7 Reasons You Should Be Watching Adventure Time

It didn't take long for Adventure Time to become a cultural touchstone, at least for Internet-surfing youth. The wildly popular Cartoon Network series, which begins its fourth season tonight, started out as a viral hit. Since then, it's spawned a lot of cosplay and fan art and probably even more slang.

Though Adventure Time airs on kid-friendly Cartoon Network, as opposed to the cable station's grown-up counterpart, Adult Swim, it's not strictly for kids. In fact, most of the hardcore fans I've encountered at conventions are young adults captivated by the stunningly adorable art and quirky, often subtly meme-referencing humor of the show.

Adventure Time follows a boy named Finn, his dog Jake, and pals like Princess Bubblegum, Lady Rainicorn, Marceline the Vampire Queen and Lumpy Space Princess. They travel across the Land of Ooo, sometimes battling the Ice King and other villains. If you've never seen the show before, you should. Here's why.

If you go to conventions or like to sift through fan art online, then you probably know that gender bending existing characters is pretty popular. (Check out our story on the Gender Bent Justice League from San Diego Comic Con 2011.) There's even an Internet Rule about the phenomenon, Rule 63.

The folks behind Adventure Time proved they know what's up with the fans when they swapped genders of their own characters in the episode "Adventure Time With Fionna and Cake." Finn becomes Fionna, Princess Bubblegum becomes Prince Gumball and the Ice King, naturally, becomes the Ice Queen. The writers then one-upped the online masses by swapping gender and species when they turned Jake into a cat named Cake. While this exceptionally popular episode isn't a regular feature, the show's penchant for picking up on below-the-radar trends is.

When you need some cheeriness, images of rainbows and unicorns can do the trick almost as well as videos of kittens and puppies. This makes Lady Rainicorn the perfect pick-me-up for the end of a long day. The rainbow/unicorn hybrid is Princess Bubblegum's steed. She's also Jake's girlfriend, who speaks Korean unless she's wearing a translation device. She's smart, brave and really good at video games. She can also shoot pixellated-looking rainbow rays out of her horn that change the color of the objects they hit.