I've met lots of alternative/emo people.. and that includes posercheckers/poser police/wokeists and such...
I'm just curious about you guys's experience in the scene or your local scene. tell me stories about people, share your experiences, or just answer my question, how'd you know if someone's a poser ?!
let's get saucey I wanna know !!!!! don't leave out any important deets !!!!
deadass ive never met an alt person irl but from online i can usually tell if someones a poser by the way they talk about how others dress..if that makes sense
ppl that immediately discredit POCs, members of the LGBT community, ppl w/ disabilities or young ppl, have right wing/centrist views or live ONLY to gatekeep have NO place in the scene! They have so much of a sense of entitlement and think that they were the first to discover anything they like and use their bigoted views to justify to themselves to create exclusionary spaces that they police and turn into a pocket of hate to breed likeminded individuals. a thriving scene should welcome everyone and if someone isn't as big of a fan as you as a band/genre it's so much healthier for everyone to bond over the things you do relate to each other on and share what else you like than be a pretentious asshole and stick your nose up at them and think you're the only person who understands the world.
also... cops/cop lovers
don't wanna seem like im actively campaigning this idea but it kinda fits here. i'm not saying someone's inherently a huge poser if this is their take, but it grinds my gears and makes me feel they need to learn more about the roots of their supposed scene/emo culture that they claim to be a part of:
"emo is diy" "inherent leftism of alternative subcultures!!!" (in reference to separating "posers" from emos).
honestly, i feel like the authentic archetype of a "3rd wave" or "mall emo" (myspace-type emo yk) ISN'T gonna align with that. a lot of em were edgy shitheads that just wanted to express their angst and/or make their local community uncomfortable with their fashion sense and persona.
most of em bought cheap fast fashion shit from hot topic that was styled to imitate goth and punk style. most of em were probably sheltered teens that just wanted to look "cool" and edgy.
their asses were most likely NOT diying band tees, they'd probably look down on punks for looking homeless and being stuck-up pretentious fuckers who cared too much about politics. i'm not saying all of them were like this. some probably WERE more authentically "alternative" in the sense people think of nowadays, but the vast majority most likely weren't.
idk... it just pisses me off that people kinda try to erase that apolitical aspect of earlier scene/emo. they weren't as woke as people like to pretend they were. dgmw, it's GREAT that in the modern day this style is more inclusive, but people were SO RACIST and homophobic (or gay fetishizing) back then, so can we stop pretending like that isn't true??? i know we love to romanticize the 2000s era a lot, but maybe we shouldn't be dismissing the history of this subculture that genuinely made it very exclusive and toxic in its heyday.
i also don't think it's our place to police people for not being left-leaning and claim that they aren't "true" emos, even in the modern day. we can dislike weird ignorant people who make this subculture worse, but that doesn't really make them posers!
@JAMES MANIC
This is kinda facts tbh as someone who's been in this community since like 2011ish. Not early era by any means, but even then the scenemo community was RUTHLESS. People like Jeffree Star and Dahvie Vanity had the platforms they did for a reason (example: the whole Jessie Slaughter situation)
Now, as you said, I'm glad the scene has evolved to be more inclusive, as it should have always been. But to pretend like it always was is just unfortunately untrue.
@JAMES MANIC I'll personally concede for '00s emo being apolitical faaaar more than I'd accept that view point on punk (which was ALWAYS incredibly political, at least until the 'pop' prefix entered the picture) or even traditional emotional hardcore (the whole founding point of emo, 1986's Revolution Summer, was incredibly political)... if only because '00s emo was largely a corporate-influenced/driven movement, practically centered around record labels cornering the 'underground' market and targeting 'alt' brands (and deals w/ fashion outlets) to profit off emotionally turbulent and insecure teenagers with wealthy/middle-class parents.
But even still. I do think it's a little sus/hypocritical for self-proclaimed alts/emos to lean too far in the conservative camp, when the whole subculture is rather explicitly a counter-culture (such as goth, such as grunge) which means embracing ideals that... fundamentally aren't. This also certainly depends on where you're from too, while American emos living in the suburbs of big liberal cities could easily get away with being and seeing it as purely apolitical, I have to imagine that emos who lived in more rural areas, or those in third-world countries that were rounded en masse and had their clothes stripped and heads forcibly shaved by their theocratic governments -- would argue back against the idea that emo is separate from some form of political rebellion. Certainly, in the '00s, emo subculture was seen as one of the few spaces where it was seen as "okay/safe" to be openly gay in some fashion, I mean most of us were derogatorily called "queer" for dressing like that, whether we were or not.
