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Comments
No not really. The point is that the Joker is an unreliable point of view, and any story he tells you is most likely lies.
I don't remember him telling people that in-story. All he says in-story is blah blah blah life is worthless blah I'm nuts. Because, y'know, he's the Joker.
Isn't everything shown from his perspective?
Have you actually read the Killing Joke? Plenty of bits cut to Batman and Gordon picking up the pieces of the incident.
Look man, it's okay to like villains because they are crazy. But you don't need to justify that they are some precious baby who is totally sympathetic. It's okay to like them because they stir shit up and might amuse you, but trying to justify whatever atrocities they commit with a shitty past is disingenuous.
Elektross did you see the most recent two parter, Finn the Human and Jake the Dog?
Considering what happened to Alternate Timeline Finn when he wore the crown, I don't blame Simon.
I never said that.
In fact, I recall openly speaking against it on more than one occasion.
That's kind of the point. Ice King was just a dude who was through no fault of his own mutated into something horrible.
But that doesn't excuse the fact that he's a butt.
Thus the implication that the Joker could be anyone for any reason. And this doesn't contradict the interpretation wherein he's a force of pure chaos; the implication is that any person, exposed to the right (or wrong) conditions, has the potential to be exactly the same. The Joker could be seen as a reflection of Batman's paranoia and a reminder of what he could become, or perhaps even what he already is. Stripped down to bare essentials, the Joker is a force of id with great intelligence at its disposal, indulging in chaos for its own amusement. But Batman is also a force of chaos, being a vigilante that works outside the constraints of the law. Where the line between correct and incorrect use of power lies is seldom perfectly clear, and if Batman ever crossed the line into indulging his psyche rather than acting in favour of justice, then he and the Joker would be the same.
Batman could be anyone, too. We know he's Bruce Wayne, and we know why that makes sense, but few people in the setting actually do. They understand Batman as a terror in the night, or as a phantom protector, not as someone who has billions of dollars worth of gadgets at his disposal; just like the Joker, he could be anyone sufficiently unhinged to do what he does. They're perfect reflections, where the Joker is the id that indulges and Batman is the id that survives. And both have less to do with their literal means of villainy/heroism than they do with the circumstances and ideas that underpin them. As far as Gotham knows, both are beings without identity that decide the city's fate beyond their grasp, like a strange dance of madmen.
That said, the entire superhero genre is supported by the idea that justice is the responsibility of everyone, not just police and investigation agencies. Most great, long-lasting superheroes operate under the principle that they could be anyone, like Spiderman, the Hulk, Superman and so on and so forth. They're often initially normal people operating against abstracted forms of normal, everyday obstacles, like the way Hulk stories are often about the danger, but also power and freedom, of explosive anger. Superman is about acting according to the same moral standard even when he's Clark. And Spiderman is almost the inverse of Batman from an economic point of view; if Batman is about using one's resources for public benefit, Spiderman is about acting for public benefit despite a lack of resources. Peter Parker, after all, seldom comes from a background of wealth.
Oh yeah, he's a huge butt.
But I'm really liking the direction Adventure Time is taking with it's lore. And all the Lich and Enchiridion, and Mushroom War, and Marceline stuff.
This one phrase.
This phrase, man.
Adventure Time is largely a children's cartoon made for surreal amusement value. I wouldn't expect it to follow especially consistent lore, and most of what I've seen operates largely on "id logic"; things that don't make sense at all, but provide the feeling of making sense. Like when you press an elevator button, and the elevator is slow, so you press it again. In your head, you know pressing the button again does nothing. But it simply feels reassuring, even sensible to press the button again. Sometimes multiple times, and in quick succession.
There's liking fictional lore, which is all well and good, but then there's imposing that lore-loving perspective on works that don't follow that pattern. I think Adventure Time is one such case, being a children's cartoon that is just trying to provide an organic sense of fun as often as possible rather than adhering to any sort of consistent, sensible logic.
It certainly isn't expected to.
That doesn't mean that it can't, and the fact that it does in my opinion brings it past what you'd expect from a children's cartoon.
@Nova and @Alkthash: He does admit that he's unreliable. That's what makes him so scary. The story we're shown probably isn't the truth, yeah, but the bottom line is that he could have been anyone and no-one (not even himself) knows who he really is.
That's my point. The force of chaos and madness he is now could have been anyone at the start, and that fact is scary.
Really, for all of your accusations of reading comprehension failure I'm starting to think that you're the ones who need a literacy check.
The developers have said as much. They want to keep AT sensical in the organic sense, but anything goes. So things like characters and locations generally remain recognizable.
Adventure Time is a fantasy cartoon at its finest, really.
The bottom line, in the end, is that anyone could be anyone. The same way anyone could be the Joker (which, in the end, actually isn't true, and the notion is kind of silly outside of the context within the comic), anyone could be Batman, or hell, even Commissioner Gordon. It all depends on circumstances.
IIRC, one of the main driving points of the story was about how anyone could be driven insane. But actually becoming the Joker? No, not at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure that comparisons were drawn between the Joker and Batman. (I had a point here, something about how insanity motivates people differently, but I forget how to phrase it.)
I guess what I'm saying is that the notion that anyone could have been the Joker is ridiculous, and annoys me on some vague level I can't really pinpoint.
You asked a question, dude.
The answer was no. I think asking if you've actually read it was a fair question there.
Ah, I see. I'm sorry, I took it the wrong way. It just seemed phrased like a personal attack.
It's been a month since I've read it last, actually. I think I lost it somewhere.
Actually, now that you mention it I think one of the points made explicit in the end is that Joker's attempt to make Gordon crazy failed.
