Adventure Time should go down as one of the best shows of all time

With Adventure Time expected to end sometime in June, the idea of a show’s legacy comes up and how it should be regarded when all is said and done.

Adventure Time has been on the air so long now that it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t on Cartoon Network. Within a matter of weeks, however, it shall be disappearing from our lives, if not forever, then for a very long time. Our adventures in Ooo will have come to an end and we’ll be left with the show itself to consider and that consideration ought to be that Adventure Time was one of the best series, animated or not, to grace our television screens.

It started off rather small: Just a story of Finn, a preteen boy and his adopted brother/best friend Jake the Dog (who is, in fact, a dog) engaging in feats of heroism, saving princesses, and sometimes learning a lesson or two in the process.

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Over time, as the series became more complex and nuanced, it became a coming-of-age tale of the often uncomfortable and subconscious process of growing up and how most of the time you don’t realize it’s happening to you until you’re on the other side and you’ve grown up.

It treated itself like a snowflake: carefully building upon itself and creating new layers, stretching itself farther and farther out in ways that only ever felt natural. You were growing up with Finn and every step of growing up you took felt organic.

The snowflake kept building out by adding more and more characters with depths you didn’t look for because you were young and every older person you meet at that age is a static figure; always that and nothing else.

Then you realize that your boss and romantic interest, Princess Bubblegum, created all of her citizens like a scientific god and ruled over them like an autocratic king; Marceline the Vampire Queen with her deep ties to other characters; The Ice King, who used to be Simon, a researcher and Marceline’s one-time caretaker until he was driven mad by his crown. Fractals upon fractals upon fractals.

Adventure Time was very good at subversion and allowed it to perform its greatest trick: Revealing that this magical land of Ooo isn’t an alternate dimension that Finn fell into or some far-off distant place, but, rather, it’s Earth. Our Earth.

The entire time we never realized that really we were watching a kid’s version of a post-apocalypse, one filled with candy people and Arthurian tropes. It was a brilliant move that totally re-contextualized the series into something entirely more interesting and convoluted.

More than anything, Adventure Time was a show that made sure that by the end of it you had learned something from it. You may not have always been able to pin down exactly what it was saying (like “Hall of Egress”) but it always made that effort.

Next: Cartoon Network: What show should fill Adventure Time's void?

Adventure Time is expected to return with its three-part finale sometime in June.