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You know in the movie Yesterday where the
guy hits his head and then wakes up in a world
where the Beatles and Harry Potter don’t
exist and no one else has a single memory
of their existence? I would deliberately give
myself ten concussions if I could go to a
world like that, but for the Onceler.
Like every other basic person stuck at home
in Spring 2020, I’ve been playing a lot
of Animal Crossing lately. I’ve got like
250 hours on my island, some sick-ass villagers,
and haphazardly placed flowers wherever I
couldn’t figure out what to put in an empty
space. And whenever I venture into online
communities about the game, I see a lot of
content about this guy.
Usually it’s not directly positive content
about him so much as content complaining about
how popular he is. His name’s Raymond, and
he’s a skinny little blond cat with heterochromia,
glasses, and a stylish manner of dress. Naturally,
the dude’s famous, with people even charging
others massive in-game sums and even real-world
money in some cases to invite the fashionable
feline to their island.
It’s inspired some truly bizarre behaviour,
like this person trying to charge people simply
for looking at Raymond. And among it all,
a common statement I’ve seen about this
insanely popular cat is “Raymond is the
new Onceler.” The Onceler being the main
character slash antivillain from the 2012
film adaptation of The Lorax. This extremely
skilled artist even drew art of Raymond *as*
the Onceler.
It’s not just Raymond, either. The same
sentiment of “this character is the new
Onceler” has been directed towards a ton
of different characters, like Kylo Ren from
Star Wars, Jim Carrey’s Robotnik from the
Sonic movie, and commonly around the time
of its release, Bandersnatch Cummerbund’s
take on the Grinch.
For those of you who remember the degree of
hell that was the culture surrounding the
Onceler… first of all, I am deeply sorry.
But for people who don’t, or just vaguely
recall whatever was going on with the whole
thing, it definitely seems a little bit strange.
Like, what do all these characters have in
common and what do they have to do with this
random green twink from a Lorax movie made
by the people who did Minions? (Off topic,
but they really reused his design and then
fused him with all of the Beatles for Minions,
huh?)
In my experience, at least for the “this
person is the new Onceler” comments, it
tends to just mean any male character who’s
popular with teenage girls, especially an
animated villain or a bad guy from kids’
media who’s a little bit sympathetic. If
someone’s hot, typically hand drawn or CGI,
kinda evil but potentially redeemable, and
teenage girls really like them despite kids
usually being the major target audience, they’re
probably gonna get called the new onceler.
I’ve also seen Onceler comments for Wheatley
from Portal, Sans Undertale, Komaeda from
Dangan Ronpa, and Guzma from Pokemon.
Basically, male, sympathetic cartoon villains
who are very popular with teenage girls get
called the new Onceler once they get popular.
Other people have pointed out the kind of
sh*tty implications of making fun of stuff
just because it’s popular with teenage girls,
and I have like… five different videos about
how society is uniquely shitty to teenage
girls and their interests. But what I also
think is interesting is how… incorrect most
of these statements are. Not even in the sense
that they’re offensive or problematic; they’re
just… wrong.
Because as absolutely buckwild as the fan
culture surrounding Raymond from Animal Crossing
got, no matter how emphatically people defended
Kylo Ren as uniquely good and redeemable,
and no matter how h*rny people got over Butterfree
Cuttlefish’s take on the Grinch, none of
these got even close to the unique weirdness
that was the Onceler fandom. (I would say
Sans Undertale is the only one who maaaybe
fits the bill for these claims, although that’s
still tenuous.) And I should know. I was in
the Onceler fandom.
In this video, I wanna take you on a bit of
a deep dive through one of the most bizarre
and short-lived fandom phenomena, from the
perspective of someone who was a teenage girl
at the time of its height and got really into
it for like, a month. I wanna talk to you
about what on Earth happened, why it happened,
and what its contemporary impact has been
on how people react to fictional characters
and villains nowadays.
So first things first, let’s talk about
the Lorax movie. Because even without the
bizarre fandom culture surrounding it, it’s…
an interesting movie.
The original Lorax picture book, written by
Dr. Seuss, came out in 1971, and a hand-drawn
TV movie adaptation of it produced by Seuss
himself came out the next year. The book and
movie were fairly similar, and were short
and straightforward. If you’re one of the
2 people who don’t already know about the
book, it basically centred around a beautiful,
pristine valley full of nature and trees and
all things good. A faceless character called
the Onceler shows up and wants to cut down
the trees to sell Thneeds, which are pretty
much just a representation of consumer goods
in general.
