#fionna and cake theorizing

[mynamesnotdahlia]

Betty has reincarnated and it’s tearing me up

She literally rides off on a bus titled ‘comet’ (shoutout to discountsnowmeiser on discord for using the enchiridion cipher to figure that out) and then at the end credit these geometric shapes that seem to reflect the geometric nature of golb morph together into an apple with a bow on it, a motif we’ve seen associated with Betty since You Forgot Your Floaties and we see her body changing and morphing when simon is flying away from her. she’s moved on and her wish of keeping Simon safe is fulfilled now that Simon isn’t a danger to himself.

which made me think again about this end credit image

what’s the significance with apples???

[quillsinkwell]

everyone: *discussing Simon's arc and how it'll have to end with him accepting change and healing* (which fucking own I love it)

me: *shivering with fear after episode 4's ending* the ice twink is coming

[blubble-lake]

I'm not okay, actually

[flovey-dovey]

(walks to a window) But what if... the Betty from Winter King's world wasn't nice? What if she loved a little too much? What if she's the reason there's an Ice Marcy? What if Winter sees in Candy Queen parts of himself who still (begrudgingly) cared for her, or the her he thought he knew OR the way Betty would look at him, as well as the insanity of the crown that exacerbated his own loneliness, a state of mind he Really Really Really didn't want to experience again? But also what if he's still just as lonely, and his statement of "I make everything better" is just a lie he tells himself every morning as he brushes his perfectly quaffed hair? But most importantly... What if they kissed?

[eyesteeth]

fionna and cake e6 spoilers + thoughts on the endgame for this series

firstly, on ice prince: i think it's good for simon's development that he got to see this. but it could also be very bad if he doesn't allow himself to ruminate on it. ice prince spends most of the episode making simon feel like shit, because ice prince apparently conquered the madness of the crown out of sheer force of will, will that simon apparently lacked. and ice prince is living the life, having everything simon wishes he could have - the benefits of the crown with none of the downsides.

except, that's a lie. it's only until the very end of the episode is it revealed that he was actually broadcasting the madness of the crown into bubblegum, showing that this ideal cannot exist. the fun magical simon everyone claims to want is a falsehood. you cannot have the magic without the sadness and the madness.

what i find very curious about this universe is that it seems to run very similar to ooo. all the candy subjects are present, albeit mutilated by bubblegum's crown-influenced mind, and we even see a young ice marcy with the same axe bass ooo marcy has. so the simon of this universe had to have gone down nearly the exact same path as ooo simon, with a few exceptions:

he somehow had the thought to beam the madness away from him, implying he had help or some level of cognition or malice ooo ice king never had.

he and marcy are no longer on speaking terms (why recreate a person if you can just talk to them).

he's not obsessed with betty.

the last one of these is the one that stands out the most. the (outwardly) most functional simon we've seen so far does not care about betty. she died and he got over it. which leads me to my main thought about the ending of this series:

i don't think simon and betty should end up together.

their story is very much one of cycles, a loop of loss and finding and being lost again. simon has been grieving betty for decades, given how much finn's aged, yet simon never seemed to get out of the third and fourth stages of grief - he's cycling between depression and bargaining and seems to have been for a while. this is definitely not helped by being a normal man in a world full of magic when that magic can't even bring back the person he wants.

and if he does find her in the other multiverses, it wouldn't last. either she wouldn't be "his betty", or he'd become an anomaly just like fionna and cake, and would end up wreaking havoc anyway. he needs to accept that the woman he loves is gone. even if he somehow made his way to golbetty, betty's wish in the AT finale was to keep simon safe. golbetty is NOT safe, that's why she left so quickly during that battle. if he approaches her, there is no guarantee that she'll stay put. she could even boot him back to ooo.

much like his desire to get the crown and be magical again, his desire to find betty is founded on the falsehood that everything will be fine if he just has this one thing.

now, granted, this doesn't mean i wouldn't like to see him try. he is so dedicated to this line of thought that it's very likely he could end up regressing into ice king if they do manage to find a crown. that's the point of this kind of narrative, seeing the protagonist struggle and fail before eventually coming to the final realization. it's a story of grief and addiction, and those are never linear things. we still have four episodes left, and a lot could happen.

