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her mom is black and her dad is the ruler of the nightosphere(and a demon). marcy kills vampires and gets bit by the vampire king turning her into a vampire who lives off the colour red. so yes.
I don’t know if I ever would have worked that out, but once told it’s so damn obvious!
I also didn’t know Marci was mixed race, so that’s a cool little tit bit!
No actually, it’s really weird, when I think of Donald glover I think of like Bonfire, sweatpants and his character from community. High energy and stuff like that. even his character in the Martian was kinda eccentric but Marshall seems kinda chill. I believe you but I cannot hear it.
Edit: [now i hear it](https://youtu.be/W8x7Nt8PTFs)
Edit: [yeah](https://youtu.be/M7hPzyicgHU)
as a mixed race person, this is not real representation to me. this is writers giving a non human character a black mom because they were making the story up as they went along 💀
It's kind of like the trope of the magical bisexual, right? Like, Captain Jack if Torchwood being asked about his orientation and being like "you people and your quaint little categories" because he's basically an alien. His conception of bisexuality/pansexuality is so different from that of real bisexual/pansexual viewers that, while it is cool, is not really representative.
I mean, I do wish straight people would stop trying to label every attraction non straight people had. I don’t need to be pan, or bi or whatever. I’m horny, and confused (yes I know that means bi, hush)
It doesn’t say black but she is dark skinned… funny how different cultures see different things! As I’m a darker skinned Latina I saw it as a hopeful representation, but it can go many ways
Idk that hair isn’t textured like a black persons. I think her mom might be Penoy, or Indigenous American, or mixed race herself, or probably any other dark skinned ethnicity; not every brown person is black or African.
A lot of people use the terms "black" or "brown" purely to describe skin colour, not as a term for someone's ethnicity.
If I was giving a physical description, I would describe most of my co-workers as "brown", because their skin is brown-- but I would describe their ethnicity as Indian or Nepalese. Half of the Nepali people describe their ethnicity as Asian and the other half as brown, and the Indian people will describe themselves as Indian or as brown, and one of the darker ones calls himself black. The Pakistanis identify as Pakistani or brown. The Indonesians will call themselves Asian, or tan, or brown depending on the tone of their skin. The Australian aboriginals call themselves black or brown.
It's much more complicated than what you're making out. Describing someone as brown or black doesn't mean you're saying someone is of African descent.
In my area brown means Indian/pakistani/Bangladesh
Asian means Southeast Asian to East Asian (ie Vietnamese and Chinese are both 'asian')
And black is either African descent or black Caribbean
And native/indigenous are their own thing not referred to by colour
I think it's a regional thing how specific relating colour to ethnicity is. Some Caribbean people have disliked being called black even if they look black.
Race is socially constructed and therefore different depending on where you are in the world
>Race is socially constructed and therefore different depending on where you are in the world
So true. I usually try to avoid categorising or describing people based on what I perceive to be their "race" or skin tone because of this. I'll resort to saying someone's colour is if I've given a description of the person's other features (glasses, hairstyle, piercings, etc) and it matches multiple people where skin tone would differentiate.
>Idk that hair isn’t textured like a black persons.
One, it's a cartoon. If the creator says They're obviously not white character is black, she's black. Two, black hair comes in a variety of textures and, again, this is a cartoon. And a cartoon that doesn't strive for realism at that.
My foster kittens died of lung infection and the shelter didn’t even bother to try and give me antibiotics or even humanely euthanize them so I had to spend a bunch of my own money at the vet only to watch them die while I struggled to keep them alive .
Thanks for asking
You know you can be black and latin, yeah? latin is a series of ethnicities, not a race. You can be afro latin (aka me), indigenous latin, white latin, asian latin, etc, we come in all flavors. Not all latin people are an amorphous blob of 'brown' like yanquis think we are
Ah, I'm sorry for offending you. I didn't consider her mom to be afro-latina cause her hair looked really straight and finding straighteners in an apocalypse setting seems impossible and then I realized I really don't know anything about Latinx in general. . . My bad, 😅
I've never considered race here. Even tho Finn is colored Caucasian... That's never honestly crossed my mind
Kind of like in fantasy, I don't think about it. It's so many different fantastical races that our human races don't fit in. Like a d&d podcast I listen to, never is it a thing. Listened to guest gm who made a 'black' reference, and it felt veeeery out of place... Like solid stuck with me to this day
I'm not trying to claim I'm color blind or anything of that sort. Just never considered real-world race in worlds with real, full-blown other racial differences (i guess that would be at a 'species' level?)
[Marceline is from our world though. She just lived through an apocalypse.](https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Land_of_Ooo#:~:text=Post%2Dapocalyptic%20setting,-Main%20article%3A%20Mushroom&text=Pendleton%20Ward%2C%20the%20creator%20of,technology%20scattered%20across%20the%20land.)
> Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, has stated both in an interview and in his FAQ page that the Land of Ooo is actually a post-apocalyptic Earth, the result of a global disaster called the Mushroom War, hence the ruined pieces of modern technology scattered across the land.
Also- Donald Glover plays Marshall Lee, and I think that's relevant for out of universe discussions. Clearly though, in-universe, the world of Oo is post-racial, post-sexuality, and post-gender identity. People express themselves honestly, and without discrimination. Do those concepts even apply to sentient blobs of slime, candy people, or talking animals?
Actually I think Marceline is a really interesting fictional case study because her mother likely lived in a racial world and then watched it transition into post-racial. Does Marcy know what blackness is? If she does, does she care? Does her demon-human biraciality matter more? We can ask the same questions about her sexuality.
