I dunno if you guessed it, but I like drawing cute little ponies....fanart of a children's cartoon. And every so often, someone feels the need to tell me that my personal interest is stupid, childish, cancerous....."cringe-y". Boy howdy, do I hear that word tossed around a lot. Cringe, cringe, cringe. We're all afraid of making something cringe-worthy. Something that could end up in those lovely "Bad OC" cringe compilations. I see other artists, especially young creators, getting policed and attacked for creating something that could-gasp!- be interpreted as the dreaded Mary Sue. So artists stifle themselves. Can't make your OC too colorful. Don't you dare make them related to a canon character! Better watch that backstory, lest somebody decry your character as an edgelord. You can have a nerdy interest, but you better not be too fucking passionate about it. Watch yourself. Don't be too different. Don't be cringe-y.





So here's my question to ye gatekeepers of content, ye knowers of all things cringe-worthy, ye adamant enforcers of creative conformity...........Who cares?









Really. Why. Why is "cringe" an issue? So what if someone makes an edgy black-and-red OC, or a sparkly mary sue alicorn princess? So what if somebody makes up an over-powered self-insert and ships them with a canon character? So what if somebody dares to be unironically passionate about a fandom or interest considered less-than-cool? Who cares if people have imperfect, cliche-riddled characters they love?







Cringe culture is mean-spirited. It demands creators conform. It's perpetuated by people who, quite oddly, get really bent out of shape at the sight of people unironically enjoying harmless things.







I say forget it. Trample it. Let people have fun. Especially don't be cruel to young creators- nobody learns to be a skilled artist or writer overnight. And this is by no means a statement against criticism, even harsh criticism.....but there's a big, big difference between giving constructive criticism, vs choosing to crap on somebody for having a "cringe-y" interest. Clicking on someone's work to tell them that it's cringe, or cancer, or that they should kill themselves.....that's not criticism. It's cruelty. The only point of it is to discourage and shame creators, often young, vulnerable ones. There is nothing heroic or helpful about this behavior. This is what I am standing against. To make things clear, I am not anti-criticism. I am anti-bullying.







Idk. I'm a teacher with an Art Education degree, and I believe one of the most important things is to encourage people's interest in the arts, not push them away (out of a mean-spirited attempt to seem cooler by proxy). My favorite Mister Rogers quote (applies to artists of all ages):





"Do you like to draw with crayons? I'm not very good at it. But it doesn't matter. It's the fun of doing it that's important. Now, I wouldn't have made that if I just thought about it. No matter how anybody says it is....It feels good to have made something."





edit: adding in a relevant C.S. Lewis quote as well, on enjoying "childish things"







“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”























edit: comments disabled because it's late and i'm tired, and some of ya'll are getting real huffy about a drawing of a rainbow horse with a flowery anti-bullying message. will probably turn comments back on later. For now i think i'm good on being told to kill myself. Great job convincing me cringe culture is totes necessary tho!



urgh

