Prove yourself.

I forgot I had a pile of notes made when I had something to say... The life thing's been a bit full recently, so here's a recycled one.

Being a longhaired, pastyfaced, makeup wearing freak I have had people demand that I justify my existence. Why do I make myself look this way? Why don't I follow their fashions? Why do you listen to such depressing music? and so-on. Really hard questions to answer seriously. It isn't because of some dark hole in my heart or anything like that. Even my usual, unassailable reason (when I go clubbing, I get to be surrounded by beautiful women in corsets), isn't actually the real one.

I have no real reason beyond I like it, and this makes me a 'better' Goth. I no longer have anything to prove. I can just shrug my shoulders, stride onto the dancefloor and dance like a man covered in bees with his feet nailed to the floor.

Now, American Goths tend to take themselves FAR too seriously. They pull the vampire schtick (even psychic vampires now, obviously for the ones who aren't hardcore enough for blood). They just simply don't get the whole point of goth. For them it's all depression, shit poetry, worse makeup and the Crow. They've corrupted it to a point that they take offence at me titling a photo "I'm more goth than you are".

I could see how it may cause offence, but then again. It was a photo of me drinking absinthe out of a coffin shaped hipflask in the graveyard by the ruins of Whitby Abbey the morning after seeing the Damned (or was it All About Eve.. Or the Wayne Hussey). Anyway, you get my point.

I am noticing something similar with HEMA/HES. The Yanks seem to be trying to prove themselves all the time. Maybe it's part of a disconnection with history- the fact that as children they weren't, as a matter of course, shipped over to the nearest castle. That they will never understand why it was immensly amusing to see Marilyn Manson (not a goth, I hasten to add) shouting "Milton Keynes!" to get an audience warmed up. Maybe it's one of those cultural things that I'll never understand, like their obsession with guns (I know, a bizarre claim from someone newly developing a thing for swords, but I've always found guns a little loud and impersonal)

But that is it- it's probably from a lack of cultural understanding. I can see it being difficult to show that what you are doing is culturally valid when you can't stand somewhere and say "I am learning how to fight like people did on this spot 700 years ago" or "This is probably the methods used when our 'Lord Protector' was accusing the King of treason".

I can see the irreverence we treat this as being a touch irksome to those who can't do this. Things like the romanticism of living in a castle wear off once you see there's nowhere to put the central heating, double glazing would look stupid and the roof costs a fortune to maintain.

And don't get me started on the subject of why American comedies tend to have a laugh track...