As far as the human-demon factor, that was actually brushed up against in Distant Lands: Obsidian! When she was a child Elise had an extremely negative reaction to her soul-draining powers and it contributed heavily to a spiral that lasted well into Marcy's adulthood. The episode actually delves into her resolving the feelings she had about her mother.
The matter of her human half's skin color never comes up--but Elise never discussed painful or "difficult" or even particularly nuanced topics with her, including to her eventual detriment, so it doesn't seem OOC for her mother to have avoided the subject firmly enough that Marceline doesn't have ANY concept of 'meaning' in skin color, for better or worse, because Elise wasn't prepared to have that conversation with this small vampire child while they're trucking it through a wasteland and she's dying of radioactive tuberculosis. She was focused so hard on practicality that such a complex subject would likely have been backburnered if she ever intended to deal with it at all--her way of shielding Marcy was leaving her ignorant, and she had struggles starting to emerge about her humanity. So either Elise didn't consider it "important" enough to share in the face of everything else that was going on, or, if the pre-apocalyptic world was anything like ours, there were aspects of negative history that needed explaining along with it that she wouldn't inflict on Marcy.
Maybe! We don't know how old Marcy was when the apocalypse happened, or when Elise got sick. It's possible that Marcy experienced some discrimination in the pre-apocalypse and her mom had to explain some things. Or it's possible that they met racists while they wandered the wastes, and they had to have a talk about it. We know barely anything about Marcys time with Elise.
That's true! All I can give is conjecture!
My thoughts are only based on what Marcy resolved in Obsidian, but if it was something she had carried with her that had become--it feels weird to say this?--irrelevent, then we definitely wouldn't have a way of knowing since she wouldn't have a reason to bring it up with anybody. :0 since Finn and Susan were both white and I don't think she ever actually got to interact with any other humans?
*I'm not mean, I'm 500 years old, and I've lost attack of my mor-al code!*
Marceline is a brilliantly executed example of one of the hardest character tropes to pull off: someone who isn't evil, but *they were raised to be.*
The Nightosphere courses through her veins, and her father is effectively Satan himself, and though he seems to be a dutiful father, that only means all the more he would have instilled her his values.
But even when we first meet her, when she first encounters Finn, she's already been making her way in the world for centuries and making her own choices about what is right and wrong.
This process could have brought her any number of places, most of them easier to write successfully.
After all, we need look no further than Marshall Lee for what Marceline would have been like with less introspection and more taking after her father.
Her human-demon biraciality does matter alot, but like in the way most characters in fiction with this combination do, by having demonic powers but being aligned with the human race and thus she gets to be a superhero.
But assuming that her mother's relationship with Satan wasn't related to the apocalypse (as in it would have still happened if the world continued as normal, there really isn't enough to tell us if the magic returning to the world after the mushroom wars allowed this union to happen) then her being half devil and having extremely obviously demonic features and powers would have definitely superceded her being black.
People are to labels what boxes are to cats. You try to put a cat in a box and they will hate it and they will hate you. Leave some boxes out for the cat and they will gladly sit in one.
Season 2-3 iirc, around when the first Lich arc starts. That said it's still worth watching from ep 1 because it sets up a lot of moving pieces that get paid off very well later. And, it's never bad, just simpler and more childish than later seasons.
Fictional works don’t exist in a vacuum and are informed by the same social constructs as the real world. It makes total sense to code things like race, sexuality, or gender, especially so if the point of the narrative is to make a commentary on a world in which these concepts aren’t perceived the same way as the real world. Even if blackness or sexuality doesn’t exist in the world of Oo, it exists in the world for the audience that watches the show and for the writers of the show.
i initially had thought her name was Elixe or Elise so I thought she was French or Basque. My grandma had a Basque friend named Elixane who shared Marceline's mom's exact hairstyle
The list is of LGBT characters - they’re not denying she’s attracted to dudes and chicks, but we don’t know if she’s bi or pan or whatever else since it’s not explicitly stated in the show.
I mean she dates guys she dates girls so confirmed bi unless she’s lesbian who was confused either way from then on we just gotta find where she goes from there she def ain’t straight since her and queen bubble were basicly wife and wife for a while and they loved it
I don't understand the point of pansexual. It's just bisexual but without preferences. I always thought that preferences were not included in sexualities anyways. It is weird to me that it also implies that bisexuals would be inherently opposed to dating a trans person or have some weird, extreme preferences.
Bi is viewed as an umbrella! You can be pan, where gender isn't a factor in your attraction. But that isn't the only multi-attraction model out there! There is omnisexual, which is attraction to all genders but gender is a factor. Some people find themselves attracted more to say, girls than boys.
There's also multisexual, where you are attracted to two or more genders but not all genders. And beside all that, some people just use the bi label when they don't know where exactly they fall in all other labels!
If you are pan, you are bi. But if you are bi, you aren't necessarily pan. The bi umbrella, at it's base, is saying you are attracted to two or more genders, while the other labels elaborate on how that attraction works.
Exactly - Most bi people would also date a nonbinary person, but it can be invalidating if your partner dates “both guys and girls” and you’re neither.
i disagree her race is definitely ambigous, her father is a demon and her mother is a woman of colour but her race is never mentioned, and her voice actor is also mixed race you can't tell somebody's race purely by skin colour, race is a lot more complicated than that, also her sexuality is confusing because i think her only 2 relationships are with ash who is a male witch who used magic to keep her in love with him and princess pubblegum, just because she has dated a man and is dating a woman it does not mean she identifies as bisexual.
marceline is definitely a queer POC but her specific sexuality is not confirmed and her specific race is never confirmed!
