5 Bizarre Subgenres of Fan Art Lurking on the Internet
Back in June I wrote an article titled "5 Unsettling Sub-Genres of Fan Art Lurking on the Internet," wherein I showed you that people with varying degrees of artistic talent and access to DeviantART can and will draw the same strangely specific images featuring their favorite fictional characters. I'm chalking it up to mass hysteria brought on by mind-warping signals emitted from a cloaked alien spacecraft hovering in the Earth's atmosphere.
It turns out there's more highly specific fan art out there -- much more than I could have imagined when I started researching the first one. I couldn't fit them all into one article, which is code for "I was astonishingly lazy," so here are five more bizarre subgenres of fan art.
the Hedgehog
I recently wrote about how Sonic the Hedgehog is full of shit for claiming he could run at the speed of sound. Today, I'm going to write about Sonic again, not once, but twice. For being the star of a video game series that's fallen off the mountain of remarkable sales figures for most of the past 15 years, people who can kind of draw sure like the guy. People like Sonic enough to desperately want to be a part of his world, to in some way exist beside him. So, they draw a generic cartoon hedgehog and slap their names on it, like my name:
And that goes for pretty much any name.
Marlene the Hedgehog:
Alex the Hedgehog:
Rebecca the Hedgehog:
Brendan the Hedgehog's acid trip is peaking:
Googling "Tyler the Hedgehog" brings up this crazy shit:
And Erica the Hedgehog was about to say something until someone was murdered in front of her:
Go ahead, give it a whirl. Google your name and tack on "the Hedgehog" and see what poorly MS Paint-ed horrors get flung at your monitor. This is the Internet's version of those spinning racks of personalized key chains at gift shops. If your name is common, you're swimming in a sea of poorly rendered cartoon balls of attitude. If your name is too unique to warrant a Sonic drawing, the folks over on the r/TheHedgehog subreddit will make one for you if you ask, and it'll be just as spectacularly shitty as the rest of them.
The closest I've found to an explanation comes from Know Your Meme. I'll save you from reading the history of stupid Internet bullshit by paraphrasing the result of what was no doubt hundreds of hours of research conducted by whoever writes Know Your Meme entries: "Some people started doing it and then others too and then more people and now there's a lot of it."
People drawing their own Sonics and adding their name is a peculiar occurrence -- strange, even. But it ain't got shit on the absolute lunacy of another form of Sonic fan art ...
Christian Sonic
I wish I could find out where this started, how this started, why this started -- I can't. No matter what I Google, no one will tell me why there is such a thing as fan art based on deeply religious Sonic characters. It's so over-the-top that it has to be a joke. At the same time, every drawing of Sonic praying with a tear in his eye as a biblical block quote floats by his head ...
... or Silver the Hedgehog accepting Christ with open arms ...
... or Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails holding their hands up in reverence of a weirdly foreboding crucifix looming behind them ...
... is so shitty that it must be sincere. These things have to be the work of people who hold Sonic and Jesus in such esteem that they pass the time by slamming their two loves together in MS Paint -- an act that is perhaps the truest expression of one's devotion to a fictional character just behind You Tube video compilations set to Linkin Park songs.
Most of it borders on blasphemous. Some of it blazes past blasphemous in a blue whirlwind and slams into the horrible, thus losing all its rings.
That one could be a joke. Maybe someone saw all that weird Christian Sonic fan art and took it to an extreme on purpose. Or, alternatively, this person is fucking nuts.
Teletubbies as Nightmare Fuel
In my original article, I showed you the dark side of My Little Pony fan art. Ponies covered in blood, dismembered, tortured. Something sweet and innocent was turned insane by fans who probably secretly hate all that sweetness and innocence. Today I bring you some fan art in the same vein. Remember Teletubbies? Those weird little alien things with TVs in their stomachs? Psychos with art degrees sure do, and they want to make sure you never forget those multicolored critters by drilling them into your subconscious so they can claw at your dreams as you sleep.
The scary Teletubbie fan art subgenre can be split further into two distinct sub-subgenres. There's the Warriors-style roving gang of unsettling alien thugs genre:
And there's the demon troll that will eat your soul genre:
Either way, Teletubbies have been converted from sweet weird things to horrors from a parallel plane, where the air is fear and the water is tears. For the most part, weird fan art is generally pretty shitty, artistically speaking -- lots of MS Paint, lots of crude sketches that look to be the work of deranged children. Scary Teletubbie fan art appears to draw the attention of people with some genuine artistic ability.
