The ultimate Adventure Time Bubbline watchlist, for all the gay romance

polygon.com:

Adventure Time’s influence on our modern crop of animated TV cannot be understated. Both as an incubator of talent — from its storyboarding room sprang the folks behind equally influential shows like Steven Universeand Over the Garden Wall — and an ever-mutating epic that used its success to experiment wildly. In many ways, the many creatives working on Adventure Time were inventing the modern serialized, long-form comedy/puzzle box/fantasy animated series for kids as they went along.

Adventure Time even lit the fuse on what’s snowballed into a genuine explosion of kids cartoons with queer romance plots or subplots — though like everything else in the show, it was produced of the slow accumulation of “yes, and”-style world-building, and like many shows after it, was hampered by network rules on queer content.

Fans that eagerly awaited tension of the next “Wait… do they have history?” moment between Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen were eventually rewarded with their relationship becoming an indelible part of Adventure Time canon. But fans of more recent queer YA animation who are interested in following the path worn by fandoms come before may find Adventure Time as a whole difficult to get sucked into.

I know, because when I mentioned that I’d put together a Bubbline watch/skip list of just the Marceline and Bubblegum episodes of Adventure Time for some friends, no less than two co-workers immediately asked me if they could see it too. They love animated TV, but Finn and Jake — especially in the show’s early seasons — couldn’t quite maintain their interest.

It’s an understandable problem! By the time Adventure Time really starts leaning into the Bubbline subtext with consistency, the lore is