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?

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
    16·
    5 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.

    • DangedIfYouDid@lemmy.world
      71·
      5 months ago

      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.