“People love identifying themselves,” Amanda Brennan, Tumblr’s head of editorial, says. The impulse for classification is a staple of internet life-tag yourself add your interests pick your favorite croissant, and we’ll tell you the Taylor Swift song that sums up your life. The level of detail on these pages isn’t quite as high or rigorously fact-checked as what’s on Wikipedia, but much of the information is still immediately useful: Most pages have galleries of images to show the nuances of each subculture or to help a casual viewer realize that they have seen “weirdcore” before they just didn’t know what it was called. Enormously popular subcultures such as steampunk and cybergoth have their own pages too (and those pages have related pages). On Discord, the chat platform popular among online communities, contributors to the Wiki even dreamed up “vaporcottage” as a bit of a joke and added to the page: “what you’d see after ingesting mushroom soup laced with Xanax.”Ĭottagecore and its many offshoots are only one corner of the Aesthetics Wiki. There is also a list of cottagecore’s 27 “related aesthetics,” which include “grandparentcore,” “cabincore,” “prariecore,” “warmcore,” and “woodland goth”-not to be confused with “forestpunk.” The same list includes “ravencore” and “crowcore” as separate entries. A group of volunteer contributors started tracking its many niches and nooks on Aesthetics Wiki-an online encyclopedia of “visual schema.” The major cottagecore subgenres, the page notes, include “bloomcore” (mostly flowers), “honeycore” (mostly bees), “Southwest cottagecore” (succulents and lizards), and “cottage gore” (the creepy version). Once cottagecore blew up, it started to mutate. By the end of last year, it was widely considered one of the biggest online phenomena of an extremely online year. By the summer, it was unavoidable on TikTok-just clip after clip of dressmaking tutorials and muffins with fresh berries. By mid-March, cottagecore was more popular on Tumblr than Harry Styles or Marvel. Teenagers and 20-somethings have been cosplaying online, posting as if solitude and wildflowers and ever-growing piles of homemade bread were enough to live on. The subculture is all about pretending to live an idyllic life in the woods, and in 2020 was embraced as a sweet attempt to make the best of a bad situation. Cottagecore was a natural fit for a pandemic year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |