Regional Gothic

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Meme
Synonyms:
Date Started: March 2015
Related:
See Also:
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Regional Gothic is a text-based Tumblr meme that gained popularity in March 2015.[1] Posts are typically written in bullet points in the second person, imitating a Southern Gothic style. Fans have also compared the meme to Welcome to Night Vale. Originally, each meme post would describe a region of the United States in a dark or creepy manner, but the meme expanded to include a variety of other topics, including fandoms and tumblr memes.

See also memedocumentation's writeup.[2]

Fannish Examples

  • An unfinished fic ends on a cliffhanger. It hasn’t been updated since April 1832.
  • A new show has taken over Tumblr. You see the gif sets everywhere. Intrigued, you go looking. You cannot find the show. Five days later the posts disappear as if they never existed....
  • There is a new coffee shop au for your ship. It is exactly like every other coffee shop au for your ship. It is exactly like every other coffee shop au for every ship. You begin to suspect there has always only ever been one coffee shop au.

  • tumblr gothic by infernalhera (April 8, 2015):[4]
    • You are in a fandom. You have never read, watched, or played the source material, but you have joined anyway.
    • The sidebar is disappearing. The top bar is disappearing. The word ”tumblr” is disappearing entirely. The void grows.
    • When you are vaguely disturbed by text, you feel the urge to add, “And now the weather” even though you don’t know what it means.
    • You used to love something. You cannot remember why. When you see it, you feel only vague dsdain.
    • Benedict Cumberbatch is here. He is always here.

  • Early 2000′s Internet Fandom Gothic by shithowdy (April 8, 2015):[5]
    • Just who else is a sock puppet of that BNF?
    • Your favorite fansite still hasn’t come back from hiatus. Rumors swirl on the forums of a different site that the webmistress died, the broken banner on her splash page her online epitaph.
    • You swear you’ve read this songfic set to My Immortal before, but it’s the most recent submission. You couldn’t have.

  • Fandom Veteran Gothic by farashasilver (November 27, 2015):[6]
    • One of your favorite old fics has been taken down. You can find it on Wayback Machine, but it’s only the original Geocities site. The font is Comic Sans and there’s a tiled repeating background of stars obscuring the cyan text.
    • You read a fic at some point in a fandom you no longer participate in. You want to re-read the fic, but the title and pen name of the author keep escaping you. You don’t even know where it was posted. You can find dozens of other fics with a similar concept but not that one.
    • An author you used to follow moved their work from their personal website to their friends-locked blog. You sent them a request three months ago. It is still marked “pending.” You wonder if you will ever get to read their work again.
    • You get a follower out of nowhere. Their screen name is familiar. It’s the person you RPed explicit chat logs with when you were sixteen. You’ve changed screen names four times since then and don’t know how they found you.

    Specific fandoms:

    References

    1. ^ See the Regional Gothic entry at Know Your Meme
    2. ^ posted to tumblr 8 April 2015. archived.
    3. ^ archived. 28,271 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    4. ^ 35,780 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    5. ^ archived. 14,651 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    6. ^ The tumblr post has 2349 notes as of 5 December 2015.
    7. ^ archived. 3214 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    8. ^ archived. 790 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    9. ^ archived. 8,697 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    10. ^ archived. 1,986 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    11. ^ archived. 17,430 notes as of 29 November 2015.
    12. ^ archived. 25,214 notes as of 13 February 2020.