cottagecore and other internet aesthetics

I feel like cottagecore could have a less malevolent root - a lot of people have housing instability, high rents, plus the general unease of life now... having a fantasy of retreating into a cozy, safe place seems like a natural instinct

I mean people could just want a home for themselves, a safe place, is that Nazi?

95% of the fantasy genre has been cottagecore if cottagecore exists

See also 'food porn'

It's good to think about how your taste mightn't be a random or neutral happening

― scamp til you're damp (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, March 17, 2021 9:47 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

A star turn from nv as usual.

I feel like cottagecore could have a less malevolent root - a lot of people have housing instability, high rents, plus the general unease of life now... having a fantasy of retreating into a cozy, safe place seems like a natural instinct

Yesssss I was keeping it short but yeah, lots of the homestead people are doing it because of housing shortage, financial insecurity, low-wage work, the desolation of two people working two jobs each to afford a "normal" middle-class life and never seeing each other or their kids.

I realize that's not the same phenomenon exactly as cottagecore but, I submit, not unrelated.

Tankcore, Sludge, Unblack, Funeral Doom etc... It was ridiculous and very silly.

Much as a language is a dialect with an army, sludge and funeral doom have been around for 3+ decades now. Their distinctive traits and staying power are such that I don't think it's fair to put them in the same basket as tankcore and unblack.

Also when my job was a nightmare, my deepest fantasy was to live alone in a moldering house and strip paint off woodwork with a toothbrush--a tiny, exacting, low-risk task that restored value to something was so much more appealing than my actual life.

A quick search for "cottagecore racism" gave me this excellent (imo) blog post + comments that says pretty much everything I would have said:

https://baixueagain.tumblr.com/post/189439029744/time-to-stop-tagging-cottagecore-alongside

Point 1:

Cottagecore romanticizes the legacy of settler colonialism and frontier living that relies on the stolen land of indigenous people. Solarpunk needs to be decolonial and pro-community, including urban communities, in order to flourish as a genre.

The history of the Homesteading Act, as well as modern white financial/land privileges, mean that Solarpunk needs to move away from cottagecore fantasies.

Comment:

Cottagecore does NOT, in fact, romanticize the legacy of colonial settlers. It does, however, romanticize: femininity, domesticity, and in some cases, rural life surrounded by vibrant, healing nature. It is wholesome by definition. It is safe. It is warm. It is peaceful. It is often unabashedly and unapologetically feminine. It is, for most, a fantasy.

Counter-comment:

white supremacist pastoral fantasies are all about recreating what they view as a natural ideal. domesticity and femininity are prized by white supremacists and every word of this fits exactly within their framework of gender roles. unapologetically feminine also stands out because this phrase is commonly used by anti-feminists who view feminism as an attack on womanhood that forces women to be unfeminine.

And more good points all around re settler colonialism, the manufactured urban vs rural divide, the gendered ideal...

I’m especially concerned by how you frame femininity, especially rural femininity. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on a farm, or done a lot of outdoorsy things. I have. It’s not delicate and romantic, and it involves a lot more than sitting and knitting by the fire or foraging for berries. It is back-breaking, physically taxing work, and rural women often spend a whole lot of their time doing extremely “unfeminine” things, even if they’re “just” keeping house.

White supremacists refuse to acknowledge that. They work really hard to push the image of the rural housewife who does simple housekeeping tasks in peace as she waits for her big strong husband to get home. I’m half of a mind that this is because they know they can get unwitting urban or suburban women out into the middle of nowhere with this ideal, and by the time the woman comes to understand the extremely unpicturesque life she’s signed up for, it’s too late, because she’s out in buttfuck nowhere with no actual knowledge of how to survive on her own.

What's a non-internet aesthetic in 2021?

Anyway I'm susceptible to the appeal of a nice cottage garden and fiber arts and 6-hour braises myself but I also choose community & collective support over individualism and isolationism. Right after I finish looking at these 10-acre plots of land in Vermont.

It’s not delicate and romantic, and it involves a lot more than sitting and knitting by the fire or foraging for berries. It is back-breaking, physically taxing work, and rural women often spend a whole lot of their time doing extremely “unfeminine” things, even if they’re “just” keeping house.

if liking the countryside is fascist then i'm not sure there's any hope for us.

that said, is there much difference between cottagecore and ages-old romanticisation of Merrie England? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England

It’s not “liking the countryside”, it’s the whole back-to-the-land aesthetic that is deliberately drawing on false and reactionary portrayals of rural life to romanticise a world where women and minorities knew their place.

