Not counting the ones I’ve accidentally vacuumed, there are at least a million LEGO bricks in my house. My seven-year-old son’s collection is so big that it can’t all fit inside the gigantic chest that we purchased specifically for storing LEGOs. Every LEGO in the house belongs to him… at least until this weekend. Now I have a small collection of my own. 

It’s really not a collection. It’s actually a single set. And it doesn’t actually live at my house. It’s at work on a shelf next to my quilting machine: my Adventure Time LEGO set. 

My son had never seen the show. So, as he and I put everything together, I gave a kind of Cliff-Notes retelling of the episodes that I could remember.

If you haven’t seen it, the main character Finn the Human, and his best friend Jake the Dog, constantly find themselves confronting one crisis or another across the Land of Ooo, driven by a compulsion to save anyone who needs saving. It’s strange and incredible. Every episode is nonsensical and silly, but they’re always asking some kind of legitimately thought-provoking question, which you wouldn’t expect from a show that stars a shape-shifting dog. 

Like, how far will you go to protect your friend when she wants something that will hurt her? Or, what if you save someone, but the act of saving them makes someone else’s life worse off? Or, what if you save someone who uses his newfound freedom to bully someone else?

My son, the super hero trainee, says he wants to be like the swashbuckling Finn. But not me. I’m Marceline the Vampire Queen. I saved building her for last. 

At first she’s an evil an evil prankster, but after Finn confronts her, they become friends. She’s not bored and jaded like you’d expect from an undead bloodsucker. She’s artsy and complex, not afraid of anything. And deep down, she’s a sweetheart.

My seven-year-old can’t answer any of the complex philosophical questions that Adventure Time is asking below the surface. But the questions will be there when he’s ready, and so will I. For now, though, he just wants to play LEGOs, and I’m ok with that too.

Song credit: Parachutes Fail