Tumblr's Strangest Obsession: A History of the Onceler Fandom

this video is brought to you by movie try movie free for 30 days at movie.com sarah's ed that's mubi.com for a whole month of great cinema for free 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 10 concussions if i could go to a world like that but for the once-ler 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 blonde 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 behavior 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 once-ler the once-ler being the main character slash anti-villain from the 2012 film adaptation of the lorax this extremely skilled artist even drew art of raymond as the once-ler it's not just raymond either the same sentiment of this character is the new one slur has been directed towards a ton of different characters like kylo ren from star wars jim carrey's robot nick from the sonic movie and commonly around the time of its release banner snatch cummerbunds take on the grinch for those of you who remember the degree of hell that was the culture surrounding the once-ler 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 infused him with all of the beatles for minions huh in my experience at least for the this person is the new wunsler 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 going to get called the new once-ler i've also seen once their comments for wheatley from portal sans undertale komida from danganronpa and guzma from pokemon basically male sympathetic cartoon villains who are very popular with teenage girls get called the new one slur once they get popular other people have pointed out the kind of shitty 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 buck wild 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 horny people got over butterfree cuttlefish's take on the grinch none of these got even close to the unique weirdness that was the once-ler fandom i would say sans undertale is the only one who maybe fits the bill for these claims although that's still tenuous and i should know i was in the once-ler fandom in this video i want to 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 want to 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 two people who don't already know about the book it basically centered around a beautiful pristine valley full of nature and trees and all things good a faceless character called the once-ler shows up and wants to cut down the trees to self-needs 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 wensler 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 wenzler 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 one slur is obsessed with growth in 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 once-ler 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 once-ler 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 in 1972 movie it doesn't matter what the little boy really wants or where the lorax came from or why the once-ler is interested in profit it's not about them as people there are 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 kind of the conscience of the story urging people to do what's right the one slur is greed and profit-seeking the boy 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 like sooth 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 story behind a wave of aggressively mediocre animated movies like the minions and the secret lives 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 once-ler 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 this 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 of 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 once-ler character just makes the whole movie strange the first time we see the once-ler he's an old man sequestered off in his sad tower in the wasteland he made quarantine 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 once-ler'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 chicken strips was turned into an animated character he would go out with this guy this guy would be played by timothy chalamet if he were live-action this guy would immediately ask me to name five films by any director i claim 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 needs 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 once-ler'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 in to 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 once-ler 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 kind of 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 ib is it was originally gonna 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 have 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 the film the once-ler 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 once-ler 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 besides the fact that it was just a weird bad movie all these conditions made the once-ler ripe to be a tumblr fan favorite for a few reasons 2012 was the epitome of a lot of fandoms now considered pretty cringy 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 on 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 that part of people's interests that like sexy darker characters without really having to justify anything too horrible since the one floor was obviously just pressured into his villainy so that alone is a pretty strong foundation for this animated beanpole to be a fan favorite among teen circles on tumblr as i said earlier i myself was a winslower 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 buck wild and went so so so much further than just liking the guy and doing a bunch of fan art of him and it's this exact reason i don't buy the raymond is the new one slur or the villain from sonic is the new one slur stuff going around the internet the one slur fandom was a unique flavor of weird and that's because of something i must regrettably tell you all is called one zest so uh one what and two why okay after the 2012 lorax movie was released the wenzler 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 the time was something called ask blogs basically it was a form of role playing where other fans would send in questions directed towards a fictional character and you would answer the 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 it 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 favorite 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 once-ler 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 once-ler and his relation to the rest of the world in the story was simply window dressing this is pretty much evidenced by the nickname they made for themselves a fan nickname 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 and k-pop fans are called terrifying but the people in this fandom weren't called like loraxites or need villians or the sousa cult they were specifically called one slings they were only there for beanpole bezos some hopefully older fans who were more specifically interested in one slur content of the not safe for work variety also called themselves one search at your own risk so very quickly a lot of ask blogs popped up for this character ask the once-ler ask the bean pool ask once he wants 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 an active 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 role-playing as the once-ler 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 fan fiction and what draws us into shipping characters with each other if you can handle the horrible peeking audio in it enough to watch it feel free to check it out i stand by everything i said in the video but i cannot handle the audio so uh feel free to just watch it with the sound off and like 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 the once-ler 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 wunsler 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 in 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 once i can't say it i have my script all written out i can't say it they began to ship the once-ler with himself they called this ship named one zest remember how i talked earlier about how the once-ler's transition from cute soft boy 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 like almost two different characters fans quickly turned from referring to the once-ler's earlier vest wearing musician self as just the once-ler or onesie and his post-villain transformation self as the greedler people quickly made ask blogs not just as some nebulous version of the one slur but as either the once-ler or the griedler and begun shipping the two characters who once again were the exact same person with one another people called this classic onecest and even individuals