once-ler: from the 2012 The Lorax movie, became a tumblr sexyman in the past and is now regarded as the posterboy for a very particular era of tumblr “cringe”.
bill cipher: antagonist from the 2012 animated tv series “gravity falls”
alastor: character from the adult animated series Hazbin Hotel, his character design looks kinda like op
I think I’m getting old, I don’t understand any of this. Nor who is even talking. I guess I just never used tumblr, though its heyday was definitely in my time.
the fact that i had to stitch this together cos lemmy doesn’t support multi image uploads probably doesn’t help but yea tumblr screenshots can be hard to parse if you’re not familiar with the format
tumblr chains work via reblogs, same logic as a quote retweet but the added text is below the original post rather than on top.
the purple on black text are screenshots of tags (they’re not always purple it depends on the theme of the screenshoter). tags are weird because they’re supposed to just be a way for people to mark posts, so for example you tag a post as “nature” and then people can search your blog for them or filter them out, but in time people started to speak in them presumably because they’re less invasive than adding text (tags aren’t carrier over by reblogs)
The Onceler is the antagonist from The Lorax by Dr Seuss. “Darkiplier” is an in joke from Youtuber/Streamer Markiplier’s fans, to describe when he is acting up. Bill Cipher is a cartoon character from Gravity Falls, the antagonist from a 2-dimensional universe who looks like the pyramid on the US dollar bill.
The original poster dressed in a silly outfit and asked for feedback- presumably knowing it was ridiculous
and then (pretends to have) got mad at being compared to the character and others, joking that he’d rather be called a slur than suffer these comparisons.
The post ends with a pun on “one slur” / “onceler” which are homophonic
Jesus. I mean, thank you for that explanation, but I also feel even more in the dark because I’m not even familiar with most of them. Except the Lorax. But I definitely don’t remember the book well enough from my childhood to remember the villain.
It’s not an age thing, you just had to be on tumblr religiously back in the day to understand any of this. Source: used to unironically call myself a ‘superwholockian’.
Why would you want to be compared to a greedy sociopath who destroyed the planet’s ecosystem and represented unbound industrialist/capitalist greed? Sure, he eventually figured out that what he was doing was wrong, but by that time it was too late and the world was fucked. It’s like getting horny for BP executives in 2070 because they said sorry and discovered the error of their ways but only after oil was no longer profitable due to 90% of the planet being uninhabitable.
Well, first: It was meant as a simple humorous comment, not hornyposting for oil barons/industrialists. If I haven’t made myself clear, my bad.
And: Even then, OOPs reaction was overreacting and giving the Internet, and Tumblr of all places, a wide attack vector.
(Btw - even when in 2070 the oil executives were to see their consequences, they would put the blame towards the common people, like they do today with things like “the CO2 footprint” as in “blaming the people instead of themselves, the aviation and maritime freight industries”)
Fandoms usually outgrow their characters and became more about the aesthetic, with the fanfic versions acting totally different than the original character. Sometimes they view their made up lore as more “canonical” than the source material. Considering the onceler came from a movie on the high end of mediocrity at best, the aesthetics and Tumblr emo boy version matters far more than the shortsighted capitalist character in the movie
As well-thought out as the answer before mine is, here’s the scoop:
The Oncler in the newest adaptation was once heavily meme’d as a “Tumblr sexy-man”– an internet bad-boy that folks would write edgy fanfiction about and make thirsty art depicting them, among other things. It was era that people who had that phase look back on and cringe. It is not something that people are proud to remember about themselves.
It was clearly unintentional by OP but once they saw the resemblance, they were filled with deep regret considering the history of the Tumblr-fied-era Onceler.
So comparing OP to the Onceler is bringing up feelings of adjacent cringe, as being compared to a Tumblr-phase-animated-fanfiction-sexyboi-twink really makes your brain scream “OH PLEASE NO” if you remember “those times”.
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