It's still something you'd want to fire a 12-gauge into, only to recoil in horror as it eats its own loosely hanging guts and continues its death march toward your soul:
But at least it's well done, even if, for no apparent reason, one particular piece crams nonsense religious symbolism into an already ominous work:
And I can't forget to mention the sub-sub-subgenre of Teletubbies/The Ring mashups, because that's a thing, too:
I have one more image to show. I don't like it. I don't want you to see it. I don't even know if I can post it on Cracked. It's NSFW, but not too NSFW. Or maybe my internal NSFW gauge has been corrupted by the Internet over the years and I've lost all meaning of what is or isn't appropriate for an office monitor. So, I'm not even going to post it to save you from possibly getting fired for having the image on your monitor as your boss walks by your cubicle. If you want to see it, CLICK HERE. I'll wait.
Did you click it? Fucked up, right? It was dripping. Jesus.
Moving on.
Epic Bob Ross
I loved Bob Ross' show, The Joy of Painting. I never watched to learn to paint scenic vistas dotted with "happy little trees," as he always said. I watched because Bob Ross was Xanax with an afro. He was so kind and soothing that he had to have been up to some nefarious shit. I know that geniality masked a psycho.
"I had to appease the trees with human sacrifices to ensure their continued happiness."
That's probably why Bob Ross fan art (because there is such a thing) goes in the opposite direction when portraying the guy who looks like he sells acid out of the back of his van. Why show him blandly standing beside an easel when you can toss some testosterone on that bitch and depict Bob Ross as a ripped Viking riding a dragon:
Notice how this piece lacks color, save for the blood and/or paint Bob Ross draws from the dragon's back with his justice brush. This, unquestionably, implies that this piece has art meanings and things of art-ish qualities and such and the like. Also, there's a burning village in the background. The dragon probably did it ... but it's fun to imagine that Bob Ross literally blazed a path of destruction in his quest to kill a dragon.
When Bob Ross must art, he must art quickly. Thus, Bob Ross uses his unicorn steed to whisk him away to his art, for his art cannot wait.
The unicorn shares Bob's hairstyle because that unicorn is Bob's son. Bob rides his son to work. It's just more efficient; they're both going downtown anyway.
To some, Bob Ross' fascination with nature can mean only one thing:
He's an Ent.
Other artists take their passion for imagining Bob Ross as a much, much more grandiose figure than he was by tattooing onto their thigh a crude image of Bob Ross firing automatic rifles atop a giraffe:
Of course, some artists use their talent to capture the truth of Bob Ross, to show him as the human he was and not the wild myth. Finally, I present to you Bob Ross, as painted in his natural state:
Link and His Pee
These entries work best when, for no apparent reason whatsoever, dozens of people out there individually decided to draw images of their favorite characters doing one very specific thing, as if they were given a command to draw this character doing this one thing. For example, in my first article I showed you how dozens of people decided to draw the Hulk taking a shit. A similar thought floated through the minds of dozens of other people, like it was whispered into their ears by a pervert fairy. The pervert fairy whispered, "Hey, you know Link from the Legend of Zelda games? Yeah, well, draw him pissing."
None of them knew exactly why they suddenly felt compelled to draw a fake elf kid unloading his bladder, but damn it, they acted on that urge:
Link pisses on everything. On Midna, like in the one above, or all over himself after his urge to piss collapsed him to his knees:
As far as I know, there isn't a meme out there about Link peeing or needing to pee. There isn't an in-joke shared by fans based on a specific moment in the games that pertains to Link peeing. The closest I can come to an explanation is with a Japanese fetish subculture called omorashi, which is when people get aroused by either having a full bladder or seeing someone who does.
The thing is, only one of the artists in the vast collection of Link pee art I found mentions omorashi, and none of the others mention anything about fetishes. But maybe I'm trying to find reason where there is none. Maybe they drew Link peeing because the pervert fairy muse told them to. If that's the case, it appears someone got wise to the pervert piss fairy muse's antics:
Take that, pervert piss fairy muse!
Luis pissed himself. Will you draw him? If so, let him know on Twitter and Tumblr.
Related: Be sure to check out Luis calling out other bizarre things like crappy action figures and terrible video game performances.
