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MagicBez t1_j6opmgf wrote

This is a complete aside but this new use of "aesthetic" is really throwing me for a loop. A game can have an aesthetic, a person can be an aesthete but surely it can't just be aesthetic? Unless we're saying that it's a decorative videogame or something.

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munkee_dont t1_j6oq7gr wrote

Its taking me some getting used to as well. I keep seeing "its such an aestethic" and I'm like "but what kind"

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MundungusAmongus t1_j6ox0j3 wrote

It’s one of those things I know I shouldn’t spend any energy correcting because the damage is already done, but it’s just so annoying to me.

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Native-Tongue t1_j6p45im wrote

Yeah it’s interesting. Originally(in its new usage) it referred to a vaporwave/pastel visual style. Now it just means literally anything with style. Gen z has co-opted the word for better or for worse. It comes across as moronic until you consider that seemingly 99% of that generations style choices in any media/medium is a rehash of styles from the past 40ish years. The way that vaporwave contains a nostalgia for early digital art I think carried over into “aesthetic” which is just anything that has style, a style that is inevitably a rehash of the past because contemporary consumer culture is in a sad art time loop where actually new things are rarely created, this is all Gen Z knows. So it’s still kind of dumb sounding but language changes for a reason. I’ve found the usage so annoying I’ve tried to rationalize it so that’s my theory.

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MagicBez t1_j6p4q7q wrote

It's probably that first step that throws me off, how the vaporwave aesthetic came to just be called "aesthetic" like it was the only one and then "aesthetic" moved from that to meaning just...looks pleasing? As best I can tell it now just means "looks stylish", I recently saw an ad for a boardgame which described it as "aesthetic looking" and I think they just meant it looked cool.

...as a further aside I'm also old enough to remember when 2000s style was described as a mash up/pastiche of everything that came before so the fact 20 years later that's still how we're describing the vibe (or aesthetic if you will) is curious - especially as there are still clear differences between the two.

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Native-Tongue t1_j6p7srh wrote

Yeah I get what you mean. It would be interesting to see it’s earliest usage, it feels like somebody just made a vocab mistake and it unquestioningly became absorbed into youth lingo. In a way it just makes sense to me from a kind of cynical art perspective where, now, any style can be absorbed, flattened, and rendered kind of meaningless when it’s being recycled and beaten to death using the methods which we now most commonly exchange visual information, internet feeds. Vaporwave kind of represents a nostalgia for an internet era when something new or original actually felt possible. I’m having a hard to tying all this together in a really specific way but it’s interesting to consider.

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halloweenjon t1_j6p8e2i wrote

It's Gen Z slang, like calling something "goals". And I hate it.

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