They’re not something the local people seem
to have been in desperate need of before the
Onceler showed up, but they’re easy to sell
and easy to make money from. This forest guardian
called the Lorax tries to convince him to
stop, but the Onceler quickly grows his business
into a large factory.
It quickly destroys the local area, driving
the nearby creatures out because of pollution
and a lack of available food and trees to
live in. The Onceler is obsessed with growth
and making everything bigger, and by the time
the last tree is cut down, the valley is
completely destroyed. The Lorax leaves and
years later, the Onceler gives a young boy
the last seed, with the message “unless
someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It’s not”.
It’s a fairly simplistic, straightforward
take on environmental degradation for the
sake of profit in a way that’s easy for
children to understand, and directly implicates
the future generation to be involved in protecting
the environment later in their lives.
The 1972 adaptation was about 25 minutes long;
for comparison, it takes about 18 minutes
to read the actual book start-to-finish out
loud. So it was essentially a fairly straightforward
adaptation of the book. Of course there are
still changes you have to make when moving
to a new medium and new things to think about,
but not a lot of transformative work really
had to be done, and so it’s a pretty true
to form adaptation of the book.
Notably, much like in the book, the Onceler
character doesn’t really show his face,
and we don’t really learn a lot about him
besides the basics: he wants to make money
and start a factory. He seems to have *some*
concerns about the local environment; there
are scenes where he’s arguing with himself
and simply talks himself out of doing the
right thing, but he still ultimately follows
the lure of profit. This is really true for
all the characters in the book and 1972 movie:
it doesn’t matter what the little boy really
wants, or where the Lorax came from, or why
the Onceler is interested in profit.
It’s not about them as *people*; they’re
stand-ins for larger ideological issues compounded
into child-friendly forms that are easy to
understand without being bogged down in unimportant
details. The Lorax is generally the interests
of the environment, and is the kind of conscience
of the story urging people to do what’s
right. The Onceler is greed and profit-seeking.
The boy at the end represents the future generations
on the whole and our obligation to do what’s
right.
So, when it became clear that they were going
to adapt The Lorax into a feature film, it
was obvious that changes were going to have
to be made. These characters don’t need
to be fully fleshed out or developed for a
20 minute fable about the environment, because
telling a character-driven story isn’t what
the book or TV movie were trying to do. But
it’s really hard to follow a story for an
hour and a half without compelling characters,
and if you’re going to add that much time
on, new additions just have to happen and
things definitely need to be fleshed out and
explored a lot more.
This wasn’t the first feature-length Seuss
movie to come out around then; Horton Hears
a Who, a simple story about our duty to do
right by people who are vulnerable and less
able to advocate for themselves, was adapted
into a CGI movie in 2008. It was not amazing,
but not bad either; it generally stayed faithful
to the story’s message while adding some
new plot threads and fleshing out some of
the characters mentioned in the book. All
this to say, this is definitely something
possible to do.
Four years later, Illumination, the studio
behind a wave of aggressively mediocre animated
movies like Minions and The Secret Life of
Pets, produced their adaptation of The Lorax,
and a lot certainly got added. For the purposes
of this video, the most important thing is
how they fleshed out the Onceler and made
him a hot indie boy, but they also had this
whole subplot with a walled off town and an
evil mayor who sells everyone fresh air, and
the kid who lives there, now with the voice
of an aggressively grown man, wanting to get
a tree to impress the girl he likes. Big Joel
pointed out in his own Lorax video how the
framing of bringing the trees back being good
only for their utility kind of confuses the
message, where instead protecting the environment
being framed as innately good on its own,
it becomes more weirdly instrumentalized and
about how to squeeze the most utility from
this new resource.
The message gets confused on a lot of levels,
to be honest. I mean, out of the universe
of the movie, they used Lorax marketing to
advertise, among other things, a brand of
SUV. Not even, like, an electric one or anything.
They just stuck a “Lorax-approved sticker”
on an actual car brand in real life,
which is the same thing the villain did in the movie?
They
also advertised disposable diapers, which
cool. But also, within the actual film itself,
the introduction of the Onceler character
just makes the whole movie strange.
