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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.
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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