If Marceline is supposed to be the archetype of the teenager, then a proper reaction would be: how would anyone be able to break that cycle unless they were immortal as Marceline is? And the proper response would be: we don’t need to be immortal, because we can tell stories like Marceline’s.
It’s interesting to see that he’s able to convince Marceline by pointing out that, as one who’s lived thousands of normal lifespans over, she’s in a unique position to see and recognize the cyclical nature of conflict. The true Emperor-Tyrant here is the cyclical fate binding Marceline to a life of continual conflict and confusion. But Vampire King’s teaching goes beyond demanding Marceline to defeat him: he’s asking her to defeat the processes that control her destiny, just as he is seizing his own destiny by destroying his vampirism. The Emperor of the tarot is a symbol of the father patriarch, or on a greater scale, a ruler of the material world, who at first protects and dictates, but eventually must be overtaken in order for a consciousness to progress along the life path of the Major Arcana. In this request, Vampire King is instructing Marceline as to the meaning of his tarotic position, just as the battles with the Empress, Hierophant, Moon, and Fool did before. Towards this end, he requests that Bubblegum cure his vampirism the way she did Marceline’s.
But true to his kingly nature, the Vampire King can’t stand to be enthralled, especially to an endlessly recapitulating sequence of events. If this were to occur, he indicates that Marceline would be turned into a vampire again, forced to re-perform her torment again and again, and he would die. After warding off their infantile attacks, he explains that his own resurrection is an opportunity to escape the wheel of destiny, which dictates that he, as a vampire, must battle Marceline, as one who hates vampires as part of her guardian complex. It seems there was some truth after all to the arch-vampires’ attempts to plead with Marceline the King wishes to no longer be a Vampire King.
The crew’s final conflict with the King of Vampires, the Emperor, was nothing as they expected. In the final episodes of the miniseries,”Checkmate” and “The Dark Cloud,” Marceline progresses not only through the stage of the Emperor (the tyrant to overthrow), but also, in oblique references, further stages of the tarot as well, to win finally an object of desire that both she and the audience have probably known all along. Throughout the miniseries episodes, the writers have made use of the tarot’s esoteric symbology to characterize the changes and realizations that have to occur in order for the teen to adolesce in a healthy manner, in a fabulous, modern-day retelling of what some interpreters see as the tarot’s primary meaning. Just as Finn enacted the basic mystery play of childhood, the “Stakes” miniseries oversees the next logical step, in which Marceline enacts the basic myth of teenagerdom, of transitioning from teen to adult.
The series’ sixth season culminated with Finn’s confrontation of childhood’s primary conflict, that we have no ultimate control over what happens next, and that we need to be okay with that. In the last installments of Adventure Time‘s “Stakes” miniseries, “Checkmate” and “The Dark Cloud,” Marceline confronts the Vampire King, whose unexpected proposal leads to the culminating battle between Marceline and her deepest fears.