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”, 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?
Someone already got you covered on crustpunks.
These new terms have a lot more to do with where people gather on the Internet than anything else. Explains why they’ve shifted so heavily toward visual aspects because their likely first exposure to -punk was seeing cyberpunk or steampunk in film or games and then seeking out community around them hoping to capture some of that mystique for themselves.
Cottagecore is definitely the child of Pinterest x Alt girls wanting to be different when alt went too mainstream to stand out. (Which is kinda punk, but for the wrong reasons.)