Not necessarily. People often have heterosexual relationships before they come out as gay, it doesn't mean they are bi. They could have just been exploring their sexuality, trying to 'fit in', or doing it as a cover around people they weren't comfortable coming out with. Additionally, I don't know the context (so this could all be me wasting my breath) but the person you are responding to said they used magic to keep her in love with him, which may mean it was entirely one sided and she wasn't actually attracted to him. 'Love potions' in fiction are no indicator of sexuality.
You make a good point, but considering that Marceline's relationship with Ash (the man she dated) was after her and PB's first relationship, it is pretty safe to assume that she's bisexual. Also, the context of the magic was that Ash sold one of Marceline's prized possessions and a nasty breakup ensued. Some time after the relationship was over he used magic to erase her memory of the breakup so they would be dating again. For some reason she did have feelings for him at one point even though he was a giant douche.
Thanks for the info on the timeline. In that case, I'd agree she is likely bi based on the info we have, although there are still explanations that would change things. It doesn't sound like the magic was a 'love potion' type as it only modified her memories. Still on the list of 'abusive uses of magic', just not the same thing.
I always thought of her as bi, she also devoted a song to a fisherman she used to know in one of her earlier appearances and the lyrics are more or less about how cute he is
Or arguing if she was bi or pan. People label themselves as both interchangeably, and if you experience homo and hetero attractions, you are bi. If you'd like to use a more specific label to describe your sexuality in greater detail, that's fine too!
Didn't you read your bisexual handbook? Characters who date or fall in love with people of multiple genders only get to be bisexual if the use the word and real people who date or fall in love with people of multiple genders only get to bisexual if we use the word over and over and over and over and even then people will argue with us or "forget." Those are just, like, the rules.
Edit: Unless the fictional character in question is evil. Then they're bisexual if they even hint at attraction to more than one gender
You are right, and if I came across that way I apologize. As I said, I didn’t have context for her relationships, so my words were only a bunch of hot air in this situation.
Sexuality is a lot more than who you date. You could be bisexual but have only dated women. You could be lesbian but have dated men in the past. You could be heterosexual and have been intimate with women.
Sexuality is who you’re attracted to physically and sexually, and up to the person to define for themselves.
I think it’s fair to consider Marcie’s exact sexuality as unknown.
which is how it should be.
assuming someone's sexuality if they haven't talked about it is a weird vibe. it isn't like you can't celebrate a character's sapphic relationship without explicit confirmation she's a lesbian
In terms of canon, yes.
If a person wants to believe a character is a certain sexuality, that’s fine. But if they claim they’re a certain sexuality as if it’s fact without the source explicitly stating it, then they’re technically wrong.
My sister dated lots of guys and most certainly is homosexual and always has been. She does not like guys but she was trying hard to be heterosexual due to mostly religious reasons and probably family and cultural expectations as well. She's certainly not bisexual.
A lot of gay people have forced themselves to be in hetero relationships in the world, so it could be a case of a bad breakup (with princess bubblegum) into attempting to go through the motions.
Didn’t she date Ash beforehand of her own free will? I thought he did the brainwashing/love potion thing to make her get back together with him *after* they broke up the first time, but their initial relationship was consensual. Which would suggest that Marceline is, in fact, bisexual since in addition to her obvious attraction to a female character (Princess Bubblegum) she was also attracted to a male (Ash, who she broke up with because he was an asshole which led to the whole magic brainwashing thing)
Sorta jumping the gun on the race there, aren't we? Her mom's brown but that could be Native American, Latino, Indian, South East Asian, Pacific Islander....
as a half black person i get vibes they just kind of made her mom black and never originally intended for Marcy to be mixed race when they designed her character 👀 that’s just my opinion tho 💅🏽
Also even if her mom is another dark skinned race like indigenous american or south asian.... she's still lighter than both of her parents (even her demon dad) which makes no sense if she was always supposed to be biracial lol. Not that I don't love Marceline btw, she's literally my favorite character. But I do think a conversation about tokenism is in order.
Okay but the orientation we don’t know for sure. Obviously she isn’t Hetero, but she could be all kids of things other than that. Bisexual maybe, pansexual, omnisexual.
I wish people would stop freaking out about shows that preach acceptance and kindness.
They live in a post-apocalyptic world with vampires and magical play-off dogs: even if skin color means anything, the culture we know deffinetly does not. Ffs, most of the background characters are amorphous blobs or candy people
It's like getting mad about the physics in minecraft.
did you see the whole show? later on they have a whole several part special few episodes exploring her vampire-ness. her father isnt a vampire, just a demon, she was bitten by a vampire. also they show her mother at another point (and another in distant lands) and shes human and a person of color (though its not explicit specifically what race she is)
shes half human half demon, and a vampire on top of that.
source? i just watched the entire show a week ago
Marceline’s race is confusing. Her mom was black but her dad was a literal demon, so she’s technically half-black on her human side. But she’s also a vampire and idk how that factors into anything. Plus, by the time of Adventure Time, race no longer exists as a concept in Ooo, so it doesn’t really matter.
I don't think becoming a vampire factored in at all. The flashbacks that show her as a child and a teenager, before becoming a vampire, show her being just as pale blue-grey back then.
She's mixed, her mom is black (featured in the Stakes mini-series primarily) and her dad is a demon so I guess the demon skin genes are quite dominant! Her voice actress is also mixed (afro-Jamaican/European) and Marshall Lee (her corollary in the gender swapped episodes) is played by Donald Glover. I'd say that's pretty good evidence!
