Teen Gothic

Please correct me if I am wrong about this and I am fully open to criticism:

For a while now I have seen a rise in berating others, especially baby bats, for interpreting a band or song as goth that another person disagrees with it/makes fun of them for thinking it is goth. I have seen legitimate harassment level messages such as death threats due to someone interpreting something as goth that another person deems incorrect. Music genres, especially this one with so many genres and subgenres, get incredibly blurry in some areas with other music (such as new wave and non-goth postpunk) and it feels wrong to say that there is an exact hard line everyone has to agree on between what is and isn’t be considered goth. Obviously not saying that BTS or Arianna Grande are goth due to interpretation as that would be straight up wrong, but for example the debates on Molchat Doma and similar seem to go wayyyy further than should. Why can’t we just “I interpret this song/band as goth” “I interpret this song differently and not as goth” “that is okay”?. The subculture is very important to me so I know that keeping the genres meanings are important, but the recent rise has kind of concerned me and a lot of the “protecting the meaning” has gone way off the rail. Has anyone noticed a similar trend? Is this a common sentiment and I’m just late to the party? How can we better approach this issue and help prevent toxicity?

Thank you!

anyone else bothered by this? it doesn't really bother me but I just think it'd be nice to be friends with fellow goths, I don't have friends with the same tastes, but in my country (Tunisia, in north africa) there's barely any alt people yet alone goths, no scene no underground no nothing lol, the only person I found that listens to goth music ended up ghosting me too lmao, so basically I have no hope of making goth friends IRL, but at least there's the internet 🙂

For me it has probably been Belirdi Gece by She Past Away for a while, makes you lose the sense of time quite very nicely.