The first time we see the Onceler, he’s
an old man sequestered off in his sad tower
in the wasteland he made. Quarntine king,
honestly. Although the movie is largely about
the kid and his love quest, it’s kind of
more of a framing device so we can see flashbacks
to the Onceler’s life and the story of how
he destroyed the local environment. And when
we meet him, he’s very much a young quirky
likable indie boy twink. This guy sings backups
in a manufactured boy band. If Buttermilk
Chickenstrips was turned into an animated
character, he would go out with this guy.
This guy would be played by Timothee Chalamet
if he were live action. This guy would immediately
ask me to name five films by any director
I claimed to like.
In the 2012 Lorax, our pretty boy protagonist
plays guitar and is pretty happy and wide-eyed
at first, just wanting to make his way in
the world and have a good time. Although he
does see the success thneeds are bringing
him, he has significant reservations about
damaging the environment, and is fairly careful
at first to just pick from the trees instead
of chopping them down. And I honestly don’t
mind the character being someone you kind
of like and root for at the beginning. Knowing
you can relate to this character might make
it more apparent that folks who consider themselves
good people can do bad things when motivated
by greed, and that none of us are immune to
it.
But then the Onceler’s family rolls into
town, and it’s his mom and aunt who keep
pressuring him to cut down the trees and increase
the size of his factory, and he gives into
them not because of greed and a desire for
profit, but because of a desire to be accepted
by his family. Suddenly, the environmental
destruction in the movie happens not because
of a desire for growth and profit, but because
of those Mean Women in this nice boy’s family.
His mommy just doesn’t love him enough!
She’s such an overbearing mother! She made
him this way! It’s… a Choice.
After that, the Onceler quickly becomes motivated
to expand his factory and make more and more
and more money, and his transformation into
evil is represented by a snazzy costume change
and a villain song that… kinda slaps if
we’re being honest? Look, every other song
in this movie is unmemorable, but you’re
lying if you say this doesn’t get stuck
in your head sometimes.
His villain transformation is really more
aesthetic than anything else, and we don’t
get to see much about how his own actions
or morality really changed outside the bounds
of that three minute song. Which is almost
too bad, because as catchy as How Bad Can
I Be is, it was originally going to be this
much darker rock opera song called Biggering
with way more interesting lyrics about how
greed and the logic of constant infinite growth
and never being satisfied works. Less catchy,
but would’ve been cool character-wise. Also
the same people who did the Community theme
song did it, which is just neat to me.
But the point is, throughout this film, the
Onceler is not really framed as that evil
and irredeemable in the end. This is particularly
exemplified by the ending, where instead of
being kept ambiguous, we flash forward to
a future where the land is being replanted,
and the Lorax returns and shares an emotional
reunion with the Onceler.
So in-universe, all the things he did are
forgiven, and are they ever really his fault
anyway when his mean unloving mom pushed him
into destroying the entire local ecosystem?
Obviously, in terms of being an environmentalist
message, it’s a pretty weak one. It doesn’t
address the actual logic of greed and limitless
growth that the book condemned, and the message
instead of “wanting to be socially accepted
by your family can make you do bad things
even if it isn’t really your fault” is
comparatively much weaker.
But beyond the fact that it was just a weird
bad movie, all these conditions made the Onceler
ripe to be a Tumblr fan favourite, for a few
reasons. 2012 was the epitome of a lot of
fandoms now considered pretty cringey: Supernatural,
Doctor Who, and Sherlock were all at their
height, as well as media like Homestuck. And
a lot of things all this stuff had in common
was hot boy villains. I myself became an Andrew
Scott stan long before Fleabag because he
played a hot boy villain in Sherlock. So to
the eyes of teen girls in 2012 tumblr, we
had on our hands a hot boy villain.
Not only that, but he wasn’t so evil after
all. He was sensitive, played music and liked
marshmallows, clearly regretted his bad actions,
and seemed to have good intentions all along.
He was SO sad after destroying the whole entire
earth, don’t you just want to give him a
hug? So we get a hot boy REDEEMABLE villain.
I mean, he wasn’t a *good* hot boy redeemable
villain, we don’t have a Zuko on our hands
here or anything. But he was new, and easy
to feel sorry for while also tapping into
the part of people’s interests that like
sexy darker characters without really having
to justify anything too horrible since the
Onceler was obviously just pressured into
his villainy.
