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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.
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.
As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?
This is supposedly such a widespread media phenomenon that it has its own article on TvTropes. Sadly I cannot remember the term anymore. The short story is that importing anime in the '80s, dubbing and distributing it was a big market risk, so these companies only selected those anime series that were pretty much guaranteed to be popular. This created the misconception among many Westerners that these series represent the entire anime industry and that anime is always high-class. Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies to it as well.
COVID killed off 24-hour businesses, including restaurants and retail. Plenty of other places (banks, libraries, etc.) reduced hours during the pandemic and never expanded them again. The lockdowns did permanent damage to our society.
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I think it's mostly a culture change. My parents, like to reminisce about hanging out at the local Denny's with their friends in the middle of the night. I have never even thought about doing that, despite going to the same college with the same Denny's. It just never came up, I did other things instead. Maybe an arbitrary change, or phone and internet related. Not only did they not have cell phones, they might not have even had an individual landline, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone was for the whole floor.
Before cellphones, you used to have specific gathering spots to hang out and meet up with people, where you'd shoot the shit while waiting for a critical mass of people to show up and decide to go do something else. A lot of times you'd never really get around to figuring out what to do, so you'd just hang out until someone made you leave for not buying anything. For me in high school, this was usually a local Dennys or mall food court. Now that smart phones are ubiquitous, these types of gathering points are no longer a necessary part of organizing a night out.
The decline of the classic American diner long predates this though, and begins with the interstate highway system and development of drive-thru fast food restaurants. Long distance travel used to involve driving down a lot of local streets and stopping at little diners for food/to stretch your legs. But the interstates streamlined a lot of that travel, and the ability to grab McDonald's at any freeway exit without having to get out of your car outcompeted the diners on both convenience and cost. And then COVID shut downs dealt the final blow to most of those who managed to survive.
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It definitely used to be a thing. I remember going to places like that as a teenager, but most of the places I remember have either shut down or are no longer open late at night. There are still some, notably IHOP and Waffle House, but they're mostly near freeways, and not somewhere I'd really like to go unless I'm driving long distances at night. Even most fast food places shut down at night (but there are some exceptions). I did see a few classic 24 hour diners in New York City, but that's NYC being different, and they were very expensive.
For why, I'm not exactly sure, but I can guess a combination of factors. It just costs a lot more to run a restaurant than it used to, because of rent and labor costs, so it's not profitable to keep a big space open with few customers. Or if it's peak dinner time, they want people to eat and leave quickly so they can turn the table over to a new customer. Especially if the "customers" are bored young people who are going to sit around for hours talking loudly and not ordering anything except maybe one soda, it's just bad business. Then, if it's in a city, you also have to worry about homeless people using it as a shelter, which is even worse for business. Maybe in the past there were more middle-class people who wanted to use it as a third space and could afford to buy a full meal there at 2am, but those kind of people would just stay home now. Something like the classic "Nighthawks" painting I just don't see, and maybe it's better that people can just stay home and go to sleep, but it is a bit sad.
Shouldn't higher rent encourage you to keep the business open 24/7, since it's a fixed cost that does not scale with hours of operation?
Rent is, but labor isn’t, and I bet restaurant owners have to pay a big premium to get employees to take the graveyard shift.
It's likely even worse than the normal premium, because a big chunk of their workforce has a curfew, either due to parole/probation or being teenagers. If you're not making a profit being open, you're not making a profit being open- especially when you add increased electrical and gas(restaurant kitchens are electricity hogs when they're in operation), and staff getting more lightfingered(all cooks use the kitchen as their personal pantry when on the clock, all the time. Good restaurant management can minimize this or limit it to cheaper items, but not get rid of it- and that's leaving out waitstaff and cashiers pocketing money directly, and the hourly workers[again, mostly kitchen] stealing time when not being watched, etc) when less senior managers are watching them(more senior ones won't take night shift).