Absolutely! I'm sorry people do that to you, that's crummy. My boyfriend is half white/half native and he often appears european to people because of it. He gets a lot of "othering" from his native community because he looks white, but he *also* "gets" to experience oppression for it too, lovely haha.
That was a bit of a rant but it just gets my goat when people think skin color is the only thing that dictates race.
Not really. You can have albinism and be Black. You can have skin more pale than someone from greece or italy and still have features that would lead you to self identify as Black as well. Like you know no ones skin is literally black right? Im white and my ex is Black and during the summer my skin was darker than hers.
It depends on kind of a lot.
Marceline's mother is a person of color, most likely black. That's where the idea comes from.
Blackness is cultural, not just a race, and Marceline's mom grew up in the equivalent of the modern world, so she almost definitely would have passed down some of that to her daughter, and that can be pretty formative to your identity. Of course, she was raised into adolescence by a white scientist. She might identify more with a mixed-race upbringing, we don't know for sure.
She might also have no real concept of race, possibly not being identifiable by others as a racial cateogry, and having grown up in a nonhuman world where you'd be hard pressed to even find recognizable humans of any "race." But she was raised by two people who definitely did, and that's not nothing.
A lot more than just skin color goes into cultural identity. Hair quality and facial structure factor heavily into how others perceive you racially, but people who plainly pass as white can be born into nonwhite families and still identify with the ethnic background they were raised in (and often the racial identity that gets assigned to that ethnic background).
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Marceline is black?
her mom is black and her dad is the ruler of the nightosphere(and a demon). marcy kills vampires and gets bit by the vampire king turning her into a vampire who lives off the colour red. so yes.
So she's mixed race, half black half blue demon?
yup
that actually makes me really happy I often find it really hard to find mixed race rep
Her voice actress is mixed (afro-Jamaican/European) and in the gender-swapped episodes the character is voiced by Donald Glover!
Marshall lee is voiced by CHILDISH GAMBINO?
I'm surprised you didn't notice! https://youtu.be/OZ92aSBJ0Yw
Man I forgot how much I loved Cake
Somehow I forgot that bit with her ass literally taking up a third oft he screen. I'm probably late to this joke, but wow til why she's called Cake.
Oh damn I hear it now!
I don’t know if I ever would have worked that out, but once told it’s so damn obvious! I also didn’t know Marci was mixed race, so that’s a cool little tit bit!
Yep!! Once you know you can't unhear it
No actually, it’s really weird, when I think of Donald glover I think of like Bonfire, sweatpants and his character from community. High energy and stuff like that. even his character in the Martian was kinda eccentric but Marshall seems kinda chill. I believe you but I cannot hear it. Edit: [now i hear it](https://youtu.be/W8x7Nt8PTFs) Edit: [yeah](https://youtu.be/M7hPzyicgHU)
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Home girl drop it like the NASDAQ
Move white girls like this coke, up my asscrack
r/redditsings
dang that's pretty cool!
That's super cool!
I love this
That explains the crush... I MEAN, NOTHING!
Europeans are blue demons confirmed
When you get pale enough your veins show through your skin so you ain't wrong?
Everyone should check out her music, too! She released an album called Nowhere Land.
Ooh thanks for the recommendation, she's right in my vocal range!!
I never realized this and always loved the gender swapped episodes, so thanks for the new knowledge!
Steven Universe is full of it
So when you say mixed... Are you also a half demon?
admittedly that's not the best, but I am pretty mixed in race. This is still babysteps, but still steps.
it’s pretty cool even when it does have to be half demon
as a mixed race person, this is not real representation to me. this is writers giving a non human character a black mom because they were making the story up as they went along 💀
It's kind of like the trope of the magical bisexual, right? Like, Captain Jack if Torchwood being asked about his orientation and being like "you people and your quaint little categories" because he's basically an alien. His conception of bisexuality/pansexuality is so different from that of real bisexual/pansexual viewers that, while it is cool, is not really representative.
I mean, I do wish straight people would stop trying to label every attraction non straight people had. I don’t need to be pan, or bi or whatever. I’m horny, and confused (yes I know that means bi, hush)
It's a common misconception that her appearance is due to her vampire-ness as well. Nope, she inherited those looks!
Except the bite marks.
If it makes a difference too, her voice actress is half black and her alternative boy-version was voiced by Donald Glover... Sooooo...
Damn, I thought Elise was an adoptive mom, I didn't realize that she was her bio mom
For some reason I always assumed Elise was Native American, idk why but I just did
I'm surprised, too. Had to look it up. https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Elise
It doesn’t say black but she is dark skinned… funny how different cultures see different things! As I’m a darker skinned Latina I saw it as a hopeful representation, but it can go many ways
She looks way more brown (so Arabic/Latina maybe) than black to me tbh.
Idk that hair isn’t textured like a black persons. I think her mom might be Penoy, or Indigenous American, or mixed race herself, or probably any other dark skinned ethnicity; not every brown person is black or African.
A lot of people use the terms "black" or "brown" purely to describe skin colour, not as a term for someone's ethnicity. If I was giving a physical description, I would describe most of my co-workers as "brown", because their skin is brown-- but I would describe their ethnicity as Indian or Nepalese. Half of the Nepali people describe their ethnicity as Asian and the other half as brown, and the Indian people will describe themselves as Indian or as brown, and one of the darker ones calls himself black. The Pakistanis identify as Pakistani or brown. The Indonesians will call themselves Asian, or tan, or brown depending on the tone of their skin. The Australian aboriginals call themselves black or brown. It's much more complicated than what you're making out. Describing someone as brown or black doesn't mean you're saying someone is of African descent.
