I’ve seen so many nostalgic reels and memes for the early 2000s Emo phase and it genuinely got me questioning my memory. Like am I experiencing a mandela effect or something?? Because I feel like I’m remembering everything differently than everyone.

So, mostly the memes in question here are the ones that reference “The Holy Trinity” of Emo music: My Chemical Romance, Panic! At the Disco, and Fall Out Boy. And while I remember My Chemical Romance being decidedly “Emo music”, I remember all my emo friends listening to screamo. Like if someone had an emo style we joked that they listened to “Hawthorne Heights”. I remember Panic! At the Disco being very mainstream, and like the “preppy” kids were the ones walking the halls singing ‘Nine In the Afternoon’. But both Panic! and especially Fall Out Boy were considered ‘Alternative’ which was a whole different category of style.

And anyway that’s the whole other thing that I remember different. It seems that after twenty years we just categorized all 2000s teenagerdom into emo culture, but what I remember is us being very insistent at the time that they were all different styles.

True emo style was a way you could show the world that you were hardcore but sad. Stereotypically, Emo culture centered around self-harm. And everyone made a lot of yikes jokes about it. They wore black on black on black. Black box-dyed fringe, black eyeliner, black chunky skater shoes, black “girl pants” (because it took them forever to make skinny jeans for men). Kinda like old school ‘goths’, but what was super weird was you could still be a ‘goth’ and not be ‘emo’. Like trench coat vampire kid with black eyeliner was a goth not an emo. But if he suddenly cut deep-parting fringe and got a chunky metal studded belt we might be like, ‘oh, okay now he is.”

But there was an offshoot of all that, where you could still have mushroom hair and viper piercings but wear brightly colored skinny jeans instead. And that style we called “scene”. Even though they were the same cut and make as emo just in a different color pallet we were adamant that “scene kids” were a totally different thing. Scene Kids were the ones that were dying horizontal stripes in their hair and like sometimes they would wear racoon tails lol. I feel like they were the ones who popularized “rawr XD”. I also remember their music being totally different than “The Holy Trinity memes”. They also listened to screamo. But it wasn’t the “cut my wrists and black my eyes” emo songs. It was like totally unhinged random stuff. Like Hadouken! or Pierce the Veil or something.

AND THEN if you didn’t want to totally fry your hair off you could just dress ‘Alternative’ lol. (There were MANY ways to be non-conforming in the early 2000s, I promise.) And alternative kids were decidedly NOT emo. At all! Alternative kids wore random suit coats or ties over their graphic tees and like those newsboy caps. And a lot of times they had those black rimmed Patrick Stump glasses, which would later become a HUGE Hipster accessory. (Okay, I haven’t seen any nostalgic “hipster” memes. But that was such a thing in the early 2010s.)

I don’t know if this was just in my local circle or not, but there were a lot of alternative kids who were desperately trying to keep third wave ska music relevant. And some of us literally called our style “Ska”. Which was basically just alternative but with a lot of black and white checkered stuff. And we’d do that little “skank” dance thing lol.

There were also metal heads who were totally separate from all of the above, other than the fact that they too wore the big spikey belts and the chains attached to their wallets. But metalcore music was for sure not emo. Like Avenged Sevenfold or Bullet for My Valentine and stuff. System of a Down, too.

No matter which one you were though, you could shop at a Hot Topic in the early 2000’s.

In short, does all this technicality even matter? No. Do I have to be as snotty and particular as I was at sixteen? No, I do not. If the girl who grew up wearing Abercrombie polos wants to remember having an emo phase because she listened to Fall Out Boy on the radio, that’s totally valid! But listen, getting freakin’ old and seeing your high school experiences come up as vintage nostalgic memes kind of sucks. So, if I don’t get to tell young whippersnappers what it was like “BACK IN MY DAY” then what’s the fun in that?

So that’s it. History class is over. You can put Papa Roach on your iPod shuffle now and drink your Code Red Mountain Dew in the library.