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saint-starflicker · 11 months

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Rudolph the Rainbow Reindeer

Spoilers for Fraternity and Handsome Devil ahead, I very highly recommend reading and watching both of these.

There's a Tumblr heritage post going around (I think? Was it from here?) about how the real lesson of the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" song is that deviation from the norm, no matter how harmless, will be punished unless it can be exploited. That got me thinking about these two.

There's a lot that I like about Handsome Devil: the aesthetics, the pacing, it is Light Academia, it is Snark Academia, it's rugby bros, it's music and essay composition nerds, it's navigating friendships and mentor-protégé relationships between gay main characters instead of romance...and rather than one homophobic age-peer bully who's supposed to outgrow it or you outgrow them eventually, the spotlight is on the homophobic adults as it should be. Oppression is a whole system of power, not only one jerk that strikes you like miniature lightning. Finally, sometimes gay adults and elders fail you: their hard-won life experiences and best advice don't help your situation or apply to it.

It is a well-constructed wholesomely satisfying story. The point of contrast I want to highlight is that the happy outcome in this movie relies on...becoming exploitable. If you let gay boys on the sports team, particularly gay boys that are very good at the sports balls, then your team will win.

Hey, whatever works. Whenever there's an exclusionary thing going on based on something as harmless as Rudolph's Red Nose, then there's a brain drain and brawn drain from those exclusionist communities, there's skill drain and talent drain. Idealistically, that shouldn't be the reason to include people "because they might be useful in other ways" but in terms of practicality then that's how it usually goes: scientists and artists and kind people and resilient people flee persecution and enrich the communities who take them in. If being exceptional in some way is how you keep your head above the water in this crapsack world, then I sure won't stop you.

Contrast that with Fraternity. There's a lot I like about Fraternity: the 1990s nostalgia, the narrative voices, I finished reading it in two days and felt a whole entire Hero's Journey times three, it is the Darkest Dark Academia at its most Gothic like literary bitter ruby chocolate, it's brewski bros, it's witchcraft, it's Angels in America Jr., it's tragic, it's cathartic, it's navigating friendships and mentor-protégé relationships between gay main characters rather than romance...

The main thing that I noticed is no matter how many languages you speak or how emotionally attached you get to your friends (traits which any supervillain worth a lick of salt should know to exploit instead of eliminate, ahem ahem Westcott)—the very powerful point that the Fraternity canon demonstrates is that...in this crapsack world it's ultimately not up to you whether or not you get to live and "be useful" to bigots in positions of power. It's the bigots in power that decide that for you.

Fraternity is well-constructed and satisfying in a different way. Handsome Devil found a reconciliation with broader communities that outvoted a bigot with power, and I'm not going to say that can never happen in real life. Fraternity shows the shadow side of playing the game that way: Evil Wizard Homophobe Headmaster Westcott's fraternity would kill him over a mistake because that's the solidarity of the privileged. Steven Hillman would lay his life down for somebody in his fraternity who he probably never really liked and who hasn't been very nice to him, because that's the solidarity of the oppressed. It still is complicated: Hiss Hiss Bitch is a refrain that takes on layers of meaning and new contexts as the story goes on. In those complications and unflinching examination of the shadow sides, there emerges a deep and moving clarity.

Polar opposite vibes, different attacks on broad in-community (and/or inter-community) issues, different issues that these do tackle—and I enjoy them both and recommend them both. More, please.

#fraternitybook #fraternitybook fandom #handsome devil #handsome devil 2016 #dark academia #light academia #fraternity by andy mientus #poe.txtwall

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saint-starflicker · 7 months

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Overview and Criteria for Gothic Fiction

Gothic as a genre of fiction novel emerged in the late 18th century and early 19th century. Modern scholars frame these works as part of a Romanticist pushback against the Enlightenment era of calculated, scientific rationalism. In English literature, these may also have been artistic expressions of the collective anxieties of British people regarding the French Revolution. The term hearkens back to the destruction of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE at the effect of Gothic peoples, an event that marks the beginning of the medieval era. As early as the year 1530 CE, Giorgio Vasari criticized medieval architecture as gothic, that is "monstrous", "barbarous", and "disordered" contrasted against the elegant and progressive neoclassical architecture reconstructions. In the late 20th century, a subculture of post-punk horror rockers began to be described as Gothic as well. This subcultural goth variation characterized itself by an aesthetic of counter-cultural macabre and "enjoyable fear".

