The parafolk, abbreviated form of a paracosm folklore.
A parafolk is more meta. Parafolks have complex, special meanings to their authors that are reflected to the fanbase as left with their own interpretation. It is an multimedia adaptation of an author's complex inner paracosm that was forged over years, or decades of brainstorming throughout their life, with an ever-evolving concept and storyline into multiple sagas, timelines, and self-parodies instead of a recycled concept by a studios rushed under a very short period, a marketing product or a pure sitcom show. This parafolk can serve personal benefits to the author, from trauma expression or a tribute, to a self-discovery journey.
Parafolks are sometimes very differently animated than cartoons, and have an overwhelming presence of starting on low budget, or being entirely animated with low budget software. Battle For Dream Island is qualifiable. BFDI was originally a paracosm from Carey Huang's childhood, later converted into a Total Drama Island-style of internet saga with different titles for different seasons. All dubbed by himself and a female voice actress.
Some parafolks have multiple co-authors, and others are adaptations of post-exhumed discoveries, for example The Vivian Girls. Differences between an indifolks and cartoons/anime are their spiritual value, origins, production, and marketing interest. Indifolks are not 'products' and are works of art truly meant for catharsis and the appreciation of a restricted fanbase, often refusing to be sold to large producers or monetized. The adaptation is open to fan requests and can run simulatenously on multiple platforms, both written and animated, or with a spontaneous or collaborative writing style.
Parafolks are predominantly used for the animated adaptations, but this encompasses a necessary urban recognition in several domains (before or during its production) as the same or different interconnected prototypal projects, often obscure websites or a short-lived fame in early development (often a newspaper appearance in childhood or a school project).
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| Homestar Runner has an extensive roster from their time as an important facet of the 2000's internet. Source: rollingstone.com |
Rick and Morty and Homestar Runner can technically be categorized as parafolks.
Homestar Runner is more compatible with a true parafolk. It started in the 1990's as a university book, and evolved into early 2000's Adobe Flash animtions (beginning in 2000) that rapidly earned at-large internet recognition as a meme and continued until the late 2000's. It was halted for several years in the 2010's, only to be revived again more as an inconsistent unofficial continuation.
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| This is not even the best part. |
Rick and Morty started in 2006 as an X-rated satirical short on roilandtv.com with darker humor than the Adult Swim series, and with several other obscure Flash animations that were not explicitly prioritized or talked about when the genuine show released its pilot on Adult Swim for fear of an accidental airing. The early shorts' original characters are now featured as cameos in episodes and well-known by the majority of the fanbase.
It has some aspects of a "cartoon" from its blandish style, extremely bad aging and product/marketing value that was abused by fans during a release of a McDonald's sauce, and caused chaos in 1/4 of the fanbase to reaching aggravated violence attempts in real-life riots. R&M is also in many ways a cartoon from its own aura resembling an advanced sitcom, but can still be categotrized as a parafolk from its extensive past and fan impact in recent years.
There are cons to parafolks. It's not entirely a utopic land of nostalgic animation. The authors themselves can be controversial above the glance of their legacy. Parafolks can become scarier as theiy evolve and age in some wacky ways and have more unstable support. They can either rot to death by fanbase abusing its value and scare away the authors, be abandoned, neglected, never found, make short-lived unofficial comebacks, or be a post-exhumous adaptation into a documentary (The Vivian Girls). True 'cartoons' often rot away from shortage of writers and animators and changing who runs the show instead of the fanbase, like what happened to Cartoon Network. The mutual involvement of the author's spiritual life, the parafolk and its fanbase can stir strained relationships, fragility and trouble but the legacy stands strong.
Parafolks can be oversatured with tons of dark humor and cynicality, and can be an extreme bait for ideological and moral taboos.
Cartoons are tests and less consistent and more simplistic or lackluster than parafolks. The cartoon industry is rigid, more eye candy than a soulfeed, accords no credit to a particular person's inner life; second, they are one-sided one-time productions that have a shallow spiritual value, rushed, have varied executive degrees, have a moral instead of a complex, deeply personal philosophy and storyline, and mostly are forced for marketing. Parafolks are more community-based and cartoons are just cartoons. Anime, on the other hand, are a total world of insanity and are extremely bland and repetitive unless you have very parafolk-like animes like Hadoka Magica: The Moving Castle, very atypical animation style,s or oldie classics. Some animes can be actual parafolks (paranimes), and that can represent One Punch Man; it originally started as a webcomic and turned into a very popular anime itself, and with its own unique vibe and style. It is almost entirely unlike mainstream anime culture.
A parafolk is very fluid and generous in its existence, almost to being haunted by the creator's soul, but the rest are just self-existent products created to entertain.
There is also a fourth type of animation value, called propaganda. Propaganda cartoons are known to have been a common occurence in the 20th century, and banned shorts are scattered over YouTube.
Eddsworld can count as a parafolk for its animation/webcomic duality, its fanbase scaring the authors away to slowly abandoning entirely its very existence, and the spiritual value and timeline being almost parallel to Homestar Runner. The biggest difference is that the characters are self-inserts and versions of real people, and the impact of the death of its main character's IRL counterpart, Edd Gould (and not the self-insert) who had the original idea, but passed away of leukemia in 2012.
Homestuck can be also known as a parafolk.









