one of my favorite things to think about is that the time period in flapjack’s misadventures isn’t just the dark, plague-ridden middle ages; the entire cartoon takes place almost in the middle of the Little Ice Age.

it takes place in stormalong, a town in the middle of the ocean where the weather is often crap. if you look at history, by that time, an entire generation of chinese had already died early from weakened immunity due to the lack of a proper heating system (it was, after all, the Little Ice Age, when nature challenged humanity, and there was no summer for a very long time). starving rats began to approach human villages and feast on dead bodies. and then they quickly made their way to europe ^__^, which is how the bubonic plague was born.

flapjack, by the way, really loves rats and plays with them, despite the plague. little did he know.

It’s funny that in the cartoon, people eat either sweets and candies or seafood. there’s nothing else to eat. because of the colder climate, farmers’ harvests plummeted, and the price of wheat seeds rose. nothing grew. the seas and oceans froze so much that people from different countries could walk across the ice to reach each other. during the Little Ice Age, people were so terrified of the cold and hunger that christians thought god was angry, and they actually started “burning witches,” in other words, warming themselves by the fire where pagans and magicians were lying, the ones who once contradicted the christian idea of "only one god.“

so, it’s clear why captain k'nuckles doesn’t take off his jacket, and flapjack, even though he’s wearing a light shirt, still has a scarf around his neck. everyone is dressed relatively warmly, because it’s cold in stormalong.