Goblincore

Recently on Reddit, my algorhithm has started suggesting posts from a place called /r/goblincore. At a glance, it appeared to be a place celebrating the less conventionally attractive aspects of nature. Lots of mushrooms, moss, snails, frogs, rats etc. I remember seeing an image of some roots tearing through concrete titled "I just love seeing nature destroy the works of man" and a piece of wood riddled with holes eaten through by insects. Lots of fashion with murky greens and browns, plenty of trinkets, things with spikes and jags, animal bones. 

I asked Lee-Anne if she'd heard of the concept but she hadn't. Most of my coworkers had. My mother and brother both said they were aware of it. Overall, I was slow to pick up on Goblincore. Makes sense, since my social group is mainly women, and most phrases that end in "core" are a form of aesthetic. Generally those attract primarily female audiences.

Wikipedia says that it's a type of "Maximalism" and that thrift shopping is a big part of it. It appears to have grown in recognition after Spotify was maybe a little liberal in its definition as a music genre.

Here is an example of Goblincore music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIyl9bCp6W4

"Come with me to the borogroves. Come with me and the slithy toves

Come come come along now,

Come with me to a place that is safe from,

Greed, anger, and boredom"

Those are maybe my three least favourite things!

I became intrigued with the community when I saw a post from someone saying that her boyfriend had told her that they'd gotten the concept all wrong. In The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, Goblins were malevolent, violent creatures influenced by dark magic. Even before Tolkien's works, in ancient tales they were a type of dark fairy. Not some mischievious group of people that love nature.

A lot of people chimed in to say that her boyfriend and his fellow "Tolkienists" were misguided. In The Lord of the Rings, Goblins were driven to evil from being marginalized, and in modern Dungeons and Dragons, rarely are any of the "Goblinoid" races considered wholly irredeemable.

This is a perspective that I've held for a long time. As a child, I was always deeply uncomfortable with the idea of an "all evil race". There is a small mention in Return of the King, where Sam overhears two Orcs discussing their plans for when the war ends, and they wanted to set up a farm together. It's brief, but I really clung to it because they simply couldn't all be bad.

I've recently read The Silmarillion, basically a history of that world. The Orcs were originally Elves that were convinced by Melkor, a powerful and manipulative deity, to stay behind and work for him in Middle Earth instead of joining the Maya over the sea. They were then twisted by dark forces into the Orc race, known sometimes as Goblins.

So I've got issues with the Orcs being considered evil based on the fact they were manipulated and then tortured. Then it doesn't seem fair that all their descendants would be held accountable for their ancestors' actions. Mostly, The Silmarillion is about inherited sin.

I hadn't seen my perspective taken up by anyone until this thread in /r/goblincore.

As I was further exposed to the subreddit, I began to see comments like "At this point, if I see someone here saying that they're neurotypical, I'm like 'how did you find this place?'"

A while back, I made a post on an AI system called "Goblin Tools", marketed toward people that were capable of living on their own, but still struggled with day to day tasks. Many of the phrases used in the marketing for this resource resembled language I'd heard in neurodivergent communities. This included a pepper scale to determine how "spicy" a thought might be, and the simple premise of being a tool for its user base, the "Goblins".

I hadn't noticed it before, but on reflection, a shockingly large number of neurodivergent people that I've known have, in various ways, compared themselves to Goblins. For being born born wrong, for not being able to live up to social norms, for being wild, chaotic, and natural. For being beautiful in an unconventional way.

Since, as I mentioned, most communities attached to the suffix "core" are majority female, I might guess that the people who align with Goblincore are mostly part of the onrush of adults diagnosed with ADHD and autism. This is because until recently, testing largely disregarded many of the more female-specific expressions of neurodivergence.

That would explain why such a large portion of my social group is familiar with Goblincore.