Sorry, kids, I’m not starting a new series; it’s just these two pages. I’m still figuring out all the different functions in Manga Studio, and made this as practice.
Alright! So, this episode leaked in Australia about a month ago, and while we never got good visuals on the book he was reading then, we heard from people there that this might have been the case, so when it aired last night I was already looking out for it. I screenshotted the pages right away, and… upon reviewing the shots here I can’t tell you for SURE that it’s Simon’s journal. You’re gonna have to make that judgment on your own, but here’s what we’ve got.
This is the first book we see him reading. The Lighter Side of Nietzsche. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche are pretty heavy, for what it’s worth. He wrote about the death of God and championed “the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond.” Really deep, philosophical stuff that should or shouldn’t be talked about in a kid’s show.
But! IK’s not actually reading it! He’s reading funnies about Nihilism! Still very Nietzsche. Check out the font of the book in the background, though. That’s the important bit here. It looks handwritten, on yellowed-out pages.
We cut right away from that shot to see that his book is called The Lighters Side of Nietzsche now. Okay. We added an S.
He puts the book down and then we cut STRAIGHT to… IK reading words in a book?!!
With CAPS on white pages! And a different font from the one in The Lighter/s Side of Nietzsche!
Talking about the “stench of death” and a “mist” “hanging low like a London fog, creeping…” that has apparently done something sinister to “those who fought against” it. The author doesn’t “believe there is hope left for us anymore,” but is “still safe… still unaffected,” by the mist, and his/her condition “is an anomaly”.
It feels as though the author has been “chosen to be a ruler in the new world”. He/she watches “the sky light up once more,” accompanied by “a stench like burning metal” and “the echoes of an explosion”. And then another quote about the mist searching the “broken Earth” for the remaining people to “corrupt and mutate”? And in the far bottom right, it looks to me like the author says there’s something magical about the way the world has become [you can get another view of this text without IK’s arm in the way in the GIF below].
So, YEAH. That sounds a HECK of a lot like maybe the way the radiation spread and turned humans into the sludge monsters we saw in Simon & Marcy. And Simon is immune because of the crown’s magic turning him into Evergreen, and not a sludge monster? And Ooo is ABSOLUTELY magical. Beautiful and totally 100% consistent with what we know.
Except…. he starts to fall asleep while reading this passage and… check the title we get right here. It LOOKS like he’s still reading The Lighter [no S this time] Side of Nietzsche. The color of the pages in the book in this shot don’t line up with our second set of screenshots. They’re yellow, like the first shot of The Lighter Side of Nietzsche. So…
Just to be clear here, he falls asleep reading the caps text on white page [in spite of the previous shot clearly having yellow pages] and:
wakes up with his face stuck to a yellow-paged book [with no visible title on the front]. BUT, the books on the table HAVE been rearranged from before, suggesting he’s switched. Check it out:
The book stuck to his face is a whole lot thinner than The Lighter Side of Nietzsche, too. It’d all add up if the page colors were consistent and we didn’t get a shot of his face falling asleep while apparently reading The Lighter Side of Nietzsche still. It’s up to you how you interpret these shots, but it sounds prettttty likely to be Simon’s journal.
We can only guess that it’s Simon’s journal because of the text itself, though, because the other shots garble that meaning. To play devil’s advocate here, if the caps text book he’s reading as he’s falling asleep IS The Lighter Side of Nietzsche, then the joke is that a mutagenic apocalypse is lighter than the stuff Nietzsche typically wrote about. And that’s a pretty good joke. But it feels to me like it’s his journal.
So far as explosions go, if we accept that this is Simon’s journal from the Mushroom War, and this is obviously just a guess on my part, I’d wager that the mist is what we’ve come to associate with the Lich’s essence:
This junk. And I don’t think it’s unlikely that, kind of like in a zombie apolcalypse scenario, the surviving humans [before they were all converted?] would’ve fought against the sludge monsters like you’ll see them fight against zombies in zombie movies. It seems logical to me that humans in an apocalypse scenario might bomb infected areas to try and kill the monsters.
