5 Unsettling Sub-Genres of Fan Art Lurking on the Internet
When fans of a movie or a character have some shred of artistic talent, they can't help but try to draw their own version of the thing they love. Go on Deviant Art, type in the name of your favorite fictional character, and you'll find art that fluctuates between incredible and laughable. Keep digging and strange patterns arise -- popular characters in peculiar situations or performing oddly specific actions. Notice it the first time, your eyes will open, and you'll start to notice it everywhere. That character you love is being drawn in a very specific way, doing a very specific thing, being drawn to act in a specific way, over and over. There's no reason for it.
And it's all usually crazy as shit. Or it exists for the internet's favorite reason: because. I have no idea why, but here are some examples of very specific directions fans have taken their fan art ...
The Hulk Taking a Shit
Superheroes are so above and beyond the rest of us that fan artists occasionally like to knock them down a peg or two by drawing them into common situations that we all experience. Since there's nothing more common than taking a dump, why not draw the giant rage beast that is the Hulk as he takes a few minutes to drop a deuce?
Why can't Hulk feel a hint of shame as his immense weight turns a toilet into dust?
Why can't the Hulk encounter a flushing mishap after he blasts gamma-shit in someone else's toilet?
Why can't Hulk apply the same determination he uses to battle foes to move his bowels a little?
The poor guy must need fiber supplements or a stern cup of coffee to help those turds slip out of that immaculately-toned green ass of his; because even more than the act of pooping itself, fan artists specifically love making the Hulk put some fury into pooping, some real vein popping strain.
It's not limited to drawings. Here's a statue someone found in a shopping mall in Seoul, South Korea:
There's always a newspaper in his hands, always a shattered toilet, always a monumental struggle to shit. But some of us don't always use the toilet to shit. Sometimes we close the bathroom door, sit on the toilet lid, and we think. We contemplate. And so, too, does the Hulk.
But most of the time he's a furious shit monster.
Fat Harry Potter
Harry Potter is skinny. Fans with varying degrees of artistic talent would prefer if he were fat. So, they drew Harry Potter if he were fat.
I'm pretty sure that was the extent of the thought process behind the tons of art depicting the normally rail-thin boy wizard as being too out of shape to do half the things he does in the books. What I find fun about this strange subculture of fan art is how each image, even if it's wordless, still tells its own silly little story.
For example, in this one:
A spell backfired on Harry and now he's been primed to rip some crazy magic farts.
In this one ...
I imagine that as Harry grew older, he grew a gut and some sass and became the cool Hogwarts professor male students can talk to about girls, in spite of the unconfirmed rumors that Professor Potter is gay.
In this one ...
Snape comforts Harry after the pressures of being The Boy Who Lived have finally caught up to him, and he learned a spell that materializes food out of thin air and materialized a feast into his body in a mad fit of stress eating.
And in this one ...
Oooh, man! The story here is great! You see, the three of them got fat.
Disney Princesses Re-imagined as Anything Other than a Disney Character
Disney princesses are beloved, cherished, everlasting, a part of a well-balanced childhood pop cultural diet. Yet, for some reason, anyone who can draw would prefer Disney princesses if they were apart of absolutely any other franchise from any other corner of pop culture rather than their own.
It's so prevalent that I can Google the phrase "Disney princesses as..." followed by damn near any other property in existence; and you'll find Jasmine, Cinderella and the rest of the Disney pantheon of princesses as that thing. So, when writing this entry, I purposefully didn't do too much research. I will Google "Disney princesses as..." and fill in the blank with the first franchise I think of to see if there's crossover fan art. I'll present my findings whether the search is a success or a failure.
First search term: "Disney Princesses as Doctor Who."
Second search term: "Disney princesses as Mortal Kombat."
Third search term: "Disney princesses as Pokemon."
Fourth search term: "Disney princesses as Marvel characters."
Fifth search term: "Disney princesses as Star Wars."
It goes on and on: Street Fighter, Moulin Rouge, Avatar: The Last Airbender.
How about something else entirely? Disney princesses as high schoolers, as different ethnicities, as boys, as roller derby girls, as college students.
Artists want the princesses to be everything the artists love, maybe even a little bit of the artists themselves, and so they make it happen. They've been crossed over into pretty much every corner of life and nerdom. Everything. Except for steampunk, strangely enough.
Wait. That can't be. Let me Goog- ah, there it is!
Should have known better. It's practically a law of the internet: if it exists, there's a steampunk version of it somewhere.
My Little Pony Characters as Homicidal Maniacs
Lost in all the mocking of bronies is the fact that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a sweet, silly, inoffensive children's show. Aside from all the weird fan art porn out there featuring colorful cartoon horses getting plowed by massive horse penises, My Little Pony fan art can be exactly as you'd imagine it to be.
Like Lisa Frank and Bob Ross tag-teamed a canvas.
But not all of it. Along with the prerequisite nice-thing-to-vicious-porn conversation fan art creators typically run their fandom through, there's a big segment of the show's fanbase that's made up of people who should be on an FBI watch list and are in dire need of intense psychiatric aid. How else could you explain the insane, graphic and deeply troubling My Little Pony torture porn that's out there? There's a lot of it on the internet, and that ...
shit ...
is ...
fucking ...
bonkers.
A lot of it centers on the character Pinkie Pie, the "crazy one" of the group. Fan art and fanfic creators have turned her from delightfully nuts to full-on homicidal lunatic, particularly in a really fucked up fanfic called Cupcakes. That last picture up there of Pinkie Pie torturing Rainbow Dash in a basement is an artist's rendering of the story, created to expand upon the rich visual tapestry of the tale. Still, it doesn't explain why I can find images of every other pony caked in another pony's blood, so I'll just chalk it up to fans being so sick of getting saturated with the show's innocence that they create a pony hell for the characters as an outlet for the darkness to balance it out.
Maybe it's time to recalibrate that balance.
Batman Eating
Let's cheer things up a bit. Here, cleanse your palate of all that pony gore with a drawing of Batman eating a lollipop:
Still feeling unclean? Well, here's Batman eating corn:
How about Batman slurping down some wriggling tentacles as a light, protein-packed snack:
I can go on. I've got literally dozens of links to pictures of Batman eating. I don't know what to do what all these things, so here -- you take them. Want Batman as an enormous slob, who apparently chose to wear his Batsuit during a bountiful feast for a couple dozen, but he's gorging on it all by himself? BAM! I've got that covered:
Wonder what Batman would look like if he crashed a wedding and started eating the top part of a multi-tiered wedding cake? WHAMM! Here you go:
In the mood for justice and Latin cuisine? KAPOW! Batman eating a delicious empanada:
Okay, how about I type a random set of words and we see what happens? How about ... Batman wearing purple culottes and eating poutine?
Fast food burgers. Bananas. Fried chicken. Hot dogs. Hell, I've got Batman eating a hot dog in video form. Maybe you've seen it:
There's no website out there that commanded a legion of disparate artists to draw Batman eating. In the rare instance when the artist of a picture of Batman eating was kind enough to explain why he or she drew Batman eating, they usually said some variation of: "I didn't know what to draw, so I drew Batman eating."
My guess is that caped crusading burns a lot of calories, and a bunch of people decided to give Batman a snack as a reward for all his do-gooding. He's not real, so they drew him eating as the next best thing. But I feel like we can go a little further in aiding Batman. Fan artists have made him eat a lot. Let's consider snack time over and draw Bats brushing his tee-
Never mind. Forget I said anything.
Luis is posing so a legion of internet artists can draw him picking his nose for some reason. You can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.
