that cup out of the knife storm because you love it, even if it kills you?