What is it about tweeness?

[cimorene]

I was trying to figure out why something annoyed me so much and I figured tweeness, but that just turned my attention to why tweeness is so annoying. Almost enraging, really? It's a powerful revulsion that's difficult to parse. What is the mechanism at work? Is it unwittingly treading on some vestigial instinct, like, idk, conglomerations of touching spheres/circles? Or is it somehow associated with trauma or something?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

To me the revulsion comes because I find it a misguided attempt to control my emotions, a false sweetness, like the fake concern of an adult for a child. It's directed at me, trying to control me or make me go "awwww" but it's unearned and ungenuine. Counterfeit. A misunderstood attempt at making me feel something.

Compare kitsch, which I laugh at readily because it comes from within, it's a more honest expression of excess with a sort of thoughtless, artless exuberance about it and a complete disregard for questions of taste.

[cimorene]

This seems insightful. I was thinking something along these lines, not exactly, but more like that it has an implicit deceitfulness which I associate with condescending adults from my childhood and the kind of peculiarly Southern behaviors that as a kid I referred to as "fake nice".

[princessofgeeks]

*nods* Like fake baby talk, or great aunt pinching your cheek. really hard.

[anatsuno]

I'm very late but I second this. I associate tweeness (in French we have "mièvrerie", a ragey dislike for which I inherited from my mother) with fakeness, insincerity, manipulation, infantilization. I wonder if partly the rage doesn't come from the vague impression (knowledge?) that this character, this... aesthetic, is a domain reserved to the feminine, the "place" ascribed to women that society has de-fang-ed and "condemned" to seemingly toothless dropping-with-honey stuff? I dunno. In any case, I do indeed hate it. Also, it's like... it's a distillation of niceness (as opposed to kindness), a little, somehow, right? just as inauthentic / possibly hypocritical.. They seem very related.

[cimorene]

Yes, (the inherently fake type of) "nice"ness is something I noticed quickly after the traumatic transplant to the deep south of America at age 7 and it's always revolted me.

Of course, a twee manner is inherently associated with femininity and infantlization but individual bits of cutesy vocabulary tend to bleed out from the twee and babytalk vocabularies and infect casual speech of people who've had contact with them, in many cases without conscious knowledge since many people don't realize what register or context their vocabulary belongs to. This results in the jarringness of, for example, twee babytalk and euphemistic terms for genitals turning up in scenes that are supposed to be sexy, which is like a bucket of cold water to me as a reader combined with like... unexpectedly stepping barefoot on something slimy...

[spark]

I don't have very strong associations with the word twee, but I'm annoyed by what I think of as disneyfication -- I wonder if that's much the same thing?

[cimorene]

Do you use it to mean, as princessofgeeks said above, "a misguided attempt to control my emotions, a false sweetness, like the fake concern of an adult for a child. It's directed at me, trying to control me or make me go "awwww" but it's unearned and ungenuine. Counterfeit", or something like that?

Performative or over-the-top sentimentality, cutesy terms and and styles, affected child- or babyishness...

[krait]

I think it's the manipulative aspect that's repulsive. Tweeness is an overdone attempt to induce/manipulate the viewer's emotional reaction; and some people have an innate NOPE reaction to anything they perceive as manipulative (me included).

[cimorene]

This sounds plausible, but in isolation the level of rage I feel about it seems outsize for the level of manipulation involved...

[lazaefair]

Do you have a strong revulsion to anything infantilizing? Especially anything that infantilizes women or feminine-associated aesthetics/traits?

Alternatively: to me, tweeness always comes with a underlying feeling of smugness, which I find repellent.

[cimorene]

Yes, I do, very much so.

But also yes, although I think smug isn't the exact word I would use, the other one is familiar. Maybe presumptuously familiar.

[msilverstar]

I wonder if we use twee because it uniquely describes a certain rage-inducing quality?

[cimorene]

Another interesting proposition. I failed to comprehend this question correctly the first time I read it. But yeah, until I was introduced to the word "twee" I used terms like "cutesy", "babyish", "saccharine", and "fake nice". Twee is broader perhaps but it more precisely denotes exactly what it is that you find noteworthy about the quality - its objectionableness.