None of our 3 teens are emo, thank God. At our local rural high school there is some emo overlap with the other teenage labelling...the jocks, the nerdy & geeky brains, the preppies all seem to overlap their social circles. Our youngest is a real artist and I see many in the arts and music groups who lean towards emo in dress but they don’t listen to mostly emo music.
I see the emo mentality broadly as another function of the current age of broken marriages and general societal dysfunction - prime example: democrats,lol, though here they are just kids who went to the mall, kids of rural working class families that are pretty much good people with limited education. The tend to grow out of it by the end of senior year.
Many do, thank God for them, but the problem is that the experience may leave them covered in tattoos and body piercing to the point where they are unhireable. And that assumes they havent fallen to drug addiction or been ‘gifted’ with an untreatable STD.
It’s not like it was for Gen-Xers. Sure, we had our issues, but the worst of our group was at best midway up the modern vice and self destruction ladder. We hoped for a better tommorow. Many Emos dispise the concept of ‘tomorrow’.
That is sort of amazing that the artsy/musically inclined kids dress emo (although they aren’t severe about it). I wonder if they see it as a kind of “uniform”? You know how the jocks will dress in Under Armour, Nike stuff? The Preppies have their style of dress. Perhaps, in your area... the pseudo-Emo “look” is their uniform. Either way, it must be a “temporary hat” of sorts since most grow out of it by the time they are 17/18.