Anybody watching these? They've been reliably funny and weird and heartbreaking and joyous and I kind of can't wait for whatever is in store for the fourth installment. The ending of the proper series was genuinely remarkable, all of the above adjectives but cobbled together with this incredible confidence in the value of fragments as a means of storytelling.

This show makes me so happy that I feel uncomfortable praising it by comparing it positively to other series or franchises, but this one feels specific enough to indulge. World-building seems like such an important emphasis in young adult and fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, and I definitely get the emphasis because those genres require telling a story and doing it from scratch, in terms of setting and environment. I'm not a creative person but that seems very difficult. Reasonably, the emphasis on world-building is typically on thoroughness - covering the built world horizontally with language and/or culture and politics and technology and religion. Detailed, rigorous, a nearly anthropological approach to fictitious worlds. That's fine, such as it is. And when it's done well people really seem to like it. But it's always left me cold because it's not really how I think most people (I'm just an expert of my own opinion on that, so if I have to backtrack to "me" instead of "most people" then that's fine) engage with their world. I float through days with huge, detailed awareness of somethings and complete ignorance of others - so even the really elegantly handled world-building ends up looking like this snowballing didacticism.

But Adventure Time never really tried to make you drink from a firehose. Finn and Jake are hugely important in Ooo but represent just a tiny corner of it. They're aware, to varying degrees of the other corners - and those corners are filled out with similarly varying degrees of completeness. It's a world of fragments, not wholes. And that works too because of the central fragmentation of the literal world, that's in varying (again) stages of post-apocalyptic diffusion. We get fed fragments of a fragmentary world - leaving only necessities like relationships and emotions to latch onto.

Anyhow, "Together Again" made me cry like a baby. The people who made this are free. They're not bound to anything, and the result is really beautiful.