#this is probably WAYYYYYY longer and more detailed an answer than OP was asking for

[a-e-redacted]

I’ve been watching TOH since ‘A Lying Witch And A Warden’ first dropped. Like a lot of early viewers, I came to the show from the Gravity Falls fandom, and was hoping it might have a similar vibe. I enjoyed The Owl House and Eda instantly became my favorite character, but initially it felt a bit slower and lighter than I was hoping for (ahahahah past!Alice! You really had no idea!).

For a long time, I felt like I had trouble relating to Luz, but I’ve recently realized that it’s more I related to her *too* much. I could write a whole essay on this, but suffice to say that my story through my late teens/early twenties has a LOT in common with Luz’s arc down to some weirdly specific “story points” (though I still haven’t danced under the moon with a beautiful girl while fighting the manifestation of our deepest fears, and I AM salty about this fact).

I was delighted with the show’s blatant queer representation. And after being in fandoms of some of the most notoriously queer-baiting of shows, The Owl House was a breath of fresh air.

However it wasn’t until the season 1 finale that I really got the plot-heavy drama I was hoping for. I remember calling up my friend Nana who would later be my collaborator for Moonshadow to basically scream “Holy shit, this show just became AMAZING?!?”

And then season 2 started handing me all the lore and plot points and character exploration I was hoping for. I watched the new episodes as soon as I could (and in some pretty random locations at times).

And yet, despite the fact that the show was giving me everything I could have wanted and I wasn’t afraid to admit that I felt like it was objectively a better show than GF, despite the fact that I LOVED the show and was invested in the story and characters, I didn’t quite hit the point of hyperfixation until King’s Tide.

(I’d actually kind of resigned myself to simply enjoying the show an unironically normal amount).

For a while, I was actually a bit lukewarm on The Collector as a character. I thought they were interesting and fun (though my first reaction to their appearance in Hollow Mind was, and I quote, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”) but, like everybody and their brother, I’d immediately made the Bill Cipher connection. Bill is one of my all-time favorite characters in anything ever and the idea of TOH trying to recreate him in a different font didn’t set well with me.

Fortunately, the more TOH separates itself from GF (even while exploring some of the same themes through a different lens), the more it shines. And it started to become more and more clear that there were more contrasts between Bill Cipher and The Collector than comparisons (personally I think there’s more comparisons to be made between The Collector and Time Baby, but I’ve not seen one person in either fandom go there yet).

I went into the weekend that King’s Tide aired with a pretty bad headspace, frustrated with my current writing project. I hoped the season 2 finale would provide a good distraction. I was super excited to watch it but I had NO IDEA how absolutely unhinged off-the-rails it was going to go.

The realization that The Collector didn’t just act childish, The Collector WAS an Actual Child ONLY WITH THE POWER OF A GOD (and hooooo boy the implications that go along with that), that their destruction wasn’t purely malevolent, the character design that LOOKED LIKE SOMETHING A FANDOM WOULD COME UP WITH FOR A HUMINIZATION OF A NONHUMANOID CHARACTER, THEIR ABSOLUTELY RAD MUSICAL THEME, WATCHING THEM WIPE THE FLOOR WITH BELOS WHICH WAS ALMOST UNDERSTATED BECAUSE OF HOW BATSHIT OFF-THE-RAILS EVERYTHING HAD JUST BECOME AND THEN THEY JUST BOOPED THE MOON OUT OF THE WAY AND STARTED HAPPILY AND SLIGHTLY-OBLIVIOUSLY DESTROYING EVERYTHING AND KING SENT THE KIDS THROUGH THE PORTAL AND WAS LEFT WITH THIS OVERPOWERED LITTLE SHIT AND THAT WAS THE END OF THE EPISODE AND I JUST SAT THERE THINKING “THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN! I WANT TO SEE THIS KID CREATE *MORE CHAOS* RIGHT THE HELL NOW.”

IT WAS LIKE CHUGGING TEN MONSTER ENERGY DRINKS IN THE SPAN OF FIVE MINUTES.

But instead I had to settle for the absolute chaos that the fandom was creating. And the fandom? Was creating some very excellent chaos. The post-King’s Tide shitposts were some of the most bonkerballs fandom creations I’ve ever seen (not to mention the Enzo Gabriel meme which shall forever live in infamy).

So in between laughing at shitposts, processing everything that had happened in the episode (and praising the hell out of it), calling up Nana and screaming about it, I realized that I had inexplicably tripped and fallen flat on my face into hyperfixation territory.

And when I enter that state, I start writing. I realized pretty early on that I was going to have to write a Collector-centric Owl House fic. Nana and I started planning out the premise and solidified a lot of ideas during a vacation roadtrip (THAT was quite a thing in and of itself).

TL/DR because this got WAY LONGER and tangent-y than I expected. BC (Before Collector) I really enjoyed The Owl House but could focus on other things. However, once The Collector entered the game in physical form in King’s Tide…Well, I’ll let the fact that I’ve written an 80K-word-and-counting Collector-centric Owl House fanfic saga speak for itself.

Attention, Collector fans!

Just as a question, what was your relationship with TOH before Hollow Mind/the Collector's first proper appearance? And what's your current one with the show for contrast?