So that alone is a pretty strong foundation
for this animated beanpole to be a fan favourite
among teen circles on Tumblr. As I said earlier,
I myself was a Onceler fan at the time, mostly
because of that same combination of finding
him cute, feeling bad for him, and generally
liking villains because villains are hot.
But the specific culture surrounding this
character was buckwild, and went so, so, so
much further than just liking the guy and
doing a bunch of fanart of him. And it’s
this exact reason I don’t buy the “Raymond
is the new Onceler” or “the villain from
Sonic is the new Onceler” stuff going around
the internet. The Onceler fandom was a unique
flavour of weird, and that’s because of
something I must regrettably tell you all
is called Once-st.
So uhhh 1: what, and 2: why.
Okay.
After the 2012 Lorax movie was released, the
Onceler character quickly gained popularity
among mostly young teenage girls on Tumblr,
who found him both attractive and sympathetic.
These blogs have since mostly fallen out of
fashion, but an important aspect of fandom
culture at that time was something called
“ask blogs”. Basically, it was a form
of roleplaying where other fans would send
in questions directed towards a fictional
character, and you would answer those questions
as if you were the character. Sometimes these
were accompanied by drawings or cosplays of
the character to really get the point across.
So, for example, if you had a Harry Potter
ask blog, you could call it like “Ask Harry
Potter” or “ask the boy who lived”.
And people could send in stuff like “Harry,
do you have a crush on Draco?” and you could
be like “yes I do” or “no I don’t”
as if you were Harry.
Sometimes ask blogs would interact with other
ask blogs as well. So, like, if someone had
a blog called “Ask Draco Malfoy” and the
Harry blog posted “I don’t have a crush
on Draco”, you could respond to if as if
you were Draco and you were seeing the post.
It was a pretty fun way to engage with stories
you liked, if a bit weird sometimes. Plus
a lot of people have fun imagining what their
favourite fantasy characters would be like
if they had social media pages, so it was
a fun way to play that up.
So, as soon as the Lorax movie came out, people
were very quickly drawn to the Onceler. I
think this was for a few reasons, and I’ll
go more in depth about why I think that happened
in a second, but honestly for now let’s
just say he was designed to be cute and relatable,
and people found him cute and related to him.
A lot of people, in fact, found him REALLY
cute and related to him a LOT. What’s interesting
is that the people who got into this character
weren’t Lorax fans. They weren’t interested
in the Zac Efron child, or the Lorax, or the
snowboarding granny character they borrowed
from Hoodwinked, or the evil air-selling mayor,
maybe why he was the way he was or where he
was getting the air he was selling people.
They didn’t care about any of that. That
stuff was for kids. They cared only about
the Onceler, and his relation to the rest
of the world in the story was simply window
dressing.
This is pretty much evidenced with the nickname
they made for themselves. Fan nicknames for
fandoms are pretty common, and the names are
usually based around the piece of media they’re
a fan of. Doctor Who fans are called Whovians,
Glee fans were called Gleeks, Star Trek fans
are called trekkies, KPop fans are called
terrifying. But the people in this fandom
weren’t called like Lorax-ites or Thneedvillians
or the Seussicult. They were specifically
called Oncelings. They were only there for
Beanpole Bezos. Some, hopefully older fans
who were more specifically interested in Onceler
content of the not safe for work variety also
called themselves “Onceluts”. Search at
your own risk.
So, very quickly, a lot of ask blogs popped
up for this character. Ask the Onceler, ask
the beanpole, ask oncie onceler, tons of them.
There’s actually a list of like 90 of them
on a wiki someone made, which clearly hasn’t
been updated in a while because only some
of them are marked as inactive.
If you look at it, you'd be surprised at the scale of it, but it's actually a relatively
small and incomplete list
compared to the fandom as a whole;  there were
literally hundreds of these things, hundreds
of people roleplaying as the Onceler and asking
questions as him.
But then a problem kind of arises. And that’s
that one of the fun parts of running an ask
blog on tumblr was interacting with other
ask blogs. It’s fine enough to answer anonymous
questions pretending to be Dean Winchester,
but it’s much more fun to interact with
an even wider net of people acting as your
brother or your crush or your worst enemy.