Notable early works of what would become the gothic literary "canon" are listed as follows: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne by Ann Radcliffe (1789), The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793), and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794). Udolpho is the name of a castle. Early gothic literature was intertwined with an admiration for gothic architecture, sorry to Vasari Giorgio who hated that sort of thing so much but is an outlier and should not be counted.

One example of French gothic literature in this vein is Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, published in 1831 although the story is set in 1482 and it was about a gothic cathedral rather than a gothic castle. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is an affectionate parody of the gothic literature genre and a staunch defense of the gothic novels' artistic merits. It was completed in 1803 but not published until 1818 after the author's death.

In Northanger Abbey, a character recommends to her friend a list of books in this genre, all the titles of which were publications contemporary to the time the author was writing about them: The Italian by Ann Radcliffe, Clermont by Regina Maria Roche, The Mysterious Warning by Eliza Parsons, Necromancer of the Black Forest by Lawrence Flammenberg, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathorn, Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath, and Horrid Mysteries by Carl Grosse.

The appeal of these stories was less the architecture itself and more the emotions evoked by being haunted by the past, threatened by unknown histories, frightened by misunderstood monsters, and in awe of wilderness and nature. All of this would be set at or relative to a location: a gothic building. Heroines in gothic stories would commonly be abducted from convents that they sought refuge in, or confined to convents or other locations against their will when they try to exercise their freedoms. Other common tropes became the journey of a gothic heroine in an unfamiliar country, and the horrors of being made to rely on guardians who make impositions against her wishes or best interests. In other cases, the gothic horror mixed with gothic infatuation would be shown by an invasion of sorts by a foreigner in the heroine's home country, person of color, or the occupation of a disabled person. These works frequently lend themselves to queer readings.

The common and notable qualities of what works came to be considered gothic literature between the 1819 publication of The Vampyre by John William Polidori and the 1896 publication of The Werewolf by Clemence Housman, naturally expanded and evolved with the inclusion of more works within this genre. Even now in the 21st century the continued recognizability of the gothic applies to new additions to the genre. The criteria for what qualifies a gothic story follows:

Ill-Reputed Work. The story is accused of being degrading to high culture, bad for society, immoral, populist or counter-cultural. At the very least, it's considered bad art and ugly.

Haunted by the Past. This can be found in a work framed accordingly in the cultural context that inspired the authors, such as early 19th century English literature of this genre as a response to the French Revolution. Works emblematic of the Southern Gothic in the United States could be framed in the context of the anxieties surrounding the Civil War. More often, however, it is personal history that haunts a gothic character.

Architecture. This is not necessarily mere mention of a building, or even a lush description of literally gothic architecture. This is more a sense of location. While it stands to reason that confined locations are buildings, the narrative function of architecture can be served by themes of isolation and confinement. Social consensus that is impossible to navigate or escape is a gothic sentiment. This is, of course, more clearly qualified if the architecture is literally a building.

Wilderness. This is not necessarily natural environments, but rather situations that are unpredictable and overwhelming. Storms can be similarly admired, those "dark and stormy night"s. The anxiety invoked by nautical horror emerges from the contrast between a human being made to feel small and out of control when situated on the open ocean and all its depths and mysteries. The gothic simplicity of fairy tales relies on the inhospitable and chaotic woods full of bandits, wolves, and maybe even witches. Logically, a city should be more architecture than wilderness, but if the narrative purpose is chaotic unpredictable vastness horror rather than confinement horror then the city can become a gothic wilderness. This is, of course, more clearly qualified if the wilderness is literally the weather.

Big Mood Energy. This is what I call a collection of emotions evoked by the design of gothic literature. The sense of vulnerability in the face of grandeur, or overwhelming emotion, is known as Sublime. The betrayal of that which is supposed to be familiar is known as the Uncanny. A disruption or disrespect of identity, order, or security is known as the Abject. Gothic literature often evokes disgust and discomfort with ambiguity, or showcases melodramatic sentimentality, or includes heavyhanded symbolism. Gothic literature explores boundaries and deconstructs the rules that keep readers comfortable.