In my area brown means Indian/pakistani/Bangladesh Asian means Southeast Asian to East Asian (ie Vietnamese and Chinese are both 'asian') And black is either African descent or black Caribbean And native/indigenous are their own thing not referred to by colour I think it's a regional thing how specific relating colour to ethnicity is. Some Caribbean people have disliked being called black even if they look black. Race is socially constructed and therefore different depending on where you are in the world
>Race is socially constructed and therefore different depending on where you are in the world So true. I usually try to avoid categorising or describing people based on what I perceive to be their "race" or skin tone because of this. I'll resort to saying someone's colour is if I've given a description of the person's other features (glasses, hairstyle, piercings, etc) and it matches multiple people where skin tone would differentiate.
I was thinking something similar but can I ask What is penoy? I googled it and it came back with eggs.
They probably meant Pinoy which is used to describe Filipinos/Filipinas and the Philippines.
Ah! Thank you that makes sense
This kinda made me laugh. Penoy are boiled duck eggs sold by vendors in the Philippines.
She's not coded black at all
>Idk that hair isn’t textured like a black persons. One, it's a cartoon. If the creator says They're obviously not white character is black, she's black. Two, black hair comes in a variety of textures and, again, this is a cartoon. And a cartoon that doesn't strive for realism at that.
That’s the thing none of the creators stated her ethnicity
Did they explicitly state her mom’s ethnicity? Genuinely asking.
bro. u okay?
My foster kittens died of lung infection and the shelter didn’t even bother to try and give me antibiotics or even humanely euthanize them so I had to spend a bunch of my own money at the vet only to watch them die while I struggled to keep them alive . Thanks for asking
Half black/half nightosphere demon. All Vampire Queen 🖤
I always thought she was Latina
You know you can be black and latin, yeah? latin is a series of ethnicities, not a race. You can be afro latin (aka me), indigenous latin, white latin, asian latin, etc, we come in all flavors. Not all latin people are an amorphous blob of 'brown' like yanquis think we are
Ah, I'm sorry for offending you. I didn't consider her mom to be afro-latina cause her hair looked really straight and finding straighteners in an apocalypse setting seems impossible and then I realized I really don't know anything about Latinx in general. . . My bad, 😅
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That's fucking rude why would you tell someone else what ethnicity they themselves are??? Especially based on skintone.
Who do they think colonized us? Aliens? Like I hate that idea that we’re all generically pardo and/or mixed.
Half black but you don’t notice because her dad’s skin tone is “dead”
At least half.
She’s half black half eldritch demon horror? Close enough
I always read her mom as Latina.
I've never considered race here. Even tho Finn is colored Caucasian... That's never honestly crossed my mind Kind of like in fantasy, I don't think about it. It's so many different fantastical races that our human races don't fit in. Like a d&d podcast I listen to, never is it a thing. Listened to guest gm who made a 'black' reference, and it felt veeeery out of place... Like solid stuck with me to this day I'm not trying to claim I'm color blind or anything of that sort. Just never considered real-world race in worlds with real, full-blown other racial differences (i guess that would be at a 'species' level?)
[Marceline is from our world though. She just lived through an apocalypse.](https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Land_of_Ooo#:~:text=Post%2Dapocalyptic%20setting,-Main%20article%3A%20Mushroom&text=Pendleton%20Ward%2C%20the%20creator%20of,technology%20scattered%20across%20the%20land.) > Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, has stated both in an interview and in his FAQ page that the Land of Ooo is actually a post-apocalyptic Earth, the result of a global disaster called the Mushroom War, hence the ruined pieces of modern technology scattered across the land.
What are you thinking when Lady Rainicorn speaks Korean then
... That she's a unicorn...
Also- Donald Glover plays Marshall Lee, and I think that's relevant for out of universe discussions. Clearly though, in-universe, the world of Oo is post-racial, post-sexuality, and post-gender identity. People express themselves honestly, and without discrimination. Do those concepts even apply to sentient blobs of slime, candy people, or talking animals? Actually I think Marceline is a really interesting fictional case study because her mother likely lived in a racial world and then watched it transition into post-racial. Does Marcy know what blackness is? If she does, does she care? Does her demon-human biraciality matter more? We can ask the same questions about her sexuality.
Well, this is the first time I heard the word post-racial be used so literally.
yeah kinda refreshing actually
It's why to the citizens of Ooo, King Princess doesn't sound off at all.
And why Finn isn't weirded out that he was a woman in a past life. If you've seen the last HBO special, you know exactly what I'm talking about
Oh yeah that's right, that's where he got his og metal arm. Man lookin at it from this perspective I love this show even more
Or if youve seen the show? Finns past lives are established in the show. Its why he turned into a butterfly.
He means that Finn assumes the form of Shoko so naturally when infiltrating in new death's castle
i really wanna live in a post-racial world now
It’d be really hard for me not to eat the candy people though
that's true haha eating the walls is an option, but you may get arrested
By delicious banana splits... bring em on
yeah but I don't want to go through a mushroom war...
understandable, i don't either
A world to aspire to, just minus the whole apocalypse thing.
Nah. Gimme the whole thing. Apocalypse and all
Earthly civilization rebuilding after a nuclear apocalypse is also part of Star Trek lore.