Really, maybe I shouldn't have made that comparison in the first place.
Also, I must correct myself there.
In the end, despite the Joker's efforts, Gordon wasn't driven insane. I think that that is the perfect counterpoint to the whole exercise.
^ Dammit, no fair editing to make the point I made before you edited >
Maybe this whole thing was just a shitty comparison.
The Killing Joke's ending hinged on the fact that the Joker was basically just projecting himself and guess what Joker, people react differently to bad days. Ice King's whole backstory depended on the fact that the Magic Crown would've driven anyone crazy, which upon thinking about it sounds pretty contradictory to the Joker's story.
Man, situations where you have to admit that you're wrong really suck.
I call those situations "Damn near any day of my life when I have to talk to other people"
The Joker just has really bad luck with his gambles on human nature.
^ Yup.
Mostly because it isn't fair to expect a homicidal maniac to be a credible interpreter of human nature.
Well he did manage to convince Harley to be a criminal. And his continual ability to find henchmen willing to work for a known psychopath.
Isn't that because she was a sucker for his fake-ass tragic backstory?
Money is money, even when it's laced with Joker venom/Smilex/whatever.
Depends. Hannibal Lectre didn't do too bad at it.
The Penguin. Two Face. Black Mask. The Riddler. Plenty of criminals to try to work for who probably won't throw their mooks off a bridge for shits and giggles.
Well, Alex, I consider the backstory revolving around the Mushroom War and the creation of the Land of Ooo as well as the change of Simon into the Ice King, and the change of Marceline from a Half-Demon/Half Human to a Half-Demon/Half-Vampire and the relationship between them, to be part of "lore" as they seem to remain consistent in the story, and each new episode, when it isn't dealing with some wacky shenanigan, builds upon this backstory.
Also the Cosmic Owl.
That's all well and good, but it's not exactly the point, is it? Some shows, films, games, books and whatnot intentionally set out to be enthralling in terms of their setting. In fact, it's become common enough that many authors of various works in various mediums insist on giving their settings massive amounts of lore despite being some variation on the elves/dwarves/orcs setup of standard fantasy. And that was a kind of awful sentence to have to write. This kind of thing has been so commonplace that we now take it as a baseline expectation, even retroactively imposing it on settings that never required it.
Star Wars is a good example, because it doesn't require excessive amounts of lore to be understood; a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, society exists on a galactic scale and a mysterious energy called the Force informs the essential rules and running of lifeforms, which themselves include space cowboys, space samurai, space wizards and space princesses. But check the first sentence of the opening paragraph from Wookieepedia's article about, of all things, Darth Vader's glove:
We have collectively come to a stage of such excessive lore-mongering that something incidental, like Darth Vader's damned glove, apparently requires some kind of history of its own to be special. This ignores one of the essential rules of storytelling, though -- what makes something special is the impact it has on an audience. However, to care at all about Darth Vader (or his glove) in the first place, you probably need to have seen the original Star Wars films and have felt said impact in the first place. In turn, this makes the additional backstory of Vader's glove narratively redundant, because we already care about the characters involved in the culmination of the glove's story. And that was a very awful sentence to have to write.
As nerds, we often fixate on patterns, systems and chronology. It's part of what makes us carry the moniker of "nerd" in the first place. But we often do this without even reflecting upon it, taking this method of narrative experience as a baseline rather than one of many possible approaches to fictional experience. So I'm not saying that loremongering is inherently bad or always inappropriate.
But I think you might be making a little too much investment in the lore of a children's cartoon, to the extent that the actual writers probably care less than you do. Because details like that, the fictional facts that contextualise a setting to some degree, aren't what ultimately deliver the core of narrative enjoyment to a wide audience. It's all just commentary and subscript when compared to the nature of each moment, which is based on characterisation and plotting. Those are the elements of a story that emote the most deeply, and where a broad audience finds the bigger part of a work's appeal.
For most of us, Star Wars isn't appealing because it has laser swords and space dogfights and cowboys smooshed together into the same setting. It's appealing because we witnessed an excellent, emotive story told with sympathetic characters and latched on to those sci-fi/fantasy elements as shorthand reminders of that. And if you look at the expanded universes for similar properties, you'll see that many repeat the patterns of the main work of fiction in the setting rather than innovate. This is because they don't so much exist as independent stories in their own right, but to appeal to an audience that has already been enthralled by something with at least superficial similarity.
The humor, characters, fantastic elements, whimsy and human emotion of Adventure Time will always be the things I like most about the cartoon.
But I am also willing to admit that I am very interested in the backstory that surrounds the creation of the Land of Ooo and if I am more invested in it then the writers and creators will ever be, than so be it. But I don't think you automatically have to assume they don't care about it just because it's a kid's cartoon.
it is like half an hour to sunrise i am going to bed maybe
^^ I'm not saying they don't care about it. What I'm saying is that it's probably going to be subject to alteration at the whims of the need of a scene or episode rather than being written in stone. And that's really the better choice, because the way in which we experience lore is often tied to how invested we are in the story being told. To use Star Wars again, there was no setting bible from which its various revisers, directors, artists and so on drew from; it evolved naturally and was only "complete" as a setting at the end of Return of the Jedi. This is because those making it were first and foremost trying to create a good story, with the lore being a result of said story rather than being a steel cage of necessary context.
And this is coming from someone who certainly likes fictional lore. But as a subculture, we place it on this towering pedestal rather than seeing it as one of many tools.
alex it is the same time for you why aren't you in bed also
I don't want you to think I'm placing it on a pedestal, or that I'll get super mad if they change it.
I just like it where it is. Doesn't mean I won't like it somewhere else.