i find the term "webcore" to be useful when i am looking for a specific kind of image or visual inspiration 
This was gonna be my first answer. Now, I'm basing this whole thing on the actual results I get when I look for "webcore" things, and there DOES seem to be a distinction between it and "cybercore," in that webcore is more bright & bubblegum with a lot of dated UI elements & cultural artifacts, while cybercore reaches more into command lines, dystopian media, darker & more "post"/echoey colors of EDM music, and a more pessimistic but still slick & postmodern outlook on the future when compared to
classic retrofuturism. I'll be focused more on webcore here, though, since that seems harder to identify (and more opinionated) in isolation.
There wasn't really a good word to fit together the things that "webcore" fits together. It's also not even necessarily the old Web; it seems to be a certain era of the Web that IS old by today's Internet standards but doesn't really fit the Web of the 90s & earlier too well. It includes a lot of aliased crunchy images & clipart, ascii art animations & kaomojis, the 2000s anime aesthetic, emo/scene patterns & looks, Blingees & colorful glitch art, Vocaloids & Sanrio, 3D models that are from video games, pixel art from Gameboy titles, Flash animations... largely just things that aren't representative of the Web until the 2000s era. I think
@MrsMoe about hits the nail on the head for what it represents in practice: it points to that specific time in history. Albeit, it DOES like to mishmash a lot of it together and zoom it all past you at once.
It's just, people who are young enough can misidentify this look as "THE old Web" when it's really AN old Web. It's 2000s Web culture; it's Newgrounds Flashes, YTMND, the Windows 98 & XP operating systems that people used at the turn of the millennium. And if you look for "webcore" on YouTube, what you get back is music! You get bouncy 2000s EDM like
Caramelldansen, you get silly viral songs like
BrodyQuest, you get mainstream music of the time like
Ke$ha's TiK ToK, and if you go to webcore Tiktok users like OkayHattie & ____zosiek, they're calling back to that very same time in visual & auditory Web culture!
For a lot of people, it's the very last set of clothes that the Internet had before it put on the business suit, so to speak. It's just, when it comes to the actual Web that it's referencing, not a lot of people really know where to look or how to create using the medium that started it all. You wind up with people scrounging up whatever they can find, so if they don't have the tools to really create, they can wind up using the exact same images of the exact same characters, the same music, the same patterns over and over. It DOES seem like a very limiting medium if your experience of the Internet is Tiktok, YouTube, and Snapchat. But for those who DO have the creative tools, like
the "webcore" tagged sites on Neocities or
the aforementioned Webcore Tiktok users, they don't seem particularly lacking in terms of creativity. There are even current music artists who now create that bouncy nightcorey EDM webcore sound:
It really does seem like something that can come from a place of passion, but webcore is just lacking creators in its space. The whole of "how to webcore" is sort of a set of templates for most people, and those templates are few enough to where, if you try to really get into it, you can actually just run out of content & start seeing the same things over again. It also doesn't help that it wants to be a sort of proto-cyberpunk fashion in a landscape where there's not really such a thing as cyberpunk fashion, at least not in any way where you could actually find the clothes for it. In other instances of today's "-core" subcultures, a person can dress the part, but if a person wants to dress webcore, what do they do? Cosplay as a vocaloid, wear a cybergoth respirator mask, put on black-and-rainbow-striped scenecore leggings/sleeves and a Reptar hat? That's not easy stuff to come across these days. The whole thing is mostly relegated to live & die in the same spot as a lot of people found it, because it's just that creatively/technically intensive to figure out what exactly to do with it.
I think it has a lot of potential, and that potential is probably going to either stay unexplored or it's going to move pretty slowly. For instance,
there are accounts on the old Blingees site with comments from just this month, and
the new Blingee creations can be webcore, but they're not really on any mainstream algorithm, so they're hard to discover. It's also difficult to discover
recent musicians who hearken back to that specific era.
Despite the substance of it being limited, I do personally think that the whole thing is cool, if only for the
ravey &
airy directions I could imagine it going in. Really, adding to it is the best thing you can do for it!
Not that all of our own creations would really fit the label of "webcore." A lot of us have taken the tools and gone in our own directions. Melon's site itself doesn't feel very webcore, but his 3D worlds do, even though they may well have been created without knowledge of the term, which is sort of how most building blocks for webcore media were made. In fact, I think that's an important part of current webcore:
most things that are webcore were not made to be webcore. If you were to give
Ozwomp Online or
Crow Island a genre, they'd be experimental, but the TYPE OF experimental lends to them being interpretable as webcore elements. Although the label doesn't capture the essence of their creation, it does communicate the slightly bit-crushed experimentalism that goes a long way toward defining the creative direction in these 3D worlds and in the things that have been labeled as webcore.
All in all, webcore is interesting, though limited, and it just seems to point to a subset of the old Web. It's at least aligned with Web revival movements in that it promotes creative Web culture, but it also doesn't provide many resources to actually CREATE with. I do think it has a lot of unrealized possibilities. I'm just not sure if it has a future that'll go anywhere any time soon.
It does mean that any new creator in its space has a good amount of room to make something new, though! In that way, it can be thought of as a canvas that's still just ripe for new creation.
Posts & Arts: 22/1k.beats
Hello Melonland! 
Author
