Against hopepunk

[lizbee]

It's difficult to articulate why I hate the entire concept of "hopepunk" and quite a lot of the works recommended under that label, because just thinking about it sends my shoulders up around my ears.

This is mostly thanks to my childhood and adolescence, and specifically my parents' friends.



My parents were extremely conservative Catholics. Technically they still are, but the world's definition of "conservative" has moved further to the right these days, and apparently my father is considered a leading progressive academic in Singapore.

Mum and Dad censored our popular culture consumption, but only to an extent. We weren't allowed to watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Outcast", for example, in case we got the idea that gay people should have human rights, and anything sexually explicit was right out. For the most part, though, they let us know when they disapproved of something we were watching, and talked about why. (Captain Planet, for example. Paganism and environmentalism. Very bad.)

And when they censored our reading material, it was more out of snobbishness than concerns about content -- I wasn't allowed to read Sweet Valley or Babysitter's Club books, for example, because they were considered intellectually lightweight. On the other hand, Mum enjoyed reading any other YA that came into my hands, and reserved her greatest criticism for Prices by David McRobbie, about drug trafficking, murder and art forgery in a small town: "He uses a bit of language, doesn't he?"

Basically, unless there was a whiff of homosexuality involved, Mum and Dad were engaged but moderately permissive when it came to our media, and after I was thirteen or so, I was allowed to read anything that came into the house. (I had by this time read Mum's secret stash of Jackie Collins novels, which was the closest to Sweet Valley that I could find. So that ban backfired spectacularly.)

But lots of their friends were even more conservative Catholics -- the sort who homeschooled their kids because Catholic schools were too liberal, and kept tight rein over what they read and watched. And these friends were pretty appalled that we were allowed to attend school and watch and read more or less what we wanted -- even books and TV shows for adults.

(For the record, most of their kids have grown up and rebelled by becoming teachers. In state schools, even! Except one, who was, last time I checked, a leading anti-capitalist economist and punk musician.)

They expressed their disapproval in the traditional form for educated middle class people: passive-aggressive gifts of books. Specifically, Catholic guides to popular culture, with ratings for morality, wholesomeness, good messages and so forth.

Naturally, I read them. And I was intrigued to note that nothing I enjoyed got a good review -- Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, was criticised for its dangerously humanistic philosophies. Asimov and McCaffrey -- along with the few other science fiction authors included in the brief fiction section -- were called out for secularism, atheism and generally being anti-God.

And it's not that these descriptions were wrong! Star Trek is famously humanist! McCaffrey depicted Pern as a world without religion of any kind! (She was also dinged for "unwholesomeness", which I suspect is a reference to the problematic queerness of dragonriders.)

(Grounds on which a work might be deemed unwholesome:

• sex
• queer sex
• any allusion to queerness whatsoever, whether or not actual sex is involved
• single parenthood
• violence
• death
• even natural death, sometimes
• divorce
• depictions of religion other than Catholicism
• High Anglicanism is acceptable in a pinch
• but only just barely
• arbitrary, undefined Bad Things)

But I still found value in those stories, and I disliked the idea of rejecting a work wholesale because it did not entirely align with one's philosophy -- or, worse, for an arbitrary value of wholesomeness. (Also -- I understood the message behind the passive-aggressive book giving: THEY WERE COMING FOR MY STAR TREK.)

Fortunately, when I finally -- rather nervously -- asked, Mum had no intention of giving up her Star Trek either. So we went on as we had always gone on, and I got to make up my own mind about the fiction I consumed, without regard to its wholesome qualities.


(I'd really like to pretend that I rejected Marion Zimmer Bradley because I sensed that she was a creep and a sexual abuser, but honestly, I was just a fourteen-year-old anti-feminist who had no patience for "the world was a matriarchy until Christianity came along and ruined it' nonsense.)

That was the '90s. Cut to 2018, and apparently it's cool to judge works by their "wholesomeness" because ... I dunno, I look at the world and sometimes I think my parents' friends won.

Finally, the bit where I talk about hopepunk

This article is doing the rounds, explaining what hopepunk is. It's by Aja Romano, which means it's deeply stupid and does a profound disservice to the entire concept of hopepunk, which is to say, it makes it even worse. But the definition she offers, long and muddy as it is, works:

Depending on who you ask, hopepunk is as much a mood and a spirit as a definable literary movement, a narrative message of “keep fighting, no matter what.” If that seems too broad — after all, aren’t all fictional characters fighting for something? — then consider the concept of hope itself, with all the implications of love, kindness, and faith in humanity it encompasses.