But there… weren’t any other characters
in the Lorax story who people were interested
in being, so there wasn’t anyone really
interesting for any of these people to interact
with.
I think this is especially true when it comes
to shipping. I made an earlier video about
fanfiction and what draws us into shipping
characters with each other. If you can handle
the horrible peaking audio in it enough to
watch it, feel free to check it out. I stand
by everything I said in that video, but I
cannot handle the audio, so uhhh.. feel free
to just watch it with the sound off and read
the captions.
But anyway, part of being in a fan community
where you’re interested in one character
is that you want to set them up with other
characters romantically, for a ton of reasons.
But you really couldn’t do that for the
Lorax movie. I mean, who are you going to
ship the Lorax with? The only other human
who the Onceler ever interacts with besides
his family is the Zac Efron child character,
and people weren’t quite freaky enough yet
to ship him with the Danny Devito Onceler.
Since he was an old man at the end of the
movie, there was a pretty small push to pair
him up with Zac Efron’s cool granny, but
this really didn’t gain much mainstream
traction among the fandom.
So right now, people were left with hundreds
of ask blogs, all of the exact same character,
with no one to ship this guy with. But you
couldn’t not ship him with anyone. It’s
just a drive people have when it comes to
being interested in a character and their
arc. So much like a group of friends stranded
together on a deserted island might begin
to eat one another out of desperation, they
began to ship the Onceler…
I can't say it.
I have my script all written out, I can't say it!
They began to ship the Onceler with himself.
They called this ship name “Once-st”.
Remember how I talked earlier about how the
Onceler’s transition from cute softboy to
evil villain happened really quickly, mostly
in the span of one three minute song? Well,
this bad writing decision meant that his aesthetic
changed very quickly and very starkly, leaving
us with what felt almost like two different
characters. Fans quickly turned from referring
to the Onceler’s earlier, vest-wearing musician
self as the Onceler or Oncie, and his post-
villain transformation self as the “Greed-ler”.
People quickly made ask blogs not just as
some nebulous version of the Onceler, but
as either the Onceler or the Greedler, and
begun shipping the two characters- who, once
again, were the exact same person- with one
another.
People called this Classic Oncest, and even
individuals who weren’t involved in actively
making ask blogs became dedicated to shipping
these two characters together. A ton of works
emerged from this, including fanart and fanfiction.
Usually they either hated each other and had
a kind of enemies to lovers thing going on,
or the Greedler was the dark sexy dominant
counterpart to the Onceler’s shy demeanour.
Sometimes these fanfictions would give a specific
in-text justification for how the Onceler
and the Greedler ended up split into two separate
entities. Sometimes they were always brothers,
which by the way is NOT BETTER. Sometimes
it’s his future self through some time travel
magic. Sometimes they get magically split
into two. Sometimes they just happen to be
two people who have no relation to one another
but just happen to look extremely similar,
and have almost the same name,
which okay sure. And sometimes it just wasn’t
explained at all and fans were just expected
to take for granted that it’s the same guy
and now there’s two of them and we’re
shipping him with himself.
And for the most part, fans straight up just
did take this for granted. I think the appeal
here was partly just out of a desire to ship
this character with SOMEONE, because they
were interested in this character and wanted
to explore relationship dynamics or their
own sxuality. I think it was also just
a lot of young teenagers who wanted to explore
relationship dynamics they found interesting,
like enemies to lovers stuff, but just weren’t
that well-read and didn’t have a great baseline
for other works of fiction that do this better,
so they just latched onto the first piece
of kids media they found that could conceivably
do that for them.
As I said earlier, I took a passing interest
in the Onceler fandom as a 13-14 year old.
I never had an askblog or made fanart or fanfiction,
but I did like and reblog some of it when
it came on my dash, which you’re all welcome
to burn me at the stake for. I would too.
And I honestly think I just liked the idea
of two people who hated each other coming
to like one another, and if you had given
me a piece of work that actually did that
better, I would have immediately latched onto
that instead. But the Onceler was there in
front of me, and all my friends were into
it, so I, too, printed out a picture of the
Onceler and taped him onto my wall.
And while people could have tried to find
some other character from a different work
of fiction to ship him with, like they did
with Jack Frost and Elsa because I guess they
both have ice magic, that’s still contingent
on everyone in the fandom knowing this character
and being on board. And apparently, the best
way forward from this conundrum was to just
split the guy in two.
