I’m probably just out of the loop, but what the hell is up with slapping “Punk” after some random word and trying to pass it off as a thing?
I know cyberpunk, I know steampunk, I know solarpunk, and those I can accept as “more than an aesthetic”, tho steampunk is mostly an aesthetic… but then you have for example frostpunk (a game I know nothing about), cypherpunk, silkpunk, etc. (I don’t really know how to find other bastardizations for examples, but I know I’ve come across other random nouns followed by “punk” and I find it super weird and confusing)
Is it just capitalizing on the cyberpunk/steampunk fad for naming, or do these other “punk” things actually have a legitimate claim of being punk? Is all this ___punk watering down the meaning or am I old man yells at cloud meme here?
-Core is the new term for just aesthetics, and I think that’s much more fitting over punk. Though in the case of steampunk, it’s one of the oldest -punks so getting people to swap over to steamcore or something would probably be met with a lot of opposition.
-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)
Lul I’ve had to enlighten people on that last point of yours. Me not dressing punk doesn’t mean I’m not, it just means you won’t see it coming when I throw a brick through your window cause I look normal in khaki shorts.