GGOOOOD MORNING!
Welcome to my Once-ler fandom sideblog!
And by Once-ler fandom I also mean The Lorax but y'know.
This is a place for me reblog things that fellow fans have created and weigh in with analysis and reviews about askblogs because that's what I love to do!
I'll still have some content on my main but this is a more high traffic pure Once-lery goodness kind of blog.
Feel free to contact me anytime! I love to talk. I love to talk about theories regarding the canon and fannon including askblogs~
Gh, how many years has it been?? Like, 7? That's what the blog says so um! HII anyone who still follows this sideblog! If you don't know where else I am located it may have been a while since i've shown my face round these parts. I've been lerking a bit, lets say... But overall I haven't actually been over on this account very much other than for mod duties.
I have been thinking of making this sideblog active again. I don't think I'm going to go back to my anotherler blog for a slew of personal reasons, but you can still consider me tumblr user anotherler if u wish UuU
But I've just been reminising about the Lorax stories, all three adaptions and the fandom as a whole and I think it would be nice to direct that energy to this blog again, maybe discuss things with you folks again? Every single time The Lorax is mentioned it just activates me like a sleeper agent, so I'm very much Not over it.
I also de-oncelerized Cheapskate-ler, (I said I never would but I have since seen The Light ) though Cheapskateler STILL exists in various incarnations actually, so now I just have even MORE Cheaps. And he's still my fav guy. And honestly he didn't even change THAT much. I feel like it's obvious to tell he was a Once-ler and honestly I like it that way. I hope Everybody Knows.
But yeah! We'll see where this goes. I was already thinking about writing an essay/thinkpiece about the Lorax and im really hankering to draw some more Once-ler it's been TOOOO long and I love him so much still ;__; 💚
So!! Hello again everyone and hope you've all been well!
Me, 6 years after the movie came out, still angry: I understand why ‘Biggering’ was scrapped and reworked into 'How Bad Can I Be", but why did they have to cut the Lorax’s speech to The Once-ler that wasn’t too dark for a kids movie and actually introduced a very important idea about pride, greed, and being blindsided by one’s own selfish goals? Anyway, in this essay I will
I dunno if you or some other folks saw Fudge-ler on my main. She was a my designated Once-ler I got from the absolute godsend IstheOncelerFandomStillAlive blog.
I was gonna be hush hush about her before but since I’m not making a blog for her and she might eventually be forgotten, here is some of the details.
Im a simple man...I like for the title of the Once-ler to have deeper meanings or in this case...double meanings.
So this is Fudge. If you look up the definition of “fudge” you might get a good idea of what she’s like.
She’s super sweet and makes Truffufudge™ and other treats with materials from truffula trees. She’s got an official cookbook and baking videos featuring herself.
She’s a bit of an older lady...probably mid 30′s going on 40′s. She’s motherly and kind and her brands make everyone smile! Everyone adores her and she’s a household name.
....but.
Nobody really knows how she conducts her business or what she’s like when the cameras aren’t rolling. She’s extremely wealthy and runs her company impeccably and strictly. Rumors have circulated about her employees being manipulated or treated unfairly but who believes that? Nothing about her in the news or in the tabloids or any magazines have ever suggested that. Surely people are just trying to sully her good name!
Well...I’ll stop beating around the bush and cut to the chase. In a meta sense she is a representation of companies with branding that make them out to be your friends or honorary family when in actuality...their practices are immoral and they’re just feeding you lies. The Once-ler already has signs of this aspect but with Fudge-ler I turn it up to 11. I like to explore different aspects of the corporate beast because I find that to be some of the most fascinating things about the Once-ler’s story.
Part of my motive for making her was that I wanted a female Once-ler as well...and hilariously her first outfit there was really self indulgent for me to design. I think think it’s so adorable :” )
Then I had to design an outfit for her that reflected her true nature...as something she would wear when conducting business in her dimly lit office...sitting in her enormous chair with her imposing gaze on the poor sucker who didn’t do his job quite right.
I feel like the content given to us from all media pertaining to the lorax is a great sandbox for thinking about different kinds of Once-lers.
Errr...let me elaborate.
SO there wasn’t really a Once-ler fandom save maybe...two randomly scattered people who never interacted before the 2012 movie came out.
You can’t come into my house and tell me that people were not interested in the Once-ler beforehand...he’s got to have appealed to someone....like even just one person. That’s the way it is with everything.
Anyways!
Long long ramble under the cut.
I’ve always found it kinda strange that the natural course the Once-ler fandom took was to branch off from canon askblogs to alternate versions and further on into increasingly varied character designs all revolving around the same idea.
Eventually it did not matter what your Once-ler character looked like. They could have naturally ginger hair, any colour of eyes, different heights and body types, they could be different genders...they didn’t even have to be human. So long as they did as Once-lers do they would still be considered such.
It’s gotten to the point where the definition for what a Once-ler among the askblog overworld should be in the fandom is a bit of a mixed bag containing a handful of common traits; typically all Once-lers would have similar destinies even if they had different manners of conducting business. Usually a Once-ler has a few of these traits and obvious links to the source material....any 3 of them.