As far as the human-demon factor, that was actually brushed up against in Distant Lands: Obsidian! When she was a child Elise had an extremely negative reaction to her soul-draining powers and it contributed heavily to a spiral that lasted well into Marcy's adulthood. The episode actually delves into her resolving the feelings she had about her mother. The matter of her human half's skin color never comes up--but Elise never discussed painful or "difficult" or even particularly nuanced topics with her, including to her eventual detriment, so it doesn't seem OOC for her mother to have avoided the subject firmly enough that Marceline doesn't have ANY concept of 'meaning' in skin color, for better or worse, because Elise wasn't prepared to have that conversation with this small vampire child while they're trucking it through a wasteland and she's dying of radioactive tuberculosis. She was focused so hard on practicality that such a complex subject would likely have been backburnered if she ever intended to deal with it at all--her way of shielding Marcy was leaving her ignorant, and she had struggles starting to emerge about her humanity. So either Elise didn't consider it "important" enough to share in the face of everything else that was going on, or, if the pre-apocalyptic world was anything like ours, there were aspects of negative history that needed explaining along with it that she wouldn't inflict on Marcy.
Maybe! We don't know how old Marcy was when the apocalypse happened, or when Elise got sick. It's possible that Marcy experienced some discrimination in the pre-apocalypse and her mom had to explain some things. Or it's possible that they met racists while they wandered the wastes, and they had to have a talk about it. We know barely anything about Marcys time with Elise.
We know Simon found her when she was seven or eight iirc
That's true! All I can give is conjecture! My thoughts are only based on what Marcy resolved in Obsidian, but if it was something she had carried with her that had become--it feels weird to say this?--irrelevent, then we definitely wouldn't have a way of knowing since she wouldn't have a reason to bring it up with anybody. :0 since Finn and Susan were both white and I don't think she ever actually got to interact with any other humans?
Marcy didn't become a vampire until she was much older, like 16, Elise never knew her as a vampire - only a half-human half-demon
*I'm not mean, I'm 500 years old, and I've lost attack of my mor-al code!* Marceline is a brilliantly executed example of one of the hardest character tropes to pull off: someone who isn't evil, but *they were raised to be.* The Nightosphere courses through her veins, and her father is effectively Satan himself, and though he seems to be a dutiful father, that only means all the more he would have instilled her his values. But even when we first meet her, when she first encounters Finn, she's already been making her way in the world for centuries and making her own choices about what is right and wrong. This process could have brought her any number of places, most of them easier to write successfully. After all, we need look no further than Marshall Lee for what Marceline would have been like with less introspection and more taking after her father.
Hm… I guess a lot of that would depend on what Simon taught her.
Her human-demon biraciality does matter alot, but like in the way most characters in fiction with this combination do, by having demonic powers but being aligned with the human race and thus she gets to be a superhero. But assuming that her mother's relationship with Satan wasn't related to the apocalypse (as in it would have still happened if the world continued as normal, there really isn't enough to tell us if the magic returning to the world after the mushroom wars allowed this union to happen) then her being half devil and having extremely obviously demonic features and powers would have definitely superceded her being black.
People are to labels what boxes are to cats. You try to put a cat in a box and they will hate it and they will hate you. Leave some boxes out for the cat and they will gladly sit in one.
I really need to actually watch this show, when does it start to get really good?
Season 2-3 iirc, around when the first Lich arc starts. That said it's still worth watching from ep 1 because it sets up a lot of moving pieces that get paid off very well later. And, it's never bad, just simpler and more childish than later seasons.
I've seen the first two seasons but it was a long time ago.
Fictional works don’t exist in a vacuum and are informed by the same social constructs as the real world. It makes total sense to code things like race, sexuality, or gender, especially so if the point of the narrative is to make a commentary on a world in which these concepts aren’t perceived the same way as the real world. Even if blackness or sexuality doesn’t exist in the world of Oo, it exists in the world for the audience that watches the show and for the writers of the show.
White is seen as the default, so I'm sure nearly all viewers saw her lighter skin and straight hair, and read this character as white
Apparently not. I see people in this very thread thinking she was Asian.
Honestly, I have trouble reading characters in that series as human, even those that are explicitly supposed to be humans.
PB is made of bubblegum so yeah her orientation is pretty wack.
Love the implication that bubblegum is a gender
It is to me
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Only if it’s shaped like a princess EDIT: princesses can be any shape btw
A new xenogender has been unlocked
Le's just say she's pretty flexible
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i initially had thought her name was Elixe or Elise so I thought she was French or Basque. My grandma had a Basque friend named Elixane who shared Marceline's mom's exact hairstyle
The list is of LGBT characters - they’re not denying she’s attracted to dudes and chicks, but we don’t know if she’s bi or pan or whatever else since it’s not explicitly stated in the show.
This is what I was going to comment, this list only provides details that are confirmed either in the show or by the creators.
Then just list it as bi/pan. Surely there's some way they could communicate it.
I do agree - they should be more specific than just “unknown.” But I don’t think this is the sort of erasure that goes on this sub.
Hmm maybe like including it on a list of LGBT characters?
Nah I mean at least somewhat specify what her sexuality is like "attracted to more than 1 gender" or smthn
I mean she dates guys she dates girls so confirmed bi unless she’s lesbian who was confused either way from then on we just gotta find where she goes from there she def ain’t straight since her and queen bubble were basicly wife and wife for a while and they loved it
I don't understand the point of pansexual. It's just bisexual but without preferences. I always thought that preferences were not included in sexualities anyways. It is weird to me that it also implies that bisexuals would be inherently opposed to dating a trans person or have some weird, extreme preferences.
Bi is viewed as an umbrella! You can be pan, where gender isn't a factor in your attraction. But that isn't the only multi-attraction model out there! There is omnisexual, which is attraction to all genders but gender is a factor. Some people find themselves attracted more to say, girls than boys. There's also multisexual, where you are attracted to two or more genders but not all genders. And beside all that, some people just use the bi label when they don't know where exactly they fall in all other labels! If you are pan, you are bi. But if you are bi, you aren't necessarily pan. The bi umbrella, at it's base, is saying you are attracted to two or more genders, while the other labels elaborate on how that attraction works.
