Artist Statement

Instructor Introduction

The final two assignments in my Writing 400: Advanced Research and Rhetoric ask students to make a creative project in response to a corner of the internet they've been researching all semester, and then to write an essay about what they've made. This essay, an "analytic artist's statement," serves to illuminate the maker's creative choices and situate the project within both a larger body of creative work and theoretical research. Mecca's Artist Statement satisfies these aims with creativity and sophistication, interrogating the notion of cringe with a rare combination of intellectual rigor, eloquence, and heart. I was consistently delighted by the analytic artistry with which Mecca connected specific, vividly described moments in their process of making a detailed collage celebrating their "cringey" interests to an excellently chosen and robust body of scholarly sources. Mecca masterfully deploys several modes of writing in their statement (personal narrative and vivid description; close reading and interpretation; analytic engagement with other writers) to produce a work that defies any easy generic categorization and invites all readers to consider a more expansive and flexible set of possibilities for what academic writing can achieve. By now, proclaiming that one is cringe but free feels less meaningful than it did before this claim became a viral meme. Mecca's project returns to us the liberatory joy of making such a proclamation, both by sharing their own contemplative progress toward cringey freedom and convincing us of the broader political, social, and aesthetic potential of thinking seriously about cringe–in all its on and offline glory.

— Angie Berkley

Artist Statement

Initially, when I began thinking about this final project, I wanted to create something with my friends. I was inspired by the topic I’d chosen for a paper at the start of the semester, which was centered on fan-made parody projects in anime and video game fandoms on YouTube. Surely, coordinating with my friends to create a 10-20 minute improv voiceover dub with our favorite anime scenes wouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, I thought. Even if it was difficult, I had half of the semester to figure everything out—and, more than that, I was going to have a good time doing it, right?

Wrong.

After writing that fan-centric paper, I was sure of exactly one thing: I did not want to make a parody video for my contribution. Not liking the sound of my own voice aside, I severely underestimated the amount of effort it would take to arrange it. Half of my friends are working full-time jobs, blissfully free of college life, and the other half are in the shit with me. Making a fanmade audio dub also requires a lot of editing, and I simply didn’t have that kind of time. All signs were pointing to taking a broader approach—but what greater point was I supposed to make about an extremely niche fan practice? After talking to a couple friends, I came to a realization. The thing that had fascinated me about these niche fandom creators, really, was how they navigated through and disregarded “cringe culture.” To those outside or on the fringes of the anime and video game communities, what they were doing might be profoundly lame, nerdy to a fault. Spending months and years on a parody series about Dragonball Z, as a grown adult? No way someone could care that much about something so insignificant. To those inside the community that engaged in these devalued fandom objects, there was still a point upon which over-engagement led to scrutiny. Sure, you could enjoy a parody video about Sonic Adventure 2, but you weren’t allowed to quote it “too much.” That, too, would be weird and offputting and lame. It would be cringe.

I asked myself—what is it about cringe culture that makes people so scared to be authentic and enthusiastic about the things they like? What is the drive behind the “movement” to abandon, if not outright “kill,” cringe? And what can I do to contribute to that?

The answer to the last question was simple: I had to put myself on blast.

Seeing as I was no longer making a video, I struggled for a bit to decide on the format of my final project. Talking about my own sense of cringe was one thing, but what was that supposed to even look like? I needed to narrow my options, before I got overwhelmed with the freedom the assignment gave me. To that end, I met with my professor, and we spoke for about an hour before she reminded me of an old project from high school. In it, students were asked to make “vision boards” as a means of having physical representations of their future needs, wants, and goals. I wasn’t exactly trying to manifest anything here, but there was no easier way for someone to see the things that I’ve been called cringe for than to literally plaster them onto a board. I went to Michaels and got glue. I went to Staples and got a canvas. I went to Scrap Reuse to get some fabric for a hypothetical “shame curtain,” after getting some feedback in class. I went to the Union and printed 18 dollars worth of colored images, leaving exactly 66 cents left over as my print balance for the rest of the semester. It wasn’t hard to think about doing this, not really. It was when everything was on the floor, and I realized I had to actually start, that I got a little hesitant.

