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Is Dinergoth a real thing? (soft-paywalled; use reader mode to get the whole article)
Before we get carried away with narrative, let's do a reality check. Is "Dinergoth" pointing to a real cultural phenomenon? Can anyone provide anecdotal evidence?
I can probably think of one or two people I know who meet this description, but that's not enough to validate the claim, which is that:
The problem is, this archetypal Dinergoth is, by construction, invisible to anyone who's not one of them. They can't afford to live in big cities, so you'll never encounter them there. Even in a small town, the Dinergoths are shut-ins who never leave their (parents') homes and never venture out into the community to meet people. Instead they (supposedly) spend all their time chatting with each other on Discord (hence, so the article claims, the flattening of regional accents among the youth - although I think that trend is older than gaming chats).
And now that I've read this article, the next time I run across one of those obese 20-something piercing-having pink-hairs I occasionally spy at CVS or Walmart, I'll update my stereotype of them from "Antifa" to "Dinergoth"; but really I'll have no evidence either way unless I talk to them and get to know them, which I won't.
Perhaps some of you reading this are Dinergoths yourselves, although I rather doubt it.
Agree with the overuse of the term goth, there’s nothing really goth here. I will note however that there’s sort of a stereotype here that gender ideology is something associated with college-educated coastal elites, and it may be at an intellectual level, but not as-lived on the ground. Walk around Princeton campus and the kids will look normal, they wouldn’t even look bizarre by the standards of twenty years ago. You’ll see much more gender nonconformity at a Walmart in rural Alabama than at Harvard.
I think this is basically the intellectually permissive ideology of colleges finally filtering down to Walmart, where it just gets interpreted as a complete collapse of any normative standards or shame. So you get this mixture of mall ninja aesthetics, anime, furries, piercings, tattoos, hip hop/black culture in an unholy combination assisted by algorithmic blending of previously distinct subcultures. Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart, especially White/black. These ideas are formed at colleges but mostly inflicted on the trailer park class.
You know, separately I want to talk about poptimism and the death of subcultures. I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s book on the 90s (good fun, I highly recommend it) and he was pointing out how “selling out” was a huge concern among indie music fans in a way it isn’t today. In the 90s subcultural fans had an expectation for their celebrities if loyalty to the subculture, of purity, and if resistance to debasement. In the early 2000s for exzmple, hip hop had it’s own unique fashion that was totally independent from the world of high fashion houses and luxury design And you would have never seen Modest Mouse collaborating with Cam’ron. At some point around 2012 when proto wokeness was emerging, indie music press started to become self conscious that their disdain of pop music was in some ways sexist and racist and they began to notice that the then-popular bearded-flannel-mandolin indie of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine was disturbingly White They shifted their ethos from searching for the most obscure music to praising the top-40 hits of Beyonce or Kanye for their racial politics, thus poptimism was born and the end of subcultural gatekeeping. I mean look at the writing credits on Beyonce’s 2016 lemonade, you have former indie darlings like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend on there, this is like if Jeff Mangum was writing songs for Britney Spears, absolutely unthinkable twenty years ago. IMO aside from the algorithmic melange & capitalistic aspects, there really is a part of the story where wokrness and concerns over sexism/racism/gatekeeping destroyed distinct subcultures
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It's a good article, and there's definitely something real there, but I hate the term "dinergoth."
For one thing, they're literally not hanging out in diners. The classic 24 hour diner doesn't exist in most locations anymore, and when it does it's too expensive for broke young people to go there casually. Also they kind of frown on people just hanging out for hours, and young people are staying at home online anyway.
Also they're not goth in any way. The glassic goth aesthetic is dark, muted colors and sad, serious emotions. This aesthetic of anime, games, and internet memes is more about bright colors and direct, intense displays of vibrant emotions. Almost the exact opposite of goth.
I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay). It's a big tent of people who want to express sexuality and don't have a good venue for it in today's society! So while I'm not part of this group myself, I do support it.
Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is? We got this small subset of poorly translated anime films in the 90s, plus everything from Studio Ghibli, and thought it should be some high-class artistic statement because we didn't understand it. But when you watch the majority of mainstream anime with proper translations, you quickly realize how low-brow and fanservice-heavy it is. Nothing wrong with that, let people enjoy themselves, it's just a very different aesthetic than you normally expect from people who watch foreign media with subtitles.
"E-prole" is a great coinage. It captures the alt-slop normie aesthetic while avoiding all three of those now very tired words.
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Anime is the only real remaining mass entertainment artform where 1) the chasm between good and bad craftmanship is obvious to the average consumer, and simultaneously 2) not irony poisoned.
The vast majority of anime is painfully, awfully earnest. Characters train hard to get stronger. Characters pursue romance for romance, not for self-actualization. Characters fight for lizard-brain reasons; survival, power, money, sex, respect - or for noble reasons like meaning, brotherhood, friendship. Hollywood used to produce this stuff on the regular but then got bored or got high on their own supply/addicted to masturbating and navel-gazing, or some combination of the two. Or just got profoundly disgusted of the people they were making the Content for.
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It strikes me that this aesthetic is much more related to the old scene subculture than goths (as is e-girl subculture). e-prole sounds about right.
I know the type. The "they live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects" thing strikes me as quite real. When rainbow hair colors started going big, I thought it was really strange -- around here that's only associated with the e-prole type, CVS worker, down on their luck, demoralized. There's a lot of hopelessness in flyover country, which competes with the hopefulness of family and faith and confusingly messianic-hope that "Trump will fix this broken country" and, of course, drugs. But there's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of drugs on the coasts, too -- I just don't know what hopefulness competes with it.
But I'll challenge that this is principally sexual. Or that cosplay is. Hell, the cosplayer I dated briefly in college turned out to be asexual, which made her the second woman I've dated that turned out to credibly claim asexuality and the fourth such woman I've had a crush on. Obviously neither relationship lasted long or went very well. (Women I've dated have turned out to be either sexless or more sexual than me, I still don't know why.) One of the latter two is someone I thought of when I read the description of the dinergoth.
I think it's fairly true that these folks are mostly politically disengaged, but in flyover country the type runs consonant with being a political leftist. But I'd describe the type as "politically disengaged because they believe the Democratic party is full of rich people who don't want to help people like them," or "politically disengaged because they believe the only solution to America's problems is gay space communism established through the revolution," which they fantasize about while standing dead-eyed at the CVS checkout counter.
I don't know that this is the default youth culture, but it certainly is huge. I'm an elder zoomer -- this is the end-fate of a lot of people I went to school with. The Asians and the gays went to elite colleges, the Christians went to <evangelical_school>, and the dorks, who I hung out with, often tried to go to college, dropped out, and ended up listless and hopeless.
Apparently I'm pessimistic tonight. I don't mean to be. I'm actually very proud of where I grew up and the school I went to, despite their problems. But there's real hopelessness out there, and everyone of my generation I speak to almost identically tells me they have no real hope for the future and almost feels humiliated in spite of their achievements. Even if they're married, have a good job, a house, friends...
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I don't think anime was ever "highbrow" like French cinema, but in the Millennial anime period (maybe 1995-2015) it did have a certain edge to it, like all things Japanese (think: karate, console games, cyberpunk, sushi, Zen). You probably had to have an above-average IQ to be into these things (although whether that translated into social status was another matter). If Dinergoth is real, that's no longer the case today.
An artifact frozen in amber:
Definitely a difference in the sort of crowd that would download a torrent + apply the .sub file, or pay expensive import fees, or join a club just to watch someone else's bootleg tapes, vs the current meta of endless mindless streaming on demand.