who weren't involved in actively making ask blogs became dedicated to shipping those two characters together a ton of works emerged from this including fan art and fan fiction usually they either hated each other and had a kind of enemies to lovers thing going on or the gradler was the dark sexy dominant counterpart to the once-ler's shy demeanor sometimes these fan fictions would give a specific in-text justification for how the once-ler and the griedler 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 the character and wanted to explore relationship dynamics or their own sexuality 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 on to the first piece of kids media they found that could conceivably do that for them as we said earlier i took a passing interest in the once-ler fandom as a 13 14 year old i never had an ask blog or made fan art or fan fiction 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 just think i 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 on to that instead but the once-ler was there in front of me and all my friends were into it so i too printed out a picture of the once-ler 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 a round where i was like oh wait this is super weird isn't it and dipped so classic one zest 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 want an indie sad boy and an evil industrialist anymore people wanted a doctor and a space explorer and a camp counselor and a pirate and a mafia boss and all kinds of things and i guess they'd just already gotten so attached to the swunsler 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 once-ler is a completely different person and then they shipped all those one stores together too so you no longer just have like ask the once-ler 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 one slur or ask the communist one slur or ask the broadway one slur or ask the willy wonka once-ler literally you name it there was a once-ler 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 once-ler 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 all those characters from this horrible grim dark universe just got to be happy and worked in a coffee shop but i think the key difference between all this once-ler 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 once-ler from the movie they were all functionally completely different people with the once-ler name attached to them and they were all dating each other from all i can find online in my memory the first big alternate universe for all the one slurs was something called camp weehawken which was a story where all the different once-lers went to summer camp together it was basically a big role play where people could submit their own versions of the once learned basically all role-play going to summer camp together there were agreed-upon locations like the campfire area the boys cabin and since some of the once-lers in this world were also girl one slurs the girl's 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 wunsler's it was a big role play with a bunch of once-lers that takes place in a world that looks down on one slurs and griedlers where they are indoctrinated with anti-once-ler ideals and subject to fascistic manual labor while a once-ler resistance grows in the shadows it was buckwild it was all buckwild and yes those one slurs were all dating each other too there was one called truffle of 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 oneslers what once was a story about greed and environmental preservation suddenly became the world's largest once-a-lorgie 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 fan art of character to draw fan art of same character twice to draw alternate universe fan out of character to once those 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 wenzler 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 once their blogs and role plays among a declining fandom for some people they got so attached to their once-lers that they wanted to keep them but the fandom was honestly dying so because these characters were so fundamentally different from what the once-ler was some of them underwent something fans called d-one slurization just turning their once-lers into original characters that no longer have any association with the lorax they eventually did this to the entire camp weehawken role play as well as many of the others and kept it going while removing any reference to the lorax or the wenzler for example a location called the needville named after needville in the movie was renamed to thornville from what i can find online this is what happened to a whole bunch of those once there asked blogs people eventually just realized they had nothing to do with the one slur and turn them into original characters i'm sure there's probably a very small subset of once-ler fans still out there and honestly good for them but for most of us the once-ler 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 animal crossing or kylo ren or any other character girls just like a lot can be called the new wenzler until we can have a summer camp roleplay populated entirely by kylo ren's brainwashed to be auntie kylo ren he's not the new once-ler 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 once-ler 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 queer coding 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 haze code you couldn't depict any characters 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 haze 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 powerpuff girls is cool and memorable because he was able to be campy and crossdress and look big and dynamic the super predictably evil lady from the second incredibles movie is more attractive to me than dummy thick 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 once-ler queer-coded but it is interesting that when he goes from average sad boy to super villain 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 in 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 anti-heroes i really do just enjoy watching villains who are real pieces of and know it because it's a fun 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 as 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 behavior in real life like if i tell someone my favorite characters i don't know hannibal lecter you get people who take that as saying i think cannibalism 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 soft boy villains and 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 towards the once-ler besides him looking like somebody'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 is 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 once-ler 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 one slurs falling in love there are probably other pieces of media that can actually give you that dynamic in a much better way but the once-ler 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 once lauren join in rather than reading a book none of their friends have read that actually does that dynamic well i also think the once their 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 once-ler 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 once-ler 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 once-ler 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 once-ler 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 want to get attached to characters with a wider breadth of experiences and media of many more types i honestly can't recommend movie 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 favorite that's on the platform right now is my dinner with andre you all know i love community and they reference this film on one of the episodes and i've been meaning to watch it ever since and now that i have movie i finally got to it's this film that's so simple and so 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 andre 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 want to watch my dinner with andre or any other amazing film on movie you can get a free month and watch dozens of them at movie.com sarah's ed that's mubi.com it's awesome [Music] [Music] so uh [Music] [Music] on top of a thank you to all my patrons i'd like to specially thank benton bowen for joining my 20 plus tier welcome

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 2,980,160

Keywords: sarah z, video essay, video essayist, breadtube, raymond, onceler, once-ler, onceler fandom, fandom history, fandom drama, tumblr, twitter, facebook, reddit, philosophy, youtuber, lefttube, fandom, weird fandom

Id: us5Y_Kba7To

Length: 37min 0sec (2220 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020