Animation is a realm where serious, controversial issues surrounding mental health are able to be addressed head on… in subtle ways. A perfect example of this is Adventure Time’s depiction of former enemy-turned-frenemy-turned-friend, the Ice King. Ice King’s main motivation throughout the majority of the series is to date a princess. He plots many kidnappings but is always foiled by the show’s main protagonists Finn and Jake.
One of the turning points for the character is when his backstory and mental illness is revealed in the season four episode I Remember You and has become a fan and critic-favorite moment from the show.
I did like the depiction of Alzheimer’s within Adventure Time with the storyline regarding the Ice King’s deteriorating mental state and how that affected the people he loved.
– Hoai-Tran Bui, writer for /Film
In the episode, Ice King seeks the help of Marceline in writing a sad song, as he’s heard that women love men with tragic backstories. He takes the pages of one of his scrapbooks to Marceline and attempts to write a song to “lure the honeys in with.”
During the writing process, he starts to throw a tantrum and begins to cry exclaiming “I’m so alone. Why won’t anybody tell me what’s wrong with me?” Exasperated and heartbroken, Marceline shouts “stop acting crazy!” to the Ice King, who responds by meekly stating “I just want to be loved.”
Startled by the lyrics and Ice King’s reaction, Marceline grabs the scrapbook pages and begins reading them – the viewers come to find out that the Ice King wasn’t always some crazy princess-obsessed goof, he was once a scientist name Simon Petrikov who actually helped raise Marceline shortly after the Great Mushroom War when she was a child and that the crown he wears and grants him his magical powers is also the cause of his insanity.
It turns out that even though the crown is what has allowed Ice King to survive all these years, it’s also destroying his brain. During flashback sequences,it’s shown that Simon knew of the dangers of the crown, but he feared leaving Marceline alone with no one to take care of her, so out of love he kept the crown on in order to protect her, eventually succumbing to the crown and turning into the Ice King.
At the end of the episode, after Marceline pleads with the Ice King to remember their time together, she eventually realizes that he’ll never be able to remember her.
The crown destroyed his mind and his relationships, leading him into a desperate life of misunderstood attempts to find compassion and companionship, and his relationship with Marceline as the Ice King speaks volumes about how both victims of mental illness and their loved ones cope with the effects.
– Lindsay A. Miller, Men, Women, and Mental Illness in ‘Adventure Time’
As Brandon Zachary explains in his CBR article Magic Is Madness: How Adventure Time Explores Mental Health, the portrayal of the two characters “plays as an extended metaphor for symptoms of mental disorder and the pain they wreck on loved ones.” The episode portrays Ice King “in a relatable place of someone we love fading away. Anyone who’s had someone they care about lose their mental faculties can speak to that kind of pain. And it’s important that a show with such broad appeal could showcasing how someone tries to deal with that pain”
Once the revelation of the Ice King’s tragic past and deteriorating mental health issues are brought to light, the character’s storylines hereafter are focused less on kidnapping princesses and more on the “loneliness and confusion that eat away of what’s left of him.” Because he can’t control what’s going on in his head, Ice King tends to lash out in pain and frustration. In reference to I Remember You, Novelist Lev Grossman shared on a 2013 episode of NPR’s Morning Edition that the series is “very affecting. My dad has been going through having Alzheimer’s, and he’s forgotten so much about who he used to be. And I look at him and think this cartoon is about my father dying.”
This is a perfect allegory for mental illness, especially with ones that involve memory loss like dementia and Alzheimer’s. According to Mental Health America, this particular episode “is a great way to help children understand what it’s like to have a mental health condition and how empathy can help someone” and it is believed that “episodes like this will help the next generation remove the stigma around mental health conditions.”
Animation Examination 