#i hate dark academia stop romanticizing old buildings

[plannersnplants]

semester starts on Tuesday so let's get back into the swing of things. I left lots of space this week so I can take notes on stuff.

[piisuke]

What's southern gothic and why do you hate it?

NO STOP I DON'T HATE IT I SWEAR

Well I do actually LISTEN

Southern Gothic is a genre of American literature that you could say basically stems off of American and English gothic, but it focuses primarily on the southern American States from like, the 1800s out. Southern gothic basically brings forth the disgusting side of humans and touches on very grotesque subjects, such as racism, slavery, poverty, death, cult activity, etc etc. One of the most famous authors in the genre is actually Edgar Allan Poe, though Toni Morrison and William Faulkner would come more famous in later years. Famous works include In The Heat Of The Night, To Kill A Mockingbird, and without a doubt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

My BEEF, however, with Southern Gothic, is less with the literature (bc in my opinion it's important that we keep writing about this as to not bury it in America's history books, looking at you Tennessee school board), it's more so there's an influx of teens on the clock app Tik Tok that are just flat out romanticizing it. Not even in the way the literature is refered to as romanticism; they're literally treating it as an aesthetic, such as cottagecore, or dark academia. It's very infuriating. People are collecting certain aspects of gothic literature, such as the clothing and imagery, and bringing it back into the modern day as a way of life without even acknowledging what it's supposed to represent. They look at long black dresses and sunhats and go uwu pretty uwu not realizing it's mourning attire picked out for funerals. They film old decaying houses and go uwu cweepy uwu not realizing it's literally a plantation where hundreds of slaves once resided.

Now don't get me wrong, I get the appeal from an imagery standpoint. Looking at moodboards on We Heart It, with the dilapidated buildings and dead trees and stuff, it does look pretty cool. But the aesthetic itself can easily be named and associated with something else other than the pain of the history of the south. Especially when people are getting into it without knowing the history behind something as simple as the name itself.

I dunno, I might just be more angry ab it than the average person bc someone who terrorized my friend group was also oddly obsessed with it and it should have been foreshadowing to their overall character, but also possibly being from the American south and witnessing the aftermath of the time period first hand (not that there isn't the same thing happening in a modern sense) is just. Eugh. It's icky go away.