If YouTube vlogger culture is going suicidesploitation while matrons gasp and pop their monocles, that would be one of the most heartening signs I\u2019d seen in a while. Youth culture embracing the rotten is the classic avenue of backlash when culture decays to sickly, ickly sweet, therapeutic, thanatophobic decadence.
Think of Mad Magazine and horror comics in the \u201850s, or Garbage Pail Kids and slasher movies in the \u201880s, rotten.com and \u201can hero\u201d stuff in Web 1.5.
Sure, there\u2019s pushback, but in the end you can\u2019t stop generational precession and it only burns the scolds\u2019 reputation. The \u201cSeduction of the Innocent\u201d thing might have pushed Mad and horror comics, back a bit, CCA self-censorship, yeah, but that spirit came back victorious as Hustler magazine.
We\u2019ll know we\u2019re back on the right track when young women start using the aesthetic to be playfully sexy with big hair - Elvira, corpse-painted goth chicks, Suicide Girls and those scene girls who would have alliterative fake names about murder and cannibalism and do photoshoots covered in fake blood.
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