gothic-shrine

icons

blinkies

I remember it being super common in the early to mid 2000s for a lot of girls to aspire to a goth-themed aesthetic online. Dark angels, sad girls drifting around cemeteries, ornate crosses, vampires, skulls - everyone wanted to be dark and soulful in their online expression.

well, i haven’t grown out of it yet lol so enjoy my 2005-era gothic icon shrine!

this page displays SO MUCH MORE on desktop btw, so grab your laptop and settle in for an authentic old internet experience: more blinkies and digital art from the era, and extra captions you can’t see on mobile!

I’m pretty sure it’s been a thing for every generation of teenagers to romanticise their own experience of sadness, loneliness, or heartbreak, and for a lot of millenial girls the melancholy of the goth aesthetic was perfect for that.

goth as a subculture had been around since the 80s and was still going strong into the 2000s. with the advent of the internet, teenagers were able to explore that punk-inspired, dark romantic aesthetic in a new way - creating identities that could be safely explored away from parents who weren’t too keen on alt fashion or music.

i remember (and have collected here!) gifs that featured pale girls standing about in the rain with glittery tears edited in, borders or dividers on websites that dripped blood, or femme fatales holding knives or baring their teeth: there was a lot of vampiric melodrama going on lol.

(it probably explains why Twilight got so popular: it perfectly captured the sad girl supernatural vibe.)

but i also think a lot of the online-goth-girl aesthetic was about being honest about the reality of complex emotion in a culture which had up until that time tried to avoid talking about mental health. the vampiric imagery especially was an outlet for tentative exploration of topics like sexuality, yearning, and feminine rage, with young femme users able to find community and engage with those more mature topics while still being protected by the anonymity of the old internet.

there were plenty of angsty gifs available for the guys, too, but something that has always fascinated me about that era was just how much influence young women and teenage girls exerted over the early internet. most of the gifs in this shrine were curated by teenagers; many of the original art pieces were carefully made in photoshop and other programs by women exploring the frontiers of digital art.

somewhere around the mid-2000s, a different way of engaging with teen angst had started to emerge: emo scene, which rapidly became abbreviated to just ‘scene’.

»» this candle gif, along with other similar ones like the braziers bracketing my vampire doll at the top, has been floating around since the 90s, which makes it a very old digital relic!

«« i had to search for AGES to find this bleeding rose gif! it was everywhere on the early internet. like the candle i think it dates back to the 90s.