Reactionary Romanticism

The general consensus is that millennials and everyone after, are a damned generation who, devoid of faith in anything that previous generations drew meaning from, lead a cynical existence in the afterglow of the optimism of the early 2010s. On the virtual cyberspace that has, for all intents and purposes, replaced the real world as the primary plane of the social human's existence, the past two years have marked some trends that I've begrudgingly enjoyed.

Almost a year back, the dark academia aesthetic took the internet by storm, reviving an interest in the arts, reigniting the world's fascination with academia and its inherent romanticism. Through 2021, I absolutely enjoyed all of the themed study playlists with a healthy blend of both Franz Gordon and Schubert, the dreamy embrace of Kafka and Austen by Instagram pages faithful to their aesthetic and a sudden explosion in the number of people willing to look back into history, literature and art. Dressed in a layer of aesthetic photography and made social media-friendly, I felt the familiar conflict in my head between the excitement at people finally recognising all of its beauty and the incessant need to gatekeep these objects of my admiration from less qualified eyes, once guarded by the veil of obscurity. Yet, what was most interesting was the liberation that it offered - entire fields buried under the shroud of nerdiness brought to light by kids willing to wear it on their sleeve. Felt nice, but again, seeing people doing what I thought only I ever did, definitely got under my skin.

I had a Little Dark Age obsession that I must confess is still running its course on me. The song is perhaps one of my all-time favourites at this point - the retro vibes along with this eerily universal but inexplicable feeling of harkening to some long-gone days of glory that the hook makes bloom in the listener's unsuspecting head. I am guilty of watching too many edits for my own good - of all kinds, ranging from those of Gwen Stacy dying and Mikasa's tears at Eren's words to fangirl edits of Tom Riddle, the Darkling and Anakin Skywalker - and of them all, I enjoy most the ones that urge the European doomer to recognise the magnificence of their heritage, of Aurelian, Prussian eagles and Crusades while this song plays. I stray, but wholeheartedly, most western nations suffer from an acute lack of much-needed national pride, so the fact that these edits are unabashedly right-wing, like the niche it serves, does not bother me in the least.

I believe, or more accurately, I like to interpret this and other indicators as a general diagnosis of the identity crisis and faithlessness the world finds itself in the midst of.

I wake up everyday with the single-minded objective of fulfilling my sacred duty to confusing Zuckerberg's algorithms - it's hilarious how both of the above-mentioned lie on opposite ends of the political spectrum - while the dark academia aesthetic has been adopted by pretentious female James Deans with views so far left it's borderline anarchism, the Little Dark Age edits are often manufactured by and for unapologetic Nazis and the alt-right. It's the sort of thing that makes you smile sadly - the left and right unknowingly uniting to wallow in their hopelessness. But people who make political views their whole personality, the true instigators of polarisation in our troubled time, probably deserve it.