Some thoughts on Weirdcore and Surrealism

I recently watched a video on surrealism and weirdcore.1 It was a good video, and I wanna be clear that this is not a reply to that video. Not fully, anyway. Watching it just reminded me that I want to put in my two cents on the way "weirdcore" is discussed on the internet. I'll come out and say it: I don't think it's a revival of surrealism. You immediately know a weirdcore image when you see it. It probably has a hazy photograph from the 1990's or 2000's, maybe some cryptic text in red, white, or black that says something ironic and/or creepy. It probably has cutouts of eyes, possibly merged with plants or fungi, and it also probably has some kind of reference to computers, like a popup window or text that looks like a hyperlink. I'm not dissing the aesthetic here--I, personally, enjoy this aesthetic--but its tropes are very recognizable and relatively easy to imitate. Maybe the first few people to make the images we now call "weirdcore" were doing something surreal. Maybe these…