In their article on self-insert fanfiction published in Emma Buchanan’s book on “high” and “low” culture, film programmer Isabella Macleod introduces the concept of a “fear of frivolity.” Relating back to women and queer people’s engagement with fandom, there is “a [suspicion] of superficial content, and often, it is ‘feminized popular culture [that is] constructed as lightweight, frivolous, and excessively emotional’” (Elana Levine qtd. in Macleod, 144). As much as I don’t identify as a woman now, I was born and socialized as a girl, and so that fear lives on within me. Even when engaging in “non-feminine hobbies,” like D&D or certain anime, women and queer people are at a disadvantage in the pecking order. Their investment in their favorite things is called into question—either they only like it for other people (to get a man), or they’re too interested, or they’re not interested enough. It is cringe to “try” to make community with “the boys” —and it sounds silly and conservative to put it that way, but I’ve seen it before. I’m reminded of the research I had to do for my high school final project, and all of the vile things I read related to Gamergate, a misogynistic campaign against diverse, feminist, and progressive ideology that laser focused on female video game content creators. These women, at the hands of the rising right-wing and exclusionary culture fostered within the male-dominated game space, were accused of stepping out of line. Even though Gamergate moved far beyond typical “cringe” harassment, I see that separatist sentiment even in hobbies that are socially unquestioned. A woman can’t even like sports too much without being seen as cringe or a try-hard or “out of her lane” sometimes. Woman or not, why would you want to share the things you like under that kind of scrutiny? It’s unfair.

All reluctance aside, it’s now 2 p.m. on a Sunday, and I’m faced with deciding where my four “personal cringe categories” (or in other words, the four fandoms I’d picked out) are supposed to go. In little piles to my left, under my desk, are pictures depicting tabletop games (Dungeons and Dragons specifically), video games, anime, and a very niche anime-inspired music community. The goal is to have them bleed into each other and lead your eye in a circle around the whole board, with tactile pieces as little spots of interest and reprieve. I start with the D&D section first—mostly because it’s on the bottom, but also because I’ve been thinking about my long term campaign a lot recently. I cut out pictures of the first edition of the D&D rulebook, of a dungeon master whose work I admire, and of a fluffy dice bag that I bought recently. This becomes a quiet sub-theme later, actually: in every section there is at least one thing I actually own, cut out from images I’ve taken of the object.

In between that, there are cameos to characters I’ve played before. An art commission of Euphoria, a blue fantasy demon I played in my first campaign, rests in the right hand corner. She acts as one of the transition characters into the video game section. Yazra, my elf character from Baldur’s Gate 3, a D&D RPG video game, is represented by the purple and grey dice scattered along the board. Kreuz (pronounced ‘cruise’), my current character, also has dice on the board. His character sheet fills the gaps between the images, binding it all together—it just looks like random text, or even like a default sheet, but I know what it is. It’s kind of like I’m inviting someone to ask about it, even though my anxiety flares when I explain why I love these silly things. There is so much of me in this project already, and there will be more. I couldn’t fake my level of investment in this if I tried—if I did, it wouldn’t just make the project worse, but it would also be noticeable.

In film and media researcher Benjamin Pinsent’s article from Buchanan’s book, authenticity is an important marker and form of currency within fandoms. The more authentic your enjoyment of something, the more you are engaged in “participatory culture,” and the more you’re respected by other members in the community (Pinsent 124-125). After all, despite what some people might say about fans of large franchises, they do know when someone’s bullshitting them. But what happens when you’re too authentic? How is it that you can lose social currency in a situation where everyone, ideally, is encouraged to care as much about their object of interest as they can? Why is that even possible? I can’t answer those questions, not really, but I do know how they make me feel. I think back to all the times I’ve given information dumps to my friends, those 2 or 3 hour long conversations where I let out the collected energy of my autistic hyperfixations. There are communities and shows that I’ve enjoyed since I was 8 and find a deep satisfaction in knowing everything about. I feel like, sometimes, it is safer to hide that pride out of fear of scrutiny.

