Some have attributed plushies’ rising popularity to social media, where the combination of cuteness and nostalgia lends itself well to shareability. The global popularity of Japanese kawaii characters such as Hello Kitty and Pikachu has also played a role, Kanesaka said. Others blame the fragility of younger generations; as one Philadelphia-magazine headline put it, “Millennials! Get Over Your Blankies and Stuffed Animals and Grow Up Already!” But the most popular explanation seems to be that the early pandemic, with its stress, isolation, and uncertainty, led adults to reach for the soothing comforts of plushies. “I grabbed a polar bear from my childhood bedroom,” Sarah Gannett wrote in The New York Times, “to ward off the onslaught of bad news and fear.”
Yet scholars such as Simon May, a philosopher at King’s College London, aren’t so sure that the adult stuffed-animal revival is solely pandemic-related. Stress and uncertainty were a part of human life long before 2020, May told me. For him and other cute-studies scholars, this revival is part of a larger shift that’s centuries in the making: the dissolution of the boundary between childhood and adulthood.
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