About

Mei Lee Drawing in Her Notebook or Mei Lee Writing in Her Notebook refers to a scene from Pixar's 2022 animated film Turning Red in which the main character Mei Lee appears to get a mischievous idea while looking at her notebook, rolling under her bed as she begins drawing it. The scene became an exploitable format in mid-March 2022 as meme creators either paired the scene with humorous GIF captions or edited the scene to show what Mei was working on. Many memes use the format to reference lewd drawings or Rule 34 artwork.

Origin

The scene in Turning Red, released March 11th, 2022, where the format comes from depicts the main character Mei Lee, a tween girl, who begins drawing art of herself and a boy she has a crush on. She then discovers that she enjoys it and proceeds to roll under her bed to continue drawing (shown below).

The same day the film was released, Redditor videowulff posted a three-panel edit of the scene to /r/MemeEconomy^[1] (shown below).

Spread

Over the following days after Turning Red was released on March 11th, 2022, the scene became popularized in meme-focused subreddits across the platform, with many high-engagement posts captioning the entire scene with a humorous caption, often related to an NSFW artist crafting their pieces. For example, on March 13th, Redditor^[3] creedroyce posted the scene captioned, "The first fanfic author realizing they can ship their favorite characters like," gaining over 24,000 points (shown below).

On March 14th, Redditor jojomamats captioned the scene "The first R34 artist realizing he can draw anyone/thing fucking," gaining over 77,000 points in /r/memes.^[2] (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References