I can’t conclude that there was more than one Mushroom bomb since I see this as just as likely a cause for explosions.
The Ice King was the main recurring villain (and not a very good one) on Adventure Time for a bit. Everything changed in the Series 3 Christmas Special, where Finn and Jake uncover the Ice King’s secret tapes, play them, and this guy appears:
TURNS OUT that Ice King was once a mild-mannered antiquarian of ancient artifacts, named Simon Petrikov. He found a golden crown in Scandinavia, took it home to show his fiancee Betty and put it on his head. The second he did that, he began to experience visions and behave violently. This incident caused Betty to leave him (actually she just jumped forward in time to be with him in the future, but no-one knew that until Series Five) and Simon, now bonded somehow to the crown, began to deteriorate in mental health but gain power over ice and snow (as well as extreme longevity, since he’s over a thousand years old now.) His skin turned blue and he began to look like this:
eeep. Okay, so far, so tragic. But it gets worse! Around here, there was a war – the Mushroom War – that destroyed most of humanity. The series hasn’t gone into too much detail about it (more on it later) but the tie-in books kinda indicate that the crown protected Simon by covering him with ice before the bombs fell. Generally it appears that the crown is in some way sentient (as most magical jewellery is, I guess) and loves Simon as its master. Also, it’s an object of tremendous power, since in an alternate universe (yay alternate universes!) Finn put it on and was instantly corrupted. What this says about Simon’s willpower is…well, A Lot.
(There is an episode explaining the origins of the crown but I figure we can skip that for now.)
In the much loved Series Four episode I Remember You, it turns out that Simon once knew one of the world’s other long-lived beings, Marceline. She’s the daughter of a demon whom Simon found alone in the ruins after the bombs. (Where her still-living demon dad was at the time is unclear, but the upcoming Marceline miniseries might explain it.) She was only seven years old and Simon became her protector against the hideous zombie goo-monsters that sprung up after the apocalypse. They grew to love each other very much (sniff) but eventually Simon had to leave her as he slipped further into insanity. (We don’t know the hows or whys of this yet, only that it must have happened.) The end of I Remember You has Simon/Ice King and Marceline playing a song Simon wrote as a note to her before his mind was lost, which goes ‘Please forgive me for whatever I do/when I don’t remember you’. Marceline cries as she sings, but Ice King just plays his drums cheerfully, utterly oblivious to the fact that this girl was once his surrogate daughter.
Nearly done! In the episode Betty, a magic spell gone awry takes away the magic of the crown and transforms Simon back into his old self. Unfortunately, without the crown he’s dying. Simon manages to create a time portal to Betty in the past, to apologise to her for what happened. However, Betty jumps through the portal and sets about trying to save Simon from both Death (who is personified in AT as a horse-skulled man with a hat and an invisible car, just go with it) and the sanity-sapping curse of the crown. Simon tells her he would rather die than become Ice King again (I wrote a little bit about that scene vs The Donna Noble Incident here, it may interest you. ;) ) but agrees to let her try. So Simon goes back to being Ice King and completely forgets who Betty even is, whilst she takes up residence in a cave and starts working on breaking the crown’s curse. With SCIENCE!
And…that’s about it for now. People have read the Simon story as a metaphor for Alzheimer’s’ disease, and I can definitely see that. (My fiance, whose grandmother had Alzheimer’s, sees it too.) Or as a Jekyll/Hyde (or Banner/Hulk) two-seperate-entities-in-one-body sort of story. But no matter what, it’s basically the story of a kind and noble man corrupted by forces beyond his (or almost anyone’s) control. Which is just the sort of story I love. Because I am a huge masochist.
Anyway I wrote a little bit a couple of months ago about why I love him so much here, as well. And my blog remains a very Simon-full zone. :D