I mean yeah my understanding

hang on, my *memory*

of what cottage culture might be deemed to be is obv not necessarily what any one other person or group thinks it is in their context

In our context we are the indigenous people pulling a living out of drying fish and pots under the leaks in the roof and mortar you can pull from between the rocks you can talk off with yr hand and draw with

Which as io’s posts say above, isn’t remotely representative of reality.

I mean my literal own memory there so

I mean its a nice B&B now but im talking sixteen ppl living in a small freehold falling apart in like the 80s!

xp that’s your context, their context is that that way of living is romantic and noble and so much better than living in the big shmoke with foreigners and women wandering around unsupervised

'When in doubt, assume fash' has become a tragically reasonable position over the past decade or so.

Here's an enjoyable article about how cottagecore as an online thing originally excluded Black people too! And--bonus!--it mentions a fave IG account of mine, Hill House Vintage (for your dose of Merrie Olde Engerland).

“Black history doesn’t only consist of the transatlantic slave trade,” Sérieux says. “We need to stop looking at our ancestors as just victims of that era and realize that Black people have lived all kinds of lives all over this planet long before and after these eras.” While cottagecore is reminiscent of settler colonization, its roots aren’t entirely shrouded in whiteness. Lifestyles such as this have always been with us throughout various eras around the world: Farming, gardening, and bread laced with herbs aren’t regulated representations of whiteness; in many Black and Indigenous cultures, this kind of lifestyle is a way to cultivate our own connection to the Earth that prioritizes protecting the land.

Black folks have always had a strong connection to rural spaces (check out Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade or Prince’s love letter to the Midwest), and this is especially important at a time when many Black farmers are fighting to survive. “Cottagecore is a return to your roots, whether they’re in the Bronx, Haiti, Nigeria, or Alabama. If you look far enough, you’ll find that simple cottagecore lifestyle,” Sérieux says. “This aesthetic offers Black people an opportunity to see a life of harmony with themselves, their community, and their environment.” For Sérieux, and other Black cottagecore fanatics, the aesthetic is a reclamation that provides hope in the face of systemic racism.

darra, I'm a bit lost. Surely the suffix "core" is hint enough that what we're discussing has nowt to do with your experience, except within the context of it possibly being a yearning for a romanticized version of that?

lots of xposts

xp that’s your context, their context is that that way of living is romantic and noble and so much better than living in the big shmoke with foreigners and women wandering around unsupervised

― Scamp Granada (gyac), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 13:43 (forty-seven seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ah ok wasnt sure re xp or not

In which case yep we agree i think

Xp the suffix core seems to mean i dunno what tbh

Its working very hard here like but as i said context

xps of course. there's a whole problematic discourse tied up in this and it's worth discussing. same as "Merrie England" - it's unrealistic and ripe for propaganda.

I mean, if people find solace or inspiration in the idea of wearing gingham and living under a thatched roof, I can't really see that as intrinsically much different from being really into dark fantasy or cyberpunk, so long as people aren't swept away with rose-tinted ideas that "this is how things used to be for everybody and we were all the better for it".

On the other hand, saying "Yeah well you know who else liked wattle and daub? Hitler!" is pushing it to another extreme.

I mean you can have this conversation (and yknow, should, imo?) about just about anything rly

that’s what we were doing before you blundered-in going “what’s wrong with liking the countryside”

eh?

Don't be dense, dl--of course it's fine to like calico and campfires and sourdough bread or what the fuck ever, no one said you couldn't fantasize about living in a cottage where none of the doorframes are tall enough to walk through. But as an overall movement or whatever you call an aesthetic coalescing on the internet, it's kissing cousins with white supremacist conservative patriarchy-affirming communities and their propaganda.

sure

Is cottagecore synonymous with ecofascism, y/n, is how I break it down to an extent.

Is cottagecore synonymous with ecofascism, y/n, is how I break it down to an extent.

Ok. I know next to nothing about cottagecore so I appreciate the clarity.

I'm open to being convinced that they share elements tbh! I think the division on that blog post I shared is interesting--"cottagecore" vs "solarpunk" is framed as, individualism vs community or rural isolation/"independence" vs urban collective support networks.