So this is weird enough on its own. The fact
that the desire to pair up two characters
superseded canon so much that people, in desperation,
split a guy in two to ship him with himself
is already extra bizarre. But I’m so sorry
to tell you that it does get weirder. If I
recall correctly, this is around where I was
like “oh wait, this is super weird, isn’t
it”, and dipped.
So Classic Oncest was all well and good, and
people were having fun with it. But pretty
quickly, it eventually got boring. People
channeled all their fan interest into this
one guy, but he just was not as interesting
as they wanted him to be. People didn’t
just want an indie sadboy and an evil industrialist
any more. People wanted a doctor and a space
explorer and a camp counsellor and a pirate
and a mafia boss and all kinds of things.
And I guess they’d just already gotten so
attached to this Onceler character, because
instead of just seeking out other pieces of
media that have characters who are those things,
they immediately delved into making alternate
universes where the Onceler is a completely
different person.
And then they shipped all those Oncelers
together, too.
So you’d no longer just have, like “ask
the Onceler” or “ask the Greedler”.
Now, and you can see by the list of blogs
how much variety there was, you’d have like,
ask the wizard onceler or ask the communist
onceler or ask the Broadway onceler or ask
the Willy Wonka onceler. Literally you name
it, there was a Onceler blog for it. Crossovers
with other media, professions, new personality
traits… all of them were on the table.
Now, to be clear: alternate universes aren’t
a new thing or exclusive to the Onceler fandom.
As long as fandom has existed, there have
been people asking questions like “what
if the Harry Potter kids went to a modern
day high school?” or “what if these characters
from a horrible grimdark universe just got
to be happy and worked in a coffee shop?”.
But I think the key difference between all
this Onceler stuff and other alternate universes
is that they changed the nature of the character
to such an insane degree that none of it had
any association or resemblance to the original
movie, let alone the book.
It got to a point where absolutely none of
them bore any resemblance to the Onceler from
the movie. They were all functionally completely
different people with the Onceler name attached
to them, and they were all dating each other.
From all I can find online and my memory,
the first big alternate universe for all the
Oncelers was something called Camp Weehawken,
which was a story where all the different
Oncelers all went to summer camp together.
It was basically a big roleplay where people
could submit their own versions of the Onceler
and all basically roleplay going to summer
camp together. There were agreed-upon locations
like the campfire area, the boys’ cabin,
and since some of the Oncelers in this world
were also Girl Oncelers, the girls’ cabin.
Camp Weehawken was the first of its kind,
and it quickly spawned massive amounts of
alternate universe Oncelers, most
of them extremely bizarre. For example, take
a look at this one, called the “War Against
Oncelers”: it was a big roleplay with a
bunch of Oncelers that takes place in a “world
that looks down on Oncelers and Greedlers”,
where they are “indoctrinated with anti-Onceler
ideals” and subject to fascistic manual
labour while a Onceler resistance grows in
the shadows. It was buckwild. It was all buckwild.
And yes, these Oncelers were all dating each
other too.
There was one called Truffula Flu, which was
so complicated and confusing that people had
to start downloading browser extensions just
to be able to read it from start to finish.
Basically, by the end of this whole thing,
everyone lived in a world populated almost
entirely by Oncelers. What once was a story
about greed and environmental preservation
suddenly became the world’s largest Oncelorgy
in a manner so dense and confusing that if
you weren’t there for every stage of it,
you had no idea what you were looking at.
But because it all happened step by step to
the people involved in it, each next step
in the fandom from “draw fanart of character”
to “draw fanart of same character twice”
to “draw alternate universe fanart of character”
to “ONCELERS ARE PERSECUTED AND BRAINWASHED”
probably seemed very logical.
So… how did this end? Well, as with most
things, not with a bang, but with boredom.
After the end of the Onceler Summer, the movie
Rise of the Guardians came out, and a lot
of people moved on to Jack Frost as their
new interest. Other people just got tired
of it and abandoned their Onceler blogs and
roleplays among a declining fandom. For some
people, they got so attached to their Oncelers
that they wanted to keep them, but the fandom
was honestly dying.
So because these characters were so fundamentally
different from what the Onceler even was,
some of them underwent something fans called
“de-oncelerization”, just turning their
Oncelers into original characters that no
longer have any association with the Lorax.
