Them: "There's no way cute and horror exists on the same spectrum"
Me:
Fig 1: Meet the Boobahs. Very normal, very safe.
Fig 1: Meet the Boobahs. Very normal, very safe.
Fig 2: SIX FEET TALL
It is clear that sometimes we aim for cute, but we accidentally hit creepy: a sense of uncertainty about whether or not something poses a threat.
So what is cute, exactly, and how can cuteness become creepy? I am going to be drawing from Simon May's excellent book, The Power of Cute. Check it out if this topic is interesting to you.
Fig. 3: Left to right: my parents' dog Lacy, Neko Atsume screenshot, corgi with confidence, lizards embracing, frog in pink shorts on a beach chair, a child either summoning a demon or warding them off, Adventure Time, a painting of Barack Obama and a unicorn by Dan Lacey, Chucky from Child's Play, Grimace eating a child, Momo based on the sculpture by Keisuke Aisawa. Arrangement is subjective.
Sweetness: "qualities that conjure an existence of perfect innocence, pliancy and dependency, unburdened by contradiction and complexity" (pg 23)
Monstrous: "unsafe... unfamiliar... menacing" (pg 25) — creepy to full-blown dangerous
Let's start with some of the physical aesthetics of cuteness. Here is Konrad Lorenz's original drawing of qualities in baby animals that prompt a caregiving response:
Fig 4: Lorenz is not just famous for drawing cute animals. He is also famous for getting baby ducks to follow him around.
And here is a guide I found on Pinterest for drawing chibi style:
Fig 5: Chibi-er Teen Titans vs their non-chibi counterparts
With a sense of what cuteness looks like in mind, let's return to Simon May with his take on what cuteness means:
...it is, above all, about what happens when the Sweet (what is soft, harmless, innocent, artlessly charming, unencumbered by complexity, usually small) gets uncanny, indeterminate — such as between child and adult, masculine and feminine, nonhuman and human, familiar and unfamiliar, powerless and powerful, unknowing and knowing... and crucially, in a light-hearted and often frivolous register.
Cute is a teasing expression of the uncertainty, the uncanniness, the continuous flux or "becoming" that our era detects at the heart of all existence, living and non-living.
Imagine for a moment we could lift off the mask of the imaginary that constructs our subjective experience of the world, and see instead the "Real" as posited by some thinkers in quantum physics: no people, no planets; no time passing like a river; only an entanglement of flux itself in an impossibly high dimensional space of possibilities.
If we could experience this, we might... die of cosmic fright? Be totally unmoored from ourselves and our identities and vanish into quantum foam? If only there was a way to encounter the liberating power of deep flux without having our minds literally blown (see fig 6)