Fiona and Cake promotional material.

Fiona and Cake is a new adult animated show streaming on Max debuting on Aug. 31, and airing its last episode on Sept. 28. It serves as a sequel to the original “Adventure Time” series airing from 2010-2018.

Unlike Adventure Time, however, Fiona and Cake is more geared towards adults. While the original Adventure Time series was appealing to all ages and did not shy away from adult themes and story presentations (especially in the ladder half of the show), it was technically a kid’s show.

Fiona and Cake, however, decided to grow up with its audience and gave itself the official adult rating. With most of the kids who grew up watching Adventure Time now in their early 20s, it was a relatively safe and not overly jarring decision to make the show with an older audience in mind.

With the change of this rating, the show is now able to feature curse words, violence, and blood much more prominently than its predecessor was able to. This is quite a profound change as it does not feel polarizing or edgy in the slightest. It just feels like the next natural step for the franchise.

The show continues the story of Adventure Time following two new characters Fiona and Cake and the old returning character Simon Petrikov. The heart of the show is undoubtedly the storyline between Simon and his love Betty, continuing where they left off from the original Adventure Time show.

Fiona and Cake obviously serve as stand-ins for Adventure Times’ main iconic duo, Finn and Jake. They’re not just gender-swapped alternates, however (they technically are actually, but they stand as good characters in their own right just fine).

One issue I have with the show is half the title, Cake. While I do not hate the character of Cake and don’t despise her mere existence, I do not love her. Fiona is just as morally righteous, arrogant, and silly as Finn ever was. Cake does not relate in the same way to Jake. While I was not expecting or even hoping for exact character duplicates of Finn and Jake, I feel the deviations made for Cake specifically, really do not add anything of substantial value to the character.

While Jake was easy-going, loving, and intelligent, Cake is far more arrogant, condescending, and aggressive. I just find this to be a strange direction to take the character as none of the mentioned traits are all that likable. Except for Cake being strong-headed and unafraid to murder evil monsters when needed, there’s not much else to redeem her.

Cake is not a bad character by any stretch of the imagination, I just feel slightly disappointed in the final product. The possible reasoning for this change in character for Cake could be to better reflect how cats act in real life compared to that of dogs.

My favorite episode of the show is its second, titled “Simon Petrikov.” While this episode does not have as grand of scope as the rest of the show, it does have a very focused one. The entire episode serves as a check-up on Simon Petrikov, better known as cured Ice King.

The episode follows Simon after the ending of Adventure Time where he struggles with the loss of his lifelong love, Betty. He also struggles with opening up to many of his friends and getting over his time as the Ice King.

This episode does an amazing job of showing the true hopelessness of being in a dark place in your mind. Things like uncontrollable outbursts of anger, the crippling sense of dread that comes with panic attacks, and a real lack of feeling purpose in life without someone are all excellently depicted in this episode.

It was this episode that most obviously justified the adult rating this show received. Not because it was the most violent or vulgar episode in the show, but because of how maturely it handled its depiction of depression. It’s quite refreshing to see an uncompromised vision like the vision of this episode reaches the light of day. As many things nowadays tend to be “universally accessible,” or “safe and formulaic.”

This show also has some seriously awesome villains as well, both new and returning. The main antagonist throughout the show is the new “Scarab,” who serves as a sort of multiverse police to deal with Fiona and Cakes’ shenanigans.

He is not only funny and entertaining, but far more importantly, an actual intimidating threat. You can really feel the writers being unburdened by their previous “kids show” rating they had with how intense they make the Scarab. Scarab plays zero games and is horrifying with his relentless blood-lusting pursuit after the main cast.

However good the new Villan may be though; he is never topping The Lich. One of Cartoon’s most iconic and horrifying villains. The Lich makes his epic return in Fiona and Cake and while there is not much of him, what we do get is simply amazing.  While he is not very prevalent in the show his presence can be felt and seen throughout the show. He sort of acts as an multiversal constant, like how Uncle Bens death in the Spider-Man story is a constant as well.

There is also the chaos of God Golb, better known to Simon as Betty. Golb serves as an intimidating force of nature throughout the show but due to Simon’s connection with her, she is quite the sad villain.

It is somewhat complicated but essentially Betty saved Simon from his demise by fusing with the chaos God, Golb. This separates Simon and Betty from one another forever. But despite these cosmic powers the two still end up being able to say goodbye to one another in a bittersweet ending that offers a satisfying conclusion for both of them.

Fiona and Cake is refreshing and inspiring in the field of lazy modern media that simply regurgitates previous ideas that worked. It would have been so easy for the show writers to just re-do the original adventures from Adventure Time with a new similar cast of characters.

Instead, Fiona and Cake evolved and matured into the next natural step for the Adventure Time franchise to take. Risks are a great thing and I am extremely glad Fiona and Cake took this risky step.