which, to that point, i think the marceline episode is going to be in the next batch, either e7 or e8. i am fairly confident this will be a world where either a) simon did not find the crown and died in the bombing, b) simon briefly spent time with marcy but died in an attack, or c) simon left marcy earlier and she ended up falling in with the vampires. her manner of dress in the trailer and promo image seems to suggest that this is a marcy who was either raised by her father and proudly wears the crown of vampire queen, or was raised by the vampires who were killing humans after the bombs. i believe this could only happen under those three circumstances.

this is going to be especially important for simon's development on two fronts. firstly, it shows that simon's time as himself was worth something. marceline is much better off having had his help during the years right after the bombing. even though he left in the end, what he did to help her prevented her from becoming whatever she is in this upcoming episode. and, secondly, it's a reminder that the marcy back at ooo is still someone he can talk to. just because she has a girlfriend/wife now doesn't mean that he's unwelcome in her life. it's the classic depression isolation, and maybe this realization will get him to break out of it somewhat.

also for future episodes, betty shows up in the trailer, and i'm willing to bet(ty) that this is going to be either e9 or e8, depending on how long simon's going to sit on this interaction and process it. i can see it being in the next batch if e9 and e10 are going to be the climax and resolution, but i can also see this betty scene happening in e9 and pushing him into regression and a mental spiral in e10, which is mostly him having a horrible time and the world of fionna and cake shaking up as a whole.

it's snowing over there now. maybe they get some earthquakes as foreshadowing to the breakdown simon's about to have. truly, who knows? we just gotta wait. but it will be interesting either way, i think.

[dynjay]

I came up with a theory regarding Fionna and Cake.

So the series seems to be based off of the alternate realities created by wishes of others. In episode 6, the creators said that the Baby World universe was created out of BMO's wish, and given how much focus there is about wishes, I thought of something.

What if each world Fionna and Cake go through are wish fulfillment scenarios from various characters?

Here's what I'm thinking so far:

Ep 1: Betty's wish (and I guess Wyatt) (Granted by: Ice Crown and Prismo) This is Adventure Time's main universe. We saw from the ending that Betty wished to Simon safe, sane, and alive, and we're simply seeing the aftermath of the wish here. Wyatt also got a wish that we saw.

Ep 2: Cake's wish (Granted by: Simon) Episode 2 and 3 are a bit strange, but it still makes sense. Both Cake and Fionna craved to be in the land of magic and Cake got her wish first in this episode.

Ep 3: Fionna's wish (Granted by: Simon) This is the episode where Fionna got her wish and managed to reunite with Cake. Honestly, I think 2 and 3's wisher can be swapped because it'd hardly make a difference.

Ep 4: Prismo's wish (Granted by: Prismo and company) I feel like the episode speaks for itself, but Prismo wanted Fionna and Cake to exist and this episode was centered around keeping them and their world alive. And he succeeded! For now, at least.

Ep 5: Finn's wish (Granted by: Prismo) In a early episode of AT, Finn wished that the Lich never existed, creating the Farm World universe. Later in the show, the main Finn actually went back to this world to destroy the crown. We're seeing the aftermath of that here.

Ep 6: Bubblegum's wish (Granted by: Prismo and/or Bubblegum herself) This one's tricky to know for certain. There's a lot of characters missing here since we're focused on the duality of Winter King and Candy Queen, but I think that's a hint to whose wish this could be.

The only person we're shown to have the brains to potentially "fix" Simon's insanity is PB and it's suggested things went the same UNTIL around 100 years ago when Simon was "cured".

However, PB hates magic. She likes solving things with science and it's possible she wanted the most logical, least intrusive solution to cure Simon as naturally as possible, but was stumped on exactly how.

The wish in this case might've been to learn just the knowledge on how to get rid of Ice King's insanity, but it ended up being only that. Just getting rid of his insanity.

It'd line up pretty well with Prismo's monkey paw effect, considering what happened to both of them.

Ep 6 Ending: BMO's wish (Granted by: Prismo) The baby world was said to have been caused by BMO who wished they could watch over everyone in peace and safety. Unfortunately I can't find a direct source to this, but apparently the creator said this.

