About Kostilin in Russian emo and scene community

You probably don't know Vitaly Kostilin, but he's popular primarily among the Russian scene emo community, as well as people nostalgic for the era around 2007, when subcultures flourished in Russia and the time generally seemed less intense. Despite this, opinions about him vary; the emo community is divided into two camps: haters and fans; most scene kids can't stand him. I want to talk about this in this blog, especially since I'm a scene kid myself.

The public page "Give Me Back My 2007" (this blog will focus on the Telegram channel, as accessing VKontakte is simply inconvenient) is his public page, which began on VKontakte and is also on Telegram. Currently, he has 7,000 subscribers on Telegram.

His public page has a section called "Emo Girl/Boy of the Day." Vitalik doesn't differentiate between emo and scenes. All scene kids fall into this category. Despite this, he easily differentiates almost anything with "goth" in its name: mall goths, cyber goths, and even 80s trads.

Admins often refer not to a person's affiliation with the subculture, but to the hashtags under a post, despite the fact that scenes can use #emo to attract an audience. Furthermore, he never mentions whose photos he uses.

 Examples of scenes attributed to emo (4 examples):

https://t.me/wetakeitback/33133?single

https://t.me/wetakeitback/24374?single

https://t.me/wetakeitback/24519?single

https://t.me/wetakeitback/32897?single

Examples with Goth distinctions (3 examples)

Mall Goth

Cyber Goth

Trad Goths

Is it really that hard? A mystery.

Let's move on to the sexualization of alternative teenagers. In the "Emo of the Day" column, there's a note—"this baby"— as a compliment. It's often used to describe teenage girls, which is bad for Vitalik, who is already quite an adult. The word "pepper" is used for boys, which is also questionable, but "baby" immediately suggests age. I'm not the only one who finds these comments unpleasant since they evoke an unpleasant association. There wouldn't be any problems if this weren't an adult's channel and the photos weren't of teenagers. I'm not saying he's a pedophile, but this comment he always adds evokes negative associations.

It's worth checking out his TikTok. 

He uses expressions like: "scene is part of emo culture," "the dead culture of the late 2000s," "scene is not a subculture," "scene in the 2000s was the same as posers," "analogous to the word pedovka" (Russian for emo posers) – all of these directly express his opinion. He believes that emo and scene are the same thing, failing to understand that scene have their own roots, that scene kids have their own music, and that they have their own visual attributes. He asks himself, "What should I look like?" implying that emo can also be colorful, though no one in the modern scene community has disputed this; in fact, some have even said that scenes can also be dark. His thinking underlies the politics of his channel, because even if a scene kid noticed the post with them and dispute their affiliation with emo, nothing would come of it; to the public, they would still be emo.

Some random facts.

He himself says he is against the sexualization of alternative women, which is very much at odds with his public channel. "Baby" for girls, "pepper" for boys at the category "emo of the day" and comments that do things like, for example, call someone a slut for wearing shorts when temperature is around 40+ (user wasn't punished).

!! By the way, update 10.12.25 : 

This is literally the post where he reposts tiktok that literally sexualizes goths which is against his beliefs (as far as I understood) which is much more questionable

(Another post with similar content) !!

Even though he's been in the subculture for over 10 years, a fact that he's very proud of, he still attributes metalcore and rus nu metal to emo music, largely due to a common mistake among emo teenagers in the 2000s, which is precisely what he was then.

Watching his video "The Amazing World of Informal TikTok," one can notice a tendency to NOT tag the author of the video. For example, when he responded to user @grechka1337's video, he didn't provide a source and took her words out of context, twisting them to suit his YouTube video. This only reinforces the trend from GMBM7, where they never tag the author of posts.

He calls himself both a normie and an emo, which is highly contradictory. After all, a normie is someone who fundamentally condemns informal movements.

Finally, a joke: Somewhere in the alt universe, Kostilin considers himself a goth, disparages mall goths, and separates emos from scene kids.