I’m learning to play Part of the Madness on guitar. It might take me the next few months, perhaps longer. I’m not preparing for a performance. This is simply a song I want to spend some time with.
It was written by Rebecca Sugar for Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, and the reason I chose it has a lot to do with Simon Petrikov.
There is something about his story that feels familiar to me: coming out of a chapter of your life, seeing things differently, and still not knowing what you are supposed to do next.
Spoilers ahead for Adventure Time and the beginning of Fionna and Cake.
Becoming yourself again
When we first met Ice King in Adventure Time, he was the strange, lonely character who kidnapped princesses and desperately wanted someone to marry him. Then, as the series continued, we learned about Simon—the person underneath the crown.
The crown gradually took away his memories and sense of self. After the Mushroom War, he relied on its powers to protect a young Marceline, even as using it meant losing more of himself. Knowing that history changed the way I saw him. His behaviour was still troubling, but there was now a person behind it whose story was painful to watch. Simon’s backstory
In the original series finale, Simon is restored to his human self inside GOLB. Betty, his fiancée, wishes for the power to keep him safe and merges with that cosmic being of chaos. Simon gets to live as himself again, but without being able to return to the life they once shared. Finale background
That is where his story becomes especially meaningful to me.
Being free of the crown does not make everything fall into place. In Fionna and Cake, Simon is still trying to find where he belongs. He has survived something enormous, but the world has moved on, and becoming himself again has left him with questions he cannot easily answer.
When I hear Part of the Madness alongside his story, I think about that uncomfortable space.
You have another chance. You can see things you couldn’t see before.
What are you going to do now?
The certainty I used to have
My life is obviously nothing like Simon’s. I don’t have a thousand years of history behind me, and there was no magical crown responsible for my decisions.
But I do recognise the feeling of looking back at yourself and seeing someone you understand differently now.
In my earlier years of teaching, I was outspoken about work. If I thought something should be done, I would go for it. I could be firm, bold, and very sure of myself.
I could also be stubborn.
When I found a way of doing something that seemed more efficient, I often assumed it was the better way. Other approaches could seem unnecessarily slow or complicated. Sometimes I dismissed them before making much effort to understand why someone worked that way.
I was focused on what I wanted to achieve. I didn’t always give the same attention to how the people around me felt.
At the time, that confidence made it easy to move forward. I had an idea, I believed in it, and I pushed. There wasn’t always much room between deciding I was right and acting as though I was.
Looking back, I can see the things I overlooked.
Efficiency was not the whole situation. Other people had experiences, concerns, and priorities I hadn’t properly considered. My confidence in my own approach didn’t mean I understood theirs.
That is uncomfortable to admit, especially when I remember how certain I felt.
I don’t want to turn my past self into a villain. But I also don’t want to describe stubbornness as determination and leave it there. Some of what I once saw as a strength needed questioning.
A different perspective, and then what?
In recent years, I have begun to see things differently.
I am grateful for that. I can recognise more of what I missed, and I want to do something worthwhile with that understanding.
But there is also an emptiness I find difficult to explain.
I used to have a very clear sense of how I wanted things done. Now, I question that certainty. I think more about other perspectives and about the limits of my own. That feels important, but it doesn’t automatically tell me how to move forward.
I don’t want to go back to assuming my way is best. I still want to contribute, create things, and care deeply about what I do.
I’m trying to work out how those things fit together now.
That is what I mean when I think about another chance. I haven’t been handed a completely new life, and the past hasn’t disappeared. I have a different perspective on the life I already have. There are things I would approach differently if I encountered them again.
What will I actually do with that?
I don’t know yet.
Simon’s circumstances are very different, but his uncertainty gives me something to recognise. The part that stays with me is what happens after the change: having to live with what remains, find a place for yourself, and decide what comes next.
This is my personal connection to the song. Someone else might hear it and think about something entirely different. For me, it brings up the distance between the certainty I once had and the person I am still learning to be.
Learning a song that means something to me
I found Charles Alexander Allred’s guitar arrangement of Part of the Madness, and this is the video I’m currently learning from. If you would like to try it too, he shares the sheet music and tabs in his description.
I wanted to share this because the song is precious to me. Whenever it plays, I get very emotional. Thinking about Simon’s story and the things I recognise in my own life makes me want to learn how to play it myself.
I’m taking it very slowly. When it comes to guitar, I rely a lot on watching, listening, and muscle memory. I listen to how a passage sounds, watch how it is played, and practise it again and again until my fingers begin to remember where to go.
But if you ask me to read the chords, tabs, or arrangement perfectly, I can’t. Having the music in front of me doesn’t mean I can immediately turn it into something I can play. I need to hear it, see it being played, and spend a lot of time trying it myself.
That’s what I mean when I say I’m a visual and audio learner with the guitar. Watching someone play helps me in a way that looking at the notes alone often doesn’t.
It will probably take me a few months to learn this one. For now, I wanted to share the song and the arrangement with you, because they mean a lot to me. If you listen, I’d love to hear what you feel.
