Basic alt girls with floral/bird tattoos who think making soup was alien enough to be considered magicks love BG3 and DnD. Now their orbiting nerds have accepted their new definition to not be cast out.

It’s another personality substitute after the tattoos, hair dye, and Lovecraft obsessions stopped feeling edgy.

People like to imagine others beneath them. It takes no effort at all on their part

This is also how reality TV works and why everyone involved is so amazingly awful.

Someone already got you covered on crustpunks.

These new terms have a lot more to do with where people gather on the Internet than anything else. Explains why they’ve shifted so heavily toward visual aspects because their likely first exposure to -punk was seeing cyberpunk or steampunk in film or games and then seeking out community around them hoping to capture some of that mystique for themselves.

Cottagecore is definitely the child of Pinterest x Alt girls wanting to be different when alt went too mainstream to stand out. (Which is kinda punk, but for the wrong reasons.)

I agree, of all the modern terms, solarpunk is the only one to actually fit punk, even if it is a bit more abstract. At it’s core, the idea is still rooted in rejecting societal norms and is inherently political, so it works.

-core predates steampunk as a term by decades. -Core was generally only used when describing musical genre mixing in an attempt to clarify the roots of a particular group’s sound.

The only -punk terms in use prior to the 2000’s were cyberpunk, crust punk, and punk all of which were used to indicate a level of rebellion. Punk is being used in a similar way -core was until steampunk rose in popularity followed immediately by dieselpunk and atompunk cementing the concept of [powersource]-aesthetic as the primary defining trait of a fantasy genre which easily found it’s way into use as a descriptor for an aesthetic that would be expected within that fantasy setting. Things get confused again with the more recent solarpunk (follows the format) and cottagecore (does not follow the format because it is not a musically defined aesthetic)

It’s a pretty classic case of a newer generation believing they’ve invented something without realizing they’ve actually misunderstood prior usage due to limiting their sphere of influences to their peergroup. These are the same types of people who would call people posers for not conforming to the punk aesthetic because they never understood what punk actually was beyond a vector to fit into a group (and all the irony that entails in the context of punk)

I’ve been saying this for at least 12 years now. 4chan has always been an interesting case study. There was (I haven’t been back to look in years) also the curious war on /d/ over eastern/western art with Dimitry’s works being accepted as eastern due to being Russian. Which fair enough, yea Russia is in Asia, but that’s not really the point. The point was creating positive association between dopamine mining (porn) and Russia for people who felt marginalized for their interests. That Bannon specifically pointed to 4chan as a vector for radicalization, well… It’s very interesting that so many interests that almost exclusively thrived on 4chan rose into mainstream acknowledgement around 2016.

This was all furthered on Reddit in the more offbeat porn-focused subs with blatant intrusions of racially charged ideas into any and all genres they could find but with a special attention paid to anything that repeatedly fetishized a loss of control/personal responsibility/agency (cuckoldry, hypnotism, coercion, etc)

Getting those messages tangled into things people have fetishized and generally felt shameful about is a hell of a way to hijack dopamine to create a false positive association between the ideas and the act.

In a way, we might have to feel gratitude toward OnlyFans models, Tumblr users, and maybe just gen-Z as a whole, for reframing a lot of those same interests in a more sex positive and silly manner - to the degree that it is not uncommon to see a blue collar working class man making light of himself wearing panties as daily wear on Instagram. Not exactly niche and shameful now is it?