Dawson Crying

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Part of a series on Reaction Images. [View Related Entries]

About

Dawson Crying, also known as James Van Der Beek Crying, is a series of reaction images and GIFs of a close-up shot of the character Dawson (played by James Van Der Beek) from the 1990s dramatic television show crying. Online, the image has been used to sarcastically display remorse, sorrow or pity.

Origin

On May 24th, 2000, the season three finale of Dawson's Creek, entitled "True Love," aired in the United States. In the episode, Dawson ends by telling his longtime romantic partner Joey (played by Katie Holmes) to be with their mutual friend Pacey.^[1] At the end of their conversation, he breaks down in tears and says, "Just go."^[10]

Six years later, on December 6th, 2006, YouTuber notdatbigyet posted a video entitled "Dawson's Crying Face." The post (shown below) received more than 880,000 views in 12 years.

Spread

Following the publishing of the video, a screen capture of the moment when Dawson cries was used in various blog posts about the series and other, unrelated topics.
On August 19th, 2008, the blog "I Will Dare"^[2] used the image as the header photograph for an article entitled "The 10 Best Episodes of Dawson’s Creek, a list because Polly asked and the draft was still there."

The following year, on December 8th, 2009, blogger^[4] Becky Yamamoto used the photo in her article "There's no crying in life" (shown below, right).

As the image became more ubiquitous online, Funny or Die collaborated with James Van Der Beek to create jamesvandermemes.com^[5] on January 3rd, 2011. The site featured additional Van Der Beek reaction faces displaying happiness, eye rolls and awkwardness. That day, they published a GIF of Van Der Beek recreating the cry.^[6]

The following day, Tumblr^[7] user TheAlexSimms shared side-by-side gifs of the original Dawson Crying scene and the new one. The post (shown below) received more than 3,000 notes in seven years.

On July 25th, 2011, the image was added to the website Meme Generator. ^[3] Since then the image (example below) has generated more than 23,000 posts as of August 2018.

The following year, on April 10th, 2012, James Van Der Beek talked about the moment with the Huffington Post^[9]. He said:

It wasn't scripted, I don't think. I mean, it was appropriate for the scene. You know, it was just high drama; you've been living with this character for a while and a scene like that just kind of drops in your lap and you just lose it. They yell cut and say, 'Oh my god. That was amazing!' So I remember being completely surprised by it because it was completely sincere. [Laughs.] The fact that it's being used to mock me now, I think it's so funny.

Joshua Jackson Challenge

On August 12th, 2018, Van Der Beek's Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson posted on Instagram ^[8] a screen capture of himself crying on the television series The Affair next to Crying Dawson. He captioned the image, "I’m coming for your crown @vanderjames." The post (shown below) received more than 50,000 in two days.