Also, excuse me while I go full weeb a minute, but I feel the same way about sushi. There's levels to it. On the low end, you can buy cheap premade stuff as a snack, and that's perfectly fine, just don't expect any complex flavors. American restaurants usually oyster California rolls or some deep fried monstrosity and that's... fine... but you might as well just order fried shrimp. The better places offer simple nigiri or sashimi with nice rice, so you can really taste the subtle flavors of the fish, and a clear mild liquor like sake really does complement it well. Some fancy plates and a cool chef also helps the experience. But at some point people go to extremes where they're just wasting money on "the secret, ultimate fish" or whatever and that's just stupid. Or you get drunk salarymen snacking on sushi while also binge drinking and smoking so... that can be fun too, in its own way. But once in a while its worth making the effort to appreciate a fancy meal with more subtle flavors than typical restaurant fare.
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I think it's one of these midwit meme distribution. Glug thinks cartoons are low-brow childish entertainment, midwit thinks since it's not aimed at kids it's adult and somewhat sophisticated. Genius knows it's mostly endless rehash of tropes comfortable to its audience.
This would be odd given the Black + Asian fanbase of anime.
Anime is aimed at teens and is for teens. Adults who are black appear to love it as well. If the meme is to be fufilled the jedi at the right end of adults should also love it.
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Yeah that's fair. I'd like to point out that there is some sophisticated anime, and especially the niche manga that never gets turned into anime. But I'm well aware that's not what people are watching on Crunchyroll or Toonami.
Do you know of a good resource for a list of niche manga you'd consider good? That's something I've never explored but would probably enjoy.
Try Blame! It is not without its faults, but it sure is unique.
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Not an easy one. I used to use MangaRock, but it got shut down for piracy. Im not as plugged into the scene as I used to be- the big mainstream western accrptance and commercialization kinda killed off the indie scanlation volunteers. Your best bet is probably to search the list of manga that have win awards not in the shonen/shoujo category, like the general category of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogakukan_Manga_Award. Once you find something you like, you can search what else they've done- often they have more experimental works that never hit it big, but are more intellectual. Or if there's a specific genre that interests you, you can see if there's a magazine for that (eg, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Yuri_Hime for yuri manga that's actually aimed at women, instead of male fanservice). Unfortunately the rabbit hole gets pretty deep, and the really niche stuff is often print-only, not sold outside Japan.
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I'm not sure Dinergoth is a useful category, outside of designating an aesthetic. There's a broader issue--the listlessness and demoralization of youth--and the Dinergoth is a good example of affliction by it. But it's shared across pretty much every youth subculture. Hustler, incel, NEET, based tradcath, femcel, influencers. To the extent any of them are political, it's an identity-defining gesture. Even antifa is just a bunch of young men wanting to break shit for an adrenaline rush.
A more provocative take: what is the cause? "Capitalism." Or, more precisely, capitalism as implemented on actual humans. Humans are wildy disparate in their capabilities and intelligences, and capitalism, by flattening the world in its relentless pursuit of legibility and information, has identified the weak and dumb and deterritorialized them from the structures that once protected them. When they previously would have found refuge in burrows or bramble, now they're easy prey on the open savannah. And a caste of strivers are the predators here, who bloodlessly condemn millions to a debased state with new, maladaptive structures that are more easy to exploit and are delivered over technology that was supposed to liberate us.
Gen Z and, to an extent, millennials are just the leading edge of it. They won't ever snap out of it, because they don't even know of any other way to live.
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In the olden days, subcultures had real functions, a chief one of which was that they allowed one to explore genres of music efficiently. If you were dissatisfied with mainstream pop and happened to hear, say, gothic rock and liked it, it's not like you had hundreds of curated Spotify playlists (or, earlier, music blogs) to find more stuff quickly; you'd get handmade zines, sections in obscure record shops, small clubs (or club nights) and, especially in non-Anglo countries, the necessity for mail-ordering stuff. To find all that you'd need to get into the local goth scene, and of course there would be other benefits like other media, interesting conversations, drugs, strange ideas and belief systems you wouldn't get elsewhere and so on that would keep you there.
