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 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.
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)
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'.