McDonald’s ‘Adventure Time’ Happy Meals Pretend Girls Don’t Exist

Adventure Time, the hit Cartoon Network animated series, is known for its strong female characters. In fact, the Adventure Time creator, Pendleton Ward, takes a special pride in his ability to write girl characters without resorting to stereotypes and clichés.

“I feel like a lot of girl characters in anything usually end up being either extremely tough or extremely ditzy. There’s always some sort of extreme personality trait that they have,” Ward has said. “I like to try writing girls that feel like normal people, like normal women that you’d meet in real life.”

So, when McDonald’s licensed the Adventure Time characters for its newest line of Happy Meal toy premium giveaways, you’d expect that such wildly popular characters as Princess Bubblegum, Lumpy Space Princess and Marceline would be naturals to include.

And you would be — wrong.

In fact, the McDonald’s Adventure Time toys are exclusively boys, for boys. McDonald’s has kept separate promotions for boys and girls in recent years. While it would seem that Adventure Time would present a perfect opportunity to break this self-imposed gender segregation, apparently McDonald’s executives did not feel that way.

McDonald’s has categorized Adventure Time as a “boys” promotion — even though, as Bustle Magazine writer Caroline Pate points out, “Adventure Time is far from a show that’s ‘just for boys.’ There’s an entire Candy Kingdom with adorable talking candy people! There are an infinite amount of princesses on this show! One of them is even entirely pink!”

But the McDonald’s roster of Adventure Time toys is limited to the male characters Jake, Finn, Ice King and Beemo.

The Happy Meal promotion for girls offered simultaneously with the Adventure Time promotion offers a stark contrast. The web site Consumerist describes them as “six pink-heavy Paul Frank toys: a handbag, a journal, a sticker dispenser, a tin of stickers, a bobblehead, and a pair of ‘best friends’ bracelets.”

As Consumerist notes, the “boys” Adventure Time toys also do things. They bend, and are movable. The “girls” toys are simply passive objects.

“The division here is pretty clear,” wrote Bustle‘s Pate. “The boys go off and have imaginary sword fighting adventures while the girls… put stickers on things.”

No comment has yet been offered by McDonalds on the “boys only” Adventure Time Happy Meal toys.