2018 @theofficialdevotee - Tumblr Blog

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modogoblin

biglawbear

Feel like shit, just want her back

#gives me Lorax vibes #remember the city?

breadna

I drew the Once-ler with my left hand

/sob

lemonstarsprinkle

AMBIDEXTROUS

breadna

/sob Not Nilly omg

meowmart

weirfguyerg LMAO I TRIED….

wtf

pkmn-white-moved-blog

nightmares

rollingorange

GR8

kudalyn

I’m hip.

Wat.

vanillaoneesan

left hand + lack of sleep C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER

sharksylph-deactivated20180816

omg guys im cry

why left hand

why

starletheaven

I Wanna do it too!

….

I Tried C:

owlapin

HOW ARE YOU GUYS DOING IT SO WELL I SERIOUSLY TRIED LIKE 5 TIMES AND THIS WAS THE BEST ONE

dezzoi-deactivated20240303

omg holy shizz……..

vetranyx

am i the only left handed person here

a-onceler-sideblog

boy oh boy

pyreo

Describe, if you will, what you think Once-ler's first time having sex would be like.

…

-cracks knuckles-

He’s not gonna end up messing around with people he doesn’t know and trust. I definitely think you’d have to be very, VERY close before something like that could happen. No amount of flirting would do it - he might reciprocate but not really think about the implications. You’d need a well-established basis of continuous understanding and affection to get him to that point.

(Which hey, in the movie isn’t very likely to happen)

Since he has a knack for not seeing eventualities, it’d probably end up happening as natural progression rather than something that got discussed very much. As in, he and the other person are in a comfortable place where they snuggle or share a bed just for the purpose of being close and comfortable, and stuff snowballs from there. I don’t think sex really registers on his priority list, and neither does romance, really, for that matter, so he wouldn’t really think about it until it was on the verge of happening.

Once he DOES realise that’s where things are going, his characteristic bravado falters. He’s not stupid and he knows what’s going on, he’s just a little stunned that it seems to be happening to him. Being an easygoing, casual kind of person doesn’t hold up to a whole lifetime of inexperience.

So he’s incredibly nervous, he can’t quite believe the other person wants to do this too, and as much as he already knows that sex isn’t anything truly important to him, he can’t deny the weight of it on his nerves.

I mean when his entire being is a constant struggle to be good enough, and to meet other people’s expectations, he’s kind of going to feel that he has to live up to every ideal there is. But as long as they have a foundation of trust there, he could go through with it if he knew that no matter what happened, the relationship would stay the same.

I mean, in bed I think is the one place where he DOESN’T have to be a performer.

There’d be very awkward mumbles and whispers trying to figure out the logistics of getting together and “is that okay” and “tell me if it—” and other unsure questions. It’s not even sure who’s going to be on top - he probably should be, right? But things are more of a tangled mess and it doesn’t help that he’s all tall and can tie himself in knots even without another person’s help.

I don’t think it’d be a smooth ride and there’d be hiccups, but the kind you can chuckle at and bring up later with fondness, because it’s not really about how sexy it is, or if everything went perfectly, and it’s not a means to an end, it’s just the next step up from their affectionate relationship and whatever happens is its own reward and they’re only taking baby steps into it at this point. ‘Course with all the build-up and hesitation he’d probably have a hair trigger by the point everything started.

I also think there’d be a sub-plot where the Lorax figures out what’s going on and has to prevent Pipsqueak from climbing in through the window and gets him the hell out of there.

Oh, and at the end of it Once-ler’d be emotionally overwhelmed and physically exhausted and might actually have gotten all heartfelt and sappy and tearful if he wasn’t immediately fast asleep and wrapped around his partner too tight to be moved.

miru667

I went full self-indulgence mode last month and put Audrey in a leather jacket :,) She’ll save your life, then steal your wife~

Idk what this art technique is called but I drew this in ballpoint pen and then did major cleanup and sculpting in sai, all directly on the original layer. It was supposed to be just light touch-ups but ofc I went overboard P:

splorpo

ok so i'm new to tumblr. was the onceler really A Thing??? Were there legit just people out here going Yes I Want To Date Beanpole Bourgeoisie Boi and running with that??? i hear stories that the shipping was as bad or worse than the sans shippers and that's profoundly disturbing to me on every single level.

Anon, I’m struggling to think of the most succinct way to tell you about this. There is literally So Much to it, but basically the Once-ler was not only a thing, but the thing. You’d think that type of character would accrue a very small, niche fanbase, if at all, but that was absolutely not the case. Totally normal blogs would convert to Once-ler blogs en masse suddenly and without reason. He basically ruled 2012 Tumblr.

As with any wildly popular character, people really wanted to ship him with somebody. The issue here was that literally all of the human characters in his plotline were either side characters who appear for five seconds or his family members, so fans split him into two separate characters: the Once-ler (guitar hipster) and the Greed-ler (suit twink). They were then shipped together in one of the most infamous cases of selfcest in internet history, known as “oncest.” All of this was only exacerbated by the film’s weak writing. The Once-ler is never given a proper character arc and instead has a 180 flip into villainy toward the end of the film, which does indeed make him appear to be a completely different person. I am absolutely not condoning all of the weirdass shipping, but it is possible to trace the fan response back to structural issues in the film itself.

