Autism, Masking, and More in Adventure Time (2024)

Oh, Adventure Time. Created by Pendleton Ward and running on Cartoon Network from 2010 to 2020, the colorful, bizarre show has captured the attention of fans across multiple demographics. I was first exposed to it as a twelve-year-old and was immediately won over by the music, oddball plotlines, and variety of memorable characters. Even though Jake the dog and Finn the human are the defined protagonists and have the spotlight for a majority of episodes, I think that Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum is the one who ties the show together and drives it forward. She will be serving the same focus in this post as a major autistic-coded character.

The fun thing about Adventure Time is that almost all of the characters, including PB, are anthropormorphic and non-human. This means that the neurodivergent representation walks the line between Type 2 (headcanonable) and Type 3 (allegorical). Candy does not have neurotypes, so reading autism into Princess Bubblegum and her subjects is similar to reading it into an alien like Spock; their characteristics seem autistic to me, an autistic human watching, but they are not truly autistic people themselves. Some plotlines of the show also mirror autistic experiences without literally being about inherently different brains. I love seeing multi-layered representation like this!

If there are two words that define Princess Bubblegum’s purpose in life, they would be science and leadership. She constantly talks, thinks, and involves herself in the policies of her kingdom and in scientific inquiry. She immediately is attracted to Ricardio because their first conversation is about zanoits. She even neglects self-care tasks like sleeping to continue with her experiments. If you read this and thought “special interest”, you would be right. PB is the second character I have written about whose laser is actual lasers, the first being Reagan Ridley from Inside Job. Science is her main window into the rest of the world, and she is very skeptical of other viewpoints and beliefs, including magic. This is an example of her difficulty taking other perspectives and accepting concepts that do not have a concrete, easily provable explanation.

In terms of Bubblegum’s practices as a princess, she leads with logic and insistence on a “greater good” that is centered on the well-being of her kingdom and herself, which some readers may recognize as justice sensitivity. This is why Flame Princess calls her out for imprisoning her and installing surveillance in the Fire Kingdom. Fans and other characters have accused PB of being selfish and uncaring, and if you look closely, her social circle is very small. The only characters who seem to really love and trust PB are Finn, Jake, and Marceline. To everyone else, she is an authority, ruler, colleague, rival, or god (since she literally made the candy people). Some autistic people do have low empathy and rely on doing a sort of “feelings math” to navigate interpersonal relationships, which describes Princess Bubblegum quite well. She has a formula or algorithm for everything.

When Princess Bubblegum learns she is a candy elemental and can shoot candy out of her body, her arc follows a similar shape to that of newly-discovered neurodivergent people. Something old and instinctual has been kept hidden from her for a long time, and then she finally accesses it. She is even guided by the spirit of the previous candy elemental the way new NDs often have someone who brings them into the fold. I can relate strongly to her feelings of being cut off from something that could have, should have, been such a huge part of her life.

Neurodivergence is sprinkled throughout the Candy Kingdom, which makes sense because the subjects are basically extensions of PB, their creator. However, different extremes and variations are shown with each experiment. Goliad is a representation of even higher intelligence and lower empathy than the princess has, and she cannot be taught consideration no matter how hard Finn tries. The Lemongrabs are the most stereotypical autistic-coded figures, having sensory issues around sound, an intolerance for mess and chaos despite being quite chaotic themselves, specific vocabulary snippets that they repeat (“UNACCEPTABLLLLLLLE!”), and difficulty describing their own emotions. They also have trouble relating to others, but cannot mask it as well as Bubblegum can, leading to their isolation. PB literally tells the original Lemongrab “you don’t play well with others”, despite him expressing loneliness. She tries to teach him how to be caring and sweet to other candy people, but it never comes off authentically. Cinnamon Bun, due to his “half-baked” status, can be interpreted as having an intellectual disability, which manifests in his slow processing speed and difficulty with complex instructions and concepts. James, the ice cream sandwich guy who dies and is cloned several times, constantly verbal stims and has no sense of danger. His impulsivity can be interpreted as a sign of ADHD, and his collecting of medals can be dopamine-seeking.

An interesting case is Lemonhope, who I see as being coded with a PDA profile. His main goal has always been freedom, as in no one telling him what to do, not even something as simple as sharing a cupcake. This is why he runs away from the school in the Candy Kingdom (despite being very clever and liking learning) and adopts a nomadic lifestyle. His fascination is music, but he prefers to figure out how to play on his own than to let others teach him. The way PB gets him to (briefly) return to her kingdom is to dress up as someone else and let Lemonhope lead himself back, which mirrors some PDAers’ strategy to approach a demand sideways through play or humor.

Another autistic-like character is the Banana Man, who is a bit of an outlier in that he is not a candy person. He is just an anthropomorphic banana…who has a very hard time making friends and is obsessed with cars, rockets, and all things mechanical. Finn and Jake sometimes let him tag along in their shenanigans because he is good at fixing things; Banana Man is just grateful for the positive attention, and seems to not know what friendship is supposed to look like. However, he bonds immediately with a fish woman named Sybil, who does not speak but encourages Banana Man to engage in parallel fun with her. This is after a line about everyone except Banana Man receiving a manual for talking to people, which is a common way autistic people describe their social difficulties in real life.

Princess Bubblegum’s own brother Neddy is an example of how autism can look vastly different even within the same family. While Bonnie has always been curious and a sensory seeker, Neddy is very sensitive to external stimuli. In the flashback of them as babies, Bonnie examining water drops and chasing butterflies, laughing with delight, while Neddy cowers in the cave where he was born. Neddy, unlike his sister, never learns to speak. It is also notable that while Princess Bubblegum assumes a humanoid shape, Neddy takes the form of a dragon, even though they both originated from a shapeless blob of gum. Old ABA literature describes autistic children as having to be built up into personhood from a pile of pieces (yikes), but we know that autistic people have never been shapeless or broken. I think that Neddy being a dragon symbolizes the “other”, but still whole and complete, state of low-masking autists, while his sister has managed to fit in with the “normal” humans by looking like one (despite there being almost no humans in the show). Princess Bubblegum keeps her brother chained up in his cave, to the point where viewers have no knowledge of his existence until the protagonists stumble upon him and are appropriately shocked.

In the final season of the show, we learn that Princess Bubblegum has made a solution to turn her subjects “dumb”, which she even uses on her own family. It turns out that the way it works is to render the victim incapable of expressing their thoughts, even though they were operating at full capacity internally. When she is hoist by her own chemical petard in a nightmare, PB wakes up crying. Being unable to communicate one’s internal world to other people sounds like being autistic, particularly of the nonspeaking variety. PB is high-masking, and in her shame, she repeatedly distances herself from the idea of pure, unadulterated autism during her arc. That is why she keeps Neddy chained up underground, why she tries to teach multiple other beings to be less like themselves (even though they are not so different from her), why she has perfectly crafted the persona of a pretty, pink, proper princess. Deep down, Princess Bubblegum knows that she is closer to beings like Neddy than she pretends to be. What makes her nightmare so real is that she has been there, and she knows how painful it is. Princess Bubblegum as a character is a lesson in wrongly-aimed justice sensitivity, masking, and shame.