#outing myself as a 2012 onceler fan | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kerink · 1 year

Text

in light of people's confusion over cecil's longevity in @sexymanotd i wanted to document a bit of his history for those unfamiliar or nostalgic

welcome to night vale is a podcast written by joseph fink and jeffrey cranor. cecil gerschwin palmer is the main character and voiced by cecil baldwin.

it debuted on june 15, 2012 it reached its peak in popularity in 2013-2014

despite this, wtnv has been one of tumblr's top fandoms since staff started tracking fandom-related data in 2014

for the longest time the only thing we knew about cecil's appearance was: "He is wearing a tie. He is not tall or short. Not thin or fat." and that wasn't until episode 19 which aired march 15, 2013. for almost a full year we had no idea what cecil looked like. so tumblr's collective unconscious kicked into high gear and we did what we do best

we created a tumblr sexyman

from know your meme: "Defining traits of the archetype include skinny body type, trickster or villain role and dapper clothing."

know your meme identifies wheatley (portal 2, 2011) and the onceler (the lorax, 2012) as being likely tumblr's first sexymen. and the onceler fandom was at its peak in 2012-2013, the same time as wtnv. in addition to this, the hannibal fandom has been cited as one of the contributing factors to wtnv's success on tumblr.

so tumblr had created an archetype that worked and the wtnv fandom was made up of mostly hannibal fans - the foundation for putting cecil in a suit was there. and honestly? cecil's at work in the show, why wouldn't he be well dressed?

however, while this explains his attire it doesn't explain some of cecil's more unique sexyman features, namely the tentacles. for this we have to return to the 2014 fandom review analysis where you can see the most popular fandom at the time: homestuck

haven't you ever wondered why almost a quarter (189/923 at time of writing) of E rated wtnv fics on ao3 are tagged tentacles or tentacle sex? why cecil having tentacles for a dick is such a seemingly popular headcanon? well look no further then homestuck cultural hold over.

throughout all of this, the development of the sexyman archetype on tumblr and the rise of homestuck, one creator really stands out: kinomatika

kino was one of the most popular homestuck artists on tumblr at the time, popular for their eridan fanart. if you google image search "welcome to night vale" kino's art is still one of the first results you'll get

their design was so popular in fact it was featured in wtnv related articles from the time

and yes there were absolutely other artists giving cecil tentacles and moving tattoos at the time, but it can't be understated the reach kino had and the influence their homestuck roots had on their design choices

i recommend going through the archive of @nightvaleartclub to see how cecil used to be portrayed back in the early days. unfortunately the earliest fanart i've been able to find is july 2013 and i find it hard to believe it took tumblr a year to draw him. although, i started listening at episode 5 and didn't start drawing him until then myself so who knows...

cecil has had tumblr's heart in a vice grip since episode 1, with "20,000 posts, 183,000 blogs and 680,000 notes using the #Night Vale tag" during its first week. tumblr's love for wtnv has always been fairly genuine, from the impact the writing has had on tumblr humor and future story telling, to how wtnv paved the way for lgbt+ representation in indi media, to how it popularized podcasts as a medium for story telling, to the little comforts some of cecil's quotes still bring people today

cecil is not only a founding father of tumblr culture, but also a blorbo of the people. cecil the character in canon has a tumblr account where he posts his art and slash fanfiction.

although cecil's character has developed over time and we've come to see what a ditzy, eccentric, brat he really is, changing his status from sexyman to babygirl, cecil is absolutely a character you should embrace. and you know what... despite what i've said in the past

#cecilsweep

[ID: Images one and two are Google analytic graphs for the search terms "welcome to night vale" and "wtnv" between June 15, 2015 and January 27, 2023. They both depict very sharp spikes around 2013-2014 until the lines decrease greatly over time.

Image three is a drawing of Cecil from Welcome To Nightvale. He is white, with white hair, glasses, a third eye on his forehead, and he is wearing a suit. In the background is the silhouette of a neighborhood from the WTNV official art, a galaxy, and a moon. It is tinted purple. Image four is the always has been meme. Instead of the earth is the tumblr logo, and the text is: “a wtnv fansite?” “Always has been”. End ID] id thanks to @princess-of-purple-prose

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #sexymanotd #cecilsweep

12K notes · View notes

straycalamities · 15 days

Note

how did you come up with making Entre? What inspired you?

