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!

Correct me if i’m wrong, but conservative goth seems like an oxymoron

On various social media I have seen people making posts about how they are “disgusted with people denying their political beliefs in goth culture” but I feel like when you get into a subculture that is well known to be anti establishment, anti-capitalism and pro human rights you would expect that.

What makes me really upset with this is that I have seen too often these “conservative goths” are transphobic when the culture was literally made to free people, like trans people who are oppressed societally.

It gets even worse with people trying to say they’re conservative punks which imo is an even more politicized subculture.

It seems to me that a lot of things were in the works even before the first albums were released – and even when albums were released how did news about the new underground culture travel since there was no internet and no tv coverage (or was there international TV coverage?)? Did record stores carry both British goth and American deathrock without time delay after release?

I honestly think that if there hadn't been any means to transfer news about goth it would have been born nonetheless both in the UK and the US (and other countries) since a counterpart to 80s mainstream excess euphoric culture was needed. Anybody agree?