Marceline the Modern Vampire Queen

Thanks to the popularity of Bram Stoker's Dracula, we now have a myriad of inspired and unique modern vampire characters to choose from in all sorts of genres.

You have Alucard, the fuck-mothering Vampire in horror, Edward Cullen, a.k.a. "Mister Bad Boyfriend slash Poor Role Model for Boyfriend" in romance, and somewhere in the middle is that one vampire Johnny Depp played in "Dark Shadows" for drama.

And then you have Marceline the Vampire Queen.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just Marceline being chill in her debut episode.

Marceline is as her name implies: the queen of vampires. She is radical, musically talented, unbound, wily, powerful, and, as of a recent miniseries, has become a complex and deeply developed character.

Not something you can say often about a cartoon character, let alone one from Adventure Time.

Her introduction into the cartoon was a commandeering of the tree-house home of the main characters Finn and Jake, which can be seen as a parallel to Dracula's invasion of London, England, albeit with less bloodshed and more musical numbers.

Marceline can transform into a wolf, a bat, change her size and shape, make herself invisible, and is able to suck blood. She just prefers to eat shades of red. Ain't that refreshing?

Her powers are the same as Dracula's, as seen above, but with added soul-sucking powers thanks to her demon father, Hundson Abadeer. As a way to make her more G-rated for the show, she is changed from a blood drinker to a red-color drinker. In other words, she can eat shades of red for nutrition.

You know, for kids!

Marceline also shares a common feature with Dracula involving sexual tension and homosexual undertones. Although, while Dracula has more of a male homosexual nature defining his character, Marceline has a female homosexual tension between her and Princess Bubblegum. This was heavily speculated before the two were even in the same episodes, and it wasn't until a certain Comic Con that Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, admitted there was some "history" to the two royals.

I will admit, they do look nice together. And recent episodes do add into this . . . 

Marceline's episodes are also laden with sexual innuendo, or seem to have some sort of sexual content that is absent from most Adventure Time episodes. In "Henchman", Marceline had a line where she asked Finn whether a man's tie looked like a woman's bra or not. She also lets another line of innuendo loose in the episode "Go With Me" when Finn asks her to the movies. She says "Fine . . . but no tongue", much to the preteen's shock and disgust.

The content goes on from there, including some rather interesting lines from her in the episode "What Was Missing" regarding how she wanted to "drink the red from (Bubblegum's) pretty pink face". This also falls underneath the homosexual undertones of her character, but is far more overt than Dracula's claiming of Jonathan to the vampiresses.

Why Marceline is a conduit for the show's more sexual tones is unknown to me. Is it because of her age and her vampiric nature? Is it because of her physical appearance and voice? Is it a teenage thing, or is an attractive monster thing?

And then there's this: how can I call Marceline a complex character when all I have covered is her being a vampire with a sexual identity?

I can answer that with this.

This is when fans of the show know to get the tissues ready. 

What separates Marceline from other vampires in fiction, aside from being in a cartoon, is her strong characterization and backstory. The show takes great strides in her depth and development, as recently proven with the eight-episode miniseries of her losing her vampirism and regaining her humanity.

The episodes do a wonderful job of giving Marceline a proper backstory and amazing origins. She was once a precocious kid, cared for by her mom, and was the daughter of a demonic being. She was taken in by a man who was succumbing to madness from an inanimate object, and her best memories are the ones she considers to be filled with people she cared about.

Her favorite thing: a stuffed toy, a monkey doll named Hambo, given to her by the same man who helped her.

This is when you realize the man here is the Ice King, and that I Remember You was about Marceline and Simon Petrikov/Ice King rekindling their friendship.

Her struggle: getting her powers back and saving the Land of Ooo from the King of Vampires and the tarot-themed villains that were released when she renounced her vampiric powers.

Her development: realizing that she was who she was, and that she had matured as a human and a person.

This makes Marceline the Vampire Queen a strong character, and an even better example of avampire done right in modern writing.

. . . Wait, why are you still reading?