Meant to evoke strong emotions, the corecore aesthetic juxtaposes imagery with its content made up of "seemingly unrelated clips" culled from a variety of sources including news footage, social media, films, livestreams, and memes.
[4] Writing on a corecore video, Moises Mendez II of Time noted it was "full of intentionally jarring juxtapositions and set to a kind of pensive sonic wall.
"[4] Chance Townsend of Mashable wrote that "some [corecore videos] can be unintelligible meme dumps that are upbeat, bordering on dada-style collage art and other edits are just clips of cats and Fortnite mashed together," with the latter also referred to as #pinkcore.
"[7] Writing for The Guardian, Hannah Ewens described corecore videos as "depressing, full of existential dread and usually on the theme of disconnection and alienation," while also calling them "crudely edited.
[8] Mason Noel, noted by media writers to one of the aesthetic's earliest creators, wrote in an Instagram Stories post that "the whole point of [corecore] is to create something that can't be categorized, commodified, made into clickbait, or moderated—something immune to the functions of control that dictate the content we consume and the ideas we are allowed to hold.
[2][4] Media outlets and TikTok users alike consider artists such as Dylan Cherry, Eddie Hewer, Mason Noel, and John Rising as the pioneers of the genre.
[4][5] Press-Reynolds told Mashable that at the time he first wrote about corecore, "most of the popular clips [...] was frenetic — they were these rapid-fire 15-second montages of surreal memes (like cute cats, alpha wolf edits) with intense music (Drain Gang and other internet rap) that didn't have much of a discernible meaning beyond the pleasurable rush of recognizable audiovisual material.
[14] Press-Reynolds opined that "the chaotic and disordered structure of these clips [...] deftly captures feelings of technological disarray and ennui that I think a lot of young people relate with nowadays.
"[3] Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch called corecore an "absurdist meme" and wrote that the aesthetic has "techno-futurism-doom vibes", with most of the genre's videos being "tied together by a general malaise — a concern that life has no meaning and technology is alienating us from one another.
[1][5][9][11] Nayyar opined that corecore "reads as an art school freshman's first found-footage project in Adobe Premiere Pro [...] presented with the societal dread induced from doom-scrolling on one's phone at 2 am after one too many bong rips on a weeknight [...] but at the very least, it's an evidence-based manner of expressing one's frustrations with the world that seems to strike a chord with a large number of TikTok users.
"[11] Felicity Martin of i-D wrote that corecore "might be the hardest to explain or rationalize" among TikTok trends, opining that the genre's videos "amateurishly splice together unrelated clips, touching on topics such as loneliness and feeling unattractive.
[8] Segalovich also cited comparisons between Dada and corecore, noting that the two genres have a sense of despondency in response to world events, but opined that such "declarations of meaninglessness and hopelessness often lead to authoritarianism.