Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4995263" data-attributes="member: 4937">Hmmm... ok, my point is that at the depth that the things are considered in the subcultures that they are no more than superficial tokens, and that both subcultures ultimately engaged in the same game of judging their superiority over other subcultures or judging the fitness of members within the subculture by the superficial tokens.For example, in my comparison of the Goths to the Cheerleaders, I was highlighting that ultimately both groups judged themselves and others by superficial aesthetic standards whose origin was ultimately selfish (eg. "I'm  beautiful because I'm blond and tan." vs. "I'm beautiful because I'm black haired and pale.")  People wanting acceptance into both groups are tempted to alter their appearance (dying hair, wearing makeup) in order to change themselves superficially to fit the groups standard of acceptable appearance.  And so forth.  The parallels run pretty deep.  Not at all.  Black and white are very different, but in this case the uses to which they were employed were the same, to the extent that they don't carry much meaning.If I am allowed to be perfectly frank about it, someone pipped up and said what I thought amounted to, "My setting is much better than their setting." implicitly slamming other games and lifting up Midnight as being somehow better, and being the sort of irrascible contrarian I am, I slammed that statement back - throwing out the claim that Midnight used its 'anti-tropes' just as superficially as other settings used their standard tropes.  Actually, I very much think that it is.  I could go into some very long discussion of Goth cultural icons and point out that this defining oneself as an anti-cheerleader runs really deeply, but rather than digging up all that research I'll just point to some obvious cross cultural examples.  The original Adams family is based on the works of Edward Gorey, whose works are very much deliberately intended to be satirical looks like at Victorian children's literature, which is arguably the culture that informs the 1950's archetypal cheerleader and resulting culture.  In the movie Adams Family II: Family Values, one of the major conflicts is between Wednesday Adams representing the Goth Culture and evil representatives of the 'cheerleader' culture (there sterotyped as intollerant, racist, etc. in order to increase our empathy for the Wednesday).  The contrasts are more than coincidental.  Similarly, the character of Lydia from Beetlejuice (another early popularization of Goth) is defined by rebellion and contrarianism.I'm not sure that if we went back the original 19th century Goths, that the behavior would be defined any less as rebellion from the cultural norm, but on that subject I'm not quite as well informed as I wasn't alive then to observe it.</blockquote>

Verification