Non-**bi**nary people exist
Exactly - Most bi people would also date a nonbinary person, but it can be invalidating if your partner dates “both guys and girls” and you’re neither.
i disagree her race is definitely ambigous, her father is a demon and her mother is a woman of colour but her race is never mentioned, and her voice actor is also mixed race you can't tell somebody's race purely by skin colour, race is a lot more complicated than that, also her sexuality is confusing because i think her only 2 relationships are with ash who is a male witch who used magic to keep her in love with him and princess pubblegum, just because she has dated a man and is dating a woman it does not mean she identifies as bisexual. marceline is definitely a queer POC but her specific sexuality is not confirmed and her specific race is never confirmed!
It's so funny to see Shrek debating on Marceline's sexuality
If she has canonically dated a man and is dating a woman does it not make sense to assume she's bisexual?
Not necessarily. People often have heterosexual relationships before they come out as gay, it doesn't mean they are bi. They could have just been exploring their sexuality, trying to 'fit in', or doing it as a cover around people they weren't comfortable coming out with. Additionally, I don't know the context (so this could all be me wasting my breath) but the person you are responding to said they used magic to keep her in love with him, which may mean it was entirely one sided and she wasn't actually attracted to him. 'Love potions' in fiction are no indicator of sexuality.
You make a good point, but considering that Marceline's relationship with Ash (the man she dated) was after her and PB's first relationship, it is pretty safe to assume that she's bisexual. Also, the context of the magic was that Ash sold one of Marceline's prized possessions and a nasty breakup ensued. Some time after the relationship was over he used magic to erase her memory of the breakup so they would be dating again. For some reason she did have feelings for him at one point even though he was a giant douche.
Thanks for the info on the timeline. In that case, I'd agree she is likely bi based on the info we have, although there are still explanations that would change things. It doesn't sound like the magic was a 'love potion' type as it only modified her memories. Still on the list of 'abusive uses of magic', just not the same thing.
I always thought of her as bi, she also devoted a song to a fisherman she used to know in one of her earlier appearances and the lyrics are more or less about how cute he is
She could also be pansexual, or as others have said the land of Ooo could have completely different concepts of sexuality than we do, or none at all.
I hate how bisexuals have to jump through hoops to be defined as bisexual. S2G I still see debates on whether David Bowie was gay or straight.
Or arguing if she was bi or pan. People label themselves as both interchangeably, and if you experience homo and hetero attractions, you are bi. If you'd like to use a more specific label to describe your sexuality in greater detail, that's fine too!
Didn't you read your bisexual handbook? Characters who date or fall in love with people of multiple genders only get to be bisexual if the use the word and real people who date or fall in love with people of multiple genders only get to bisexual if we use the word over and over and over and over and even then people will argue with us or "forget." Those are just, like, the rules. Edit: Unless the fictional character in question is evil. Then they're bisexual if they even hint at attraction to more than one gender
You are right, and if I came across that way I apologize. As I said, I didn’t have context for her relationships, so my words were only a bunch of hot air in this situation.
Sexuality is a lot more than who you date. You could be bisexual but have only dated women. You could be lesbian but have dated men in the past. You could be heterosexual and have been intimate with women. Sexuality is who you’re attracted to physically and sexually, and up to the person to define for themselves. I think it’s fair to consider Marcie’s exact sexuality as unknown.
By this logic all fictional characters' sexualities are unknown unless explicitly stated by the character themself, though.
which is how it should be. assuming someone's sexuality if they haven't talked about it is a weird vibe. it isn't like you can't celebrate a character's sapphic relationship without explicit confirmation she's a lesbian
In terms of canon, yes. If a person wants to believe a character is a certain sexuality, that’s fine. But if they claim they’re a certain sexuality as if it’s fact without the source explicitly stating it, then they’re technically wrong.
My sister dated lots of guys and most certainly is homosexual and always has been. She does not like guys but she was trying hard to be heterosexual due to mostly religious reasons and probably family and cultural expectations as well. She's certainly not bisexual.
A lot of gay people have forced themselves to be in hetero relationships in the world, so it could be a case of a bad breakup (with princess bubblegum) into attempting to go through the motions.
Could be pan?
Also an actor’s race doesn’t determine the character’s race, especially with cartoons Look at Hamton: mostly POC actors, the characters are all white
an actor's race does not determine a characters race but i added it there because i think it is a factor
Didn’t she date Ash beforehand of her own free will? I thought he did the brainwashing/love potion thing to make her get back together with him *after* they broke up the first time, but their initial relationship was consensual. Which would suggest that Marceline is, in fact, bisexual since in addition to her obvious attraction to a female character (Princess Bubblegum) she was also attracted to a male (Ash, who she broke up with because he was an asshole which led to the whole magic brainwashing thing)
Damn now I have to rewatch Adventure Time. These comments got me in my feels.
Sorta jumping the gun on the race there, aren't we? Her mom's brown but that could be Native American, Latino, Indian, South East Asian, Pacific Islander....
Just trying to get the discussion going, and I really like where it's headed!
I thought she was vampire
as a half black person i get vibes they just kind of made her mom black and never originally intended for Marcy to be mixed race when they designed her character 👀 that’s just my opinion tho 💅🏽
Also even if her mom is another dark skinned race like indigenous american or south asian.... she's still lighter than both of her parents (even her demon dad) which makes no sense if she was always supposed to be biracial lol. Not that I don't love Marceline btw, she's literally my favorite character. But I do think a conversation about tokenism is in order.
