Shy and decidedly quiet, Embarrassment is ready to flop onto the Headquarters console at the first sight of social awkwardness. Embarrassment is quiet to be sure and uses his hoodie as a built-in hiding place. He's a gentle giant, and unfortunately for him, he wants to hide but he's hard to miss.
Personality[]
Embarrassment, as his name states, is the literal embodiment of any and all feelings of self-consciousness, bashfulness, shame and humiliation. He is shown to be very shy, nervous and skittish around the other emotions and doesn't necessarily have much speaking dialogue due to his timid nature. When interacting with someone else, Embarrassment is very awkward and always fails to respond to a greeting properly (like answering a handshake with a fist bump) and gets easily flustered when receiving any kind of attention even if it's positive (such as Sadness smiling at him or everyone looking at him when he spoke for the first time). Whenever his awkwardness reaches a very high level he can't handle, he hides himself by closing his hoodie around his head, leaving only his big nose out. Embarrassment also can't take second-hand embarrassing situations and he cringes while slamming his nose on the console or in some cases faints. His job is to respond to when Riley does anything socially unacceptable or awkward, suppress said behavior and keeps her humble.
Embarrassment also takes up the role as the muscle of the new emotions as he apprehends Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust all at once when Anxiety stages a coup d'état to take over Riley while imprisoning the first generation of emotions, showing that Embarrassment, due to his shyness, is easily influenced by others. But despite this, he is not above to see when something is wrong, as he is the first of the new emotions to perceive how Anxiety is being harmful to Riley, showing a more sensitive and compassionate side to him. This leads him to secretly help Sadness after finding her when she managed to sneak back up to Headquarters, proceeding to hide her from the others, help Joy to project positive thoughts into Riley to help her sleep and also help Sadness to bring Joy, Fear, Anger, and Disgust along with the old Sense of Self.
Physical appearance[]
Embarrassment is the one that stands out the most due to his enormous size, and he is the biggest out of all the Emotions; around the same size as Bing Bong, who is also pink. He has bright pink skin, small pink eyes, a very huge, rounded nose in proportion to the size of his head, magenta pink hair, and slightly reddened cheeks. His wardrobe consists of a light magenta hooded sweater with a drawstring, purple jeans, and red sneakers with white soles. His nose and cheeks usually blush dark red whenever he gets nervous.
In the book Go To Sleep, Anxiety!, Embarrassment is shown to be wearing a fluffy bright pink, bear-themed onesie, and a matching magenta-colored blanket with a white bear head symbol.
He was only going to be in the first film but due to cutting down from 27 emotions to 5, he was scrapped. However, he was reused for the sequel as one of the new emotions.
This is Paul's third voice acting role, following Adult Swim's Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm (2022) as Elmer, and Netfilx/DreamWorks Animation's Orion and the Dark (2024) as Dark, the latter of which came out the same year Inside Out 2 was released.
Coincidentally, Deep Dark Secret, who appears inside Riley's vault of secrets, bears a strong resemblance to Dark's physical appeared in the aforementioned animated movie.
Like Joy was able to notice when greeting him, Embarrassment has very sweaty hands, which in fact is a very common symptom when a person feels very embarrassed and/or anxious.
Embarrassment's pink coloration is representative of his emotion, since people are known to blush whenever they feel awkward and/or embarrassed.
In concept art, Embarrassment was originally supposed to be blue, and his hoodie says "I'm with Stupid." This could play into the idea that Shame was originally going to be a character in the movie, but was removed because the filmmakers deemed the character as too dark for the story they wanted to tell.
He is also the only one of the male emotions to have a full haircut, unlike Fear who only has a single strand of hair, and Anger who has no hair at all.
Embarrassment is the only one of Riley's new teenage emotions to be male, with the others being female.
Being the biggest of the new emotions, Embarrassment's size is a reference to the feeling of embarrassment in reality, where one feels so big and so noticeable in an uncomfortable situation that all one wants is to hide away.
In one of the descriptions of Embarrassment, it's been stated that Sadness "sees" Embarrassment and implies that they will form a kinship of some sort.
This makes sense because sometimes when one cries or feels sad in front of people, it might make them feel embarrassed for feeling that way.
Embarrassment and Anxiety are the only emotions in Riley's mind that share the longest names with the most syllables compared to the other emotions; with four syllables each.
Besides of being the only new male emotion, Embarrassment is also the least antagonistic of all the new emotions in Riley's mind.
Embarrassment does not speak until the end of the film.
This can reflect the fact that when one feels embarrassed, they weren't able to speak properly for a while up until they gain confidence later on.
During Riley's anxiety attack, Embarrassment was the first one to charge into the danger of ripping out Anxiety's new Sense of Self, followed by Envy, Sadness, and Ennui.
He appeared before Ennui.
With his introduction in the sequel, Embarrassment now took Joy's position as being the tallest among all of Riley's emotions.