It takes me an hour or two, but eventually, the D&D section has dried up. I run my hands along the images, looking to where the video game section will begin off to the right. I’ve only finished a portion of this project, and yet there’s a part of me that is so deeply opposed to doing this at all. I think I don’t want to be annoying—a cardinal sin it seems, these days. But isn’t how I engage with what I love authentic? Does it have to be cringe? Who gets to decide what is cringe or authentic or valuable, and why do I feel like I have no say in it?

It would be better not to care so much. It’s much less vulnerable to not give a shit. But unfortunately, vulnerability is the name of the game here.

As I shuffle through the pictures I printed out for the next section, a friend watching me work through a Discord video call asks me how Kreuz is doing—like he’s a real person. To me, he kind of is. He’s existed for three years, just sort of ambiently floating around in my head, and there are parts of me within him. To share details about any of my characters is to offer myself up, to ask very nervously, “Do you like it? Do you like him? Do you like me?”

My friend says they do. I want to believe that they mean that. I move on to the video game part, a little more motivated to continue.

That said, more than any others, this category was the one I struggled the most with in terms of actually picking images. The simple fact is that there are a lot of games that I’ve loved over the years, so it’s not exactly an easy task to just print out 30 pictures and slap them all on there. Even with Baldur’s Gate 3 acting as the transition piece, I spend a few minutes a little unsure. Video games are, in a lot of ways, slowly transitioning out of being unapproachably nerdy objects and becoming something more understandable in modern culture. In a Reddit thread about the topic, multiple people can testify to watching the shift—particularly resonant is the idea that playing games used to be “social suicide” and an indication of immaturity (Lick). While that isn’t nearly as true as it was 20 or 30 years ago, the “immaturity” is still a salient part of being “cringe” in gaming spaces.

Where a lot of the cringe accusations come from, I’ve noticed, is from within the gaming community itself. Gamers are notorious infighters—in fact, it feels like outside of small friendly circles, there’s always someone waiting to shit on a game that you like out of a pure commitment to the hater game. For example, there are those that look down on gamers that flock to more “unserious” or family friendly titles, like Pikmin (which is fundamentally an army-management game with an “alien carrot” coat of paint). Additionally, some gamers roll their eyes at people that enjoy games that were popular on Tumblr, like Undertale and its sequel, Deltarune. I include these games in my board, in the middle and top right of the section, because they’ve both been formative to my experience growing up. When I try to think about why these games are cringe to some people, though—the lack of realism? The surprising emotional depth? The character designs or dialogue?—I can never really find a clear answer. There’s nothing actually wrong with any of these games, after all. Often, I wonder if the people I see and hear saying these things are less critiquing the game itself, and are more trying to unalign themselves with the game’s fans, as it relates to the gaming community writ large.

The conversation of alignment is brought up in Escoe et al.’s That’s so Cringeworthy!, where the group of marketing researchers try to pin down the differences between cringing and secondhand embarrassment. These two things are often related to each other as if they were the same thing, but Escoe et al. argues there’s more nuance there. Essentially, the difference between secondhand embarrassment and cringe is whether or not the person observing the “cringe act” can envision themselves doing something similar, which allows them to “excuse the transgression” (667). If they can’t imagine themselves doing it, for whatever reason, that is grounds to reject both the act and the person committing the “social faux pas” of cringe (667). Identification is also discussed in film studies graduate Aidan O’Malley’s article Bro, You Just Filmed Cringe! In O’Malley’s case, he discusses a distinction between contemptuous and compassionate cringe, as well as naive and deliberate cringe. In naive, compassionate cringe situations, the creators of cringe set out to make a good product and are deeply unaware that it’s turned out badly, but are still earnest about the effort they spent making it—as a result, a viewer is able to be more compassionate towards them even while viewing them as cringe, because they can sympathize to the experience of earnestly making a “bad” thing. The inverse is true in deliberate and contemptuous cringe examples (51, 55). Embarrassment, perceived intentionality, empathy (or lack thereof), and excusability all factor into how acceptable something is—which, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are perhaps the most subjective measures of acceptability I’ve ever seen in my life. They fundamentally have little (if anything) to do with the “cringe person,” so why do they get all of the heat? The idea that someone deserves derision, not because they’ve done anything truly bad, but because you personally can’t identify with their methods of engagement, is wildly absurd in its own right. It becomes even more so when you bring it to subjects like video games, and when the people spouting the belief are gamers themselves. I don’t personally understand the appeal for people that play sports games, but I’m not going to say they’re cringe for not picking up a real basketball and shooting hoops instead. How someone engages with their interests is, quite frankly, none of my business. It’s none of theirs, either… and yet.

