Chuuni Tunes
May. 8th, 2026 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlThis is a bunch of largely "yes-and" commentary for tresfoyle's piece here, laying out a definition and theory of "Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism". It stands alone perfectly well, but I couldn't resist scribbling in the margins in a way that wouldn't fit in a comment box. So, here's my Live Utilitymonstergirl Reaction:
"I’d say femtanyl’s musical ouevre is frequently Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordist; Jane Remover’s dabbled; Vylet Pony plays in the space" - I get the sense that a lot of Femtanyl's audience is about half my age (I'm 29), and I'm thrilled that they get to grow up with this. I expect the fandom to be a hell of a talent incubator, given the sheer number of fanworks and covers and bedroom producers taking cues from them. And the members themselves give me that same sense of "the kids are alright" when I see these girls younger than me just commanding a stage for an hour. Good stuff.
I agree that Jane isn't really a central example, but I think "posing with a blunt and a flaming katana in a nuclear control room" deserves a mention as one of the all-time-great Transfeminine Chuuni works of art. (Likewise, underscores is even further out, but she did make a song around the premise of "what if Pumped Up Kicks was about getting groomed", and fishmonger sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a 2000s teen dramedy that never existed.)
I'd say Monarch of Monsters qualifies for this cluster by being an immensely traumahorny prog rock album wrapped in a pony fanfic novella, but you can engage with it while preserving your self-image as a Serious Music Critic. Love & Ponystep and Gonarch's Lair offer no such protection; you must grapple with the recession pop pastiches and the cringe-ass 2010s web culture and Call of Duty samples and meditations on what "pony music" can even be. I think that level of inescapability is important for this culture, stress-testing "new sincerity" as hard as you possibly can.
"[ISSBROKIE's] sheer meathead braggadocio" - A few months on, the part of Stardust that's stuck with me the most is two lines from Whatever The Case - "How come it's politics whenever oldheads discuss me?" / "How you gon' comment some hater shit, still tryna fuck me?" The Edgelord Heir Apparent, who kicked off her verse with a Bad Dragon joke, stares right down the camera and says, Hey, I am inescapably seen as a political football and a sex object. I think that's really neat.
Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalo subculture as a whole laid a lot of groundwork - Every piece I see about "the Gathering of the Juggalos is fun as hell actually" makes me more convinced that it serves the same emotional needs as a furry con - what if your ridiculous, maligned, horny subculture got to run shit for a weekend? - for a broadly lower-class audience. (There's no stereotype of Juggalos as IT professionals, after all.) Also, looking through the Gathering's lineups, there's something kind of intersectionally beautiful at work, in the spirit of "the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup album solved racism in middle schools for a good three months." More on this later.
"before the Wachowski sisters’ works were publicly reassessed" - I'm also reminded of Tyler, the Creator's early work getting recontextualized as a closeted queer kid going through it in the early 2010s. And now, Chromakopia has back-to-back tracks with a thoughtful examination of internalized homophobia and a genuinely really funny pronoun joke.
"ultraviolent Flash power fantasy simulators on Newgrounds" - I'm delighted to see a fandom resurgence for Madness Combat, one of the great standard-bearers of that culture, which I think was due to a Friday Night Funkin mod? Oh, the whims of history.
"Hyperbolic violence, psychosexual bewilderment, antisociality, bile, vitriol, good old fear and loathing" - The adolescent/chuuni sensibility definitely goes hand-in-hand with how pervasively transgender this scene is. When you reboot puberty while grappling with the duties and constraints of adulthood, plus facing horrific political besiegement, of course you're gonna enjoy all its most goofy excesses as best you can.
"works in this new vein [...] can only speak in the language of the ideologically fluent and cannot claim neutrality or some kind of agnostic self-interest, populism or tribalism" - I think a core part of the politics is Intersectionality That Fucks; solidarity and diversity pitched not in a moralizing eat-your-veggies way, but as the inevitable result of getting all the most interesting artists of today in a room together. I discussed some of these dynamics back here, and I think it's telling how much of this movement is built on strengthening ties between Black and queer art cultures that have each been doing their own forms of this for a very long time.
"twee liberal triumphalism in the culture industry that set up a lot of cute wins for the marginalized" - I think that DWNE is driven a lot by a deep frustration with this style, and confronting how mainstream representation is inseparable from respectability. Trashy problematic stuff can hit emotional frequencies that tasteful depictions fundamentally can't, because to be marginalized is to have your life shaped by ridiculous undignified bullshit. Cutting it out completely just makes art ring hollow, and I get that it's hard to extract the toxicity from trash without making it utterly sterile, but it's a worthy goal to attempt.
"Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism is our inheritance from Isabel Fall" - I think Coquette Dragoon stands out in this lineage, pulling no punches with its hellish forever war while never, ever letting you escape the premise of 'babyfur mech pilot'. Of course having your childhood devoured by this world produces some deeply silly sexual hangups. It is funny, sad, horny, terrifying, adorable, and tragically beautiful in equal measure.
"When Sulfur shares a poignant little moment with The Gamer on the couch" - [I am making a heart with my hands] I'm very happy with how that scene drives home the story's metanarrative - a game that cluelessly used trans bodies for shock value gets re-appraised and resurrected by a modern queer audience. It serves as catharsis for both eras, whether the world doesn't know you exist or explicitly wants you dead. I'm happy with how The Return is pushing that theme in new directions, and am excited to see what you make of it.
