• PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    In case anyone’s wondering where the connection is made between the 20th century depressive/morose post-punk subculture and music genre known as goth and the Germanic ethnic group that crippled the Western Roman Empire:

    The 20th century subculture getting that label is because the aesthetic and attitude was reminiscent of the late 18th to 19th century artistic movement known as British gothic revival. Basically, a lot of British architecture of that era copied the style of mid-late medieval architecture known as gothic. The term got slapped on a lot of Anglosphere culture at the time got stuck with that label, including the literature which was morose, depressive, obsessed with death, lots of horror/dread. Think Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker.

    Now, the original gothic architecture, like a lot of these things, wasn’t actually called gothic at the time. It wasn’t until that movement passed that it was described that way, and it was intended as an insult. Renaissance artists and intellectuals wanted to depict their movement as a more civilized one than that which came before. Thus, their art and architecture was reviving the big-brain, advanced Greco-Roman traditions, while casting the medieval equivalent as a product of dumb dumb savage Goths.