As I glue down each picture, meticulously crossing parts of the images over so they layer nicely while staying flat, I find myself getting a little irritated. Cringe feels so cynical, cyclical. Either you have to like a perfect object, or like an imperfect object perfectly. I make jokes about the things I like, downplaying how dear they are to me, just so someone else doesn’t insult it first. But it’s not about me, not really. At its core, it’s just a bunch of loud people that think they have the final say over how you get to feel about something, isn’t it?

I realize, as I lay down the Pokemon piece that acts as the border between the gaming and manga sections, that it’s never mattered what the object is. Only that someone—anyone—feels they’re in a high enough social position to call it stupid, and to call you different and mean it in a bad way.

Why, then, does it matter to me?

I think about an answer as I start on the anime section—the area that, you could argue, is the most “traditionally cringe” of all the things I’ve chosen to glue down. I’ve been an anime fan since I was in elementary school. I remember in 5th grade—before other people’s opinions really started mattering to me—when I’d meet up at school with my friends and discuss the latest episodes of Attack on Titan, Ouran Highschool Host Club, and Black Butler (the only series here to make it on the board itself). I think I knew, in a sort of abstract way, that it wasn’t necessarily “cool” to be into these things, but I also went to an art middle and high school, so our grade’s idea of “coolness” was more focused on having an eclectic personality than being into certain kinds of media. Anytime someone new joined our class, they learned pretty quickly that “nerd stuff” wasn’t a valid target of bullying. (You can’t be called cringe for liking anime when everybody’s a hop, skip, and a jump from being a theatre kid with extra steps.)

It was only when I briefly left that environment in 7th and 8th grade that I got the impression that anime and manga weren’t considered normal everywhere. In the new schools I went to, outside of my small friend group, I heard the things being said online being repeated back to me in person—claims that anime was a deeply unserious and unsophisticated genre of media, that it was just a bunch of bright colors and fanservice and weird voice acting. I noticed that these sentiments were similar to things people said about Western cartoons, like Steven Universe and Adventure Time. In fact, it's not just that anime and animated shows were vapid. That wasn’t the problem. It’s that they were attempting to be deep or profound, and were perceived as fundamentally failing their mission (whether that was actually true or not is subjective, but the failing itself was treated like a fact). At some points, I said those things too, maybe to shield myself from the criticism of the things I liked. As if a moment of forced self-awareness would make my interests more acceptable.

… What happened to authenticity being valuable? Does “cringe” as an adjective, as an analytic lens, as a media philosophy, even make sense? Is it supposed to?

I pick up the last set of pictures for the Vocaloid section, on the left side of the board. At this point, my knees ache and my back is stiff—I’ve been at this on the floor of my apartment for six hours or so. I’m surrounded on all sides by the evidence of my effort. I mix around glue in the little paper bowl I stole from the common room with the sponge brush I’ve been using. I don’t want to pour out any more glue unless totally necessary, and also I need some time to think about the “composition” of the last part. Friends have rotated in and out of the Discord call over the last few hours. Someone leaves to pick up their sister in the middle of the video game section and comes back to me cutting out an image of Hatsune Miku, the de facto poster girl of Japanese vocal synthesizers. They recognize the specific picture I chose—it’s the key art from an in-person concert we’d gone to last year, intuitively named Miku Expo, where various other vocal synths are projected onto a screen in the middle of a stage and perform songs with live musicians.