Cottagecore is like...Mumford & Sons. Rural life without the actual hard labour and graft that characterises how it actually is to live and work on a farm, crucially tapping into traditional ideas of how men and women are (the latter mainly confined to baking bread/embroidering/popping out multiple children) and living an existence of isolation away from other people.

Survivalism presumably also looms in the background here.

Ecofascism also thinks cities are bad, but because they are all about aesthetics of trees and wildlife, which quickly segues into “we should protect the environment and stop destroying it to sate the teeming hordes” and they have very particular ideas of which hordes are teeming.

It struck me just now that my parents were part of the cottagecore of their time - politically radical hippies (though they loathed the term) who quit big city life to become farmers on an island in the middle of nowhere. The very fact that this was an ideological decision, and something that could be quit if you wanted to, makes it so far from the experience of indigenous people pulling a living out of drying fish as to make comparisons pointless. I suppose it's quite different in that they wouldn't have thought of themselves as traditionalists, certainly not with regards to gender roles, but quite a lot of them did end up eco-fascist anyway.

Survivalism presumably also looms in the background here.

Yeah I said homesteading up above but on reflection, that's a really loaded term considering what it meant in America--anyway there's a pot with "survivalism" and "homesteading" and "off-grid" and "prepper" all swirling around and idk where they end and begin.

xp ecofascism as I understand it also posits that the problem with life on earth is that there are too many people, rather than that very few people are using all the resources that should be supporting millions?

Ugh, the examples itt are exactly what I'm talking about. Here's a box, a sturdy + well-made corrugated cardboard box. Nothing to write home about but I appreciate it because something about its dull lack of flash speaks to me. Because I'm boring. Now as it turns out, a bunch of white supremacist cosplay dorks also have an appreciation for this box and have decided to attach their own dumbfuck ethos to it. I dunno, maybe some prominent fascist owned a box factory. So now everyone has to tiptoe around expressing any appreciation for the simple box just because a bunch of wads have also adopted the box? Feels a bit like cultural capitulation imo.

I feel like a skill we're going to have to learn to develop in the coming years/decades is how to appreciate a thing even while simultaneously acknowledging unsavory associations that thing may have. Like nothing is pure anymore. Nothing is untainted. So unless you're willing to engage in some zero sum act of throwing out the cultural baby with the shitty bathwater, it behooves us to take a more nuanced approach with this stuff. And I'm not speaking from on high here, I'm still figuring it out myself. It's an unquestionably good thing that we're increasingly willing as a society to call out shitty people and challenge troubling legacies and associations but I feel like there needs to be a concomitant shift in our perspective such that we don't paint ourselves all the way into a corner.

Again it bears no relationship to reality

Mos def, but since internet aesthetics are what led us to this discussion in the first place, it's safe to assume that a non-negligible amount of folks who fantasize about cottagecore on IG have never set foot in the country and likely never will.

So now everyone has to tiptoe around expressing any appreciation for the simple box just because a bunch of wads have also adopted the box?

This circles back to my point earlier: the past decade or so has trained us to parse ambiguity as fash camouflage. There are very good reasons for this but I'm not sure it's sustainable in the long run.

TBRR I wasn't even aware of the term 'cottagecore' before this thread. I just like pictures of rough-hewn stone fireplaces and overgrown flower gardens and shit like that.

the wokies will ban birdwatching next!!!!!!!

lol i am chill this thread is okay everyone otm

Literally the second I read tiptoe I rolled my eyes so hard I saw stars. There is context to this conversation, it’s not something people made up out of nowhere and it would be nice to have that acknowledged before people come in and post “but I like pictures of trees and I’m not a fascist!”

how to appreciate a thing even while simultaneously acknowledging unsavory associations that thing may have. Like nothing is pure anymore. Nothing is untainted.

Yeah this is absolutely correct! Leave no turn unstoned. I don't mean to be blithe but as a non-indigenous, non-descendant of enslaved people in America, the bare minimum is to be aware that all of our cultural myths and ideals are ultimately rotted at the root by our twin original sins of settler colonialism and chattel slavery.

There is context to this conversation

Indeed. Misunderstandings about which context we're talking about in the first place seem to be built into 99% of online debates, and ILX is no exception to this rule.

Old Lunch, feels a bit like you're creating a strawman here - think it's been kinda established on this thread that no one's saying you can't like the box, or that liking the box makes you a fash?

