Someone already got you covered on crustpunks.

These new terms have a lot more to do with where people gather on the Internet than anything else. Explains why they’ve shifted so heavily toward visual aspects because their likely first exposure to -punk was seeing cyberpunk or steampunk in film or games and then seeking out community around them hoping to capture some of that mystique for themselves.

Cottagecore is definitely the child of Pinterest x Alt girls wanting to be different when alt went too mainstream to stand out. (Which is kinda punk, but for the wrong reasons.)

I agree, of all the modern terms, solarpunk is the only one to actually fit punk, even if it is a bit more abstract. At it’s core, the idea is still rooted in rejecting societal norms and is inherently political, so it works.

Oh wow I totally forgot about splatterpunk, you’re right.

-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)

They’re a meme beyond discord as well, but not hugely mainstream, existing in a similar space to mentions of Ohio in a positive light. Just more Gen-Z ironic humor.

It’s a take on “doth protest too much.” Because Poland is super conservative, therefore secretly specialized in femboys.

The weather effects and condensation on Samus’s visor in Metroid Prime had this same feeling. It’s been quite a while since such minor graphical details in a game held me in such awe.

Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.

I can’t imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.

There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.