Cinerati defines "Gothtentious"

...gothtentious would be when someone is "attempting to impress" by affecting a demeanor which disdains all that is not suspenseful and macabre. Especially, the gothtentious person reserves particular disdain for lighthearted and bourgeois entertainments. The individual will also praise material that is otherwise lacking in merit for the mere fact that it contains an appropriate amount of macabre or suspenseful content."

The gothtentious person would often be willing to take a position of disdain for a particular entertainment vehicle merely to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Such opinions may be driven by a narcissistic desire for attention, even negative attention, from others, or from an underlying sense that one is held in similar disdain by society at large. In these cases, the gothtentious person is acting out against society either for attention or as revenge. -- Christian Lindke

posted Mon, 24 Jun 2002 14:49:41 -0700:

One obvious root assumption of a lot of modern writing about the arts (and in the arts) is that pessimism is inherently more profound than optimism. That it gets at more of the grim truth about life. There is certainly such a thing as cheap optimism. One of the common words for it is "sentimentality." What we see a lot more frequently now is a form of cheap pessimism (heavily inflected with adolescent self-pity) for which there is, alas, no handy dismissive term.

And now there is, for at least one strain of this nihilistic twitch of temperment.