Ep 7: Marceline's wish (Granted by: Prismo) This one's also tricky. The biggest difference here's that Simon presumably managed to survive the Mushroom War, but had no defense against the vampires, causing him to die too soon to meet Marcy.

I think the implication here might be that Simon never found the crown, but found a bomb shelter to survive through the Mushroom War. Humanity found a way to survive the war, as we saw in Islands, so this would track.

If that's the case, this may imply that someone wished for Simon to never find the crown to become Ice King, but still survive the war with the rest of the humans.

The irony here's that he still died anyway from the vampires due to having little to no defense against them without the crown, which would line up nicely with what Marceline could've potentially wanted.

Ep 8: Lich's wish (Granted by: Prismo) Everything and everyone organic seems to be dead. This was the Lich's original wish before Jake changed it, and we're seeing the aftermath of it here.

Ep 9: Simon's wish (Granted by: Simon) This episode hasn't come out yet, but what was established was that Simon's been wanting to go see GolBetty since the beginning of the series, and the ending of episode 9 suggests that where they went.

Ep 10: ???'s wish If I were to take a guess, I think this would probably be Jake's wish in the sense that life for everyone continues in the original AT's universe; the one that Jake's wish managed to preserve.

What do you guys think?

[kingdomoftyto]

I am taking all of you theorizing that Betty reincarnated into Finn and am swatting you with a rolled up newspaper

[dansiepor]

It's because of things like this that I believe that Cartoon Network is not a single Multiverse, but something akin to a Mega/Omniverse as it contains many multiverses, one of which is AT.

A crossover, huh?

lol, where was Prismo during the OK KO special?

[sillybond]

As a send of here's my compilation of every detail/gag or pretty much everything that I loved about the Fionna and Cake finale.

First off, the lighthearded stuff.

First of all. That's Hunter!!! We finally get to see HW gender-swapped counterpart's design. Gotta say I love that they kept it the same, it does feel like it could fit anyone.

Talking about him, I LOVE that they are finally adding him to the gang. I didn't expect him to be so prevalent in the finale, but I couldn't be happier! It seems like the crew has finnaly learned to apreciate HW and they are inserting her (even if it's Hunter) whenever they can.

All the raw emotion of the lich would have been unheard of at any other point in AT's history. The depression and hopelessnes, such human emotions were amazing to explore in him. He poses himself as a "ceesless weel" a god-like beeing of pure destruction, but even he neels when he realices it was all for nothing.

For some time I theorized that Golb (and subsequently Golbetty) was, in fact, Scarabs and Prismo's Boss. Kind of like a ultimate deity, high up on the pantheon. But seeing how Scarab adresses her in such a careles way, emphasizing that she should "stay out of this" made me think about the real power dinamic between thees two. And thus, of the whole multiverse bureocracy.

This tittle card rips me apart. It's briming with thematic importance. But I feel so many emotions simply beacuse it says cheers, it's like a send-off, a happy cheerfull goodbye to all of us who enjoyed this show. It made me tear up a bit when I first saw it.

For thoose who aren't aware Pawn Swan's was created by Steven Wolfhard after CAWM alongside the pup kingdom. He has in his tumblr a gigantic amount of lore about it. I'm sooo happy they finally got to use his ideas and designs. Many of the pups seen all trought Shermy and Beth's sequence were in his drawings too. So go check that out!

I'm a complete sucker for happy endings and THIS was PERFECTION. I simply connot describe how much I obsolutely LOVE that they are able to comunicate and talk. it's just perfect, this show has me spoiled-rotten.

In pure Marceline fashion Marshal tries playing another song. And Gary is soo into this man it's unreal

But, also in pure Marceline fashion, he gets interupted. It kind of reminded me about Marceline's song to Bonny in Obsidian. But it's kind of the oposite outcome, Scarab isn't affected by it at all while Glorbo is finaly delt with.

Talking about Simon being happy. I'm just so glad that he has been able to reconect with Astrid!!! This man is such a DAD, I love him :,)

Before Fionna's world was finaly canonized we can see that it really just amounts to the city. Which makes sense because if you are trying to put a whole world in a dude's head, you are going to have to cut some stuff out.