I mean conservatives on the whole tend to bash anyone for just dying their hair unnatural colors because they auto-assume it to mean 'woke degeneracy' -- and I'm sorry, but there's no element of "wearing skinny jeans and black eyeliner" that aligns with the kind of "traditional" hyper-masculine bravado that the modern conservative moment expects men to live up to. Sure, you could make the argument that quite of a few of the bands back then were evangelical Christian plants who incorporated such themes into their music (I know Paramore used to hold bible studies at their shows) or that there were misogynistic lyrics in the breakup songs... but that's about the extent of it.
this isn’t as fleshed out as other responses but I was friends with a guy who was sooo obsessed with coming off as emo and “sassy”. When I tried to talk to him about anything else music wise he would just shrug me off and then parade his white belt and constantly repeat “i’m so emo, you wish you were me with my white belt blah blah blah” and it was so frustrating. He was genuinely one of the most shallowest people I’ve met, no personality, no takes on the outside world whatsoever.
@MeAndHimCallItUs uhh I've got this girl I know who was always posting stuff on Instagram with corsets cathedrals blood bags etc. I asked her if she was goth and she said "You didn't know?"
The other day I'd asked if she was into Diva Destruction cause it was a darkwave band I'd come across not long before. She dodged the whole thing and said she just wore what she liked and didn't fucking care about labels, but WHy the hell do these people have the nerve to call themselves part of a subculture if they can't even back it upppp
>"you can be alt and MAGA" motherfuckers
>"scene is only fashion based" people
>Shein warriors
>racists, homophobes, etc.
> "you have to be nice if you're alt/You cant be alt and mean"
> OF goths/people bastardizing alt styles into porn categories (not to shit on SW just the ones fetishizing subcultures)
honestly liek my response isnt gonna be super long but there are SO many ppl I've befriended because I like their style only to find out they're SHIEN/Temu warriors and dgaf about the issues behind fast fashion. I'm not gonna name names but I have a friend who is very fortunate in life, not to say that those who are wealthy can't be alt, but the reason I bring it up is because she uses SHEIN so much for like all of her clothes.
I feel like the main defense behind wearing fast fashion is that its affordable, but her dad owns like six cars bffr 😭😭
It sort of just annoys me because she has a general lack of caring about the unethical-ness of the stuff she buys which is a major red flag as a human, not only as an alt person. I don't like calling people posers really because, tbh, a lot of alt people aren't super political. idk maybe I just dont like her mindset lol
if all they post about is critiquing others in the space, but neverrrr posting about their interests in the space 😭 asking 20 ppl to name 3 songs from a band they never post about liking...
Lwk the only way I can tell is like if they constantly call others posers or if they use larp instead of poser. Also like dogwhistles to their political views
I'm from the Philippines. There are a lot of alternative bands and solo artists here in the Philippines, and the alt community is also quite big, but one Artist caught my attention. She's actually quite famous because she won a singing competition back in, like, 2018 or 2019. Her name is JANINE BERDIN. One thing I noticed about her is that she started wearing alt stuff. This didn't bother me tbh cause I was expecting her to be woke and probably have the same mindset as the alt people but she kinda gave me an ick she is just wearing a costume cause I notice half of her fit in concerts are stuff you can buy in shein, but since I'm very chronically online, I was scrolling TikTok, and a video came across my Fyp exposing that she supports a CORRUPT POLITICIAN IN MY COUNTRY one thing you have to know about my country is all of the politicians here are corrupt and my country suffering because of corruption and I've seen in the Alt people had they share that they don't like because of how she presented the Alt community in the country and some are defending her saying that she is wearing the style for an Avril Lavigne vibe.
Jake Webber. I honestly don't know why but I get the impression he's one of those alternative types who only wear pieces starting at five grand and up (on top of that, he's a bit of a nuisance, soo that part's personal I 'll admit)
he gen pisses me off everyone once in a while 
some la influencers bro
@amazingsavv_ If you stick him Tara and Gracie together they make Satan's centipede. I remember when I was into those niches Jhonnie and some random bro of his seemed like the coolest ones, I reckon
@Nathaniel Every single "alternative influencer" I can think of -- from the MySpace days to now (it's especially gotten so much worse in the TikTok era, but I've admittedly tuned out) has given me extremely bad vibes and, to my knowledge, almost every seedy one who immediately comes to mind were all eventually found-out to be some outright foul dirtbag human beings who'd done heinous shit.
I think it's because for someone to call themself an 'influencer' and want to be perceived that way/put themselves out into the scene like that, not as an artist with genuine passion but as someone who simply wants to ride the coattails of a cultural wave and make money/fame that was built upon other's genuine passion, it says alot about their egos, if not just them as people.
