A Mental Vault

Have you ever unknowingly put on a show, and later realized that that episode will rattle you for years on end after the fact? Well, that’s what happened to me in 2013 at the age of 15, and the show was Adventure Time. This episode exposed me to something that I was subconsciously doing, that the main character Fin was also doing. Terms I had never heard of before but felt strangely familiar with began to flash before my eyes. Phrases like ‘repressed memory’, ‘mental vault’, and ‘that’s where the stuff I can’t handle goes,’ put me in a spiral of questions that ultimately led me to a rabbit hole of weird answers on the internet.

I think we all have a little Fin in all of us because we all have that mental vault we put things in that we can’t handle. Whether it’s a ‘cringy’ moment of embarrassment, disturbing trauma from your past, or just about any moment you’d like to never revisit, we all have that vault within us with the key never in sight.

The episode ends with Fin concluding that to solve his problems, he must visit his ‘vault’ and face his problems head-on. I still find this to be one of the deepest connections I’ve formed with a character. And for a cartoon show airing on Cartoon Network to get that deep and profound is pretty impressive.