It’s that, and it’s more. It’s a culture shift away from the world of FaceTuned Instagram celebrities and towards more “real,” cringe-embracing creators. Despite the prolificity of influencer content, 51% of consumers admit scrolling straight past it, according to a 2023 study, and 90% would prefer brands to share user-generated content instead. In the eyes of younger audiences, many traditional celebrities, who have built their brand image on being inaccessible, embody premium mediocrity. Perhaps this explains why celebrity presence on Twitch is also increasing — think Nicki Minaj partnering with 22-year-old Kai Cenat, or Drake streaming with Ninja — in response to a a collective disillusionment that has made way for a new breed of creators willing to “free their cringe,” embrace their quirks, and proudly be, for lack of a better word, dorky online.
Pokimane’s online presence has been described by The New York Times as “puckish,” and overarchingly, it’s innocent. Her voice is sweet, almost cartoonish, and measured: our interview is so pleasant, she seems media-trained.
Her “tell-all” podcast, facetiously titled, Don’t Tell Anyone, was originally marketed with cutesy artwork that recalls the tween chick-flick genre: cheeky portraits embellished with infantilised crayon scribbles, and a handwritten title with a love heart dotting the eye. The cover art is cozy and utterly G-Rated: fitting for a lighthearted, “confessions”-style podcast that sees — in its inaugural episode — Anys giggling about boys and breakups for the best part of 30 mins, littered with adjectives like “silly” and “comfy.”
The podcast’s first iteration echoes the domestic cozy vibe of all her content: largely inoffensive, candid, and uncontroversial. She takes a stance against boys with misogynistic views, but even this she manages to handle with light-hearted humor, addressing fetishizing or sexualizing comments in the “unban” videos she makes on YouTube, and assessing whether these users deserve to be unblocked from her chat (her glass-half-full attitude agrees with second chances). She’s frequently compared to an anime character, which has even called her ethnicity into question, but instead of choosing to berate or lecture, Anys actively and jovially engages with such comments, broadcasting her DNA test results in a YouTube video entitled “Is Pokimane Asian? I take a DNA test!”. Her content is largely apolitical and secular; it’s hard to see how she’d significantly rub anyone the wrong way, other than maybe being too nice or un-opinionated, and yet, Pokimane’s innocuous content has become a battleground for the culture wars raging in the public sphere: heated debates over gender and misogyny, social justice, political correctness, privacy, cancel culture, and commercialization converge in the public scrutiny faced by figures like Anys.
“In a lot of new and emerging industries, there are going to be these kind of sensationalized controversies,” Anys says. She’s no stranger to them by now — from “Cookie gate” (dubbed “the most boring streamer scandal of the year” by thegamer.com), which saw her issuing an apology for a “broke boy” quip-back at someone who deemed her $7-per-bag cookie collab to be astronomical, to a clearly sarcastic off-hand comment that "women belong in the kitchen." It’s part of the process when you choose to chat non-stop for several hours straight on live streams, multiple times a week. Anys can say one thing that is then cherry-picked, spun completely out of context, turned into content by others looking to capitalize off her brand name, and used to lambast her.
