INACTIVE @connxrskye - Tumblr Blog

hi, i’m leaving this blog.

my online presence has become a place of toxicity for me a lot lately and i need to put an end to this. i won’t be off social media, but you won’t be able to reach me at accounts i’ve had from today forward.

I’m really bad at doing good things for myself so i consider this a step in the right direction. i’ve had this blog for almost 6 years, and for anyone who’s been around nearly that long, i just wanna say thanks.

later guys.

#peace ✌🏻#personal

honestly i’m just thinking about deleting

#tumblr has me fucked up #i might just start a new blog and delete this one #i feel like i cant be myself on here #yall always talk about supporting people with autism/aspergers #but guess what bitch. i dont feel supported

thecaffeinebookwarrior-deactiva

The Problem With Cringe Culture

From what I’ve seen, the phenomenon dubbed Cringe Culture is a paragon of insecurity, internalized misogyny, and self-loathing.

Let me elaborate a little here: here on Tumblr (and in life in general, honestly), a lot of folks are very pre-occupied with what is or isn’t Cringey. It’s a dynamic somewhat reminiscent of an eighth grade schoolyard, but that’s really not the issue here.

What Tumblr folks dub Cringey are typically things that are enjoyed by young teens (in particular, young girls) exploring fandom and fan creativity for the first time.

Yes, these teens are frequently obnoxious, overzealous, and loud, but it’s an exciting time for kids: we as adults may have comfortably settled into our interests, but for them it’s an avenue of unsupervised self-expression they may not have experienced before. Moreover, they have little to no experience in moderating themselves, which is one of the reasons why I believe the act of mocking them to be a somewhat callous one.

Are they occasionally annoying? Subjectively, yes. I frequently find young teens and tweens annoying, particularly when they’re being loud and obnoxious during my allotted writing time. But I don’t shame them for it, on here or in real life, because I’m an adult and they are literally children .

And most importantly, so are the people mocking them.

I’ll elaborate once again: I’m nineteen. Most of my friends, both on here and on my other blog, are fellow chill late teens and twenty-somethings. And I’ve never seen any adult who’s secure in their own self-image do anything other than Do Their Own Thing and allow everyone else do the same.

In other words, I’ve been involved in fandom for a few years now, and almost everyone I’ve seen actively participating in cringe culture has turned out to be no older than seventeen or so themselves, and probably (consciously or otherwise) attempting to distance themselves from their “embarrassing” younger alter egos and feel more confident in their purported maturity.

Because they probably did some Cringey things when they were fourteen, too: maybe they drew manga OCs on DeviantArt with needlessly elaborate hair, ran a passionate SuperWhoLock blog, read Homestuck, wrote angsty poetry about turning into wolves, et cetera.

Of course, the whole point here is that there is literally nothing wrong with any of these things: they’re harmless examples of children exploring revenues of creativity for the first time, that we’ve been conditioned to find embarrassing.

Now, I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have this phase myself: I once got into an impassioned argument on Facebook with a bunch of One Direction fans when I was sixteen or so, in which I dismissed their obsession as being Stupid and Juvenile and proclaimed my favored Heavy Metal as being far superior.

Now, I’m still not into One Direction in the slightest, but if I could go back in time I would probably smack my sixteen-year-old self upside the head and tell her to leave people alone and let them do their own thing.

Of course, a large part of my reasoning was also driven at the time by my unfortunate Not Like Other Girls phase, in which I wanted to distance myself from the silliness of my fellow teen girls as much as possible. I may or may not have still been in my “I hate pink” phase, which I still shudder to think about to this day.

Which brings me to another one of Cringe Culture’s more problematic aspects: it’s inherently a little misogynist, in that almost everyone who partakes in it is attempting to distance themselves from the interests of teenage girls.

Shows like Doctor Who, Steven Universe, Voltron, Supernatural, Yuri on Ice, and many others all have passionate and predominantly young female fanbases, and as such, people seem unwittingly inclined to see them as inherently vapid, annoying, or Cringey in a way that equally vocal male-dominated fandoms simply aren’t.

Even being a Trekkie (Star Trek fan) was considered embarrassing when the fandom was predominantly female populated, although the means by which fanfiction and discourse was exchanged was via fan-run zines rather than Tumblr blogs. Now that men are in on it, it’s considered one of the best fandoms there is.

