Exploring the Reborn baby doll community and its controversy

I played with baby dolls until what would probably be considered “too old,” about age 14. I consider this a developmentally appropriate activity, but my friends, maintaining the attitude that they were cringey, had quietly grown out of them so I pretended to as well. However, I had the magic of the internet, where I could covertly maintain my interest in dolls through the discovery of the Reborn doll community on YouTube.

Reborn baby dolls are hyper-realistic, life-sized baby dolls that are often hand-painted and sculpted. These dolls are typically wildly expensive, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Their price point and fragility make them collectors’ items better suited for teenagers and adults, who make up the majority of these online communities.

People’s motivations for joining the Reborn community vary wildly; some people just find them enjoyable, while others find it satisfying to engage in the challenging art form of creating these dolls. A large number use the hobby as a coping mechanism. Many collectors are people who are processing some form of infertility or child loss, and these dolls can be comforting while grieving. In an interview with The Guardian, one woman in this community said about her Reborn, “I needed them because they helped me, because to go to a store and to walk by a baby section is painful. I had no reason to be there, but now I do. Now I can go into a baby section and be like ‘Oh, that’ll look cute on my doll…’”

Many collectors — mainly younger women in the community — take their hobby to the internet, where there is a massive audience for content about these dolls. The online community consists of roleplay videos like morning routines, outings, nursery tours and any other aspect of child care one can imagine. Again, this community is massive, with creators like Kelli Maple — a popular creator in the Reborn community and my childhood icon — receiving up to 82 million views. But even though this content brings in millions of viewers, almost every video’s comment section brims with confusion and hate — the simplest of videos have comments like “there’s something wrong when (you’re) taking a doll out in a pram … very strange” or “This is sick!” While this community is mostly wholesome — albeit somewhat strange — it is one of the most controversial and taunted online communities I have ever come across.

The most straightforward criticism these dolls and their owners receive online is that they are creepy, which to some may be true. I’ve seen people on the internet say they are in the “uncanny valley” or the “weirdest thing (they’ve) seen in a long time.” This criticism seems to come from a lack of exposure to the dolls, which is understandable as it is quite an unconventional hobby. It also makes sense to be a bit wary of these dolls when so much horror content uses the trope of creepy dolls. However, it is also important to respect these dolls as an art form and hobby and to avoid straight-up insulting their looks.

A more insidious genre of criticism for Reborns is the most upfront — those calling them cringe. There is a large subreddit, r/RebornDollCringe, dedicated to this opinion, with plenty of members who fully agree with the cringeiness of Reborn dolls. Brett Cooper, a conservative political commentator and online personality, posted a particularly scathing video against the collectors where she calls them “weird” and “strange,” describing the community as “adult women who can’t let go of their American Girl Dolls, or worse.” She hints at an “alt-right” path of this discourse in the video, saying, “Everybody is either identifying as an inanimate object, or being in love with an inanimate object or raising an inanimate object. Why don’t you have any people skills anymore?”

These critics crying “cringe” at Reborn dolls point to a larger issue on the internet: Anything enjoyed by women is instantly ridiculed. Cringe has become a political term on the internet, and particularly with these dolls. While we encourage young girls to play with dolls and dream of the “magic” of having kids, when they actually arrive at motherhood, we criticize their every move and often force them into intense loneliness. Playing a mother and admiring motherhood, in a world where mothers are so degraded, is somewhat of an outlandish act. It seems crazy to some people to desire to care for a child so badly, especially going so far as to spend huge sums of money just to do so with a doll. Reborn dolls, as this beautiful and strange in between, exist completely outside of the motherhood binary, and as such have to be “cringe,” right?

The discourse on cringe pertaining to Reborns also connects to a hot topic on the internet: the death of the preteen. As the internet grows, media for preteens is dying out and as “cringe culture” continues to hold strong, any hobby outside of the norm —  particularly for girls — is hated. Reborn baby dolls and their online community are a perfectly normal hobby for adolescents transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Young girls are taught to care for their dolls as they would care for their future children, so the urge to continue nurturing these dolls as they grow makes perfect sense. Imaginative play has always been deemed healthy for young children, so why on earth should that be looked down upon as you get older? At what age is using your imagination no longer good for you? These dolls are too delicate for young children, but still invoke the creative imagination of childhood, with a vast online community to accompany the hobby. By demeaning and cringing at the community, we discourage young people, particularly women, from getting involved. This traps them in the cycle of always being simultaneously too young yet too old for childhood joy in the eyes of the internet.

Teenage girls have always ruled the internet. The One Direction fandom created a lot of online fan customs that persist today. BTS has become the “most valuable pop act ever” thanks to their online fandom, and Taylor Swift fans consistently break the internet. All of these fandoms, despite their power, have a cringe stigma attached to their names. As with the Reborn doll community, young women often find these online havens in their teenage years and stick with the fandoms as they age. When these virtual spaces are deemed cringe, new people are discouraged and shamed for their interest, ruining the joy in things that could help people through a difficult time.

Along with being “cringe” because of its emphasis on motherhood, the Reborn baby doll community is also simply comprised of women passionately doing something out of the ordinary — a death sentence in the eyes of the internet. As with any fandom spearheaded by girls, being a little unconventional is not an option without the label of cringe. The joy of these dolls and the lifestyle required of them seems extraordinarily odd to many, and as a result, women in the online community find themselves unable to escape judgment. This is the familiar and vicious online cycle that the Reborn doll community seems to find itself trapped in, as “cringe” becomes a stronger deterrent for possible new members and further stigmatizes current creators engaging in the hobby.

Protecting a group of people who are just trying to cope with life from misunderstanding commenters shouldn’t be controversial. If creating a morning routine for a doll helps someone get through their day in an unharmful fashion, who are we to stop them? And further, we should call attention to and avoid the weaponization of cringe flung at this community.  

If nothing else, I hope greater exposure can garner empathy for this community, encouraging the confused to ask respectfully while giving collectors the peace that caring for their doll brings them.

Daily Arts Writer Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.

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