No one wakes up one morning and goes "you know what? i totally want to spend the rest of my life being overly obsessed with darkness, mood, ambiance and things that go bump in the night! Yeah i want to be kind of an outcast and never really fit in with most people." Its not really a choice that anyone makes. You don't turn 13 or 14 and just go "Dude I wanna be a goth when i grow up! I should start now!"
Being goth isn't a choice. Yeah i know people could wear pastels more often, but when your down and depressed, dark colours are what you tend to reach for without thinking about it. Truthfully, most people don't make a conscious decision to be a goth. What happens is that one day most people realize that 90% of the clothes they own are black, and that the people they hang out with are the same.
For me it was one morning. I was putting my make up on, thinking about which boots i should wear. I put on my eyeshadow (black), my eye liner (black), my lipstick (black), grabbed a necklace with lots of black and chains, and then looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing black clothes, black makeup, heading to put on big black boots, i had dyed my hair blue black. I just thought "holy crap, i'm a goth, when did that happen?" Then i realized that it had been a long time since i wore an outfit that wasn't mostly black. My choice in footwear was mostly boots (i had 4 pair). My jewellery tended to be black, lots of chains, and lots of crosses. I wrote poetry, I played RPG's and Larped, I didn't listen to happy music. And i was happy.
Some people are naturally perky and popular. Some people never really fit in. Some people are just not what society thinks is normal. They fit in on the edges of things. For those people, being goth is finally fitting in somewhere.
If your reading this, your probably already a goth, or you love someone who is. You might not know alot about the gothic culture, where it started, how it's grown. So this is to give a foothold, a little boost inwards and upwards. To see where things started and how they have evolved.
Its like the doors said 'people are strange, when your a stranger' so don't be a stranger, come on in, sit down and learn about the world of goth.
You might have seen stuff on the internet saying things like "so goth, i sacked rome." That tends to be referencing the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths, who were a bunch of badasses in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The term Gothic orginally referred to them and meant gaudy or barbaric. In the middle ages a new style of cathedral came into fashion, with high open ceilings, large windows, pointed arches with decorative woodwork and stonework. Two examples would be Notre Dame De Paris and Westmister Abbey. In the 19th century gothic came to refer to a genre of literature that combines both horror and romance. Today gothic means something completely different.
Today gothic is a series of tastes in music, fashion and aesthetics. It tends towards darkness, misery and horror. It was born in the early 80's in the wake of punk music. In 1979 the band Bauhaus released the single "Bela Lugosi's dead". It was the first rock in the avalance of goth. By 1982 the term goth had been adopted as the genre's identity. Bands like the cure, siouxsie and the banshees and the cult were on the rise. In the early 90's goth was slipping downwards as a trend, but it has survived and thrived since.
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