Since all that is not particularly necessary now - due to the said Spotify playlists and music blogs and such - all the subcultures have since started to bleed together to create some sort of a general lowest-common-denominator simulcra of a subcultural look which, for some odd reason, is now being called "goth" despite not particularly resembling the goths of old, expect perhaps for the derided "Hot Topic goths". Earlier the same look was often called "emo" with only marginally more of a connection to the claimed musical genre.
I think the bigger one was the sense of community itself. Maybe you were a loner in your class, but you could put on your "uniform" and mingle with people like you. You could even identify each other from a distance, just one glance to see that the person across the street was one of yours.
The sense of community probably dominated once you were in the community, but the exploration of niche interests, chiefly music, was what got people in the first place and the communities formed.
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I agree that subcultural aesthetics are kind of pointless now, but it's not so much that Spotify made them pointless, it's that alt aesthetics have gone mainstream, or at least aren't really judged anymore, and hence there is no sacrifice and no meaning in dressing for a subculture. It doesn't tell you anything about the person.
The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.
Similarly, we've had the conversation on if tattoos are attractive or cool many times over, but one thing that is beyond dispute: they are so normal that you can't really judge based on them and achieve much of anything. In 1960, if my grandmother went to the hospital, she would have pretty much refused service from a nurse with a visible tattoo. In 2026, if you refused service from any nurse with a tattoo, you'd just die in the lobby.
A punk or goth in the 80s got bullied in school. In my high school years they got mocked as emo kids a little ("remember to cut down the road not across the street!") but could fit in as skaters or whatever. In 2026, a goth or emo or punk kid is dressing like and listening to bands that his teachers and parents listened to. He fits in, more or less, the same as he would if he dressed in polo shirts and khakis.
Maybe we have different definitions of "manbun", but IMO it's one of the more professional hairdos for guys with long hair, especially if it isn't straight. Or am I thinking of a topknot type of thing, and a manbun is different?
But having long hair, as a man, would have been a Serious Statement until quite recently, and not one that you could have in a professional white collar job.
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I don't disagree, in the year of our lord 2026. But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room. 50 or 60 years ago, they might not have even let him talk. Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo. Long hair on men was a serious, serious CW issue for like a good thirty years! It would have been considered wildly strange and unmanly, let alone unprofessional, for a man to have hair long enough to bun in America before the 60s. And until pretty recently, you could with workable accuracy judge that a guy with long hair did not have a good professional job. Now, you can't, that guy might be your traffic engineer. He might even be a good traffic engineer!
Other "weird" and "alt" aesthetics have developed similarly.
20 years ago? I wouldn't be too surprised to see a Gen-X engineer with long hair in 2006.
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This is a bunch of fake academic sounding nonsense. I would completely disregard this article as it appears to be mostly cope for the author's breakup with a hot portland goth girl. He has a nice dump of random statistics, many of which are years old, and no real honest way to pull conclusions from them. You can alternatively just as well say that anime is popular because netflix made content for young adults boring and gay.
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For a few years now, I have been more and more worried about the youths. Sitting on my porch, in front of my lawn (get off!), I watch the they/thems scuttle by and think to myself, "kids these days!"
The aesthetics don't actually worry me. This is kids doing what kids do; picking fashions and accessories deliberately to freak out the squares. Long haired hippies, punk rockers, grunge, glam, goth, emo. It's all branches from the same trunk.
What worries me is the response to it by their peers. For most of post WW2 western history, there were normie aesthetics that were obvious and represented the median of teenage expectations. Think of your preps or in-crowd. Jocks and cheerleaders. Perhaps those were the zenith of normie expectations, but it filtered down. Being counter-culture was deliberate and carried real costs. If you had green hair and piercings, you'd be looked at weird. Peers would make fun of you. You might be bullied. You then got to respond to this in a number of ways;
You could endure the bullying and double down on your identity as a goth/punk/emo/sensitive kid. Good for you. These are the kids who go on to art school or something and at least maintain their weirdo integrity. You probably open up a Banh Mi shop in Portland years later and dabble in polyamory.
