“Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”
―“Clean girl”, “That girl”, “It Girl” we are in a fucking girl-pocalypse and I for one am sick of people acting like any of you have the range. I mean I saw this coming back in 2020 when we were talking about the whole “main character energy”. The real pandemic is people repackaging tumblr era subcultures and aesthetics as if it’s a brand new thing that they created. I’ve been on the internet since they were learning not to slob on their mush peas and they’re telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.
The real issue is that these self proclaimed “It Girls”' (because lets be honest they only reached it girl status because they forced it), don’t know their history. They reference without knowing what they’re referencing, they don’t know their cultural context. That’s how we have reductive wannabe’s like Aliyahsinterlude who are able to browbeat everyone with “aliyahcore” even though it’s just late 2000s rave aesthetic with costumey “Y2k” color palettes and silhouettes. Throw in a little gyaru while we’re at it, why not.
People forget the beauty of It Girls was how mundane and almost nerdy they were. Chloe Sevigny was just a random girl in New York’s underground scene who attracted people with her easy nature and guileless eyes. Tavi Gevinson was a regular yet artistic girl who started off taking pictures in her room. Hell, even Anna Karina was a teenage runaway who didn’t speak French. But these girls have personality, they have clear interests that make people want to know more about them.
It girls of the 2010s were born and bred on tumblr, and people are still clamoring to replicate that allure on tiktok and twitter to a lesser extent. It doesn’t work. They can’t monetise it they way they can on Tiktok and Instagram. Everyday girls on Tiktok cry and whine about not being a Tumblr girl during it's heyday and God I'm glad they weren’t. They seek to be popular for popularities sake. They’re quirky in a highly curated way. Everything is empty and vacuous behind their lobotomised stares.
It’s easy to buy your way into coolness. Wanna seem quirky and cute? Pay $20 for a Sonny Angel figurine. Wanna be mysterious and interesting? Carry around the latest slop by Otessa Moshfegh and pose with a cigarette you won’t smoke. The Tumblr Renaissance has been rumbling since 2020 and it won't ever work because people don’t care enough. So instead they take what the Tumblr girls have been doing for the past 2-4 years and bring it to Tiktok like it’s the new hot thing, And don’t you dare ask for credit or swarms of perfectly coiffed yet deliberately messy “it girlbloggers” in training will swarm your comments saying your not good enough because you didn’t spend $40 on a mediocre lip gloss.
Everybody wants to make a statement but nobody has anything to say. It’s not cool to care or to develop unique interests when someone has a ready made personality pack on Depop so you can pretend to be subversive. When you see someone else’s personality gain them 100k on Tiktok why carve your own niche when you can just wear their skin. We saw it with the Alida Simone clones and their constipated smiles (disregarding the fact that Alida smiled like that because she wore braces and was in her teeny key west kitten porno phase).
We will never get a real Tumblr Renaissance and we need to let sleeping dogs lie. Girls prefer to rewrite history instead of learn it because they’re mad they didn’t do it first as we see with the bizarre reframing of Coquette as a hyper feminine Rococo inspired aesthetic to make it more palatable to outside audiences instead of embracing the messy, vulgar, uncomfortable aspects of it that made it truly subversive. “Reclaiming girlhood” just doesn’t have the same conservative, capitalist ring as “reclaiming femininity” needed to mold future alt right tradwives in the making. It’s also much harder to do a Brandy/Shein/Amazon haul if the subculture you wanna infiltrate is based on self expression when you have none. Sad to see.
Ironically, tumblerinas obsession with having a "renaissance" is making them way more akin to tiktok aesthetic preferences than anything else Tumblr is notorious for being. Where is the authenticity? The organic feel? Even something as unpolished as the "feminine rage" thing is turning into an empty coquette trend
ReplyDeleteThis this this!!! All of this.
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