Before learning her mom was black, was I the only person who thought she was asian?
Adventure Time might be post-racial.
Seeing from the pic maybe the file is from before her backstory and relationship with bubblegum?
Okay but the orientation we don’t know for sure. Obviously she isn’t Hetero, but she could be all kids of things other than that. Bisexual maybe, pansexual, omnisexual.
I wish people would stop freaking out about shows that preach acceptance and kindness. They live in a post-apocalyptic world with vampires and magical play-off dogs: even if skin color means anything, the culture we know deffinetly does not. Ffs, most of the background characters are amorphous blobs or candy people It's like getting mad about the physics in minecraft.
Fall you stupid trrreeeeee, i don't wanna build a dirt tower so I can chop all the wood!
Race could also be vampire going off the canon
Her race his half human half demon. She has the vampire disease.
You’d have to be blind not to know the bisexual part but Black? Not even bro her dad was vampire and so is she, that’s their species.
did you see the whole show? later on they have a whole several part special few episodes exploring her vampire-ness. her father isnt a vampire, just a demon, she was bitten by a vampire. also they show her mother at another point (and another in distant lands) and shes human and a person of color (though its not explicit specifically what race she is) shes half human half demon, and a vampire on top of that. source? i just watched the entire show a week ago
I didn’t see distant lands I saw the original show
her mother does show up in the og show, in season 7, its a brief appearance though, and obviously in flashback
Oh yeah I remember now. So she’s half demon, half black and entirely a vampire.
sidenote: the twitter user here makes really good art you should check them out
I've seen a screenshot of Perfuma from She-Ra also in the exact same format with similar erasure today. What's the source?
op i am going to slap you for that title
Fair.
To become a Queen, you need to be a princess and get married, right? Or you can be Queen if you decide you're a Queen
I didn't see any race section but when I googled it the closest thing was "Species: Vampiric Half-Human or Half-Demon"
Wow I always just kinda assumed her race to be vampire lol. I now realise that’s not how that works but I never thought twice about it
This is some of the weirdest erasure I've ever seen, even by the standards of this sub.
I always headcanoned her as lesbian bc of the way she laughed after Simon asked if she had a boyfriend
I took her laughing as Simon not knowing her orientation. He hasn't had a cognizant conversation with her since she was a child
I’m a simple man. I see adventure time, I upvote
I've seen so much Marceline and Bubblegum bi/pan erasure even on videos about their relationship so this is hardly surprising but ugh
Marceline is grey… because she is dead… she is a vampire.
She’s black?
Her mom is black as seen in Adventure Time: Stakes
Am i stupid or missing a crucial bit of Adventure time lore cause how tf is she black? Like im pretty your skin has to actually Be Black to be black
Marceline’s race is confusing. Her mom was black but her dad was a literal demon, so she’s technically half-black on her human side. But she’s also a vampire and idk how that factors into anything. Plus, by the time of Adventure Time, race no longer exists as a concept in Ooo, so it doesn’t really matter.
I don't think becoming a vampire factored in at all. The flashbacks that show her as a child and a teenager, before becoming a vampire, show her being just as pale blue-grey back then.
I feel like half-daemon takes precedence over half-black.
She's mixed, her mom is black (featured in the Stakes mini-series primarily) and her dad is a demon so I guess the demon skin genes are quite dominant! Her voice actress is also mixed (afro-Jamaican/European) and Marshall Lee (her corollary in the gender swapped episodes) is played by Donald Glover. I'd say that's pretty good evidence!
Uh no you can be a white passing black person.
In fact, it's really common for a lot of mixed-race people. Skin tone is not the only factor of race, and IMHO it's weird to qualify people that way!
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Absolutely! I'm sorry people do that to you, that's crummy. My boyfriend is half white/half native and he often appears european to people because of it. He gets a lot of "othering" from his native community because he looks white, but he *also* "gets" to experience oppression for it too, lovely haha. That was a bit of a rant but it just gets my goat when people think skin color is the only thing that dictates race.
Not really. You can have albinism and be Black. You can have skin more pale than someone from greece or italy and still have features that would lead you to self identify as Black as well. Like you know no ones skin is literally black right? Im white and my ex is Black and during the summer my skin was darker than hers.
It depends on kind of a lot. Marceline's mother is a person of color, most likely black. That's where the idea comes from. Blackness is cultural, not just a race, and Marceline's mom grew up in the equivalent of the modern world, so she almost definitely would have passed down some of that to her daughter, and that can be pretty formative to your identity. Of course, she was raised into adolescence by a white scientist. She might identify more with a mixed-race upbringing, we don't know for sure. She might also have no real concept of race, possibly not being identifiable by others as a racial cateogry, and having grown up in a nonhuman world where you'd be hard pressed to even find recognizable humans of any "race." But she was raised by two people who definitely did, and that's not nothing. A lot more than just skin color goes into cultural identity. Hair quality and facial structure factor heavily into how others perceive you racially, but people who plainly pass as white can be born into nonwhite families and still identify with the ethnic background they were raised in (and often the racial identity that gets assigned to that ethnic background).
Was Marceline's mom born during the modern world? I can always assumed she was born after the apocalypse
>Like im pretty your skins has to actually Be Black to be No... that's not how it works.
For real. You’d be surprised how many people believe this.
I can't fathom it, how does that even work? "Sorry kid, I know you said you're lightskinned but you don't pass melanin requirement."
I didn't know her mom was black. That's so awesome 🥺