Wirt
| Character | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Wirt |
| Occupation: | Student |
| Relationships: | Greg (Brother) Sara (Crush) |
| Fandom: | Over the Garden Wall |
| Other: | |
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Wirt is one of the main characters in the Over the Garden Wall miniseries, voiced by Elijah Wood. He is a teenage boy with a younger half brother Greg who he is lost in the Unknown with. He spends the series going on adventures with his brother trying to return home from the Unknown and trying to evade the series' main antagonist, The Beast.
Wirt is shown throughout the series to be a very intelligent young man, prone to melancholy and pessimism. It is shown that he feels like an outcast among his peers and feels he has difficulty fitting in. Wirt is a poet and a clarinet player and expresses a knowledge of interior design in the episode Mad Love.
Wirt has a crush on a girl named Sara who he believes likes Jason Funderberker (Human). Wirt creates a cassette tape for Sara but is too shy to give it to her. Greg takes the tape and gives it to Sara's friends who make sure she gets the cassette tape which causes Wirt to panic and try to get it back. This leads to them going with Sara and Jason Funderberker (Human) to the graveyard. In the graveyard the police pull up and the children scatter, with Wirt and Greg going over the graveyard wall and ending up in the unknown, kickstarting their adventure.
Fandom
Beast!Wirt
Beast!Wirt is an incredibly popular trope where Wirt remains in the Unknown and is corrupted by the Beast or the dark lantern. One very popular version of this is the Bad End Friends idea, which also appears in the Gravity Falls fandom, and the Adventure Time fandom, among others. Beast!Wirt, Bipper, and Ice Prince Finn are the three original members of the Bad End Friends group, which is a group of cartoon characters who got the "Bad End".
Beast!Wirt also shows up in other contexts outside of Bad End Friends. Sometimes Wirt becomes the Beast to fill his role after the dark lantern is extinguished, sometimes Wirt is the one who extinguishes the lantern, though in canon it is the Woodsman who blows out the lantern. Sometimes Beast!Wirt occurs in a world where Greg died or became an edelwood, and sometimes Greg has gone home but Wirt is trapped in the Unknown. In some depictions the Beast is still alive while Beast!Wirt exists though this is considerably less common. Beast!Wirt is also sometimes a result of a roleswap rather than actively changing from being human.
Beast!Wirt is typically depicted with antlers and the multicolored eyes of the Beast. Other traits that are occasionally changed in fanworks are his feet, often becoming hooves, and his hands often becoming claws. Sometimes his transformation is so complete he is nearly unrecognizable as human.
Fanworks and fanart of Beast!Wirt are so pervasive in fandom that many first-time viewers of the show assume that it is canon, and has led to many falsely remembering that Wirt blew out the lantern, while in the show, it was actually the Woodsman.
Other
- Wirt is a fan favorite within fandom and is the most popular characters to appear in fanworks.
- Wirt often appears in crossovers with the fandom Gravity Falls often being shipped with Dipper Pines.
- A common staple in fanworks is that once Wirt returns home he is more confident, though not entirely so, this often leads to him being able to ask out Sara.
Shipping
Wirt is shipped with a variety of the characters within the show, a few of the most popular ships are:
- Wirt/Beatrice (Otherwise known as Wirtrice or Infinite Eyerolls)
Wirt/Beatrice is incredibly popular due to the fact that Beatrice is present in most episodes, even though she is a bluebird throughout. In the show Beatrice and Wirt never met while Beatrice was human, however most fanworks portray Beatrice as human when shipping Beatrice and Wirt.
- Wirt/Sara (Otherwise known as Poetic Bee)
- Wirt/Lorna (Otherwise known as Turtlebells)
- Wirt/The Beast (Otherwise known as Poetree)
- Wirt/Dipper Pines (Otherwise known as Pinescone)