I Love LA, Fionna & Cake, and the Familiar Hustle of Growing Up

I’ve said I’ll try to post more, but honestly, every time I sit down to write, I have a review I need to write and post elsewhere. So that means I end up letting this newsletter languish even as I get some new subscribers each week. Welcome, new folks, and I apologize to my older followers. The next few posts will most likely be like this one, recapping reviews I did other places and other things I’m working on. So I hope reading an elaborate linktree for a bit will be a little interesting.

So HBO has a new comedy on now called I Love LA. Here’s my review I wrote on RIOTUS with my thoughts on the whole season. I haven’t been a big fan of a lot of the current HBO darlings, Succession and White Lotus. I’m not interested in The Gilded Age either. The overreliance on shows about rich people and their focus just feels a bit out of touch. Out of touch by the network, the people making it, and the critics loving it. I think these shows are good, but the constant awarding and dialogue get a bit boring for me. Shoot, I haven’t even watched Hacks, and that premise sounded good to me.

What does that have to do with I Love LA? So while the characters in this are privileged, it’s the drive of most of the characters to get to a new place in their lives that interested me. The drive and the hustle, I resonate with that, as I spent so much of my twenties and thirties trying to make something of myself, before, in some ways, I just gave up and accepted defeat. In my review, I brought up Girls and Insecure as previous HBO shows that people would connect and compare this show to, with it being about women’s friendship, dealing with adulthood, career, relationships, and, in a sense, speaking for a generation. The real show that this first season felt like, though, is the more deep-cut show of How to Make it in America.

Check out this synopsis:

Now check out the first two episode synopses of I Love LA: 

From the start, I Love LA has a strong focus on Maia and Tallulah’s careers and how they are intrinsically tied together. They have to navigate the world of being an influencer and celebrity in Los Angeles just as much as Ben and Cam had to navigate the fashion industry in NYC at a time when blogs and streetwear were changing the landscape at such a speed that it was hard to get a hold on it. With Maia and Tallulah being college friends from college in NYC, you can even see the clashing ideas of how to move in the world while living and working with people in LA.

I really connected with How to Make it in America, as the characters were in creative fields. Since going to art school in New York – Brooklyn specifically, I had many friends up there in that world and the hustle of trying to make it. I even dabbled in fashion in my twenties with some close friends, which made this series very close to us as we’d call each other up and talk about the show each week. This new show just feels familiar, even if I’m not really connected to any of these characters and have only been in LA a very handful of times.

Seeing a series about young people attempting and possibly failing at making the lives they want for themselves in a United States after or during great financial upheaval just rhymes with the current state of things. Seeing so many articles about whether or not Gen Z will have a future, or if the generation is screwed or not, in the press. At the same time, most millennials dealt with the economic collapse of 2008, and if you want to be real, that initial time after 9/11 was not a fun time to try and start a career in these things; history rhymes. Times haven’t felt like Reality Bites in a long time.

That brings me to Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, season two—another series I reviewed on RIOTUS with themes that connect the two shows together. The one thing about Fionna and Cake that I find interesting is just how much the Fionna reality is about struggling to make it in a city on your own. While seeing all the different gender swapped versions of the characters is cool, we kind of saw most of them before when they were just the “imaginary” dream world of the Ice King. After becoming a “real” reality after the first season, seeing Fionna struggle after saving a universe taps into something even most of the superhero universes don’t do anymore – how do you live?

I like that Fionna and Cake have this tight friend group, like that you’d see in a show like I Love LA, these twenty-somethings just wanting to hang out and live their dreams. Gary Prince just wants to open his bakery and make great desserts for people. Marshall just wants to chill, be with Gary, and make his music. Seeing Fionna screw up in a place that Finn never has to, as Finn never has to worry about eating or having a place to live or what to do with his life. All these things Fionna and her friends have to do. Their adventure time, for the most part, is just life, like the people watching it.

As I wrote in the review, I like that with the Fionna and Cake show, it works in a place where the original kid audience of Adventure Time should be around twenty-five years old. I always liked how Finn would age along with each year it was on, and with the viewers as the show’s theme got more and more complex. I feel that now, with the series over and making the Distant Lands along with this, while having it on HBO Max instead of Cartoon Network or even Adult Swim, Adam Muto and the rest get to be more experimental in how far they can push this world and the shows they make from it. It makes me more and more interested in the other new things coming out animation-wise from the Warner Bros.-owned studios. So far, the visual aesthetics are great, the stories they are telling are fascinating, and they aren’t overly influenced visually by anime. We are getting something else, something new, and that is what I seek out the most.

One thought I should write about is how Adventure Time is about a world after the end of the world and growing up in the speculative idea, where Fionna and Cake is set in a place where we can feel like we might be at the end of the world. A world with no future vs a world that shouldn’t have had one. Damn, this cartoon is fire.

Not too long ago, I started a YouTube channel called July Collects. It’s where I try to play in the video content world and put up action figure unboxing videos and videos of different comic book stuff, someplace other than Instagram or TikTok. I like shooting stuff in widescreen vs portrait, and also longer than the super short form stuff that excels at that stuff. I have zero expectations to make money with this, but I do think I have my own viewpoint on collecting action figures and toys that I haven’t seen from other collectors online. I tried posting to IG and TikTok, and some did okay, but most of the time I just ended up recording videos and never posting them, and being too self-conscious about the quality and comparing stuff to other accounts and people that are better at video. Now I’m just not caring as much and learning more about editing. Buying two cameras this year also helped push me (even as it has hurt my pockets).

Alright, y’all, that’s it for this time. Talk to you all soon. Peace!

-Julian