Jack Campbell

Photo of a diorama inspired by the treehouse in the Forest Fic

If you’re big in the Twenty One Pilots fandom, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ve heard mentions of The Forest Fic. Usually when the story is mentioned on multiple online platforms, it’s not in a good light. In turn, making people “scared” to read it. If you are one of those people who is scared to read it, here is a summary of the story.

Starting off, before even reading the story, it’s important to know that it deals with heavy topics, a lot of which could be triggering to people if not warned that they’re there. Everything is stated in the tags of it, however, if it’s reposted, people often forget to add a warning. The story deals a lot with mental health struggles, abuse, and suicide so before reading, it’s important to keep that in mind. 

The story opens with our characters Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun, since it is a fanfiction for Twenty One Pilots, and it’s seemingly just the two boys talking to each other, until Josh hears Tyler’s mom coming up the stairs and he goes and hides in the closet. Once Tyler’s mom comes into the room, she asks her son what he was doing, which he replies simply with, “talking to Josh”, and immediately regrets it. Tyler’s mom sighs in response and reassures Tyler that Josh isn’t real, and continues with telling him about his appointment with his therapist. 

After Tyler’s mom leaves his room, Josh comes out of his closet and expresses his distaste for Tyler’s therapist, saying “he sounds so…I would say purple-red-green but I’m missing something, aren’t I?” Tyler then follows up with a simple, “Pink,”. As Josh keeps explaining how he doesn’t like the therapist, Tyler asks, as a joke, if Josh would prefer that he went back to his old therapist, which frightens Josh and he frantically says no. Tyler says that it was just a joke, worrying Josh, since it’s clear that something bad did happen with Tyler and that therapist.

Now, the story skips a bit forward, now at the point where Tyler is at his appointment. His therapist asks him if he’s written about anything recently, Tyler replies with how he and Josh found a treehouse. Of course, he just shortens it down to he found the treehouse and not Josh. The session continues for a while, and at the end, Tyler’s therapist suggests that since Josh is one of the only things he seems to like, he should talk about him to his parents, which confuses Tyler in a way, since everyone believes that Josh is just his ‘delusion’. He ends up talking with his mom about Josh, which makes her speculate that Tyler might actually have feelings for something that’s allegedly in his mind.

After the conversation with his mom, Tyler sits in his treehouse with Josh, who asks him the question that most people know this story for, “How do you feel?”  Tyler responds with carving it into the floor, spelling out TERRIFIED in all caps. Soon after, Tyler is back in the therapy office, which ends up in a rant from Tyler. Once he gets home, he finally talks to his mom about how he thinks that he’s actually in love with Josh, which leaves his mom concerned.

Now that Tyler finally admitted to being in love with Josh, he runs away from his mom and goes to meet Josh in the treehouse, they end up briefly talking before Tyler cuts Josh off with a kiss, leaving the both of them surprised.

After other events happen, Tyler says one thing that Josh takes the wrong way, which was just, “I know,” making Josh blow up at Tyler, abandoning him in the treehouse. Tyler leaves the treehouse shortly after, and there is a timeskip. Tyler ends up back at therapy, where he finally uncovers the bad things his other therapist did to him. He leaves the therapy session feeling upset, worrying his mom for many different reasons.

Tyler escapes from his room after his mom leaves him there, running out to the treehouse, screaming about how he’s upset that Josh isn’t real. He goes into the treehouse and sees Josh’s lighter on the ground next to his carving of “TERRIFIED” on the floor. In the actions of a manic episode that Tyler was clearly having, he puts the flame to the wall of the treehouse, letting it catch on fire and burn around him.

In the end, the treehouse burns down with Tyler inside it. A timeskip happens and now the setting is at Tyler’s funeral, where the priest asks if anyone has any words, which ends up with a boy with bright blue hair standing up, who ends up being Josh.

Considering this fanfiction covers very sensitive topics, it got extremely popular by how “traumatizing” people found it. When the story was first published in 2014, it was a lot more “normalized” than it is today, especially since most of the people it was popular around were young. Now, people are really starting to realize how upsetting all of the topics really are and it is now mostly viewed negatively, but with a very large impact on both the Twenty One Pilots fandom and even the fanfiction community.