#me: descole f*ckers write too many essays also me: writes an essay

[oncie]

why clive is THE ‘tumblr sexyman’ of the professor layton fandom; a short thesis written at 5am.

“descole fits sexyman tropes more than clive does” no he doesn’t. look at my url. this is coming from someone with a long long background of once-ler fandom and sexyman studies (and terrorising the pl fandom with clive/once-ler ship art LOL). SO. im educated in this matter is what im saying. the once-ler, AKA the ORIGINAL tumblr sexyman, SHAPED an entire generation and put the term tumblr sexyman in the internet vernacular which also made this whole competition exist in the first place so you better show some RESPECT to that man’s name.

clive’s polarising personalities: outwardly charming and friendly (future luke), inwardly malicious and spiteful (clive). his story arc: his selfishness and delusion leading to irredeemable destruction followed by his commitment to atonement even if it meant his lifelong imprisonment. he’s even got a weird kind of father figure in his story who tries to save him from himself. and then how the fandom that sprouted up around him was a microcosmic version of the once-ler response: some skinny white villain in a suit who was barely even the main character of their own media, their SINGLE piece of media (not counting precious versions of the same story here re:the lorax), suddenly taking an internet collective by storm to a surprising degree and giving impetus to a fandom-wide legacy of fame and infamy for said character. you see this in the fandom response to clive even today in 2022. look in his tag; you will either get people passionately devoted to him or people who passionately hate him for the chaos he wrought upon a community and also the general annoyance of seeing his face everywhere unjustified for the amount of media he actually was present in. THAT’S the once-ler response.

descole, on the other hand, has been a largely well received character after his four media appearances. you either get people passionately devoted to him or people lukewarm on him. people don’t complain of fatigue and annoyance at seeing descole’s face everywhere, because his appearances in the entire prequel series justifies his popularity. yes, descole fits some of the aforementioned tropes mentioned: namely the polarised personality, the suit, the villainy, tragic backstory. but the term tumblr sexyman is not solely rooted in tropes; it is equal part trope and equal part fandom meta. the term itself was coined by not the fans, but the critics; those in response to the once-ler fandom  who had grown fatigued by tumblr’s affinity towards the same flavour of charismatic villain in a suit. when you think of the phrase “i want that twink obliterated” and the people who genuinely mean it, which is the professor layton character that springs to mind first? it’s probably not descole.

a slight digression, but it’d also be wrong to write about the once-ler response without a mention of the absolute avalanche of once-ler OCs and askblogs that unexpectedly flooded out of that ONE kids’ movie. an entire fandom UNIVERSE was made from literal scraps (seriously have you seen the lorax 2012 the once-ler is barely fucking IN IT). these scraps AKA missing information about a character led fans to compensate by filling in the gaps which is what ended up birthing the infamous oncest ship - in its essence, a response to the largely unexplained and sudden jump from ‘nice once-ler’ to ‘bad once-ler’. this was what created a literal ‘once-ler fandom’ as opposed to ‘lorax fandom’. ANYWAY. this is a digression because neither clive nor descole had a ‘clive/descole fandom’ of their own (sadly) and selfcest was not a defining feature of their respective eras (thankfully). but that’s not why i raise this point. i do because THIS was the phenomenon that truly allowed the term ‘tumblr sexyman’ to come to fruition. it was a marker of not only just fatigue, but cringe. 

CRINGE is an important and defining factor to what TRULY makes a tumblr sexyman, and those in the tags this past week dunking on clive for being embarrassing and wearing kneesocks and being ‘the sexyman of the past’ (AKA a teen girl’s crush) is only proving it. that thirst that brought about the once-ler fandom from literal scraps was created by the most important demographic in internet history: neurodivergent teenagers circa 2007-2014. THIS was the one demographic with the POWER to make the most unexpected characters and media popular with their sheer passion and creativity, and yet the characters and media loved by this era specifically became the first subjects of cringe culture. cringe culture itself is a topic for another day; why it matters here is that there is an unmistakable element of cringe today surrounding clive as a character most of all. there are far too many examples of this to count but see this post for one example. this one post is really important because OP really gets it; the insane fandom response to one unlikely character, the main era of his popularity (cited 2013), and a question of cringe from a 2022 fandom perspective - why DID he inspire such lust and loathing when he looks like that? it’s because the neurodivergent teenagers wished it so, and thus it came to be. 

to most people, thanks to current tumblr’s over-categorisation of the term in an attempt to “cringe” at its past in a self-aware manner, “tumblr sexyman” has been watered down to mean “any character conventionally attractive and popular enough who sometimes skews towards the morally grey.” seriously, look at that sexypedia wiki, there are hundreds of these characters now. ANYONE qualifies if they had a sad backstory and had a reasonable fandom following. but this is only a cheap imitation of what the term really means. a majority of these characters haven’t actually earned what truly makes a “tumblr sexyman”, which ultimately boils down to the factors of tropes, unlikely fandom response, and their following notoriety based in cringe culture. in only a short time, we are forgetting the history. we’re forgetting where this phenomenon came from, WHO it came from, and how this essentially defined an entire era of the internet.

anyway im going to bed so what i’m saying is that voting clive represents and respects what the term “tumblr sexyman” really, actually means at its core and origin, because in the end, the character has earned it. descole on the other hand may very well be the ‘sexyman of the modern age’ - a cheap, watered down imitation only replicated by those who have forgotten their internet history.