The Goths

https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-goths

by drdee • 2 years ago

63 26 2 years ago

the-hinternet.com

keiferski5• 2 years ago

You might also find this interesting: a post I wrote on the topic last year:

From Gothic Invaders to Mall Goths. How an ancient Germanic tribe gave its name to a modern subculture.

https://onthearts.com/p/from-gothic-invaders-to-mall-goths

defrost3• 2 years ago

That's a long arc with a barely addressed tail end.

I read somewhere within the past few months an entertaining take on how Goth culture of Bauhaus and the 80s has little to do with Hot Topic mall rat goth of the 90's and even less with recent naughties Goths of Tik-Tok .. less and less substance, more and more appearence.

In the Venn diagram of Goth|not-Goth there's more than a few lucky trifecta's, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpCyNQ80JoE

keiferski5• 2 years ago

Eh it’s a big topic and the post was already getting too long. You are right that mall goths are less interested in the “ethos” of the previous subculture and more interested in the surface appearance, but I think that probably applies to every subculture of modern times.

bazoom424• 2 years ago

What is “substance”? Since Walpole built a fake gothic caste, it have always been about appearance.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Naughties 2000-2009?

jart• 2 years ago

So what. In order to be a truly authentic goth you'd need to sack the Vatican.

kevinh456• 2 years ago

They say fashion goes in cycles. That cycle is ~ 20 years to start and ~ 30!years to complete, the approximate time it takes for a generation of teenagers to raid their parents old shit. Which just so happen to hit the second hand market around the same time.

1984 -> 2004 -> 2024. Emo and goth cycles.

1964 -> 1984 -> 2004 -> 2024. First, second, third, and… fourth? waves of ska.

keiferski5• 2 years ago

That’s one thing I came away with from studying this topic - classicism vs. the gothic (and variants of them like order vs. chaos, minimal vs. maximal, etc.) seem to alternate over and over throughout time.

card_zero• 2 years ago

If everything is provided digitally as a service, there won't be old shit lying around to raid, and it won't be sold second hand.

bazoom424• 2 years ago

Doesn’t really connect the dots. For example suggest the Gothic disappers beween Victorianism and The Doors, completely missing the horror movies which was a major influence on the aesthetic.

keiferski5• 2 years ago

I didn’t suggest that the Gothic disappeared between the Victorians and The Doors:

While the Gothic didn’t disappear entirely after the Victorian Era, it was largely pushed aside by Modernism and related movements for most of the early 20th century.

It was only by the 1960s that the Gothic ideal began to make a resurgence – this time via music.

This is pretty standard history. Modernism dominated most art forms at the time.

But yes, films were an influence as well. I couldn’t include every influence on the genre as the post would be novel length. The ending part is a bit condensed as a result as I wasn’t trying to explain the intricacies of modern goth culture, just show how the word traveled through time. It’s been awhile since I wrote the post but IIRC the films didn’t play a direct role in transferring the use of the word gothic itself, as they were primarily referred to as horror films.

hollowpython• 2 years ago

No wonder goths expanded so much. They have very cheap infantry.

nickcpainter• 2 years ago

AOE2 ftw :)

avhception2• 2 years ago

There is an excellent Goth festival in Germany, I'm visiting every year since about 2012. https://www.wave-gotik-treffen.de/english/

eythian• 2 years ago

I went once and it was very fun. It's about time I tried to arrange a group to go again.

avhception2• 2 years ago

I'm always open to meeting new people with different backgrounds, so if you do go we could get a beer together or something :)

wildpeaks• 2 years ago

Ah I didn't expect to see Wave Gotik Treffen mentioned on HN, I only went one year but keep a very fond memory of it :)

netbioserror• 2 years ago

I'm unsure of the narrative that Gothic civilization was the birth of high German and an origin for mongrelization of the German people. My understanding from lots of other sources of ancient history was that the Germanic heartland and the eastern Gothic offshoot evolved quite distinctly, with tenuous connections through Germanic settlements throughout Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish lands (which MAY amount to a language continuum, I'm unsure).

My impression is that High German evolved fairly distinctly in the Bavarian and Austrian heartlands during the age of the Holy Roman Empire, while Gothic populations were assimilated by Slavic, Bulgarian, and Romanian peoples and were eventually absorbed until the Gothic language went extinct.

kayo_20211030• 2 years ago

Because Gothic is ancestral to what would become Old High German

That's just wrong. It was connected, but a dead offshoot; a vestigial limb.

The Goths

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