Optionally, Supernatural. As a response to Enlightenment-era science and rationalism, the supernatural found new importance in gothic literature, symbolically and in the evocative emotions it wrought.

The growing edge of genre gothic I think can be found in genre overlap with picaresque stories, detective mysteries, works of libertine sensationalism, science fiction, fairy tales, and dark academia. Quaint tropes are subverted or transformed, and new ones can emerge in the symbolic conversation that works of fiction can strike up with one another. I hope the above criteria remains a useful guide.

Sources:

Peake, Jak. “Representing the Gothic.” 30 April 2013, University of Essex. Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B51o-1KTJhw

Nixon, Lauren. “Exploring the Gothic in Contemporary Culture and Criticism.” 4 August 2017, University of Sheffield. Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZP4g0eZmo8

"Why Are Goths? History of the Gothic 18th Century to Now". Wright, Carrie. 17 December 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrIK6pBj4f8

"8 Aspects of Gothic Books". Teed, Tristan. 19 June 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NULLOYGiSDI

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, Vernor & Hood, etc., 1798. Originally published in 1756.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, Penguin Books, New York, 2003. Originally published in 1919.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2010. Originally published in 1984.

Commentary and reading list under Read More.

Commentary

I owe to Tristan Teed the idea of framing emergent gothic literature as countercultural to Enlightenment rationalism and science, and this pushback symbolized by wilderness; Dr. Jak Peake for contextualizing gothic literature as an artistic response to civic unrest in general, and highlighting the fear of seductive immigrants in Bram Stroker's Dracula more specifically; Carrie Wright for the feminist readings of the literary references in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Dr. Lauren Nixon framing the term gothic as originally meaning bad art—the lattermost aspect I personally consider integral to the genre as it must remain a constant interrogation of what artistic expression we as a society consider "bad art" and why. Both Wright and Teed inspired the aspects list applied to an otherwise categorization-defiant genre that gothic literature is. Critical Race Theory readings and Queer Theory readings of works considered part of gothic literature canon, I would say are informed by the works themselves being very suggestive of these readings. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 Carmilla influenced Rachel Klein's 2002 The Moth Diaries that blurred the lines between the homosocial and the homoerotic at a girl's boarding school. Florian Tacorian (not listed in these citations, but go watch his videos) highlighted Romani presence in adaptations of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, as well as Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. The work of another Brontë sister, Charlotte Brontë, is more often mentioned as though closer to the core canon gothic literature, and the eponymous Jane Eyre contends with a Creole woman confined to the attic of her new home (this was written in 1847, the race issue was made explicit in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys published in 1966 that was a retelling of Jane Eyre.)

Notes on the works of gothic literature mentioned: As of this writing, I have read Northanger Abbey, The Vampyre, Carmilla, Dracula, and only half of Notre-Dame de Paris. I have only watched a movie adaptation of The Moth Diaries. (Update as of the 8th of October 2023: I finished reading The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein. This whole essay was posted on the 1st of October 2023.) (Update as of December 2023: I finished reading Jane Eyre.) Despite taking the internet handle Poe, American gothic literature is pretty much completely alien to me. I might have read a handful of other works that might be arguably gothic, but have not mentioned them here so I would not count them in a list of works that are mentioned in this essay and that I have personally read. The initial list was a semi-facetious argument for the presence of gothic architecture in gothic literature based on the titles alone. Note also my focus on gothic literature from the British Isles, with a mention of only two titles from Germany (Der Genius by Carl Grosse, translated into the English The Horrid Mysteries by Peter Will; and Der Geisterbanner: Eine Wundergeschichte aus mündlichen und schriftlichen Traditionen by Karl Friedrich Kahlert under the pen name Lawrence Flammenberg, translated into the English Necromancer of the Black Forest by Peter Teuthold that was first published in 1794) and only one from France (Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 by Victor Hugo). This is not to say that there was little to no Romanticist movement in Germany or France in the 18th and 19th centuries compared to Britain. Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's stageplay Sturm und Drang premiered in 1777 and lent its name to a proto-Romantic artistic era that was supremely Sublime and Big Mood Energy. The earliest French gothic novel I could find via a cursory search engine search was Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, 1772, and I deliberately selected Notre-Dame de Paris for mention instead to demonstrate the continued theme of architecture and variety in architecture: churches as well as castles, and to affirm the representation of disability in gothic literature because Quasimodo (a character in the book) is deaf and according to John Green had contacted spinal tuburculosis that left the character hunchbacked. I have not read any of Le Diable Amoureux, let alone the half that gave me the temerity to list Notre-Dame de Paris among these gothic works.

