Time

Fandom
Name:	Time
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Randall Munroe
Date(s):	March 25 - July 26, 2013
Medium:	Webcomic/graphic story
Country of Origin:
External Links:	https://xkcd.com/1190/ (original xkcd URL, which now displays the final frame of the comic) http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ (scrollable version of the comic)
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The very first panel of Time, featuring the comic's two protagonists (commonly referred to in xkcd parlance as Megan and Cueball) sitting on a sea shore.

Time is a 2013 webcomic by Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, which was serialised on the xkcd website for four months between March and July 2013. It was published frame by frame (effectively an extremely slow-moving animation, or a comic where each panel replaced the one before), initially every half an hour and then later every hour. The completed comic is 3,101 frames long, published over 124 days.

As the comic unfolded, it quickly spawned a fandom that began to obsessively catalog each new panel, trade theories, make jokes and references and much more. The Time thread on the xkcd forum (now sadly offline as the forums went down in 2019 following a data breach) was home to most of the discussion and fannish activity and became infamously huge, with more than 50,000 posts by the time the comic concluded. Randall Munroe wrote in a blog post published shortly after the conclusion of Time,

The xkcd forum thread on Time grew terrifyingly fast, developing a subculture with its own vocabulary, songs, inside jokes, and even a religion or two.

The Time webcomic has its own fan wiki created to document the fandom's in-depth analysis, discussions, creative endeavours and unique culture.

Outside of fandom, Time has been widely recognised as a remarkable, landmark work, and has been described as Randall Munroe's "magnum opus". It won a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2014, with blogger Cory Doctorow accepting the award on behalf of Munroe, dressed in a cape and goggles as he has been depicted in multiple xkcd comic strips.

Canon

Time is set 11,000 years into the future of our world, and takes place during what creator Randall Munroe referred to in his blog post about the comic as "one of the strangest phenomena in our world: The Mediterranean Sea sometimes evaporates, leaving dry land miles below the old sea level … and then fills back up in a single massive flood." (This phenomenon is known as the Zanclean Flood).

The comic follows the two protagonists, known as Cueball and Megan (their names and appearances are not unique to Time; they are character archetypes that appear in many xkcd comics) as they realise that the sea level where they live is rising, and go on a journey to discover its cause. They discover a river and follow it, encountering signs of human habitation, plants and wildlife. All of these were designed to give hints to readers as to where the comic was taking place.

Cueball and Megan encounter a group of people who speak a language incomprehensible to them (the language, which was created by Munroe with the help of a linguist, was dubbed "Beanish" by fans due to the fact that its speakers wore headgear similar to beanies). After meeting the group's leader, who speaks their language, they learn the truth about the sea rising and the fact that their home is about to be flooded. Cueball and Megan flee back home to try to help their people escape.

Fandom

xkcd Forum Thread

The comic's thread on the xkcd forums was home to most of the fandom activity surrounding Time. It came to be nicknamed the "One True Thread" (or OTT) by the Time fandom, after the fans' nickname for the comic which is the "One True Comic". Thread regulars are thus known as OTTers.

While the xkcd forums were still online, the Time thread was by far the biggest and most active thread in the Individual XKCD Comic Threads subforum. The Explain xkcd wiki recalls,

In the xkcd fora, this comic was given a thread like any other comic. The Time thread expanded over the months of the comic's running to include 1254 pages, or just over 50,000 posts, and continued thereafter at a considerable pace. As of August 23, 2018, it has over 106,000 posts and an enormous 38,000,000 views, which easily tops every other thread, while still being quite active. More than 1/3 of all posts within the Individual XKCD Comic Threads subforum are in the 1190: "Time" thread.

A mirror of the thread reveals that when the forum went down in August 2019, there were 2,689 pages in the thread and a total of 107,526 posts. Per the Time fan wiki's own description, the thread's community tended to be "essentially a self-enclosed bubble of the larger forums", with a very friendly and amiable atmosphere lacking in any kind of serious conflict:

The users have formed strong connections over their shared interests, amiable personalities, and friendly mindsets, as well as a tendency to be mildly competitive with creative works; flame wars are essentially non-existent within the OTT, with good-natured ribbing and a focus on friendliness being paramount. They tend to be extremely welcoming of new faces, and are genuinely delighted when someone new to "Time" joins in the discussions; prior knowledge of the thread's content is not a requirement for joining in.

The OTT's unique personality was influenced early on by an annual forum event called "The Madness", or Mod Madness, in which forum moderators are given free rein to do whatever they please with their powers, which tended to include abusing a script that replaces certain words with other words (normally used to censor offensive words). This came as a surprise to OTT denizens, many of whom did not interact with the wider forum. The OTT was later granted immunity from The Madness due to the fact that replacing the word "Time" had the effect of breaking every comic image URL in the thread. However, this whimsical attitude towards language persisted in the fandom and went on to influence a lot of the OTT's lingo and terminology.