Joining the Zoom in a Pitch Black Room and Other Ways to Push Your Goth Brand
Having minimum requirements from where and how you can join your classes’ zoom calls has opened the doors for self-expression. Everything is fair game. Some of your classmates really want to show off the dirty, empty Dasani bottles inside of their Toyota Corollas during your discussions. Others love to put the camera on the foot of their bed to really emphasize how much of a family you are as a class. But you have bigger ambitions than these people--darker ambitions, even. People need to know how you make even Robert Pattinson (AKA the newly-crowned king of dark eyeshadow) jealous. All the most powerful beings work in complete darkness, and you are joining every Zoom call with a mysterious, black screen.
“Oh? You believe darkness is your ally? Everyone knows that I am now biologically nocturnal. The waking hours are lonely, but the cockroaches keep me company,” muses your gatekeeping friend E. Dark’ness as she angles her computer camera to center her signed Avenged Sevenfold poster in the shot. “Your attempts at mimicking the dark arts amuse me. You see, the ancient Four Dark Devas combined with this new normal have only amplified the forbidden magic that prolongs my life indefinitely. Mortal, you are seen, and I feel nothing but pride that another wishes to join the Blood Drinker Covenant. Soon, all of the world and all of Zoom will drown in the night and become one great void! Our professors will teach to a choir of true darkness!”
“I figured E. Dark’ness just had sticky notes over their screen or their camera was broken. I did not realize this was part of a movement,” explains Professor Tanaka, who is decidedly not goth but definitely pastel. “Of all the terrible things going on in the world, my students sitting in complete darkness like vampires is not a top concern. I don’t understand why some teachers demand students to be visible at all times. If they are not going to listen, then so be it. That is on them! Let the students be vampires or demi-liches or whatever. Listen, if my student does their best but needs to bathe in the blood rain and be cloaked in the dark threads of the fall moon, fine! They can be as much of an eldritch being as they want. I don’t care. Sacrifice babies and see if I blink an eye. Just turn in your paper.”
As the blood moon makes its second circle around the earth, E. Dark’ness has sworn that she will “rise again” at the start of class tomorrow, for the chains of society and the sun can not hold back her violent, tortured soul. If you find yourself called to the void by some hidden force, consider joining your next class cloaked in darkness like your brothers and sisters of the occult. Or just come to the next meeting--they’re on Wednesdays at five.