I think about how I felt in that concert hall in Newark; the high of it all, the excitement of the people dancing behind us, the satisfaction I felt when I knew all the words to a song. I’d brought one of my Vocaloid plushes to the concert—my favorite character, Kagamine Len—and took a picture of him during a song the hologram Len was performing. On the board he sticks out like a sore thumb, what with the dark lighting in the original image, but it makes me smile anyway. He deserves to be there.

As I cut out more pictures, I reminisce with the others in the call. We hadn’t brought lightsticks with us because they were expensive, so I spent 30 minutes before the start of the concert finding color matched images of each lightstick preset for my friends to use. I remember laughing about it at the time, but I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t see a point to it, if this event and that fandom didn’t mean anything to me. “Cringe” might be an instinctive word to describe the idea of paying 100-something dollars to watch a fake robot pop idol dance and sing for 2 hours, but I just can’t think of it that way. And as I look over this board, I can’t help but want to reject “cringe” as a word altogether. These things were important to me—it doesn’t really matter how other people feel about it, if they can “relate” to what I like.

Of course people want to relate to others, to fit in. I’ve wanted that. But writer Saumya Kalia, in her article about cringe, makes two points that I think are really important: “self-censorship strips away any semblance of empathy” and “cringe stands at odds with chic, of a social order built on conformity and status quo” (“Cultural History of Cringe”). I don’t think of myself as some profound force against cultural hegemony or anything like that, but I do think that being different from the people around you is just as important as being similar to them. I want to be able to champion my interests without fear of being judged for them, or without feeling like I have to hide in my self-dug trenches in order to minimize damage to my heart. It’s always the people doing cringe that have to change their behavior, never the people looking at them—but if what they’re doing isn’t harming anyone and is enriching their lives, then who cares about if the “cringe” is compassionate or contemptuous, really? Who cares that someone’s doing something different? I want to be able to laugh at myself, not as a defense mechanism, but because I’m having fun listening to music, watching animated shows, playing silly games, and telling stories with my friends.

Eventually, I lay down the very last image on the board, which ends up being box art of an older Vocaloid named SF-A2 Miki. She’s a bit of a last-minute addition, admittedly, but I’ve always liked her voice, and this is a board about things I like, after all. At this point, there’s only one more thing left to do. I stare at the centerpiece. At the very beginning, I’d decided to make a diamond out of thin washi tape—the only-somewhat-sticky kind people normally use for scrapbooking or journaling. I hadn’t really thought about the significance of the material when I started, to be honest. I just wanted a way to plot down each section that was also easily removable. I made similar choices with the push pins and ribbons I used to mark the general area of each section. Still, looking at the diamond now, I can see it in a different light.

The border between the things I like and me is flimsy at best—there’s not really a true separation between those things, and I don’t think I want there to be. Hell, even the border between myself and peering eyes is flimsy. The curtain I’ll use to cover up this board, with the little white “Are You Sure…?” sign written on scrap paper from the images I cut out on the front, is made of a thin fabric. It'll blow wildly in the wind by the time I take the finished board to North Quad, to show my professor what I made. And despite the cover “protecting” me from being vulnerable, despite that little diamond keeping my heart away from my favorite things, little pieces of dice will still fall to the ground, demanding attention. The acrylic pins and buttons I stick onto the board after all the images dried down can still be noticed and touched, tactile despite the cover. Despite my best efforts, some of the images cross onto that washi tape. The shield is imperfect, and that’s okay. I don’t think I need it.

I’ve known, since the start, the phrase that I wanted to have in the middle. I don’t make lines to keep the text neat and pretty—I’m not practicing cursive here, I’m just being a person. I just pick up the sharpie, uncap it, and write in one go: I’m Cringe But I’m Free. It's a phrase I’ve seen online for a couple of years now, as people reclaim the things that made others cringe and love them unabashedly, without fear. It’s a rejection of all the things I talked about for this entire statement, really. I’d like to try believing in that phrase, hard as it might be at times, and the board is an exercise in that philosophy. Very recently, a talkback episode from a D&D show that I love came out called Dimension 20: Adventuring Academy, hosted by the Dungeon Master on the bottom of my board, Brennan Lee Mulligan. As I was watching it, a quote from his conversation with that episode’s guest, Ally Beardsley, stuck out to me. It’s a long transcript, but it summarized how I’ve come to feel about myself and my relationship with cringe over the course of the project.