This sparseness is due to my own interest in the emergence of English-language gothic literature focused on Britain between the years 1789 and 1830, in keeping with Ian Mortimer's definition of the Regency era in Britain. That, and the information from the sources I have cited, are what I based the criteria that I offer for what makes a novel genre-compliant to gothic. The narrative psychology and historicist analyses of The Castle of Otranto as an outlier published earlier than the timeframe I confine myself to, is for another essay perhaps written by somebody else. Similarly, my argument for the lineage of picaresque heroes from Paul Clifford to The Scarlet Pimpernel, Don Diego "Zorro" de la Vega, and ultimately the angst-filled cinematic version of Bruce Wayne as overlapping the picaresque with the gothic is a blog post for another time. I have read some works by the Maquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade and I utterly and unutterably abhor all of it, will the spectre of his abysmal depravity ever cease to haunt me—but I think I can make an argument for his works being gothic even as he argued for himself that they were not; I have no plans of doing so.

My main intention in writing this overview and criteria is to lay the groundwork for examining the overlap between Gothic as a genre and Dark Academia as a genre, which I aim to evaluate in future essays by using this criteria.

List of Works Mentioned Above

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)

Le Diable Amoureux by Jacques Cazotte (1772)

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne by Ann Radcliffe (1789)

The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793)

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794)

Necromancer of the Black Forest by Lawrence Flammenberg (translated by Peter Teuthold, 1794)

The Horrid Mysteries by Carl Grosse (translated by Peter Will, 1796)

The Italian by Ann Radcliffe (1796)

The Mysterious Warning by Eliza Parsons (1796)

Clermont by Regina Maria Roche (1798)

The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathorn (1798)

Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath (1798)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)

The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1819)

Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830)

Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 by Victor Hugo (1831)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

Dracula by Bram Stroker (1897)

The Werewolf by Clemence Housman (1896)

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy (1905)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein (2002)

#dark academia #goth lit #Austenblogging #Northanger Abbey #← my bias #poe.txtwall

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saint-starflicker · 11 months

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Riding on the coattails of this on-point post about how Peter and Jason mirror Romeo and Juliet in that they were flawed teenagers that should have been allowed to have their romance run its course without...you know...fatality...

I agree but the first thing that got me about how this is a good show is that the central characters' flaws and dynamic mean they have actual personalities.

One era-typical effort to alleviate homophobia was to try to show in fiction that a gay boy was innocuous, nice, and (what with it being entertainment media) conventionally attractive. Rantasmo, a video essayist, called it "the problem with Maxxie" (because Maxwell Oliver from the television show Skins was one case study: Maxxie is there to be gay and show that it's not bad to be gay. And he's not allowed to be anything except good-looking, and nice, and gay...or else he'll become a bad person to somebody and then that would be bad for real-life gay people everywhere.) (At least if Maxxie's that bland and somebody still doesn't like him, then you know that dislike is only because of homophobia. We don't do gray area or complications in storytelling media, because everything is pure propaganda and audiences cannot think for ourselves or think different things from each other.)

I think that's very similar to the observation I read somewhere else that girl protagonists in Young Adult literature are written to please everyone, which probably comes from the intention to alleviate misogyny, and probably even has impact in favor of that end. As a result, though, these characters are not there to make a connection with. They're a calculation.

This all implies that until homophobia and misogyny ease up in real-life culture, the people living at those intersections of oppression absolutely must be bland and perfectly inoffensive.

