where do we draw the line where fake/exaggerated styling a trick is disavowed? over exaggerating a tre flip is bad, over exaggerating a front rock gets a pass?
pushing the limits of a trick's form is rad. doing it at the expense of whatever your natural expression is in a very specific, contrived way just to fit in among all the goons who're trying super hard to look the exact same as someone else, not so much. it's just skateboarding, a lot of it is subjective and at the end of the day it doesn't matter, but everyone will have their own sensibility for what they find, or don't find, ridiculous. every once in a while, the opinion of some people who've been skating for a long time might hold more water than a skatepark kid's just because they've seen more shit, so they can appreciate and read into certain essential qualities of skateboarding the same way an art critic (oooh...) would, so they don't get fooled as easily as somebody more naive would by someone faking the funk, but in reality there also are a lot of elders out there who are actually essentially clueless about skating despite having been doing it forever and will just repeat the same washed-up, popular opinions over and over. everybody's got their approach and everybody's missing on at least some elements of understanding, that's actually one of my favorite things about skateboarding, listening to the do's and don'ts, or the sophisticated rules peeps like Puleo come up with; there's always some kind of reasoning behind them and sometimes it's so sharp, it's hilarious. within the same activity you have a spectrum of a community punctured with dudes who live by the forbidden 14's and others who think Chris Haslam shit goes. just find your own happy medium. generally speaking though, just looking at a photo or a clip you'll know bullshit when you see it, but there are so many factors involved depending on what you like or not, understand or not, relate to or not. everything is cool and nothing is cool. just stay humble, skate a lot and everything will be fine