That being said, I do think a fascination for the old ways of the countryside has a specific history of association w/ reactionary and fascist movements that not "everything" does. This doesn't mean you can't like it - it just means that, as with liking I dunno black metal or something, it's worth being aware that there's some unsavoury fellow travellers.

xposts

here's an aesthetic for you

🤮

Are the manic street preachers "bibliopunk"?

Not sure if this has already been linked, but thought this was an excellent exploration of internet aesthetics and "vibe capitalism"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-vibes-revival

Anecdotally, I've found that instagram ads are much more persuasive in getting me to buy things than any other channel - I guess when yr vibescrolling through the grid, you're infinitely more suggestible to buying a houseplant subscription/new pair of yogis/a ridic expensive swedish raincoat/whateves? Since deleting the app and only accessing insta via firefox packed with adblockers, it's a notably different experience...

agreed - instagram seems to have me absolutely nailed and i hate it

Thirded. I have no need for some Japanese cat jogging pants but I still follow the Instagram link

once i was in a coffee shop and a very tall and handsome man sat down with a brand new copy of "anti-oedipus." he glanced at the back of the book, stood up, looked around, then sat back down. then he cracked it open, seemed to read it for like eight seconds and then closed it with a sort of shudder. he was tapping his foot at his point and his eyes were darting wildly, suspiciously around the coffee shop. this is chaotic academia in action it is rhizomic.

― treeship., Sunday, May 23, 2021 2:54 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This man's thinking was too arborescent

What are some current aesthetics you enjoy?

I don't entirely mean this in the cottagecore/dark academia sense of the term, though it can be that, too. It's more that as I get older* I find it easy to pinpoint aesthetic trends I dislike - slowed down pop song trailer music, the way every cartoon show tends to look now, Corporate Memphis - but harder to find ones I enjoy.

This has also been brought home to me by how much I enjoyed films like The Souvenir, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and Licorice Pizza purely as fetishistic evocations of their periods, which tbf I didn't even grow up in. Which is a trend in and of itself ofc, but I don't want to start a discussion about nostalgia, it's more I would enjoy getting a similar aesthetic charge out of something looking entirely now, tho I understand that this will never happen as tidily for a time that you're actually in.

Important bit for me here is I'm looking for aesthetic trends rather than specific artists, works or even, in the case of music, genres.

* yes I get the irony of asking this on a forum where I'm probably in the younger half of posters

It's always in danger of being too retro for me but I very much like the revival of juicy colored lighting (pioneered by italian horror films) in Refn's films, Color Out Of Space, We Are The Flesh, Bliss, Mandy and many more. I'd like to see more experimentation and evolution of it though.

And I like the ragged messy style of some new-ish comic artists

Yeah I think bisexual lighting is an aesthetic I enjoy.

Which comic artists are you thinking of? I've been watching a lot of Cartoonist Kayfabe and getting more and more into the art of comics (as opposed to writing) and there as well all my fave aesthetics seem to be ancient.

I like to make playlists of mood music and they're very much centred around specific vibes or aesthetics. It all started when I was trying to make a playlist based on the video game Earthbound, and then it got more specifically about the beach level of that game, so I ended up mining what I'd call "16Bit Balearic".
I've done a playlist called that is numinous and wintry, a sort of implacable mix of soothing neo-classical music mixed with more tempestuous and upsetting stuff so it doesn't just become an Einaudi-fest. That one's called "Quiet & Falling".
Then there's one that has a slightly acoustic/Latin vibe but not exactly called STRING.
I also have one called "SEED" which is sort of rural-ambient-drone-folk-horror.

Which comic artists are you thinking of?

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, February 24, 2022 11:03 AM

Kind of scribbly alternative stuff that seems more viable in mainstream now, I'm blanking a bit but I think Loic Locatelli and Muriel Bellini have a bit of it even if the latter is a lot more underground looking and they are very different, but I'm seeing more artists willing to make a total mess and it's cool. There's an artist I'm forgetting, she's in a punk band and everything is super wonky, I can't get on my instagram anymore so I can't name many names

Lale Westvind is great and I don't know if that new book is ever coming out. Forgot about how comics can delay forever

an aesthetic i'm really liking is dance music nights that de-emphasize starpower and treating people like cattle with wallets. man power is doing this in the uk, i saw some other night called 'fuck it, let's dance' that's also on this tip. also musical and lineup diversity.

not really an aesthetic but more of a way of balancing doing something for the joy of it with business i suppose.