Anyways, after they are made legit we can see that the city has expanded! And I also assume that now there's not only a city, but a whole world too!!

This really came as a surprise honeslty, but a welcomed one at that. I assume that since Jay agrees to stay in the city, even if it's not forever, Farmworld Finn must be fine. It doesn't make any sense for him to drop his 4 little brothers just to screw around in another universe.

The only sad part is that, since we don't see neither PB nor Marcy in the tank that means they are probably dead. In the end it does seem like they took eachothers life, together.

Now onto the heavy stuff!

"This is the world we want to fight for. The Scarab is kind of invincible. But we won't give up. If we die, we'll die together, as ourselves"

This cuts deep. At this moment Fionna was ready to die. She acknowledges that she had tried everything she could and that, in a way, it was her fault. But she also understands that this is what it is. And she's ready to depart. In what she thought were her last moments she found happines in thoose and that around her. Magic or not, they were all together, and that's what mattered.

"We made our choices. We could have made better ones, but I don't have any regrets. You were a wonderful experience"

We knew Simon had wronged Betty. She had put away everything for him. He didn't do it on porpuse, but he recognised he could have been more thoughtful. In the end, while Simon acknowledges his mistakes Betty doesn't demonise neither him nor the relationship that came bacuse of it. It's a very sentimental, heartfelt conclusion.

As humans we often try to make our best to navigate life. But with all the choices in front of us it's very hard to get it right. A lot of time might have to pass before we truly see how wrong we were. We realize that we hurt people, and that things didn't have to be this way. But once we acknowledge this we can finaly move on. At this moment, Simon realizes that it's okay to fail but, unfortunetly, we can't go back. We have to live with it and it can't prevent us from moving forward.

In the end all we can do is have compassion for ourselves, and for each other.

That was pretty much all of the details and highlights for me. There's some other ones but they are kind of too obvious to point out.

Thanks a lot for reading the whole thing! It means a lot :)

[bedknees]

So I was just freaking out about this again:

And the lovely @mynamesnotdahlia pointed out that, based on the description, this has to be where this Betty flashback happens, and I agree:

And if this episode is primarily Simon-centric, featuring his Twisted Mind(TM), I doubt these characters involve Fionna & Cake's plot and instead are a reference to the main A plot, aka the Simon plot. And if the ep does feature the above scene, it's probably going to be flashback heavy in general.

So who are these two brand new characters? I'm clawing at the walls! Also, please feel free to provide any speculation in the reblogs/replies. I love theorizing with all of you.

Also I wonder who Jerry is lmao.

[solar-plant-princess]

I’ve been so normal about Fionna and Cake. And I recently saw a theory about where Simon is actually from. The theory goes that he’s clearly not “white white”, he has a Russian last name, and brings up Jewish foods with some regularity. So it was theorized that he’s Central Asian.

And I agree with this and would just like to add some details about his wider pre-apocalypse origin. I believe he’s probably ethnically Uzbek just based on his more olive skin tone and that being the country with the highest Jewish population in Central Asia.

So if I had to make some large leaps, to me it seems he could have been born to a mixed family of (maybe) Uzbeks and (likely Russian Ashkenazi) Jews. As they would have lived under what we can assume was the Soviet Union given we see various military vehicles with red stars on them in flashbacks. We can assume he or his family probably moved somewhere else in the Soviet Bloc to pursue higher education or better opportunities generally. Which is why he ends up in roughly where Ooo begins which is implied to be Central Europe, specifically Germany given that he interacted with the mother gum and Bonnie speaks fluent German as a second language in every dub except the German version (where she speaks Turkish iirc, which isn’t anything direct, but would be a funny coincidence that Simon is seemingly Turkic).

So piecing some things together it seems like he’s mixed race from Central Asia, and then at some point moved out west. And seemingly from Cheers being like the only show he remembers and has fond memories of, as well as a total lack of any family being mentioned, he escaped into West Germany to pursue his academic career which required a lot of travel looking for the most fucked up cursed artifacts at some point. Also all of his artifacts being of a truly magical nature as he believes probably wouldn’t have been received well at all in the State Atheist USSR, whereas in the west it’s still looked down on but not something the government would like actively clamp down on unlike in the USSR.