They eventually did this to the entire Camp
Weehawken roleplay as well as many of the
others, and kept it going while removing any
reference to the Lorax or the Onceler. For
example, a location called Thneedville, named
after Thneedville in the movie, was renamed
to Thornville. From what I can find online,
this is what happened to a whole bunch of
those Onceler ask blogs; people eventually
just realized they had nothing to do with
the Onceler and turned them into original
characters.
I’m sure there’s probably a very small
subset of Onceler fans still out there, and
honestly good for them. But for most
of us, the Onceler fandom is now just a very
distant and very, very cursed memory.
So uh.. that whole thing was certainly extremely
weird. It’s why, once again, I don’t think
Raymond Animalcrossing or Kylo Ren or any
other character girls just like a lot can
be called the New Onceler. Until we can have
a summer camp roleplay populated entirely
by Kylo Rens brainwashed to be anti-Kylo Ren,
he’s not the new Onceler. Not even close.
But I really don’t like looking at a phenomenon
and just laughing at the people involved and
saying how weird it is, even when it is indeed
super weird. I mean, all this bizarreness
happened for a reason. It happened because
of how fandom culture works, and the specific
ways the culture around fan stuff evolved
to be, and that to me is way more interesting
than just pointing and laughing at the weird.
So why do I think the Onceler fandom happened
the way it happened? Well..
let's take a look at a few things.
So one weird thing on recent social media
in terms of how we criticize media is that
a lot of people want to like villains. And
I think that’s perfectly normal, for a lot
of reasons. For one, because of a not great
process called queercoding I talk about in
one of my earlier videos up here in the corner,
villains tend to be the characters with the
most flamboyance and visual interest. Because
of old fashioned morality laws on TV like
the Hays Code, you couldn’t depict any character
seeming gay or not super gender-conforming
unless you were specifically depicting those
traits as bad.
So the ones who got the flamboyance and dramatic
costuming tended to be the villains. Even
after the Hays code was abolished, these visual
cues remained in media as commonly recognized
character tropes, like the dumb jock or the
femme fatale. Which is not great for how we
societally perceive flamboyance or being gender
non-conforming, but does leave us with a lot
of villains who are just aesthetically more
interesting than the protagonists. Ursula
has a cooler design than Ariel because she’s
designed after a famous drag queen. Him from
the Power-Puff girls is cool and memorable
because he was able to be campy and cross
dress and look big and dynamic.
The super predictably evil lady from the second
Incredibles movie is more attractive to me
than dummy thicc Helen because she looks like
a hot lesbian sugar mama and I want to be
her evil arm candy. I certainly wouldn’t
call the Onceler queer-coded, but it is interesting
that when he goes from average sadboy to supervillain,
he also gets a much cooler outfit upgrade.
The reasoning for it isn’t great, but villains
just tend to look cooler.
I also just think people like villains because
they tap into something interesting in our
own psyche; it’s the desire to explore darker
themes and content in a safe, controlled setting.
It’s, I think, the same principle behind
roller coasters or horror movies: you get
the thrill of perceived danger and the adrenaline
rush, but there’s no real risk and you can
enjoy only the fun parts without any ramifications.
As much as I love redemption arcs and antiheroes,
I really just do enjoy watching villains who
are real pieces of sh*t and know it, because
it’s a way to explore and confront things
I don’t actually want to see in my day to
day life in a way that’s fun, fascinating,
and safe.
But there’s also this weird push about villains
over social media and modern pop culture analysis
of late, and that’s this idea that liking
a character or finding them interesting is
like, an endorsement of their actions or a
condonement of that behaviour in real life?
Like, if I tell someone my favourite character
is, I dunno, Hannibal Lecter, you get people
who take that as saying I think cannibaism
is fun and cool. Or if I think Darth Vader’s
mask is cool, that’s akin to supporting
space fascism. It’s a very weird form of
analysis that, while I can’t attest to its
popularity before the time of social media,
I do think has grown more popular as of late.
And I think that’s part of why there’s
this push toward being outwardly interested
only in softboy villains, in ones who are
framed as redeemable or having not done much
wrong on their own. It’s also part of why
I think there was this big push toward wanting
Kylo Ren from Star Wars to be this misunderstood
innocent victim who was forced into villainy
and is ultimately redeemed instead of just
a Bad Dude: there has to be some kind of moral
payoff to liking a villainous character because
otherwise it’s perceived as supporting their
actions for some bizarre reason.
