icons
gothic-shrine
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/commentaries 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 (including ones who weren’t goth!) were able to explore that punk-inspired, dark romantic aesthetic in a new way: creating identities online 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 usually 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.
amy lee of the band Evanescence captured that gothic vibe in eyeliner, shredded dresses and haunting vocals, and often featured in gifs and icons made lovingly by teenage girls who aspired to that ‘darkly beautiful’ aesthetic.
(that was a phrase a lottt of girls who leaned alternative - or wanted to - would have loved to hear themselves described as haha!)
i can remember seeing folks who were actual members of the goth scene venting their frustrations on forums and blogs, trying to explain that Evanescence was not a goth band or even part of the subculture - they just had the aesthetic, and were about as goth as Avril Lavigne was ‘punk’ (and i am definitely going to have to do a blogshrine on the teenpunk aesthetic some time too!)
but for a lot of teens who didn’t or weren’t allowed access to the real music of either punk or goth, mainstream artists like Avril Lavigne and Evanescence were the only way for them to interact with anything resembling alt fashion and music. in an era like the early to mid 2000s, whose mainstream was characterised by manically bright, hyperfeminine, and hypersexualised fashion and imagery, anything that leaned darker felt like a rebellion.
so teens kept blithely populating the internet with their fan-made edits and to this day, if i’m browsing through the old web in search of goth stuff, i’ll find pics and gifs of amy lee more often than not!
i think there might have been a bit of the online-goth-girl aesthetic that was driven by the need for introverted, possibly neurodivergent girls to express, romanticise, and find a home for their own frustration and loneliness. in an ableist and aggressively extroverted culture that prized only ‘bubbly’ presentations of femininity, the internet felt like a safe place to deliberately play up being ‘dark’, weird and introspective - and actually be celebrated for it.
(and that is still the case on social media today!)
the more 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.
on a frustrating note: it’s unfortunately really hard to find gothic-themed gifs featuring people of colour from the era. :( the goth scene itself has always been driven by people of colour, but the online aesthetic of the 2000s (which as we’ve established was a visual aesthetic rather than part of the scene) overwhelmingly featured young, thin, able-bodied white women. (if you have any POC gothic art/gifs from the 2000s please email me so I can add it to the blog!)
the online goth aesthetic was heavily femme. there were plenty of angsty gothic 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 art of 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 and photography.
i’m sure i’ll keep adding to this shrine over time, but in the meantime i hope it’s been an enjoyable nostalgia trip!
^ neo-victorian imagery (i.e.; art that borrowed from the Victorian era of corsets and long dresses without being historically accurate) was super popular in the online goth aesthetic. as were rain and tear motifs!
^ this might be one of the most 2000s gothic gifs ever lol, what with the skulls, supernatural themess, and the ever-present animated glitter.
^ the art of victoria frances was a popular choice for girls into the online gothic aesthetic to feature on their websites, or edit into glittery gifs. victoria’s art often pushed the era’s boundaries with themes of vampirism, witchcraft and occasional depictions of female queerness.
(teenage me hadn’t figured out she was queer yet, and also couldn’t figure out why she liked this specific artwork so much lol!)
»» 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!
^ this melancholy artwork was everywhere and has been made into numerous edits.
«« i had to search for AGES to find this bleeding rose gif! it was everywhere on the early internet. like the candle i believe it might date back to the 90s.
^ the blog that this banner must have been attached to is lost to time, sadly. but I do love the elvish pseudonym taken from tolkien’s legendarium - and of course the ubiquitous evanescence lyrics and ‘dark angel’ theme!
