Of all the villains in Cartoon Network’s brilliant Adventure Time, Lemongrab might be my favorite. His origin story is very similar to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but where we might feel some sympathy toward Frankenstein’s monster, Lemongrab is so wretchedly awful, that we want only the worst for him.
Princess Bubblegum, who eschews the common-place magic of the land of Ooo, and instead navigates her world through science, creates sentient candy people in her lab. One of her failed experiments is Lemongrab. Lemongrab is somehow incomplete and different; he has a kind of psychopathy characterized by extreme selfishness and violence, and has to be banished from the realm. In his isolation and alienation, he becomes so despondent, and even weirder, that PB creates a second cloned Lemongrab as a companion. This agrees with Lemongrab’s narcissism. Then things get very awful indeed.
The two Lemongrabs start taking the lifetime of candy that PB has left them and using the formulas of her candy science, they create more lemon people. But they’re not very good at it. The Lemon people that they create are twitching and malformed things, actually scary and uncanny in a Jacob’s Ladder sort of way. Lemongrab's kingdom soon runs out of food. Every one is starving except the original Lemongrab has become morbidly obese with a penchant for cannibalism, and has apparently taken a bite out of the head of the cloned Lemongrab, who also fears him. The kingdom has become a totalitarian prison state, full of starving, unhappy lemon people. As a satire, he is more Kim Jong Un than Ubu Roi.
It is at this point one has to be reminded that this is ostensibly a children’s program.
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