I guess the long answer, cause I'm pretty curious
alright. let me take you back, anon. let me take you back to a time that was nearly precisely 5 years ago - back to March 2nd, 2012. on this date, the movie The Lorax came out. it was an adaptation of the classic dr. suess story, albeit with heavy creative liberties taken and an arguably much less poignant environmental message.
but that’s not what you need to know.
what you need to know is, the main character of the original book, the Once-ler, was given a face in this movie - the face of a young, skinny, baby-faced man with the voice of Ed Helms.
for reasons still unknown to me, the internet at the time developed an incredibly deep and immediate fixation on him - most likely due to his nonthreatening, attractive appearance and voice. a fandom began to develop around the movie, but most specifically, around this character. the most prevalent place of operation this fandom took to was tumblr, in the wake of the rapidly receding superwholock fandom.
as with most fandoms comprised of sexually frustrated teenage girls, there was a heavy emphasis on shipping. however, this movie’s main cast aside from the once-ler were either vaguely off-putting, too young, or had absolutely no interaction with the object of their desires - the once-ler. their solution to this was the most surreal and bizarre fandom uroboros that many innocent souls have ever witnessed.
they started shipping him with himself.
later in the movie, the once-ler adopts this appearance while singing the only significant musical number from this movie, How Bad Can I Be? and undergoes a pretty striking character shift as he’s blinded by his own greed. hence, the fandom began to view this green suit-wearing once-ler as a completely separate entity than the previous, innocent, vest-wearing once-ler. they subsequently dubbed this double as The Greed-ler.
past that, things began to spiral quickly and violently out of control.
how many different ways are there to cook an egg? you can ponder on this for a very, very long time - but eventually, you’ll just get bored of the taste of eggs. how many different ways are there to ship someone with themselves? if you ask the once-ler fandom, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. because they tried literally every way imaginable.
there were high school AUs. there were wolf AUs. there were countless different ways to ship this character with his own self, in every single way you could possibly stretch it, to the point of absolute unrecognizability from the source material.
and even that became tiring.
they began to ship individual body parts with each other. they began to ship articles of clothing. there were RP blogs for each and every single AU and scenario, and then some. there was an RP blog dedicated to playing AS the once-ler’s semen.
here is a list on the once-ler fandom fucking wiki of but a fraction of the number of once-ler ask/rp blogs there were. it’s endless.
for a time, the blue hellsite was the green hellsite. the green man was inescapable. after a time, it eventually faded and died down over the course of these 5 long years - active once-ler blogs are now considered cryptids. rightfully so.
the idea of shipping junkrat skins with each other is a disturbing echo of the hellish period that was once-ler fandom. best we nip it in the bud now before we enter a new era.
then again, we’ll never reach heights like this again, right? we could never even come close to doing this all over again…
how bad can we possibly be?
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