Last week was Cinemacon, essentially the E3 of the film world, for better and worse. Over four days, major studios like Disney and Lionsgate take over Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to unveil logos, trailers, and a cavalcade of surprise cast announcements for their ever-changing release schedules, all of which could have easily been an email. Amid the fanfare, Cinemacon’s sneak peek at Disney’s latest heavenly mandated sequel, Zootopia 2, was a sleeper agent activation code for brain-broken internet dwellers like myself.
Zootopia, otherwise known as SFW Beastars, is a 2016 animated film in which a rookie cop rabbit named Judy Hopps teams up with a sly, street-smart fox named Nick Wilde to save their society from a political conspiracy. Aside from having a tiger supporting character who is hot to folks who swear they aren’t furries, the film was entertaining, with overtones about social injustice and prejudice that were broad enough to reinforce racism as a deplorable thing to kids. At its core is the buddy-cops-with-romantic-undertones dynamic between Judy and Nick, a relationship Disney seems eager to delve deeper into in Zootopia 2.
In a grainy cell phone photo shared by Discussing Film from the showcase floor, Judy and Nick are seen in therapy, officiated by a quokka named Dr. Fuzzby, played by Quinta Brunson. The first look left normies puzzled, wondering what had transpired during the nearly decade-long gap between the films to send its heroes to therapy. But to those of us with Tumblr-warped minds — trained to spot “Loss” memes in the wild like a Where’s Waldo? and receive breaking news via Destial confession memes — this seemingly innocent scene unearthed a relic of internet lore we thought had been buried: the infamous Zootopia abortion fanfic comics. The replies and quote retweets to Discussing Film’s post are flooded with users sharing the first panel of the fanfic comic, citing it as the real reason behind the therapy session, leaving the uninitiated scratching their heads.
Sure, no one needs to know about Zootopia fanfiction in the year of our lord 2025, but I’ve been blighted with this Tumblr knowledge for nine years and have to offload it onto you. So allow me to bridge the gap for those left in the dark.
I Will Survive: A Zootopia Fan Comic by DeviantArt artist Borba emerged in 2017 and quickly spread across the internet to platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and even The AV Club. The comic begins with Judy taking a pregnancy test and discovering she and Nick are pregnant. After insisting on taking a long shower before Judy can “ruin the rest of his day,” Nick reacts with joy upon hearing the news. However, Judy reveals her intention to have an abortion.
What follows is a heated exchange, with Judy expressing concerns about the complexities of bringing an interbred pregnancy to term (a theme explored extensively in Beastars, which is really good and you should watch/read it). Meanwhile, Nick embodies every conservative argument, condemning her decision as a “premeditated sin” driven by career ambitions. Judy slaps Nick across the face, creating one of many memes that live out of context from the comic, before Nick storms out of the apartment.
But their story doesn’t end there. Borba responded to a DeviantArt question about I Will Survive’s political alignment by claiming it was “negative for both sides,” then later made a sequel titled Born to Be Alive. That story picks up months after Nick and Judy’s falling out, with Nick showing up at Judy’s apartment at 2.a.m, desperate to make up. Upon learning Judy went through with the abortion, Nick pleads for forgiveness for his “past errors and many flaws”—conveniently leaving out the fact that he’d been seeing someone else during their time apart.
After Judy verbally drags Nick’s ass across the coals for abandoning her in her time of need, Nick insists they should get back together. Suddenly, a fox lady named Shay walks out of Judy’s bedroom, wearing a robe and offering to help. Amid Nick’s panicked “Oh no! No! No"s, Judy explains that Shay was there for her when Nick wasn’t. Judy also reveals she’s been hiding her relationship with Shay because her parents had already disapproved of her and Nick living together without being married; Judy outing herself would’ve brought about more conflict with her parents’ conservative “carrotholic” beliefs. Judy and Nick fall out once more, and Judy falls into Shay's loving embrace. It's no Shakespeare, but the comics made for an entertaining read on Imgur.
Borba’s webcomic saga includes a third installment titled Never Say Goodbye, where Judy becomes the mayor of Zootopia and the story takes a wild turn and spoofs the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but we don’t need to dive into all that.
There’s no chance Zootopia 2 will make Judy and Nick’s therapy session as dramatic as Borba’s bizarrely well-drawn comic. Still, it feels like a subtle nod, intentional or not, to that peculiar moment when the internet collectively imagined the pair needing therapy. While anything’s possible, including the idea that someone at Disney stumbled across that corner of the internet and decided to drop a subliminal wink to those of us who’d catch it, I can confidently say this is a prime example of how the internet loves to spiral, turning a sneak peek at a glorified ad convention into an unofficial epilogue for a decade-old fan comic.