Eventually, people got bored of the whole Once-ler/Greed-ler thing and started making Once-ler OCs that were basically just AU versions of him. Much like the Sans fandom, there was an active community of askblogs, but in this case there were literally hundreds of them. I am not exaggerating here. I’ve seen multiple attempts to catalogue every single one, and I don’t think anyone has ever succeeded. The askblogs only piled on the notoriety because people had moved on to shipping their Once-ler OCs with each other, and that became a whole thing. Time went on, the fandom just kept producing content, and the most popular AUs developed full-on, self-contained plotlines. There were AUs of AUs. It never ended. The longevity of the fandom is probably one of the strangest aspects of it, but it definitely stemmed from the fact that there just was not a lot of content in the film, so fans had to produce it themselves. The Once-ler’s plot takes up about 35 minutes of an 80-minute runtime, aka 43%. That’s the length of like one episode of a TV show, if that.

As years passed and AUs progressed and piled up, a lot of Once-ler OCs had become so divergent from the source material that they were no longer recognizable as the Once-ler. There was a period of time where tons of them became normal OCs through a process that, I kid you not, was called “deoncelerization,” in which they were stripped of whatever remaining Once-ler-esque traits they still had.

The Once-ler fandom is often cited as the most cursed fandom to ever exist, but I actually don’t think it’s as weird as everyone thinks it was. Just about every aspect of it was directly caused by technical elements of the film, intentional or not. It’s honestly a fascinating look at what happens when a character is marketed a little too well and their resulting fandom is driven to desperation due to a lack of content.

northshorewave

This is a fascinating history, and I mean that sincerely, but it doesn’t get to the heart of what has OP (and me!) so morbidly curious. Why did people go so crazy for him in the first place? Like, obviously, not every side character in a forgettable kids’ movie in 2012 went so fucking thermonuclear. Was there just an underserved market for skinny emo-folk-looking cartoon dudes?

splorpo

I was trying to avoid opening this can of worms because it’s entirely separate from the can of worms that is the fandom history, but you asked, so it’s worm time! The short answer is that he was a perfect storm of a character who was engineered to sell to a specific audience and hit his mark at the exact right time.

What it all comes down to is how the film presents him. Of the two plots, the Once-ler’s is the only one that provides anything to get invested in. The A-plot, which centers on young boy named Ted, is paper thin and each character is so one-dimensional that they’re practically cardboard. The film is aware of this and leans into it hard, very specifically setting up the Once-ler as a good person who doesn’t intend to do any harm, and giving him a sad backstory in the form of a family who not only doesn’t care about him but pressures him into becoming evil. This is leveraged as a way to excuse him of his actions because the narrative operates in a morally black-and-white world where you’re either good or bad, and if you’re good then the consequences of your actions don’t matter because, well, you were good all along and didn’t really mean it. The Once-ler is a textbook woobie, which is a fandom term for a character you’re meant to feel bad for. Fandoms love woobies. They absolutely adore them. It’s not surprising that people became so emotionally attached to him considering how insubstantial everything else in the film is.

Of course, his design is a huge component of this too. Make no mistake: he was absolutely designed to sell to teen girls. He’s a lanky, goofy, ambiguously-early-20s pretty boy who’s kind and down on his luck and can play guitar. This specific brand of hipster was all the rage in the early 2010s. There are several concept designs for him that portray him as either middle-aged or nonhuman, so his final design was not just a fluke and was a conscious decision by the studio to help sell the film.

And then, of course, you have the added layer of what happens to both his design and characterization after he becomes a villain. It’s a common joke that the “Tumblr type” is a tall, thin, evil dude in a suit and that’s honestly pretty accurate. This is a character design that has proven immensely popular again and again. Unlike his hipster design, I do not believe this design was specifically chosen to appeal to teen girls; I think they just got lucky because said design type happened to be popular. So the Once-ler had dual appeal to people who love softboys and people who love edgy boys. Everyone who liked him because “aw he’s actually still a good person” could pull the classic “I can fix him” and write a zillion fics, while everyone else was free to characterize him as the type of unabashedly edgy evil that people on this site get super horny for.

And that’s it! The Once-ler was essentially an amalgamation of likability tactics in the middle of a completely hollow movie, and I think a ton of people bought into it because the film does its best to hide how little substance it has. That said, there was also a number of people who liked the character but thought the film either didn’t do him justice or just wasn’t very good. This only served to spur the production of more fan content as people re-imagined a version of the story that had more depth. So the studio’s intentional creative decisions created appeal, but so did the film’s deficiencies. There was also an amount of luck involved too. People are always quick to jump to “[character name] is the new Once-ler” when a male character starts gaining popularity among a predominantly female group of fans, but the circumstances which made the Once-ler the Once-ler are highly specific and exceptionally unlikely to be replicated again.