#i'm going to rewatch Tooth Fairy soon. sorry for the person i'll become again

[starleska]

i just had an ancient fandom memory unlocked which i need to share with you all 🙈 many of you are far too young to remember the halcyon days of early-2010s-Tumblr...particularly a pre-Once-ler Tumblr. so there may be a good chunk of you who weren't present for the insanity that was the Portal fandom, and specifically the fixation around Wheatley: one of the earliest Tumblr Sexymen 😳 so strap in for a little Tumblr Sexyman History...!!!

meet Wheatley, your companion and later-turned-antagonist in the enormously beloved Portal 2. bumbling and never able to shut his digital mouth, Wheatley is a Personality Core: a type of artificial intelligence housed in a metal sphere, developed by Aperture Science. specifically, Wheatley is an Intelligence Dampening Sphere. he was developed to attach to GLaDOS, the main antagonist of the whole series, to distract her with a litany of terrible ideas 😂

however, Wheatley doesn't remain amiable for long. in a scheme to dethrone GLaDOS and escape the facility you (or your playable character, Chell) are trapped in, you perform a core transfer, placing Wheatley in GLaDOS's chassis. the sheer power of being in control of the entire facility immediately goes to Wheatley's head, transforming him into an evil, sadistic, Machiavellian figure who forces you to perform test after test for his own satisfaction. also, he has a British (Bristolian!) accent. you can see the recipe for obsession, right? 😂💖

however, this was a time wherein fandom tastes were a little different. while today we are delighted to obsess over characters with unusual designs (and particularly thirst over characters of the robot/android/objectum/etc. variety), 'White Twink Humanisation' was rife in the early 2010s. if you've seen humanisations of Bill Cipher and ideas of what Cecil Palmer looked like, as well as the site's preoccupation with pale gangly weirdos (David Tennant and Matt Smith's Tenth and Eleventh Doctors come to mind), you can imagine that the urge to humanise Wheatley was huge.

enter Stephen Merchant: Wheatley's actual voice actor, who just so happens to be a six-foot-seven, gangly, nerdy British guy. fanfic author Wafflestories wrote an extremely well-known Wheatley redemption fic called Blue Sky, wherein Wheatley is able to control a hard-light human version of himself...who bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Stephen Merchant. the Portal fandom unanimously decided that human Wheatley looked just like Stephen Merchant—a design trend we still see today!! 😳 here's where the cursed forbidden memory comes in. we were so goddamn obsessed with Wheatley. we wanted to see him as a human so badly. so we went through Stephen Merchant's filmography, and...

this is Tracy, Stephen's character in Tooth Fairy (2010), starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson 😂 Tracy is a wingless caseworker fairy assigned to the Rock's character Derek, an ordinary man who becomes a tooth fairy against his will. Tracy is...unhinged. bizarrely intense. a delightfully weird and memorable character in a movie that can only be described as a fever dream, played with idiosyncrasies only Stephen Merchant is capable of. i recently found out it was directed by Michael Lembeck, who directed both The Santa Clause 2 and The Santa Clause 3 🙈💖 yes. for some ungodly reason, plenty of us Wheatley simps decided that not only was Stephen Merchant the faceclaim for human Wheatley...but this specific iteration of Stephen Merchant as a wingless tooth fairy. Tracy had his own little dedicated fanbase complete with ask blogs and fanart and extended Tooth Fairy lore. of course Tracy's popularity was helped along by his dapper dress sense and his...interesting personality. there was even a joking trend called 'Tracy Goes Insane 2011', wherein fans made a significantly more yandere, knifemurder-esque version of Tracy after he finally snapped. truly incredible 👏 so there you have it. we all started simping for a silly little metal ball who got drunk on testing juice and went full Joker mode, decided that he needed to resemble his tall, handsome voice actor, and consequently became obsessed with his stint as a deranged tooth fairy. and so it shall be written. thanks for reading 🙏💖