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I spent most of my 20s as a 24-hour diner creature. This doesn't make me an authority, but it makes me feel like I am. The pandemic caused most of the 24-hour businesses around me (not just diners) to get rid of their overnight hours. The local diners mostly all failed and reopened afterward with new owners, reduced and much more expensive menus, and much more limited hours. My suspicion is that, long before the pandemic, those 24-hour diners had already lost most of their overnight clientele (graveyard shift employees, EMS, cops) to mega convenience stores along the lines of Royal Farms, Sheetz, and Wawa, so once the pandemic killed the inertia that was propelling the 24-hour service there was no reason to bring it back.
There are lots of factors keeping the current crop of 20 year olds who should be lurking in diners in their homes, whether it's lack of jobs, the internet, or social-developmental damage from the reaction to the pandemic. But even if they did want to go hang out somewhere, I think there are even fewer places left to go than ever. We went to the diner because it was the place that was open once everyone was done second shift. Even once everyone was old enough to drink we mostly wound up there because it was open later than the bars and our cop and firefighter friends would cycle through. It's how we made our friends in the first place. Now where can they go? Not even the local Wal-mart is 24 hour anymore, so that last resort of killing time is also gone.
(As an aside, I knew real human beings who were goths lurking in diners. Dinergoths, you could call them I guess. This article seems to me like the author's brain made the noise "dinergoth" and he found a way to staple it to a concept that, in so far as it even points at a real thing, has nothing to do with either of those ideas.)
Yeah. Somehow I surmised that whatever happened is largely due to the lockdowns.
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As someone from the US I've got to second this request. I've got 6 24-hour diners from 3 different franchises within a 15 minute drive of my house! Maybe @MollieTheMare is right that it's just a Southern thing now? 3 of those diners are Waffle House.
Maybe the "relatively expensive" qualifier is what's important here? Or maybe not. A quick check says that a big (eggs, bacon, toast, waffle, hashbrowns, but water to drink) breakfast at the closest spot to me would top $15 after tax and tip, and a full but cheap lunch or dinner (I'm assuming you don't get a T-Bone or something) is in the same range. That makes me wince as an old person whose mind recoils at accumulated inflation, but it's still only an hour's wage as a new fast food hire here. It looks like the situation is about the same for the "working poor" as it was a generation ago. This Denny's menu from 2003 shows comparable meals that would be around $7.50 with tax and tip, at a time when fast-food cooks were earning $7.27 per hour.
Or maybe the change was much earlier? My "young person in debt (not poor, just not working during college semesters) going to 24 hour diners" days were a few years before and after 2000, and I didn't notice any skyrocketing prices during that period, but maybe things were much cheaper in the 80s or 50s or something.
Is Waffle House safe for dinergoths to hang out in? As a somewhat-too-online Brit I have mostly heard of the chain in two contexts:
Yes. Waffle house is rowdy and... odd, but fights turning into all out brawls is genuinely rare.
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This is just anywhere that's open later than the bars and serves greasy food.
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So you haven't heard about their insane marker system? It's right up there with the Waffle House Index and their chair-parrying employees for infamy.
This is the longest Tim and Eric sketch I've ever seen.
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Can said dinergoths deflect flying furniture one-handed? (famous chair deflection about 1:30 in)
But I actually have no idea whether this 2022 event remains unbeaten because Waffle House violence is actually rare, or just because getting such awesome chair-fu caught on video is rare. Back in my "go to the diner at 1am" days the diner was either a Denny's or a local chain with only a couple franchisees.
The worst crime against memetics caused by the British English-US English divide is that the Waffle House Wendy story is not called "Chavatar - The Last Chairbender"
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Re:
Maybe @BahRam You can chime in with what he meant more specifically.
As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.
That's not to say there is no residual of the 24-hour diner left. Notably, Waffle House continued this tradition well into the 90s and is still extremely common in the American South.
In that era it did serve as a third place sociologically. Describing the eponymous song:
Dreams don't come true anymore.
Through a combination of prices rising, penny-pinching degraded service, and more widespread public drug use, it has now developed a reputation as a place for vagrants, not a place to hang out.
Being open 24 hours a day is part of the draw. They are often on the side of the expressway. And if you need a cheap(ish), filling place for food, you can be assured they will be open. Even after a hurricane.