More male populated fandoms such as Game of Thrones, the Walking Dead, the DC and Marvel cinematic universes, and Star Wars are just as impassioned, and have had just as many ideological issues in the past. Yet are these things ever denigrated as being Cringy or annoying? Not that I can recall.

Another one of my greatest issues with Cringe Culture is that it discourages passion: I have never encountered a fandom, Cringey or otherwise, that hasn’t produced genuinely stunning works of art and fiction. Moreover, I’ve never encountered a fandom that doesn’t have fans who have cited it as what saved them from depression or even suicide.

So if someone’s passionate about something, even if it’s something of no value to you, it costs absolutely zero dollars to mind your own goddamn business and not taint their joy with your own insecurity, cynicism, and internalized self-loathing.

Similarly, I can speak from experience when I say my interests and fandoms got me through the very worst period of my adolescence, and I’d be a significantly less happy person if I didn’t have still have them to fall back on. Not everyone’s sole source of enjoyment and comfort in life comes from nihilistic memes.

So if you want to take a step towards fostering a more creative generation, take a step away from Cringe Culture. Respect other people’s interests, and openly and unabashedly enjoy your own. Question why you think certain interests are Cringey, and try to distance yourself from the mentality that you’re a better or cooler person for being less similar to young women.

And finally, try and forgive your fourteen-year-old self for whatever cringiness they may have been culpable of, and tell them that you love them anyway.

#being in communities like the superwholock fandom saved my fucking life and helped me form relationships in real life and online #fuck you if you wanna shit on me for that #im so done with trying to brush it off as cringey and discredit all the help it actually gave me #i wouldnt BE HERE if it werent for the support i had from people who shared those fandoms with me #and now that im an adult i can watch things critically!! and i can enjoy the good and point out the bad!

girlpromise

i hate cringe culture so much

Like if all that gets my little sister to smile on a bad day is a trio of silly YouTube men with colorful hair or a band of shitpost brothers, then so be it. If that’s what makes her happy. If the little freshmen shits in my school find common interests in fnaf and undertale why should i be the one to tell then ‘no ur thing is bad and therefore u r bad as well’ like fuck that bro. I hate it. Others have said it before and i agree: i will never forgive the internet for making me feel bad to play a game about building houses and mining.

eltehdork

There’s these sevies I hang out with and we talk about Pokemon and Minecraft and it’s so much fun like if people find my interests cringy I’ll find the people who like them and if they’re children then so be it

doesnotloveyou

I asked a guy what his favorite star wars film was, and he was honest and said it was “the phantom menace,” but he cringed when he said it and was super self-deprecating. I just wanted to hug him bc dude it was the first one he saw as a kid and it holds a lot of meaning for him And I get that. I mean yeah it was bad, but people don’t always like bad things because they themselves are bad or stupid. It just makes them happy and wth is wrong with that?

frogitivity

Sometimes you just gotta XD

fullyrealisedlegend

Another reason to stop ‘cringe culture’

I’m a teacher. Today I was covering for a grade 9 science class. Decent kids, if a bit rowdy, and didn’t want to do their work. Wtv, it was textbook work. Not the point.

1 girl (reminder that these kids are, like, 14/15) was doodling bust portraits (head & shoulders) in an art book. I had a squiz and asked her if they were her characters. She said they were and excitedly told me she had so many characters for this one story of hers. I laughed about how I wished I could draw mine, and moved on.

Later in the class, I hear her enthusiastically telling her friend all about her main OC - a gay kitsune prince with a tragic past. It was so, pure, classic Deviant Art: my first OC. And you know what? I loved it. I was just sitting there half overhearing, smiling to myself and glad that her friend was engaging and interested in her story and characters.

This is a girl who will become a creator. She will draw and write and imagine, get better and better. She’ll probably move past this stage and start making more nuanced characters (she was already lamenting she didn’t have enough girl OCs). But this is where she started. This is where so many of us started. I had a tiger catgirl, goth witch/sorceress OC in high school. I found my original design for her recently. Look what I create now.

Let kids be kids. Let them explore and invent and go wild and be cliche and make overpowered OCs. Let them have their anthropomorphic animal OCs. Let them try everything before they settle into maturity.

For fucks sake; let them have fun.