I’m probably just out of the loop, but what the hell is up with slapping “Punk” after some random word and trying to pass it off as a thing?

I know cyberpunk, I know steampunk, I know solarpunk, and those I can accept as “more than an aesthetic”, tho steampunk is mostly an aesthetic… but then you have for example frostpunk (a game I know nothing about), cypherpunk, silkpunk, etc. (I don’t really know how to find other bastardizations for examples, but I know I’ve come across other random nouns followed by “punk” and I find it super weird and confusing)

Is it just capitalizing on the cyberpunk/steampunk fad for naming, or do these other “punk” things actually have a legitimate claim of being punk? Is all this ___punk watering down the meaning or am I old man yells at cloud meme here?

  • zeekaran@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Punk as a suffix was first made mainstream by cyberpunk, implying a high tech setting with low life, punk anti authority DIY characters. The next big use was steampunk, which was (as far as I know) purely an aesthetic for cosplay / costuming. Now it’s a general term for aesthetic, such as desert punk, atom punk, or solar punk, where the punk part completely lost its original meaning.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    Those are sci-fi genres generally describing a dystopic future strongly leaned to a particular technology and is mainly related to it’s esthetic.

    Atompunk is a future society based in nuclear technology. Steam, diesel are other known alternatives.

  • MagnyusG@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    -Core is the new term for just aesthetics, and I think that’s much more fitting over punk. Though in the case of steampunk, it’s one of the oldest -punks so getting people to swap over to steamcore or something would probably be met with a lot of opposition.

    • DangedIfYouDid@lemmy.world
      11·
      4 months ago

      -core predates steampunk as a term by decades. -Core was generally only used when describing musical genre mixing in an attempt to clarify the roots of a particular group’s sound.

      The only -punk terms in use prior to the 2000’s were cyberpunk, crust punk, and punk all of which were used to indicate a level of rebellion. Punk is being used in a similar way -core was until steampunk rose in popularity followed immediately by dieselpunk and atompunk cementing the concept of [powersource]-aesthetic as the primary defining trait of a fantasy genre which easily found it’s way into use as a descriptor for an aesthetic that would be expected within that fantasy setting. Things get confused again with the more recent solarpunk (follows the format) and cottagecore (does not follow the format because it is not a musically defined aesthetic)

      It’s a pretty classic case of a newer generation believing they’ve invented something without realizing they’ve actually misunderstood prior usage due to limiting their sphere of influences to their peergroup. These are the same types of people who would call people posers for not conforming to the punk aesthetic because they never understood what punk actually was beyond a vector to fit into a group (and all the irony that entails in the context of punk)

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
        2·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, its infuriating that punk has become a suffix.

        There is nothing punk about steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk. They are just fantasy technological scenarios / art styles.

        Cyberpunk has an both a recognizable aesthetic and a whole lot of political, social and philosophical views baked into it. You get the punks in cyberpunk as either a direct ideological opposition to the power of corporations, or as an indirect result of said corpos creating a hell world for 99% of people.

        There is nothing inherently rebellious about worlds or characters within worlds with more prevalent / advanced steam or diesel or nuclear power.

        Solarpunk arguably has some actual punk to it if you actually try to follow the idea of personally minimizing your fossil fuel usage, but mostly its a utopian or post-dystopian setting / art style.

        Its now like -gate being affixed to any kind of publicized controversy.

        Most people do not understand what Watergate even was and why it was so significant.

  • MagicShel@programming.dev
    0·
    4 months ago

    Punk indicates rebellion against the status quo as part of the theme. If that isn’t part of it, then IMO it has no place in the name.