So those are my notes on this, and even if I don't end up writing my own thesis on the genre, you can absolutely analyze my work through this lens. Maybe future scholars will place me in some completely different -core or -wave, but I want to help them out by being transparent about my taste and inspirations. More on this soon.
tresfoyle's piece here, laying out a definition and theory of "Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism". It stands alone perfectly well, but I couldn't resist scribbling in the margins in a way that wouldn't fit in a comment box. So, here's my Live Utilitymonstergirl Reaction:"I’d say femtanyl’s musical ouevre is frequently Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordist; Jane Remover’s dabbled; Vylet Pony plays in the space" - I get the sense that a lot of Femtanyl's audience is about half my age (I'm 29), and I'm thrilled that they get to grow up with this. I expect the fandom to be a hell of a talent incubator, given the sheer number of fanworks and covers and bedroom producers taking cues from them. And the members themselves give me that same sense of "the kids are alright" when I see these girls younger than me just commanding a stage for an hour. Good stuff.
I agree that Jane isn't really a central example, but I think "posing with a blunt and a flaming katana in a nuclear control room" deserves a mention as one of the all-time-great Transfeminine Chuuni works of art. (Likewise, underscores is even further out, but she did make a song around the premise of "what if Pumped Up Kicks was about getting groomed", and fishmonger sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a 2000s teen dramedy that never existed.)
I'd say Monarch of Monsters qualifies for this cluster by being an immensely traumahorny prog rock album wrapped in a pony fanfic novella, but you can engage with it while preserving your self-image as a Serious Music Critic. Love & Ponystep and Gonarch's Lair offer no such protection; you must grapple with the recession pop pastiches and the cringe-ass 2010s web culture and Call of Duty samples and meditations on what "pony music" can even be. I think that level of inescapability is important for this culture, stress-testing "new sincerity" as hard as you possibly can.
"[ISSBROKIE's] sheer meathead braggadocio" - A few months on, the part of Stardust that's stuck with me the most is two lines from Whatever The Case - "How come it's politics whenever oldheads discuss me?" / "How you gon' comment some hater shit, still tryna fuck me?" The Edgelord Heir Apparent, who kicked off her verse with a Bad Dragon joke, stares right down the camera and says, Hey, I am inescapably seen as a political football and a sex object. I think that's really neat.
Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalo subculture as a whole laid a lot of groundwork - Every piece I see about "the Gathering of the Juggalos is fun as hell actually" makes me more convinced that it serves the same emotional needs as a furry con - what if your ridiculous, maligned, horny subculture got to run shit for a weekend? - for a broadly lower-class audience. (There's no stereotype of Juggalos as IT professionals, after all.) Also, looking through the Gathering's lineups, there's something kind of intersectionally beautiful at work, in the spirit of "the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup album solved racism in middle schools for a good three months." More on this later.
"before the Wachowski sisters’ works were publicly reassessed" - I'm also reminded of Tyler, the Creator's early work getting recontextualized as a closeted queer kid going through it in the early 2010s. And now, Chromakopia has back-to-back tracks with a thoughtful examination of internalized homophobia and a genuinely really funny pronoun joke.
"ultraviolent Flash power fantasy simulators on Newgrounds" - I'm delighted to see a fandom resurgence for Madness Combat, one of the great standard-bearers of that culture, which I think was due to a Friday Night Funkin mod? Oh, the whims of history.
"Hyperbolic violence, psychosexual bewilderment, antisociality, bile, vitriol, good old fear and loathing" - The adolescent/chuuni sensibility definitely goes hand-in-hand with how pervasively transgender this scene is. When you reboot puberty while grappling with the duties and constraints of adulthood, plus facing horrific political besiegement, of course you're gonna enjoy all its most goofy excesses as best you can.
"works in this new vein [...] can only speak in the language of the ideologically fluent and cannot claim neutrality or some kind of agnostic self-interest, populism or tribalism" - I think a core part of the politics is Intersectionality That Fucks; solidarity and diversity pitched not in a moralizing eat-your-veggies way, but as the inevitable result of getting all the most interesting artists of today in a room together. I discussed some of these dynamics back here, and I think it's telling how much of this movement is built on strengthening ties between Black and queer art cultures that have each been doing their own forms of this for a very long time.
"twee liberal triumphalism in the culture industry that set up a lot of cute wins for the marginalized" - I think that DWNE is driven a lot by a deep frustration with this style, and confronting how mainstream representation is inseparable from respectability. Trashy problematic stuff can hit emotional frequencies that tasteful depictions fundamentally can't, because to be marginalized is to have your life shaped by ridiculous undignified bullshit. Cutting it out completely just makes art ring hollow, and I get that it's hard to extract the toxicity from trash without making it utterly sterile, but it's a worthy goal to attempt.
"Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism is our inheritance from Isabel Fall" - I think Coquette Dragoon stands out in this lineage, pulling no punches with its hellish forever war while never, ever letting you escape the premise of 'babyfur mech pilot'. Of course having your childhood devoured by this world produces some deeply silly sexual hangups. It is funny, sad, horny, terrifying, adorable, and tragically beautiful in equal measure.
"When Sulfur shares a poignant little moment with The Gamer on the couch" - [I am making a heart with my hands] I'm very happy with how that scene drives home the story's metanarrative - a game that cluelessly used trans bodies for shock value gets re-appraised and resurrected by a modern queer audience. It serves as catharsis for both eras, whether the world doesn't know you exist or explicitly wants you dead. I'm happy with how The Return is pushing that theme in new directions, and am excited to see what you make of it.
So those are my notes on this, and even if I don't end up writing my own thesis on the genre, you can absolutely analyze my work through this lens. Maybe future scholars will place me in some completely different -core or -wave, but I want to help them out by being transparent about my taste and inspirations. More on this soon.