Waffle House manages to survive because of highly highly optimized supply chains, and dirt-cheap wages. An independent diner with highly competent, friendly staff would have much higher overhead. Particularly a problem is that classic American diner staples have seen a dramatic increase in input costs. Eggs, chicken fried steak, coffee, etc. have all seen price increases that vastly outpace broader inflation. You still find some small diners limping along, but it's often more of a boutique, higher-priced thing.
I think this is a slightly different place.
The 24-hour diner wasn't charming. Cheap, certainly. Always looked at least slightly grungy. There were regulars, but also a lot of people who were just passing through. The waitress called you "Hon" (or local equivalent) regardless of which you were.
There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.
Some of these original diners still exist and are open though. Some have re-invented themselves as basically a nostalgia version of themselves, and there have been others purpose-built as nostalgia versions -- these are not cheap.
Disagree - diners have always served mostly local customers. The market has been for food done quickly with minimal service and without pretense, at reasonable prices [ETA: and where it's normalized to dine alone]. As such I think three things primarily killed diners:
Frozen meals - I think a lot of people have forgotten how big a deal the introduction of TV Dinners was. For the first time, you could have a prepared meal in your own home, with no cooking required, at a price competitive with or even cheaper than cooking from scratch. Prior to this, if you wanted anything more complicated than a cheese sandwich and didn't want to or couldn't cook, your only option was a diner. Afterwards, you could have diner-quality meals at a substantially lower price, in the comfort of your own home, and all you needed was a freezer you probably had already and a toaster oven.
Fast food restaurants - A major appeal of the diner was a hot meal you could get quickly and cheaply, and sit and eat at your leisure. Fast food restaurants offered hot meals even more quickly and cheaply, and many built indoor dining areas so you could sit down and relax. You were never rushed and dining alone is fine. Granted, the menu was much more limited, but it ended up capturing a lot of the remaining people that wanted a simple and cheap hot meal and didn't want to make frozen dinners.
Bar food - I think a not insubstantial amount of diner traffic, especially the 24-hour variety, was from bar patrons desiring some food to soak up the alcohol, when most bars would offer popcorn or pretzels at most. Now many bars have a TurboChef convection oven to heat up all kinds of frozen snacks, and many have a full kitchen to serve up pub grub, so if you are drinking and want some food, you can just stay at the bar and eat.
That's why I think most diners now survive mostly on breakfast, which is under-served by all those categories.
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Yeah, I have the mental defect of thinking things that are slightly grungy are charming. The fact that purpose-built as nostalgia versions are not grungy is partially why I don't like them. In addition to not cheap.
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Civil-engineer nitpick: According to the official definitions (MUTCD ¶ 1C.02.03 items 83 and 91; probably also AASHTO, but I don't have access to that any longer and I don't care enough to look up a pirated copy), expressways are full-access (e. g., the parts of US 1 that you're talking about) and freeways are limited-access (e. g., I-95).
Official definitions be damned, I'm in that-sort-of-diner central and only limited access roads are termed expressways. Nobody calls anything a "freeway", they look at you like you're from California if you do that.
The Conowingo Diner I mentioned was on a part of Route 1 that wasn't (and still isn't) divided, so it wasn't even an expressway by the MUTCD defintion. It was here, where the Royal Farms is, though IIRC Route 1 was two lanes rather than 3 when it was open.
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I mean the standard diner that is a recurring location in Goodfellas, for example.
Your independent diners are being pinched by inflation(egg prices, in particular, and large wage increases for lower blue collar workers like cooks etc) and changing tastes, with the younger crowd often preferring fast casual food or less greasy meals. The logical business move is to reduce hours, and overnight is the fastest axe to fall. Remember, this is, except for waffle house, a full kitchen with a full kitchen staff, so it's expensive to pay $15+ per hour 24/7. You can find a normal diner pretty easily if you go at normal breakfast or lunch hours, but independent diners are mostly not open for dinner or overnight anymore.
Waffle house is special, because they serve a restricted(and much cheaper) menu, have a business model that relies on hiring the cheapest labour possible, and specialize in selling to drunks after the bars close. It has a reputation that... reflects that.
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