Now, picture that swath of comfy ideas, not as a brightly optimistic state of being, but as an active political choice, made with full self-awareness that things might be bleak or even frankly hopeless, but you’re going to keep hoping, loving, being kind nonetheless.

Through this framing, the idea of choosing hope becomes both an existential act that affirms your humanity, and a form of resistance against cynical worldviews that dismiss hope as a powerful force for change.

Now, I quite like a bit of optimism in my fiction, and I'm not averse to the occasional happy ending now and then -- although one of the reasons I don't read romance fiction is that the happy ending is built in, and the lack of tension irritates me.

Here's my beef:

"Hope" and "optimism" are incredibly subjective concepts. What one person finds comforting, another will find cloying, and what many people found enjoyable and reassuring, I found boring and sexist.

One of Aja's suggestions for "hopepunk" in television is The Expanse. I love The Expanse, and I was arguing just a few weeks ago that it's a profoundly optimistic series. But it's also very, very dark -- there's body horror, there's psychological horror, there's the terrorist attack in the later books which kills billions of people and renders Earth almost uninhabitable. What makes it optimistic, for me, is that redemption is never off the table for people who want it. Atonement is hard work, and painful, but it's there.

But a lot of people disagree, and consider it grimdark. Not to mention that the first book features a straight-up fridging of a woman of colour, and the whole series is replete with the male gaze.

It's subjective. Star Trek is widely considered optimistic and hopeful, but a lot of people look at a universe which was entirely devoid of canonical queer people until just the last few years, and see a dystopia where they and people like them have been erased.

And modern fandom -- okay, Tumblr -- has this bad habit of describing works as more pure ("pure") than they actually are. Like, people will claim that Mad Max: Fury Road treats all women as people, overlooking that the Milking Mothers -- fatter and darker-skinned than the Wives -- are shown hooked up to milking machines and treated as props. I'm still mad about that time people told me -- and I believed them -- that Pacific Rim was a smart, feminist movie. Tumblr's current favourite movie is Addams Family Values, which a friend recently rewatched and found full of racism and jokes about violence against women.

Now, my only actual trigger is "bad things being portrayed as good or, at least, deserved", so a lot of the discourse around hopepunk really puts me on edge. Take, for example, "hopepunk" coiner Alexandra Rowland's list of people (men) who embody the concept: “Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon”. Out of five men, one is fictional, two were domestic abusers. I mean. Seriously?

I like a lot of the things Aja points to as signifiers of "hopepunk"! Community building, perseverance, connection.

But then I see the words "weaponised cuteness", and I want to punch something out of sheer contrariness. Fuck you and your commodification of hope and optimism, your narrow little boxes and wilful misreading of texts. The Handmaid's Tale is hopepunk? The Hate U Give? These are great works, and I love them, but let's not pretend they're not incredibly dark. They're just not nihilistic. The Broken Earth? I haven't read it, but I've seen it described as "grimdark but without sexual violence" -- which I said on Twitter, only for coffeeandink to tell me that it does, in fact, contain sexual violence. The Vorkosigan Saga? One of my all-time favourite series, but it has a shitton of sexual violence and I could not in good conscience recommend it to a trans or genderqueer person.

I see a lot of black and white thinking bound up in "hopepunk". A lot of "I like it, and I found value in it, therefore it is optimistic and hopepunk, and self-care is hopepunk, and so are kittens and memes".

And that's fine, so far as it goes, but ... again. It's subjective. We're back to the concept of "wholesomeness" in fiction, which became popular on Tumblr just before "hopepunk" emerged as a concept. To be honest, I have trouble separating the two.

But to me, ascribing wholesomeness to a work of fiction is as useless as ascribing a moral value to a food. Fresh, warm wholemeal bread is healthy for most people, but I'm gluten intolerant, so it'll only give me diarrhoea. All fiction contains problematic elements, and some you can overlook, others are dealbreakers. And if there are too many dealbreakers in a work described as "hopeful", you start to wonder if the problem is you.