You could decide being bullied sucks and that conformity actually isn't so bad. You ditch the piercings and black clothing and get a decent pair of jeans, a polo, and a leather wristwatch. Later, you laugh at some old high school photos you find years later as you logon to your 10:30 zoom call and greet your peers with "Happy, Friday, gang!"
Or, least preferable, you let bullying soak into your soul. You maintain your goth aesthetic but develop anxiety and depression. Barely graduating High School, you self-medicate through your 20s and wake up at 35 as a committed misanthrope. You either turn into a hardcore burnout or find religion.
This spectrum is continuous, not discreet. Most kids experiment with some level of "rebellion" in the teenage years but shake out towards the median. That's fine and good. With that last example, of the committed burnout, I'm being a bit intentionally hyperbolic. This is also why I still am against extreme forms of bullying.
I am not, however, against all bullying because the alternative is worse. The alternative is what has resulted in these so called Dinergoths.
Total and radical acceptance means there's no cost to defecting from norms and median social aesthetics. If I come into 9th grade with cat ears on my pink dyed hair, black lipstick, a rainbow flag choker, and am met with a shrug from my peers and "you do you" milquetoast encouragement, I haven't encounter a real social cost function. This is a massive societal failure to the Youths. Childhood and adolescence is where you have unlimited (mostly) do-overs for social situations. You awkardly ask someone out, you make a bad joke, you make a poor outfit choice, you experiment with various identities. It's all (well, most of it) fine because the folly of Youth is expected and you can reset as many times as you like.
In adulthood, this isn't the case. The stakes are high. Being socially malformed can have real negative impacts on career and personal development. Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore). I think these Dinergoths are what they are because they didn't encounter real social cost until it was too late and they had no emotional means of dealing with it, so they retreat to basements and discord servers.
To use a physical health analogy, it's always been folk wisdom that letting kids get a little dirty is a good thing for their general immunity. I don't know how accurate that is (although I believe exposure to peanuts has been proven to reduce or eliminate peanut allergy severity) but I think it is still useful. Likewise, it's good to let a kid make a few social faux pas - and to let his or her peers inform of this. Sure, there may be some tears and hurt feelings, but how many childhood embarrassment stories become the stuff of humorous remembrances later on?
Taking this useful and necessary feedback mechanism from kids makes them brittle and turns them inwards as they enter adulthood.
I hope that you are wrong and 2rafa is correct. I suspect you are right, though. Interesting take.
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Not now that dinergoths are the ones making the hiring decisions. Plenty of people get away with non-median social aesthetics now, and still make plenty of money and have successful social lives. The archaic social norms no longer matter at any stage of life (other than maybe for boomers, but soon they will be retired and irrelevant).
James Damore was fired because of wokeness, not because of his aesthetic or personality traits. He was fired for committing wrongthink. When has someone ever been fired from a tech company for wearing cat ears? The question of what lifestyles and aesthetics are allowed is different than freedom of speech and thought.
This thread is veering off topic. If "dinergoths" exist at all, they aren't working as well-paid professionals, let alone as hiring managers for said professionals. They're going to be in dead-end jobs commensurate with their poor social skills, as remnants of the hollowed-out working class.
As much as engineers may bemoan getting bossed around by Woke HR Karens despite their lack of "real" skills (as in, pertinent to the company's stated purpose), becoming adept at Machiavellian court intrigue isn't exactly easy either. Your typical socially inept Dinergoth would never make it in HR.
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Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?
‘Elite’ or niche subcultures never become common in the same form. So the libertine sensibilities of the Greenwich Village beatniks in the ‘50s became free love for college students (a much smaller proportion of high school graduates back then) in the late ‘60s and then became John Hughes / suburban teenage picket fence Americana for the wider middle class in the very late ‘70s and ‘80s. Teenagers who had casual sex in 1985 didn’t typically share the leftist, third worldist politics of many of the hippies on communes eighteen or twenty years earlier.
I think it's more of "this is what luxury beliefs look like when they hit the underclass."
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