I think that's the peril of "the united front". If you're a demographic that everybody has prejudices against, then you aren't allowed to be a whole entire person even by those on your side. The priority is carving out some breathing room in the mainstream culture, so being all of the rest of who you are becomes a detriment to every cause and community that you'll be in.

And somehow that results in that if you are a whole entire person with complications and flaws who responds to an imperfect world in an imperfect way, then that's your fault that your cause will fail.

Bare was so refreshing because it explored contradictions and gray areas that do make complacent people uncomfortable. Peter is as sincere in his Catholic faith as he is in his love for another boy—How is that a thing?!?? The Catholic church is so homophobic, shouldn't he have picked a side a long time ago? He's a hypocrite both ways if he doesn't, no he's not allowed to be a confused high schooler doing his best to reconcile all the equally-real parts of himself. He has to be attractive and nice and gay and inoffensive and easy to file into a box! His religious community has to be portrayed as completely bad, or else it won't know that it's being criticized! What is this? And how are we supposed to believe that Jason means that big song number when he's obviously not a Gold Star Gay? What even happened there?

Then there's Jason shoving Peter to the ground right before Ever After, and shout-singing at him when it's his verse. It's easy to say, "This means that Jason is a violent person and an abusive partner," and if somebody watches that and discusses how much bad behavior you'd put up with from a partner of any gender or orientation, and decide that is too much bad behavior...then, good. I wouldn't want a boy like that dating my son, either, if I had a son.

That should also coexist with the idea that homophobia in society scares Jason so deeply that he would hurt somebody he loves. In anything similar to his situation, would any of us really be better?

And even that does not mean that it's all the fault of the system, or that homophobia against boys is the only problem.

Ivy wasn't suffering a stigmatized medical condition that she's severely limited in treating on account of that stigma, because the priest impregnated her. No, Jason did that impregnating. That doesn't mean Jason is the real villain and the priest isn't. Saying that Jason did that because he was confused and oppressed doesn't mean that his actions don't have consequences. It certainly doesn't mean that Ivy can't be angry that she's in this terrible situation because of Jason's confusion and dishonesty and what he did about it...to her.

Ivy has no reason to decide that the priest is the real problem, even though what the priest represents is her main problem too. The priest himself is a product of his conditioning and limitations: he has all this social power, but he isn't subversive because...Again, in his exact situation, would any of us be better?

That's not a rhetorical question to imply that we can't be better than our conditioning, worldview, emotions, intersections of privilege, intersections of oppression, or what we're immediately responding to will "allow" us to be.

Sometimes we can imagine ways to be better, and from a work like Bare I think that's the main point: What if No Voice didn't have to be the end? It didn't have to end that way. Think of the possibilities. Be better. Also sometimes, the pressure is too much on all sides and there isn't a better way, and we might try to sympathize with that too: Ivy shouldn't be blamed for having never "learned to stop at just a kiss" when we know from her Portrait song that she was only doing more than kissing to feel recognized for who she is instead of what she is, so there's another systemic problem that strikes right in the personal. Everybody's in this mess of systemic problems. It's complicated.

#bare: a pop opera #bapo #poe.txtwall

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saint-starflicker · 4 months

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I never want to read "heterosexual" and "canonical fact" in conjunction ever again. It's not 1999 CE and we're not on Pitas or Xanga blogs anymore.

This also applies to any sentiment that "these characters can't all be [LGBTqueer] label, it's not realistic".

We've been over this. That sort of thinking was dated decades ago. Everybody on the internet is already so over this.

#poe.txtwall

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saint-starflicker · 10 months

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15 Questions 15 Mutuals

Tagged by @uhhbelluhh — thank you!

1. Are you named after anyone? No.

2. When was the last time you cried? While writing a fictional character undergoing strong feelings of bereavement. I call that "Method Writing"! 😁 😭 My therapist thinks crying about things like that is healthy.

3. Do you have kids? Add me to the no-and-I-don't-want-any club.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot? I was pubescent in the late 1990s globalized anglosphere. Everybody was sarcastic and I imprinted on that like a baby duck, so I probably use it more often than I think I do. That said, if I actively try to write a sarcastic character, then I can feel myself failing.