Comments

[muccamukk]

First off, whoever told you Broken Earth didn't have sexual violence was off their fucking gord. I love that book, but it's incredibly violent. The entire series is about how violence, including sexual violence, including sexual violence directed at disabled children (!) is embedded in empire. One of the heroines is forced to have reproductive sex with someone she doesn't like (he's gay and doesn't want to either) the first time we meet her. (That said I wouldn't describe it as grimdark, because I find it incredibly optimistic. However, as far as I can tell, "grimdark" = "something dealing with darker themes that I personally did not like.")

*coughs*

To the actual point: I'm not reading the thing by Aja, because my blood pressure doesn't need that, and I generally like say Rebecca Solnit's comments about hope in activist work (she considers optimism something else), but I find a insistence on hope not only cloying buy unfair and manipulative. What if I don't fucking want to feel hopeful? And if I'm not hopeful, did the shitty things that keep happening happen because I didn't have the right outlook? It's some kind of high level emotional blackmail bullshit, as far as I'm concerned.

Also, "punk" fucking means something. I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

[lizbee]

I find a insistence on hope not only cloying buy unfair and manipulative. What if I don't fucking want to feel hopeful? And if I'm not hopeful, did the shitty things that keep happening happen because I didn't have the right outlook? It's some kind of high level emotional blackmail bullshit, as far as I'm concerned.

That's a point that I couldn't quite articulate -- there's a sort of magical thinking in the western world that tells us to be happy, and if we're not happy, maybe we're not trying hard enough and we deserve to be sick or sad or ... whatever.

And I feel like we're seeing a lot of consequences of unfounded hope? A lot of UK voters hoped they could just Brexit on out of the EU without consequences, and they were wrong. Hope is important, but so is realism.

However, as far as I can tell, "grimdark" = "something dealing with darker themes that I personally did not like."

Yeah, look, I'll argue until I'm blue in the fact that GRRM's work isn't grimdark on account of how, aside from the dragons and zombies, nothing happens in those books which hasn't happened in actual history, and until the story is over, it's too soon to say whether it's nihilistic.

[askalis]

As someone who is also incredibly side-eyey at the whole “hopepunk” thing… yes. This. All of this.

(Also: I think I throw up in my mouth a little every time I hear someone use “comfy” unironically. Gak.)

[lizbee]

"Comfy" is a word that should only be used for couches.

(I was going to say it shouldn't be used for fiction, but that's a matter of personal taste. My idea of comfort reading is going back to Bujold's Mirror Dance, in which the hero gets his brother killed, attempts to molest a teenage girl and ends up being systematically raped and tortured for a bunch of chapters.)

[wolfy_writing]

But then I see the words "weaponised cuteness", and I want to punch something out of sheer contrariness.

Ugh, this. I see hope and optimism in stories, and sometimes it works for me. I see people in Tumblr talking about hope and optimism and how it's all part of some big Cute Soft Nice all-consuming morally-obligatory thing, and I want to hit things until something breaks.

I see a lot of black and white thinking bound up in "hopepunk". A lot of "I like it, and I found value in it, therefore it is optimistic and hopepunk, and self-care is hopepunk, and so are kittens and memes".

Yeah, there's way too much putting a specific moral spin on things to argue that they're Good or Bad, rather than they have good and bad elements and also elements that aren't assessed on a moral scale. (There's no moral obligation for a story to be optimistic or hopeful, and sometimes the best way to go with a story is dark. A bleak story can be badly told or not to someone's taste, but there doesn't need to be a movement about it.)

[lizbee]

There's no moral obligation for a story to be optimistic or hopeful, and sometimes the best way to go with a story is dark.

And sometimes you need to go through the darkness to earn your happy ending!

I see people in Tumblr talking about hope and optimism and how it's all part of some big Cute Soft Nice all-consuming morally-obligatory thing, and I want to hit things until something breaks.

Do you also start to worry that there's something fundamentally wrong with you? Or is that just me?

[nam_jai]

Ugh, I thought we were finally past putting a halo on John Lennon's head, but I guess not.

I haven't read the Aja article (and it doesn't sound like it would help), but I really don't get the concept. At least when it comes to popular fiction: As far as I can tell, what hopepunk doesn't apply to would be a much shorter list.

