Goblincore hit me sideways during a 2019 scroll through Tumblr, back when I still thought cottagecore was the final word in aesthetic rebellion.
Here’s the thing: goblincore isn’t just about collecting moss and celebrating ugly-cute mushrooms, though that’s definately part of it. It’s a deliberate aesthetic philosophy that emerged from online communities—primarily Tumblr and TikTok—around 2018-2019, positioning itself as an antidote to the polished perfection of Instagram minimalism and the pastel sanitization of mainstream cottage aesthetics. The movement embraces decay, dirt, asymmetry, and the kind of natural chaos that makes gardeners wince and mycologists weirdly excited. I used to think it was purely reactionary, but turns out there’s actual cultural lineage here: folklorists trace similar “grotesque nature appreciation” back to Victorian fern collecting crazes and medieval marginalia featuring delightfully ugly creatures doing mundane things. Roughly 500 years of humans finding beauty in the grubby bits, give or take.
The visual language borrows heavily from fantasy illustration—specifically Brian Froud’s work on Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal—but filters it through smartphone photography and meme culture. Muddy hands holding smooth river stones. Jars of unidentifiable foraged items. Frogs photographed from unfortunate angles. It’s deliberately anti-aspirational, which is kind of aspirational in itself, I guess.
The Philosophical Underpinnings of Choosing Ugliness Over Perfection
What makes goblincore culturally significant isn’t the aesthetics themselves—humans have always been attracted to grotesquerie, from gargoyles to Hieronymus Bosch. It’s the intentionality of choosing the malformed over the beautiful in an era of algorithmic smoothing and AI-generated perfection.
Dr. Elena Gorfinkel, who studies visual culture at King’s College London, told me that goblincore represents “a form of aesthetic resistance that’s less about political statement and more about sensory relief.” Wait—maybe that undersells it. The movement actively rejects capitalism’s demand for monetizable beauty. You can’t really sell goblincore the way you can sell cottagecore’s expensive linen dresses and artisanal sourdough starters. A good stick is free. Pond slime doesn’t photograph well enough for influencer partnerships.
I’ve seen this play out in online communities where participants share genuinely terrible photos of interesting textures—lichen patterns, rotting logs, the iridescent sheen on beetle shells. The appreciation is sincere but also ironic, existing in that uncomfortable space where you can’t quite tell if someone’s joking. That ambiguity feels central to the aesthetic.
Material Culture and the Sanctification of Mundane Natural Detritus
Goblincore collections look like what you’d find in a seven-year-old’s pockets: rocks, bones, feathers, bottle caps, rusty keys. The physical practice involves foraging, but it’s ethically complicated foraging. Most goblincore practitioners are actually pretty serious about Leave No Trace principles and not disturbing ecosystems, which creates this weird tension between wanting to hoard natural objects and knowing you probably shouldn’t.
Honestly, the collectors I’ve interviewed are more knowledgeable about mycology and decomposition ecology than most casual nature enthusiasts. They can identify slime molds. They understand fungal networks. Their aesthetic choices are informed by genuine curiosity about the organisms and processes that break things down rather than build them up.
Gender Performance and the Subversion of Traditional Nature Aesthetics
Here’s where it gets interesting from a cultural studies perspective.
Cottagecore has always carried this soft-feminine coding—flowing skirts, flower crowns, delicate preservation of beauty. Goblincore emerged partially as a gender-nonconforming alternative, embracing the grubby, the feral, the “unfeminine” relationship with nature. You’re not gently picking wildflowers; you’re digging in mud looking for interesting beetles. The fashion leans toward oversized earth-toned layers, practical boots, an overall “forest creature of indeterminate gender” vibe. Social media analysis by researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found that goblincore communities have significantly higher rates of LGBTQ+ participation than cottagecore spaces, though both attract queer audiences. The aesthetic codes different relationship to gendered expectations around beauty and domesticity.
It’s not universal, obviously. Plenty of femme folks love goblincore. Plenty of masculine-presenting people are deep into cottagecore. But the demographic patterns suggest the aesthetics are doing cultural work beyond just looking at pretty (or ugly-pretty) things.
Digital Circulation and the Memefication of Aesthetic Philosophy
Goblincore exists almost entirely online, which shapes its visual grammar in specific ways. The aesthetic spreads through image sharing platforms—Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok—but it’s inherently anti-algorithmic. The stuff that gets engagement in goblincore spaces wouldn’t recieve mainstream appreciation. A blurry photo of shelf fungus doesn’t perform well in feeds optimized for human faces and sunset landscapes.
That creates an interesting filter: you have to actively seek out goblincore communities to participate. It doesn’t come to you via recommendation algorithms. This has kept the aesthetic relatively underground despite having hundreds of thousands of participants across platforms. The New York Times covered it briefly in 2020, but it never achieved the mainstream visibility of cottagecore or dark academia.
I guess that’s kind of the point, though. Anyway, the underground status feels essential to the identity—once something becomes too popular, too marketable, it stops being a genuine alternative aesthetic and becomes just another consumer category. Goblincore’s ugliness is its protection against commodification, at least for now. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess, but for the moment, it remains a genuinely weird corner of visual culture where people celebrate decay, embrace imperfection, and find beauty in what most others would literally step over without noticing.