5. What sports do you play/have played? I've gotten compliments on how I play hockey and basketball in gym class, but I never loved it.

6. What's the first thing you notice about people? Whether they're armed or not.

7. What's your eye color? Brown.

8. Scary movies or happy endings? Depends. I think most jump scare movies are underrated for date nights—viewers can comfort each other—but I also like the type of Asian horror films that one reviewer described as "like being trapped in a room with somebody that hates you very passive-aggressively". Then, just because it's a scary movie doesn't mean it can't also have a happy ending hello the Final Girl trope how are you. Then happy endings can apply to so many other genres that I can't say I prefer that on the basis of how sometimes if I don't get a happy ever after from official media then I must resort to fan fiction hello James Farrow how are you.

9. Any special talents? I strive to be a sort of jack-of-most-trades.

10. Where were you born? Hospital.

11. What are your hobbies? Watercolor painting and some textile crafts (not together), and as mentioned above writing about bereavement.

12. Do you have pets? Not at this time.

13. How tall are you? 153 cm

14. Favorite subject in school? Science class.

15. Dream job? Author, except that a friend of mine who actually runs an indie publishing house says that there's very much more to it than just writing...and from the description of it all I won't like most parts of my dream job that aren't the writing part. Most days I'm not even really sure that I like the writing part. It's more like a nightmare job, except that we have established that I like well-done horror.

Any mutuals feel free to answer!

#gpoy #poe.txtwall

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saint-starflicker · 1 year

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Because this site won't let movie uploads in reblogs:

Do we need to start having workshops and counseling sessions to increase tolerance of other people's headcanons...including the creators' headcanons?

[ College Humor skit, at a couples counselling office. Lily Du plays a high-femme ex-fan of the television show Sex and the City. The other half of the pair being counseled is the television show titled Sex and the City, represented by a human figure concealed by full-body stretch fabric covering their face, and who holding a cocktail glass in one hand.

Lily: And those movies? Steve cheating?? NOT CANON.

SatC: IT'S CANON AND IT'S FABULOUS

Counselor: Okay, okay... How about a compromise? Lily, I would like you to admit that the movies are canon, and...Sex and the City, I would like you to admit that they really suck. ]

#poe.txtwall #not really a textwall but categorization tagging

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saint-starflicker · 1 year

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On Internet Aesthetics

The YouTube algorithm recommended me Lily Alexandre's video essay about how internet Aesthetics hurt art. I personally enjoy the aesthetics wiki, and I was interested in an opposing viewpoint (haven't watched any of Alexandre's other vids).

I thought some points were fair, for example the collaborative knowledge of internet teenagers misattributing the contributions from people of color to more hegemonic demographics (claiming that the Afrofuturism aesthetic began with Gene Roddenberry), or Lily Alexandre's concern that aesthetics can be used as lifestyle branding that gets people—influencers, content creators, and consumers alike—more concerned with the appearance of a thing rather than the philosophies or power struggles that make a real life real.

Others I thought were off the mark, for example how a third of contributions to the Aesthetics Wiki make no sense. This doesn't bother me, because I think there's something democratic about that: just pop in something like Night Luxe...which I think can be more like a folkloric being, "beware the Night Luxe"...or Coastal Granny, or the one Alexandre was complaining about that had a photo of a model in unripped skinny jeans "grunge" beside a plate of sushi and just Make It Make Sense(!!) why and how does that earn its own separate Aesthetic page on this Wiki??

Nay, I say it doesn't have to make sense, it's primordial information, pop it into the internet cauldron and find out if it sticks, what that means for it to stick, and what it's doing.

If this overall pattern of Aestheticization is a product of post-quarantine culture, scrolling through our smartphones in isolation, making a suffix -core or a collection of media "my whole personality", losing our souls to how organizational hashtags are used by marketers—as Alexandre argues—then, yeah, that can be a thing to ponder.

But I also don't find, even after watching that 40-minute video essay, that Aestheticization is really a new, different and more harmful thing.

If the message was, "Big Corporations have always done this harmful thing that is adapting in the context of Namecore so beware and here's the plan" then I wouldn't be so disagreeable.