the onceler LOL and homestuck

okay story time w chase ahem

so actually how i got into tumblr at all is very relevant to the chain of events that led to entre existing. so before here, i was mainly on a...particular art webbed site that was basically a sinking ship circa: 2010 so i forgot how i heard about tumblr? but i joined here at first just to do naruto comm rp. like my only account was a naruto rp account for the first... i dont remember how long

eventually i got curious enough to make a personal account and started being active on that. a bunch of my friendgroup from the other site moved with me and we were just hanging out being naruto nerds. at some point i got into homestuck/learned about the askblog format. i don't remember which came first, but i DID run kibanaru and flutterdash askblogs before the lorax was a blip on my radar

i remember when i was in the homestuck fandom, i was so used to the naruto fandom where like..sure it's huge but i had established myself in a corner of it and it felt very like... it was a community! and in the homestuck fandom i didn't feel like that at all. i felt swept out to sea and it was very lonely tbh aside from the friends id manage to drag with me into it, but i always felt a certain dissatisfaction from my time in it

a friend of mine was the one to show me the lorax and the once-ler. i don't...remember how THEY found him, but they were already very into him before they even came to me about him. and they basically nagged me into watching the movie LMFAO (this was when the movie was still freshly in theaters so all we had was shitty camrips and LiveStream was a thing) so i started to draw smexy onceler and oncest fanart to mess with them and...well y'know ye olde saying about doing things as a joke.

so yeah i kinda got...genuinely interested in him. especially after i watched the 72' short and reread the book and was like wait. this movie is mid as hell actually. (the siren song of mid media) and i was like "well if /i/ wrote the movie id do this n this n this n this" and then all that added up in my head and i was like wait.

what if i did a once-ler askblog where i just change certain things to what i like? it wasnt gonna be a complete revamp/remastering because i wanted to do a proper askblog so i wanted to have his character be recognizable to any fans of the onceler. and this was wayyyyy before anyone was getting the idea to do the very creative and expansive onceler takes we have these days as a norm. so it was kinda like? being shoehorned into being Canon!Once-ler because?? that's just how you did askblogs back then

BUT!! there were a few other askblogs already around back then (end of April 2012 for ref) so i didn't wanna do what everyone else was doing (very much Established Business Once-ler/Greed-ler, Vest-ler/Oncie, or Aftermath Once-ler) so i got the idea to do the onceler but! he's still very fresh and new to his business. still basically vest-ler/oncie in personality but with big things on the horizon.

i started creating his blog the weekend before may. that's why his birthday is May 1 because that's when i officially started his blog and posted his first post and all that. literally when he was born.

so yeah this was all to try and find my niche in a community again as well as do what i'd already been doing for years now: waving my headcanons in ppls faces via my art LMFAO

it was honestly pretty new for me in a bunch of ways so it was very scary. i even tried to keep it a total secret at first. i thought people wouldn't recognize me for my art style.... (yeah idk how i thought that'd work either) and i mean??? for the most part that was true because it's not like anyone in the once-ler fandom would've known me beforehand anyways

so for the first uhhh...idk it didn't last long tho..i was a secret mod, but i got too itchy about sharing art that i didn't wanna put on his blog so i broke that pretty quick. i had a lot of personal rules i put on myself on what to do/not to do on and with his blog. and i still, to this day, follow a handful of them. so when i drew other stuff that i didn't think fit on his blog, i was like well damn i wish i could show this somehow...

tho sometimes i wish i'd tried to keep up the secret mod shtick a little longer

anywho. from there it's kinda like..he really just grew on his own. new ideas, new inspiration, new experiences shaping this or that. now i can write him without touching him for years like i just picked him up yesterday. he's that wormed in my damn brain at this point. he's basically his own person sitting in my head telling me what to do with him/what he'd say

so yeah at first? it was just me trying to write a very accurate 2012 movie onceler with a few tweaks. and then he just grew organically into what he is now. that's still his root and so that's still the default direction i try to take, but he definitely has a lot of things that make him his own person at this point too. even on his main blog.

as for why he's so stupid goofy. well. that's because i like drawing dumb expressions. the end. and in the end i'm glad his main blog remained super unserious and lighthearted because it really helped me mentally a bunch (those random spikes in activity? yeah it was for my own mental health LMFAO he helps me...a lot...because of the escapism and comedy)

bonus: as for truffula flu entre. i don't remember if something in particular inspired me to make him the ender of the world. i just felt like it'd be a fitting story for the once-ler for him to be in that spot. and from there i just approached him how i thought someone like him would react were he to find himself in that position.

my goal was always to make him as human as possible. like he's technically the villain of this story, but he's also the protagonist. yaknow. so i wanted to really interweave those two ideas interestingly into his character (and now im obsessed w it)

originally i thought of truffula flu as everyone doing their own storylines. i didn't expect at all that everyone would adopt MINE as all of THEIR canons. that was LKFJSLDKF a big surprise for me i was like wait what. i guess it seems silly now in retrospect that i didn't expect that, but i was just like "well this is entre's story. ppl can do whatever else they want tho" but suddenly entre's story was everyone's story. and it's pretty cool i can't lie

#asks #Anonymous #entre #this was a fun ask to answer thank u for it!

18 notes · View notes