As a narrative medium, TV valorizes stasis. Most shows rely on maintaining a narrative status quo in order to tell ongoing stories within a comfortable framework for an audience. The Friends live in the same apartments with largely the same jobs for almost a decade. The characters of The Office dream of leaving Dunder Mifflin but rarely do. And every difficult antihero makes the same mistakes ad nauseum until it’s time to end the show and collect syndication money.
So it makes sense that TV tends to be, at best, skeptical of new technology—and, in particular, skeptical of virtual reality.
At best, TV depictions of VR take it as a useless curiosity. Take the Community episode where the Dean wastes a boatload of money on an outdated VR system, a purchase that serves as a vehicle for visual spectacle without making anyone’s life easier. At ther times, VR is mildly threatening — Star Trek created an entire sub-genre of holodeck-gone-wrong episodes, though there VR mostly exists to create a sense of adventure. And often, it’s outright murderous, as in Black Mirror’s recent VR “Playtest” episode (which is closer to augmented reality, though the technology is presented in a way that blurs the distinction).
Adventure Time, the beloved Cartoon Network show, is a strange candidate for a complex take on VR. But then again, Adventure Time has always had a strange relationship with the future. The show is frequently simple and childish, befitting its subject matter and intended audience (several of the characters are talking pieces of candy). But it has consistently maintained a darker side, and a skeptical view of technology stemming from its post-apocalyptic dystopian setting. When your sparkling world of magical creatures was created by nuclear fallout-related mutation, it’s hard to be so optimistic about the possibilities of new technology.
In Islands, a new Adventure Time miniseries kicking off the show’s eighth season, Finn (a human, and our main protagonist), Jake (a magical stretching dog, our secondary protagonist), Susan Strong (also human, with mysterious cybernetic origins), and BMO (a cool robot and game system, addressed as “they”) set off on a boat to visit islands far away from the series’ primary setting of Ooo. In the process, they answer one of the show’s biggest questions: What happened to all the humans? The answer, it turns out, is intertwined with the series’ view of technology in general, and virtual reality in particular.
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Source: thereisonlyr