@hobos One thing I AM very disappointed about in recent pop culture is a word you used: edginess. Allow me a short soapbox here.
Edgy is a term I'd seen thrown around a lot while MUing a few years back, and I've seen it used over the years in greater increments. While there's nothing wrong with something that is "edgy", it's usually thrown around in a connotation of "this person is trying to be edgy for edgy's sake". This approach usually comes with a biased opinion of the writer, the content, or the intent behind the content that is wrapped in the bias of the person using the term "edgy". In most cases, the person using the term "edgy" doesn't delve into WHY the content is the way it is before judging the person an edgelord or the intent behind their writing.
Example: A long while back I was apping for a character on "Fifth World". I noticed that 9/10 characters on this "lords and ladies" game were basically "Prince/Princess Perfect" with variations really based on what weapon they used. "Princess Perfect the Knight" and "Prince Perfect the Archer". So I decided that when I made a character I would make "Prince...who had a lot of privilege and thus became a drug addicted sorcerer who would rather club crawl than face his lordly duties." I simply wanted to make something flawed that wasn't perfect and my creative mind went to the concept that the idle rich in the setting are no different than any other setting: privilege and lack of equal amounts of risk for illicit activities. I wanted to challenge myself by writing a character that was deeply flawed, somewhat unreliable, but a talented sorcerer and thus useful.
So...I made the character. I had scenes. Then, a few years later an allegedly (airquotes) good person on the Hog Pit started joking and guffawing about my character and how I was an edgelord, trying to be so edgy, and it was so embarrassing to them that they quit the game. Which, I'd always found hypocritical given that this person was always afraid of being judged, themselves.
I guess the moral of this story is that I feel that art needs to have an edge, and the popular use of the term "edgy" is less of a critique of the greater content but more an attack on the content itself with a means to belittle it. In some ways I think our society as a whole needs more "edge" and needs to face those hard details, but the PROBLEM is that you take an edgy concept like "The Purge" (which was intended to be a dystopian critique of where our society is heading) and then people only seem to fixate on "Oh I'd love the Purge!" and lose the entire point of the original content to begin with.
GOOD art will usually have some sort of "slap effect" that at first may come across as "edginess" (as in: trying to be) but only upon taking the time to review it with an unbiased lens you may find that the original purpose wasn't to be edgy at all.
One last example:
Nikki Sixx's photography might be laughed off as "oh look how edgy they are..."
When in fact the entire art photography book he put out had a theme of taking people with deformities, missing limbs, and developmental issues and showing how beautiful and intriguing they could be. So you could take a first look at that picture above and think "LOL Wannabe NIN EDGY LOL" but then when you take a moment to consider that Nikki Sixx (who often talks about how ugly he feels inside and wants to show his own beauty) focused on people who society deemed "disfigured and ugly" and put out a book of creative photography highlighting their beauty...it becomes something entirely different.
...I guess this wasn't a short soapbox. Alas.