Which also explains why in his memories there is largely western architecture despite his Russian last name. And since we know what caused things to go wrong is the “Mushroom War” which was obviously a nuclear war which explains all the wrecked military vehicles where he was surviving. As a nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have seen a huge amount of extreme fighting in Germany as both sides had intended to push through Central Europe in case of war.

This is all basically empty conjecture, but to me at least the pieces fit together and build up a more well rounded origin for Simon. It could also explain a little bit about why he survived beyond the crown. He likely spent a lot of his youth moving around to escape poverty, and had to be resourceful during that time. On top of escaping across one of the most guarded borders in history, it is no small feat.

It at least makes a bit more sense to me of how a brown man, with a Russian last name, who brings up Jewish food, ended up in what seems to be West Germany, and had a career as a niche archeologist looking for actual legit magic artifacts around the world.

[mynamesnotdahlia]

i am not at all sure what’s going to happen in the next episodes but i had the thought that if there was any time for them to connect the dots for why we don’t see simon in any of the dead worlds besides just that they didn’t show him it would absolutely be now

[olsonshroom]

Reading all of people's reactions, first impressions and analysis about Fionna and Cake and all their individual takes on it and the general shared excitement truly takes me back to when I was like 13 and everyone in the fandom was theorizing about Simon's backstory, the mushroom war etc. And now it's like all happening again!!

Oh I missed that:') what a great universum

[blubble-lake]

the wait is insane 😭

[fefairys]

some people are theorizing that the ending of fionna and cake will be simon coming to an epiphany that he can let go of betty and move on from her, and that would be compelling for sure, and a good message about grief, but considering how distant lands: together again ends, with finn having an epiphany that he can just be himself without jake and that he'll be okay reincarnated without him, but then jake being like "lol nevermind actually we should be together forever for all eternity in every life in every universe, im comin with you again!" i... am not Expecting that.

like we already know finn is never going to move on from jake when hes alive. we saw him after he died and he still couldn't move on, even in death. i think adventure time wants to say, "shit, man. sometimes we just cant move on, ever. sometimes someone is so integral to your life that when you lose them you simply will never be okay again, even if you not being okay impacts your friends and loved ones forever! we are kinda selfish! thats life!"

to get personal with it and expose my toxic lil relationship, i know that if my boyfriend died before me, i would simply not ever be able to move on in any meaningful way for the rest of my life. i would always feel like a piece of me is missing, because we really do complete each other, we are defined by each other, we dont know who we are without each other. and i think thats how finn and jake were, and that is textually how simon and betty were! is it healthy? no! but i think it's truthful.

adventure time has never been a show that teaches you lessons on how to be a good, healthy, well adjusted person! even in early seasons, the characters would spend a whole episode trying to learn something, and then either learn NOTHING, or take the completely opposite lessons from it and become worse as people! i think its pretty awesome for that tbh! theyre not teaching you big life lessons, theyre just sort of showing you life, as it happens. yknow???

not to say i'll be disappointed if simon does get to move on and learn to cope with grief in a healthy way, tho, just that its not what i expect from adventure time. i trust this ending to be handled well, no matter what it is. but i imagine it will probably be bittersweet, as is the ending of the original show! erm ok thats all ^_^ byeeee

[yaminobean]

Guys. Guys..... I just watched Fionna and Cake's Winter King episode and now I have an idea that won't leave my head.

It is theorized that Marceline has either died or separated from Simon in this universe. But let's say, if Marceline never died, that she grew up and met Bonnie, and WK Ice king grew fearful of Princess Bubblegum taking his surrogate daughter away. So that when Wk Simon does transfer the madness of the crown into Bubblegum, Marceline finds out and is about to reverse it but the winter king, now more aware of his magical abilities, stops Marcy by erasing her memories and coming up with some fake story about how the madness went away and he's better now. This is where we the plot proceeds in a similar fashion to Tangled with the winter king being Mother Gothel and memory wiped Marceline being Rapunzel.

Cue another Winter King musical rendition of Father knows best.

The image of this man singing this song has possessed my brain and won't leave. Help.