But, for example, Steampunk was a genre before it was an aesthetic, and maybe it was even an aesthetic genre in how some people like stimmy tech and corsets paired with boots. There wasn't some Steampunk Manifesto (that I knew of) that told everybody "The Purpose of Steampunk is to take historical aesthetics to actively criticize the impact of Victorian-era colonialism, sexism, discrimination against mentally ill people, and the exploitation of laborers with the growth of factories at the time...and how nothing has changed in those aspects of society in the past two hundred years, so that's bad, and we're rubbing in how bad and outdated are those unexamined attitudes today, and we're doing that by dressing like people did two hundred years ago".

But that nonexistent manifesto was the purpose and meaning that I found in (or made of) Steampunk.

For somebody else Steampunk is nothing more than Goths that discovered the color brown. I'm not being snobbish, I'm saying I love that angle too and I fully accept that that's also Steampunk.

There are thinkpieces out there about how Dark Academia heralds the accessibility of the markers of class that its aesthetic predecessor of Prepsters used to easily conserve/gatekeep ("What’s Dark about Dark Academia?" article by Ana Quiring), and I personally find themes in Dark Academia media that speak more to the hypocrisy of being classically-educated and "civilized" as in image or reputation...but truly hiding a soul-crushing if not outright fatal violence in the prestigious boarding school gilded cage (abusive father in Dead Poets Society, predatory teacher in The Moth Diaries, and I heard The Secret History has a murder mystery set at a prep school so I think there's an appropriate irony there in how violent the heavily-controlled and image-conscious echelon of society can truly get.)

On the other hand, an art movement like Surrealism historically had a manifesto and a community. Salvador Dali with the melting clocks paintings got kicked out of the club for being an antisemitic fascist, while Jean Cocteau with the special effects black-and-white movies possibly got kicked out of the same club for being definitely gay. But both Dali and Cocteau are still considered surrealists by laypeople such as myself. Because of the similar aesthetic.

I'm into Art Nouveau lately. I don't know what philosophy or power struggles underlie it, I might look into it but right now I just think it looks pretty.

When I write about characters in the 1950s, or think about doing art for 1990s characters, then I think about how the aesthetics shows characterization as well as what they had access to. Lily Alexandre described good old days of culture being localized and image being bought at a local store...but I don't find that there's much difference between those good ol' days versus today with Internet Aesthetics in how young people (really, any people, but these characters are mostly young enough to still depend on their parents) engage with self-definition and self-expression. I might not have been alive in the 1950s, but I can believe a tendency towards a full-on prepster look would have communicated something that an imitation of rockabillies or greasers would not.

I don't find the high school clique tropes from the 1980s through the 2000s to be true to life, either, but there was plenty of (age-appropriate, so I was told) angst and prejudice back in the day based on whether you presented as Emo or BoHo or Prep or Hipster.

I disagree with Alexandre's assertion that those subculture-dividing personal limitations were less harmful only because of it also being limited in scope, because of the limitations of technology at the time. Again, I find that Internet Aesthetics are as democratic as internet access, and I find it for free, I contribute to it for free, so I cannot reason that it's more vulnerable to becoming Namecore Capitalism than aesthetics, subcultures, and genre trends always were.

I was recently years old when I read the sentence "90's grunge is not a fashion style, it's a philosophy" and I thought that was the most pretentious awful sentence—but after a little surface-scratching of the ground, it's true. Grunge was a protest against consumerism. I only remember what it looked like on glossy magazine pages when I was a kid in the 90s.

It's not new, maybe some sides of it is tired (Grunge on fashion magazines) or didn't follow through with its best potential (Steampunk as protest), but I'm not quite at "Grr kids these days with their Namecore and their Dark Nautical Luxe Granny Coastal Wave" or more condescendingly "Kids these days don't know they're being exploited" ... I don't know that there's more marketing exploitation in category hashtags than back in the day that we didn't have those. We still had Aesthetics of varying depth and dilution of meaning, but we just didn't call it Aesthetics. So what's really so bad about it now that somehow wasn't so bad back then?

#poe.txtwall

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