Exactly, it's basically been reduced down to just the aesthetics which can be readily repackaged and recuperated. It's a floating signifier, waiting for a brand to attach to and be capitalized on. But since there's something fundamentally good at its core, I still see value in it.

Cottagecore was a lesbian aesthetic about escaping heteronormative society and going off grid. It got turned into a tradwife aesthetic about neo lebensraum. Solarpunk is similar, but the way it gets coopted is via green capitalism washing away the revolutionary parts of solarpunk and replacing them with consumerism of the eco friendly variety.

It's alright, auntie, lol.

For cottagecore - I think it's the fascist idealization of a past that never really existed. I've never really thought about the connection between cottagecore and solar punk, but I could see both having a twee idealized rural life aesthetic (with solar punk adding a dash of sci-fi)

I feel like even if we had communism tomorrow we’d still have discussions on if X thing is worth doing labor wise or if that labor could be used more effectively doing something else. It’s not like having a bunch of vining plants on every building is inherently a good thing. Those plants are going to want water from somewhere and they’ll probably get it from the sewer system or something which means clogged drains everywhere.

Looks more like utopia.

Shows how that's just pure vibes and idealism. The result would be more like cannibalpunk when 8 billion humans suddenly reverting to subsistence farming.

Survival of thr fittest oh yeah totally fine

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but I always thought the idea was that it isn’t being actively maintained

That would be logical, but unfortunately it is not so. On the art of cities/towns you have greenery absolutely everywhere, roads, roofs, houses, walls, tons of flower pots and other bigger and smaller containers. It again shows how idealist vision this is and how they know shit about greenery in city spaces, all this would very quickly just wither and die without constant care and the amount of plants needing that care means the labour would been simply crazy, especially that on the art if anyone is even doing that is always by hand. Even moderate amount of city greenery we have in some cities today need quite a lot of care. Alternatively they could make it less maintained by planting some crazy invasive species which would overgrown everything and look like Angkor Wat before rediscovery but that's not possible under most climates and not only monoculture weed is not close to the idea, but again, the erosion of cityspace would be huge.
Also there is a thing that solarpunk is nearly always vision of at least harshly understood degrowth if not outright primitivism and you have the full vision closer to postapo disaster than to any socialism.

Kulakpunk lol