And the odd part about this is...we’ve sort of seen it before the fandom even popped up.
The original Once-ler was a completely anonymous figure. The most you would see of him are his yellow eyes, his feet in the TV special and above all his iconic long green gloves. And when you saw the rest of his family they were all presented the very same way. In the TV special, all the residents of his town were the same.
You had no way of knowing if they were even human figures. That actually never crossed my mind. I thought of Once-lers as being another one of Seuss’s fantastical creatures, but they are an obvious symbol of aspects of human nature at the very least.
Because of this, you could really imagine him to be any way...and the Once-ler could really be anybody. He doesn’t even have a proper name. It’s more of a title.
To me, it translates to “Has-been” It may not even be his true name but who needs to look into specifics? It was probably never meant to be that way.
What’s important is that is who he is. The TV special takes this further by extending the name of the Once-ler to everyone.
“For he’s a jolly good Once-ler aren’t we all?”
Anyone has the potential to do what the Once-ler did. It could be anyone looking any way, coming from any particular background. You know so little about the Once-ler that you might project someone you know onto him...like someone you know in real life who acts in a similarly careless way or someone you heard about on the news.
Arguably, the 2012 incarnation of the Once-ler gives him the most humanity he’s ever had making him out to be a character that can be sympathised with while you realize that what he’s doing is wrong and selfish. You may not feel sorry for him, and that’s natural. That’s all up to your feelings, but the movie pushes his sympathetic and relatable sides.
I kind of like that about him. It feels harder to disconnect from the character and say that you could never be in the same position as him when your ambition takes you too far and you use others for your own personal gain all while making excuses and insisting you’ve done nothing wrong. The only problem is Illumination does not focus on how his choices are his own and it seems from a surface glance that he was purely pressures and a victim of circumstance...but that’s a topic for another day.
The point Im making is that the idea of the Once-ler is a flexible one. It’s easy to re-imagine him with a somewhat different personality, him taking a different course of action, running business a little differently, looking different, dressing different and prioritizing different things. His appearance and motives in the original series are that easy to modify.
It could be that people speculated about the Once-ler when all there was was the books. I’ve seen people play with those ideas with their blogs among whatever fun and self indulgant things they want to do, and honestly that’s the best.
People made all this great content because they wanted to fill the gaps and pose “what ifs” about this character. It grew into something unprecedented.
I for one prefer when people address the nature of corporations, selfishness and greed and human nature in their blogs and in all these years I have seen a lot of it. It all ties back into the themes present in the source media. With a lot of people, these themes just crop up by sheer fluke when they flesh out these characters and put them in these situations.
I really love to see what people come up with and what will become of their ideas. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I love this fandom and the askblogs in it.
Everyone is always drawing other characters in the Once-ler’s iconic green suit, so why not draw Once-ler in the outfit of another character similar to him?
Here’s Once-ler doing a clothes swap with Clive Dove! In part to compliment Andy’s drawing of Clive in Once-ler’s suit!
Of course the outfit is also sized to fit Once-ler’s proportions cause otherwise….it would not work. LOL.
Illumination’s “The Lorax” has long been the subject of controversy amongst fans and critics alike, many citing that the movie’s consumerist undertones, overly pandering, fairy-tail ending, and superfluous characters take away from the original message. Indeed, outside marketing for the movie often conflicts with the story’s environmentalist outlook, the 2012 Mazda CX-5 commercial being a primary example of this.
In addition, some also argue that the character designs may hold an impact, stating that, “Removing the anonymity of both the Once-ler and the originally unnamed boy, now dubbed ‘Ted,’ distances viewers from the very real world problem of both deforestation and the monopolization of industries.” This, of course, is referring to the Once-ler and “Ted’s” roles as stand-ins for both large corporations and, of course, the viewer, eliciting a message of direct action and personal responsibility.
That being said, animation does come with its own set of challenges. While keeping the lead character out of sight may be feasible for a twenty minute animated short, viewers may grow tired of the gimmick over the course of a full length feature.
In hindsight, however, the answer is almost frighteningly obvious.
In order to keep viewers visually invested, while still maintaining a sense of personal authority, the Once-ler’s design should have been taken to the next conceivable level. It would depict him as, not the late 2000s vision of a “lovable and dorky hipster”, designed to appeal to young teens, but instead as a horrifying fleshy mass that spews acid at other organics when their heat signatures register as too close.
Lye Co Imagineers have drawn up a side by side comparison, showing both the original design and the improved variation.
The Onceler - Original Design (2012)
The Once-ler - Reimagined as a Horrible, Writhing Mass of Flesh Beyond Your Comprehension (2018)
I felt like Old Once-ler wasn’t getting enough love so I drew him!
He’s actually got an excellent design himself. I like how they decided his facial hair should look and the long thneed scarf he wears.
If any of you are out there lamenting that Once-ler is a bad guy and a jerk, look no further than Atonement Grampa™ for all your pure and good Once-ler needs.
Also the second pic there was a joke pic of him wearing one of the outfits worn by the grandpa in “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” the timeless animated classic………………………..as requested by tumblr user @traveling-madness
