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History of The Lorax In August of 1971, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax was published as a children’s book. The story was about an unnamed boy visiting The Onceler and asking about why there were no longer any trees. The Onceler, who was shown as just a pair of green gloves, tells him his backstory about how he came upon a huge forest of trees and then used them to create his invention, the Thneed. The Lorax came to him, telling him to stop cutting down the trees, but he didn’t listen, and then he finally chopped all of them down, could no longer make his Thneed, and basically destroyed an entire ecosystem. Look at all the fandoms! Oncest & the Greedler The Askblogs Conflicts in Fandoms Every fandom is made of a bunch of fans that really love one thing, and sometimes receive criticism from those outside of the fandom.

The Once-ler that started this all was an animated character played by Ed Helms from the 2012 movie “The Lorax”.

But after the 2012 release, in which the Once-ler character was suddenly personified and obtained a face and a back-story, something a bit out of the norm happened: A large a sporadic fan-base grew up overnight from Tumblr and invaded both DeviantArt and YouTube with thousands of articles, blogs, cosplay, gifs, fan-fic and fan videos related to the character. Currently 5,500 posts under Once-ler and 8,500 under Lorax exist on DeviantArt. 1,990,000 results came up when searching “The Once-ler” on Google.

Why the Once-ler? because simply he was the only character in the movie with conventionally attractive looks to it and fit the fan favorite formula completely. The main character (which is the unnamed boy from the book) Ted, is far too young to obsess over; Audrey is a girl and an implied young teenager so that wouldn't've done either; O'Hare (the movie's made up antagonist); Ted's family (also movie unique); and the Once-ler's relatives didn't fit the role to carry on their own fanbase. So people split up the Once-ler into two and made him the extremes of both sides (the one prior to cutting down the first Truffula tree) and the corporate executive in the Elton John green suit. Which was later given the name Greed-ler due to his defining character trait.

The Once-Lings[]

The fanbase is largely female and in their late teens and mid-twenties, in general, way out of the target audience for the movie. But the fandom seems to largely aware of this fact and typically describe their experience of joining the fandom as “weird” “uncontrollable” and "a result of “temporary insanity” after watching the Lorax movie. Therefore a considerable amount of “spoof-art” is made within the fandom – poking fun at themselves – which has made the community light-hearted and open-minded, often praised by outside fandoms as being blissfully joyful and “fun to watch” – Easily comparable to the early “My Little Pony – Friendship Is Magic” crowd.

Another part of the fandom consists of Ask-blogs in which blog hosts roleplay as one of many Once-ler-personas (named individually by their defining character trait kind of like a dwarf in snow white) or share embarrassing anon submissions to great delight among both fans and curious by-standers who wants to have a good laugh or just be weirded out.

Especially “The Swag Once-ler” and “Once-ler Sexual frustrations”seem well visited

Once-luts[]

A darker side to the fandom exists, just as with many other fandoms, which focus strongly on sexual imagery, fan-fics and role-play and slashing characters from the movie. The main attraction in this category is a theme called“Oncest” in which the “nice” Once-ler is paired up with an evil version of himself. Several blogs are dedicated solely to Once-ler smut and sexual imagery – often taken to ridicules levels, including pancake batter, marshmallows and thneed-bondage.

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