When they tell other Alt people what they can do, wear, listen too ect. I HATE THAT!!! alt is an umbrella term not everyone knows every band or brand ever. Its the alt people WHO TRY WAYYYYY TOO HARD.
For me, the big thing, and really the thing is music. I think that's something that's unfortunately really being lost these days among the newgen in the age of TikTok, 'starter packs' and streaming. Personally, I think it's well okay and fine to have a diverse music taste individually and to like other things outside of your niche (I always have) -- but for literal decades, these subcultures were DEFINED by their associated music scenes, so much so that many were literally even named after them (punks, goths, grunge, emo, etc.) that music set the entire tone, image, attitude, even the politics of the entire scene they were attached to.
So yeah, if you're claiming to be a 'tr00' Y2K (2000s) MySpace 'emo' and yet 90% of your playlist is Playboi Carti, Doja Cat and Kendrick Lamar -- and there's practically no Alesana, Funeral for a Friend, Thursday, or Saosin, or an traditional 80's goth whose "never heard" of such surface-level shit as Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy or Siouxsie and the Banshees. It reads as incredibly suspect to me. Not because I have some vapid consumerist logic that dictates I think you need to exclusively listen/consume only one style of music and that's it or you're a fake -- but because without any dedicated exposure to that music, you're also 90% likely to be fundamentally missing everything else that comes with the music ideologically in the culture, and if you're just playing "dress-up" with other people's subculture because you "like the clothes/aesthetic" but do not even attempt to authentically engage with it's art or core ideological tenets... I'm sorry but that definitionally makes one a 'poser', or as one might say today a "LARPer".
Like, I get why this shit seems so dumb and surface level, the "purity-testing meme" of some random girl just wearing a Nirvana shirt she picked up at American Eagle/Forever 21/Urban Outfitters just because it looks cool and some sweaty 50-year-old loser passive-aggressively demanding her to "name five songs" over a piece of fabric -- but there is a genuine point to be made here. We wouldn't be so tolerant if people were brazenly doing the same degree of mindless appropriation for other's cultures (based on their religion, ethnicity, or country-of-origin) -- yet we deem it perfectly socially acceptable to do it for sub-cultures because we value them less for... seemingly no particular reason? In my mind, subcultures are just as valid to the cultural experience of a group of people as any other signifier (and that's ignoring that they can even extend beyond racial, geographical or economic divides).
It's also why I hate that starting around the early-2010s Facebook/Tumblr era, people started referring to a collection of post-hardcore/emo-adjacent artists (primarily PTV, SWS, BMTH, MCR, etc) as being this: "bands" (and not 'bands' as in literal bands, but as an established singular fandom named "bands") as if all other music is irrelevant outside the context of those handful that are accepted by the "bands" community. It's a fundamentally hyper-reductionist view of music. That practically kills the whole notion and point of music (esp. alternative music, which began explicitly as DIY counter-culture and not just 'edgy corporate pop') being to explore and find music that speaks to you, as an individual person, and find community around that -- and instead shovels them into a bunch of pre-approved record labels and corporate-marketing silos (Hello Vans, hello Hot Topic, hello MerchNow, hello Monster Energy, etc).
by biggest sign that someone is a poser is if they don't have any PASSION. like i get being a casual fan of something, but engaging in subculture requires some kind of genuine interest and curiosity. posers are usually nonchalant and don't have the same curiosity as someone who is actually alt or whatever
When they clearly learned about emo from tiktok and think it’s the same ideologically as punk
When they're weird about strange interests and the macabre.
For example, if they cant possibly understand why someone might collect bones or taxidermy, get extreme body mods or play piercings, unwilling to understand dark themes and metaphors in gothic literature. that kinda thing.
Im not saying you have to like those things but there are some people who claim the "alt" label but look at you weird when you live an actual alternative lifestyle
Those are the ones that typically say its just fashion and music with a side of vaguely leftist politics, but its the life you live as well,
this mainly goes for goth subcultures i suppose.
Well tbh I didn't get to meet many posers aside some girl that listened to rebzyxx and other stuff thinking shes a metalhead and this absolute DIPSHIT of a guy that I have ongoing beef with because he's misogynistic, racist, sexist and worst of all, A PEDO!!!!! Ever since I called him a fucking poser last summer because he was LITERALLY listening to tik tok metal songs and posting insta stories with monster energy and some metal song from the reccomended songs on instagram when searching "metal" he has been getting into goregrind and asked me if hes still a poser because now hes listening to "heavy" shit and i told him NO YOURE NOT, HEAVY ≠ NOT POSER, HE IS ACTIVELY A 4CHAN INCEL WHILE CALLING HIMSELF A METALHEAD AND SUPPORTING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
When someone hates on the way others are dressed or thinks that someone can't be alt while not looking traditionally alt
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