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?

  • tate
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    fedilink
    15 months ago

    I agree that the word punk came to be associated with aesthetics, almost exclusively. But that is very far from where it started, and it is frustrating for those who started it to see it coopted like this. The association of the word with anything other than anti-consumerism is just " branding" at its worst.

    • @RightHandOfIkaros
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      English
      25 months ago

      I didn’t say anything about how it started, I said what it means as it pertains to aesthetics, which was what I felt was the primary root of the question.