#character type

me in 2020 : hot bearded long haired men with a tragic backstory!!!!

me in 2024 : This too, but.... um....

Now, as for Moon Knight...Moon Knight is interesting. I still don't understand the character, but I see that he's equally violsnt. Accidentally found a modern comic picture where he skinned someone's face. It's disturbing, and I don't think that image is gonna vanish from my mind easily. But Moon Knight feels like The Punisher, in that they're both crazy action guys who only work for me when their crazy is neutered by better and more moderate characters. Spider-Man, The Defenders, The Thing, even the Werewolf by Night probably keeps Moon Knight in check sometimes. But solo stories? I don't wanna read it. It's a personal taste thing, but these violent characters with insane morals don't do it for me.

Character Archetypes: Femme Fatale

As I write these lines, the first snowfalls happened in France. To fit with the weather, I thought of starting something I was planning to do for quite a long time... A series of posts talking about Adventure Time's Ice King.

Well... not posts talking really about him. But rather posts talking about the origin, the formation, the tropes and archetypes at play with this character. Adventure Time is a very, very weird media in terms of mediatic evolution as it is a very bizarre yet influential step in the evolution of fantasy, placing itself as the unusual crossroad between faithful homage, absurdist parody and fresh continuation. It's... well it's weird. And the Ice King, one of the most crucial characters of the series, is a literal melting pot of MANY many different elements of the fantasy fiction.

I will start in this post with the function of the Ice King, mainly how he manifests the type of the "recurring pitiful villain".

When I think of a potential cultural ancestor for the Ice King, being a French person, I immediately think of Gargamel, the main antagonist of the Smurfs.

Why? It seems at first the two have nothing in common... And yet when you think about it, the two are old, ugly men practicing magic. The two are recurring villains that become one of the iconic head of the show. The two start as a legitimate, creepy, evil threat and then devolve in a pathetic, foolish, almost friendly foe - notably because each of their scheme and plan is bound to fail or blow back in their face, as part of the law of "evil can't win". The two are driven by a monomania, an obsession that becomes their main trait (capturing princesses/capturing the Smurfs), and the two have an animal sidekick that they treat with a mix of abuse and love (Gunther/Azrael).

I can't claim that the Ice King was directly inspired by Gargamel... But it is interesting to point out that the Ice King answers to a very specific type of villain in older children cartoon: the recurring but ineffective villain, the returning protagonist who always fail and despite his antagonism is part of the "main cast" so to speak, the "evil" guy who isn't so much evil as just a weird goof we laugh more at than we really dread.

A more American example could be Dick Dastardly from "Wacky Races", who has the bonus point of also having an animal sidekick:

There are many, MANY iconic and classic exemples of the "recurring, ineffective villain" in older children cartoons. I evoked Gargamel and Dick above because of their familiar animal, which highlights the parallel, but other "predecessors" of the Ice King include The Professor from Felix the Cat (bonus point for being an old man with a strong white theme and this huge mustache - and extra bonus point when you know that "Felix the Cat" was one of the first inspirations for Adventure Time's artstyle):

Elmer Fudd, who was eventually so pitiful in his evilness that Yosemite Sam had to be introduced (Yosemite Sam could also have played a part in the Ice King's creation as he has the King's short-temper mixed with the luscious facial hair):

You can also count in Wile E. Coyote - he isn't obviously related to the Ice King and I don't think he was an inspiration, but he is one of the icons of the "loser villain" that keeps inventing extravagant schemes, a monomaniac who is doomed to never succeed.

Or Shredder, from the old Teenage Turtle Ninjas cartoon...

... Or even "Eggman" Robotnik from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise (there is something to be said about how a lot of these characters enjoy excentric facial hair).

And to conclude we need, of course, to bring forward the greatest of all these ineffective antagonists, and one that clearly did have an influence over Adventure Time: Skeletor, who was such a failure that the writers of He-Man themselves took pity on the guy and ultimately replaced him with alternate antagonists.

All of these "predecessors" did form a type of villain, a niche that the Ice King nicely filled. However, the Ice King's first "function" was not to be such a sad clown of a villain...