BEARDSLEY (23:50): Part of my own maturity is like, not worrying about looking cringe. You know, I think that [for] everyone this is such a common theme, I think, of growing up. But you’re just like, “oh, if I just do something that feels a little bit scary, it’s completely rewarding, versus just not doing anything for fear of being made fun of.”
MULLIGAN (24:23): I mean, probably the best thing that ever happened to me was the brutal and cruel awareness that I couldn’t be different. [...] And taking any kind of effort to blend in and having it immediately fail, and being like “you cannot fit in,” and being like, “well… I guess I’m just gonna do this because I can’t achieve another thing. I’m just gonna do what I love doing.”
MULLIGAN (25:22): [...] I can’t imagine a deeper pit of hell than being concerned about how the things that bring you joy will be perceived. [...] Because, yeah, it’s the only way to get through.

If being sincere is the only way to get through, then there’s probably no bigger success than the completion of the project. I run my hands over the sharp black letters, in awe after 8 straight hours of work. Impulsively, I put a little heart sticker in the middle of the ‘U’, to hide the damage that the pushpins caused. There’s always going to be a little part of me that’s hurt by the vulnerability of this project, but that doesn’t mean the board wasn’t worth creating.

Another friend of mine, who came in right as I finished and only sort of knew what I was working on, says it's pretty fitting to have my heart as the centerpiece of the board. And maybe they make the connection immediately because they know me, and because they’re not looking at me with “cringe” goggles on. But I’m glad that they see what I tried to do. I’m glad that they took the time to look.

I’m glad I showed them.

Works Cited

Escoe, Brianna, et al. “That’s So Cringeworthy! Understanding What Cringe Is and Why We Want to Share It.” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 62, no. 4, 2025, pp. 664–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437241305104.

Kalia, Saumya. “A Cultural History of ‘Cringe,’ and How the Internet Made Everything Awkward.” The Swaddle, 20 May 2022, www.theswaddle.com/a-cultural-history-of-cringe-and-how-the-internet-made-everything-awkward.

Lick_my_ballon-knot. Comment on U/Conscious-Golf-5380’s post about the 'King of Nerds' on the PC Master Race subreddit. Reddit, 1 Aug. 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/wdpaj4/comment/iijsoa7/.

L. Mulligan, Brennan, and Ally Beardsley. “Be Yourself Everyone Else Is Taken (with Ally Beardsley).” Dropout, 6 Nov. 2025, https://watch.dropout.tv/adventuring-academy/season:6/videos/be-yourself-everyone-else-is-taken-with-ally-beardsley (Subscriber Only). Accessed 7 Dec. 2025.

Macleod, Isabella. “Insert the Self Here: Understanding the Radical and Erotic Potential of ‘Reader-Insert Fics’ as a Unique Form of Escapism for Female Fans.” Culture: Raise “Low”, Rethink “High”: A Representation of the Academic Potential of So-Called “Low” Culture, Nov. 2020, pp. 137–55.

O’Malley, Aidan. “‘Bro, You Just Filmed Cringe!’: Cringe Cinema and So-Bad-It’s-Good in the Internet Age.” Film Matters, vol. 15, no. 2, 2024, pp. 49–60, https://doi.org/10.1386/fm_00337_1.

Pinsent, Benjamin. “Making a Self-Consuming Monster: Using ‘Youtuber’ Will McDaniel as a Case Study to Explore the Blurring of ‘Media Consumer’ and ‘Media Producer’ on YouTube.” Culture: Raise “Low”, Rethink “High”: A Representation of the Academic Potential of So-Called “Low” Culture, Nov. 2020, pp. 117–35.