thoughts on "once and for all, what is the onceler fandom?"

a copy of a rant i banged out in response to a page i found on fanlore about an essay (a stretch!) on tumblr entitled, "once and for all, what is the onceler fandom?". written 11 march 2026.

genuinely bothers me when people don't understand the onceler fandom. i just read this meta and had to keep myself from being like "i need to go reblog this right now with a giant rebuttal"

it began spiralling out of control, AUs upon AUs spawned for the million possible variations of one character, and shipping them with the original, and then shipping them with each other and ignoring the original, and then creating alternate versions of those that are so wildly different from the original canon that they might as well be something else entirely, and it just became this huge ouroboros of a fandom desperately trying to justify its own existence that was inevitably doomed to basically eat itself

its not so much that the onceler fandom is weird, but that fandom in general has bizarre behaviours and it took this one shitty animated film to really demonstrate that maybe we need to chill

(emphasis mine)

THAT'S what you got out of it??? that "maybe we need to chill"??? and i'm not even going to touch the weird usage of "ouroboros" here that makes no sense to me.

there is, of course, something to be said about a fandom no longer having any connection with its original source material and transforming into its own new thing, but it assumes (incorrectly) that the deoncelerized askblogs and their fans were claiming still a connection to the lorax/the onceler fandom. it really and truly became its own thing! and it lasted (i think for some people, it continues to last) for a long time, and had its own value, and was interesting!

at least to me, i found it cool that the askblog artists held onto the stuff that they enjoyed and used that to propel them forward into something even more interesting. even beyond the fact that they were able to use this baseline character to inspire a variety of different characters, which they all developed to very different and creative ends, it's also the way they were able to tell stories via a unique medium (tumblr asks and posts – in real time! you had to be there!) and in so many different variations (thornville high, wee/deehawken, truffula flu, etc).

to me it represented the full extent of transformative works and of fan community, and that was inspiring. i can't understand how you can take away "we gotta stop" from something that so clearly had a ripple effect of creative ingenuity and invention, or just generally think of policing harmless fandom behavior as if there's a wrong way to go about it.

i think it's a fandom phenomenon i'll always be thankful to have witnessed because of how the (maybe not even conscious) message of the entire thing is "look what passion for something (regardless of the thing's quality! the lorax was a bad movie!) can drive you to do, so long as it moves you."