And I think the same is true for why people
gravitated toward the Onceler: besides him
looking like someone’s indie boy fantasy,
you also get the benefit of liking a villain
who’s evil and doesn’t care about anyone
but himself while also being able to excuse
and justify all the reasons this character
was bad, because his Mean Woman Mom pushed
him into it and he reconciles with the Lorax
in the end, so really all is good and fine
and it’s no harm no foul. Liking this weird
pseudo-villain was, I think, the inevitable
result of a culture where any interest in
a character or story in which bad things happen
has to be specifically justified by the text
as not that bad.
I think if fan culture was more understanding
of the fact that sometimes evil characters
are just evil and they don’t have to be
secret good guys or misunderstood babies in
order to like them, we’d probably have a,
fewer attempts to justify every single evil
thing every single villain character does
ever if people want to like them, and b, less
draw to characters who let people experience
all the fun of liking a villain while also
having all these bad writing choices tacked
on that remove interest and accountability
from those characters.
In terms of the shipping and alternate universes,
I think the reason we got an army of onceler
clones is simply that people grew attached
to something familiar. I mean, if you want
the dynamic that you’re seeking out by writing
two Oncelers falling in love, there are probably
other pieces of media that can actually give
you that dynamic in a much better way. But
the Onceler was there, and easy, and familiar,
and if all your friends are already into this
very simple and accessible character, someone
will probably make their own Onceler and join
in rather than reading a book none of their
friends have read that actually do that dynamic
well.
I also think the Onceler character did just
hit a lot of buttons for archetypes people
were already interested in: ambiguously sad
backstory, skinny, white dude, musician. I
think this speaks less to what the Onceler
himself was, which in the context of the new
Lorax movie was still a character of very
little depth, and more to what fan archetypes
tended to appeal to people at the time. This
is still not a fantastic thing in a lot of
fan cultures, but especially in the culture
of 2012 Tumblr, people’s breadth of interest
in characters was very low.
Female characters in shows like Supernatural
and Sherlock were almost universally hated
by fans, and characters who weren’t white
and skinny were basically non-existent in
the text anyway. This was unfortunately a
time where diversity of interest wasn’t
particularly abundant, and even in stories
where a larger variety of characters existed,
people still tended to gravitate to the Onceler
types. See: Hux from Star Wars who has very
few lines and almost no personality except
evil getting more interest from fans than
Finn who’s literally a main character. So
I think the interest in the Onceler, and in
just making a million different versions of
him instead of taking interest in different
works, is kind of the inevitable and most
extreme consequence of a fan culture that
is only interested in a very specific type
of character.
The Onceler fandom is obviously essentially
dead, but I do think the need for more varied
and interesting types of media is still out
there. If you wanna get attached to characters
with a wider breadth of experiences and media
of many more types, I honestly can’t recommend
MUBI enough. It’s so cool. It’s basically
a streaming platform where every film is hand-picked
because it’s interesting or well-made or
culturally relevant, and in my experience,
it’s stuff I wouldn’t have even known
about otherwise. So it’s a ton of foreign
films, and lesser-known films by famous directors,
and stuff that’s showing at festivals somewhere
in the world.
It’s basically a film festival in your home
forever, and it’s so good. My favourite on the platform
right now is My Dinner with Andre. Y'all know I love Community, and they referenced
this film on one of the episodes and I’ve
been meaning to watch it ever since and now
that I have MUBI I finally got to.
It’s this film that’s so simple and so
amazing about these two friends who meet up
after a while, and their own lives and perspectives
are so different now. The film never really
tells you what to think or who exactly is
right, and after I spent this whole video
talking about a film that’s really heavy-handed
in its confusing message, something like My
Dinner with André that lets you make those
decisions for yourself and just think about
how people’s own experiences shape why they
think the way they do is really nice and appreciated.
If you wanna watch My Dinner with André or
any other amazing film on MUBI, you can get
a free month and watch dozens of them at MUBI.com/sarahz.
That's MUBI.com/sarahz. It's awesome.
On top of a thank you to all my patrons, I’d
like to specially thank Benton Bowen for joining
my $20+ tier. Welcome!
