When Did Judy X Nick First Get A Kiss In Fanworks?

I still get a little giddy thinking about how quickly fandom filled the quiet space left at the end of 'Zootopia'. The movie famously avoids turning Judy and Nick into an obvious romance on-screen, and that silence was basically an invitation. From what I’ve tracked through tags and old posts, the very first kisses in fanworks started popping up almost immediately after the film’s 2016 release — within days to a few weeks. People were sketching stolen smooches on Tumblr and DeviantArt, and the earliest short fics and one-shots that landed on Archive of Our Own and FanFiction.net often featured a post-case, quiet moment where one or both of them leaned in. It wasn’t a single, definitive “first” moment so much as a tidal wave of little kisses across platforms as fans explored the chemistry the movie left dangling.

One of the things I love about digging into early fan activity is how platform-specific it was. On Tumblr you’d see quick, stylish pieces of fanart and micro-comics — the kind you scroll past but then come back to because the composition is just right — while DeviantArt often hosted more finished painted scenes of a full, cinematic kiss. AO3 and FanFiction.net collected longer prose: sweet coffee-shop AUs, post-movie confessions in the back of a police car, and a ton of “they finally say it” slow-burns where the kiss is the payoff. If you want to find the oldest stuff yourself, sort by oldest posts on AO3 tags like 'Judy/Nick' or 'JudyHopps', comb Tumblr tag histories (or check the Wayback Machine if the posts are gone), and filter DeviantArt galleries by earliest uploads. Reddit threads and early Twitter posts from 2016 also capture snapshots of fanart and links back to those first microfics.

From a fan’s-eye perspective, the first kisses weren’t all the same: some were shy and domestic (Judy pecking Nick after a long day), some were bold and dramatic (rain-drenched declarations with a kiss), and others played with genre — noir, fantasy, steamy adult reinterpretations. I remember being surprised at how quickly folks used those tropes: within weeks there were both tender, PG-13 post-credits kisses and very explicit works for older audiences. That variety is part of why tracking a single “first” is tricky — the earliest kiss might have been a tiny doodle that wasn’t widely reblogged, while a more polished comic or fic that people remember could have shown up slightly later but made a bigger cultural splash.

If you’re trying to pinpoint a concrete earliest instance, expect to find contesting claims — people hoarded screenshots of their old posts, others unearthed 2016 DeviantArt uploads, and some of the oldest Tumblr posts have gone private or been deleted over time. My favorite way to explore this history is to enjoy the artifacts themselves: read a few early one-shots, compare styles of those first kiss-illustrations, and soak in how the fandom collectively answered the question the movie left open. For a fun scavenger hunt, try matching the tone of an early kiss (awkward and sweet vs. cinematic and passionate) to the platform it came from — it says a lot about how we, as fans, processed that chemistry.