#and this film had TERRIBLE creative decisions due to its profit-incentivized storytelling

[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.