Fionna and Cake Adds a Beautiful Wrinkle to Adventure Time’s Best Time-Travel Twist
The show’s most tragic love story just got even better.
It was only a matter of time before Simon’s story circled back to Betty. Casual Adventure Time fans know Simon Petrikov best as Ice King, the deranged (if mostly harmless) ice wizard obsessed with capturing princesses. But over the course of 10 seasons, Adventure Time peeled back the layers to reveal one of the show’s saddest stories. Now, the spinoff series Fionna and Cake is adding one more wrinkle to Ice King’s tragic life.
We’re about to get into all that, but first, here’s a quick refresher on Betty’s story in Adventure Time.
Who Is Betty Grof in Adventure Time?
Voiced originally by Lena Dunham and later by Felicia Day, Betty was Simon’s fiancée 1,000 years before the events of the show. After he found a magic crown and lost his mind, she left him, and they never saw each other again. That is until Adventure Time Season 5, Episode 48 (yes, that’s correct, Episode 48), which both introduces Betty and brings her into the show’s main timeline.
Simon creates a time portal to find Betty in Adventure Time Season 5 Episode 48, “Betty.”
At the start of the episode, Ice King (who’s been kept alive for 1,000 years thanks to the powers of the crown), suddenly loses his magic and reverts back to his old self. Aging rapidly as his powers wear off, Simon digs through his old possessions and is reminded of Betty. Then, using a bit of borrowed magic, he creates a portal through time so he can talk to Betty — and hopefully find out what happened to her after she left him.
But in a brilliant Adventure Time twist, we learn that Betty actually left Simon for... Simon. She leaps through the shrinking portal and joins Simon in the show’s present.
Betty with the Ice King in a later episode of Adventure Time.
Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a happy ending. Simon is still dying of old age, so Betty decides to turn him back into Ice King to save his life. She then sets out on a quest to fix Simon, but along the way, she winds up losing her own mind through the use of magic — notice a pattern?
In Adventure Time’s series finale, the god of chaos, GOLB, swallows Ice King and Betty whole. Through his powers of entropy, GOLB transforms Ice King back into Simon. Meanwhile, through some complicated canon trickery that I won’t bother explaining, Betty merges with GOLB itself, becoming the freakish cosmic god pictured at the top of this article.
That’s where we left Betty, but in Fionna and Cake Episode 8, we learn a whole lot more about her backstory.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Fionna and Cake Episode 8 👑
When Simon Met Betty
Simon and Betty in Fionna and Cake Episode 8, “Jerry.”
In Fionna and Cake Episode 8, “Jerry,” our heroes find themselves stuck in an abandoned wasteland. It turns out, this universe was conquered by the Lich, a disciple of GOLB who made good on his quest to destroy all life. While they navigate this barren version of the Land of Ooo, Simon distracts Fionna with the story of how he met the love of his life.
I won’t go into too much detail here because it’s worth watching the episode yourself, but the gist of it is that Simon was a hot-shot professor and Betty joined him on an expedition. For a while, they were just colleagues, but after a couple of bold gestures, they fell in love and became engaged. The story ends with Simon and Betty happily together while an original song by Karen Harvey called “Everything in You” plays. (You can listen to the song here, at least until it gets removed from YouTube.)
There’s still more of Simon and Betty’s story to tell. And hopefully, someday, in some universe, they have a future together as well. But for now, just knowing the details of how they met and fell in love makes that original Adventure Time episode — and Betty’s leap of faith into the future — all the more beautiful. Even if it also makes everything that happened to her afterward all the more sad.