[lizbee]

Truthfully I can't think of many stories -- in any medium -- that are entirely and completely devoid of optimism. Possibly ASoIaF, but that's incomplete. Breaking Bad is pretty dark, but ends with Skyler free of Walt and her kids provided for.

Maybe some video games?

[kore]

It's by Aja Romano

AHAHAHAHA LET'S PUT THAT IN FILE 13

But anyway. These people need to read Rebecca Solnit for one thing. Hope is not squishy. Or wholesome. Or comfy.

The Handmaid's Tale is hopepunk?

MARGARET ATWOOD GAVE IT A DELIBERATELY AMBIGUOUS ENDING WTF (also,in both the movie, which Atwood helped write, and the series, which she influenced considerably, the heroine is a lot more rebellious and active than she is in the book)

"hopepunk" coiner Alexandra Rowland's list of people (men) who embody the concept: “Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon”

Whaaaaa omg no. (Robin Hood WTF are these people smoking. Also why not people like John Lewis and Sharice Davids and Janelle Monae and Solnit herself. But anyway.)

One of the most actually, no lie, hopeful films I've seen in years and years was Rogue One, in which EVERYONE DIED at the end, but it wasn't gratuitous or hopeless or even that depressing. Those people had weighed the chances, knew the cost might be their lives, and were as okay with it as anyone can be, from the heroine of the movie down to the unnamed characters at the very end struggling to pass on the message.

Anyway, tl;dr, anyone who uses the phrase "weaponized cuteness" unironically is someone I want to stay far the fuck away from. Good Lord.

[lizbee]

Also why not people like John Lewis and Sharice Davids and Janelle Monae and Solnit herself. But anyway.

Three of the people you just mentioned are women, that's a strong point against them.

One of the most actually, no lie, hopeful films I've seen in years and years was Rogue One, in which EVERYONE DIED at the end, but it wasn't gratuitous or hopeless or even that depressing.

That's a good point! I can never watch it again, because I just cannot cope with stories where everyone does, but the execution was incredibly optimistic.

No pun intended.

[sugar_fey]

I haven't come across the term 'hopepunk' before, but it seems to be another one of those terms that applies to basically whatever the user of the term wants it to.

I haven't read the Expanse books, but the tv series is pretty dark, and certainly not without its flaws. The first season in particular is pretty dude-centric and the treatment of Julie Mao gives me the creeps. Season 3 has probably the best treatment of women so far, but even then the female characters tend to only interact with one other female character at a time (and the show really, REALLY Needs More Gay. Anna is great, but she may not even be in Season 4, Drummer's sexuality is implied but so far unconfirmed).

And modern fandom -- okay, Tumblr -- has this bad habit of describing works as more pure ("pure") than they actually are.

GOD, YES. I think it comes for everyone and everything to be Morally Pure: I, a non-problematic individual, will only ever consume non-problematic content, therefore everything I like will be non-problematic. Mad Max: Fury Road is a good example, as is Captain America: Winter Soldier (a movie I am so fucking sick of). What happened to liking something while also acknowledging its flaws?

Also, I read your linked article on why novels like The Goblin Emperor didn't work for you, and I completely agree with what you say here: that horrible phrase “awesome ladies”: they turn up, do or say something to subvert the patriarchy, and then step back and let the men get on with the plot stuff

I feel like that sums up so much of what fandom ultimately seems to want from female characters, especially female characters of colour. Turn up, say or do something cool, be emotionally supportive to the male lead, get nothing in return because she's a Strong Independent Woman Who Who Don't Need No Emotional Support, then go away again. Emotional and moral complexity and a variety of relationships, healthy or unhealthy? That's for white men.

[lizbee]

I feel like that sums up so much of what fandom ultimately seems to want from female characters, especially female characters of colour. Turn up, say or do something cool, be emotionally supportive to the male lead, get nothing in return because she's a Strong Independent Woman Who Who Don't Need No Emotional Support, then go away again. Emotional and moral complexity and a variety of relationships, healthy or unhealthy? That's for white men.

Bonus points if you can turn them into the Team Mom! And/or the Matchmaker!

[kore]

//gives in and clicks

The aesthetic of hopepunk can be seen as part of a broader cultural embrace of “softness,” wholesomeness, and gentleness. We see this in a growing emphasis on what might be thought of as an extreme, even aggressive form of self-care and wellness in response to stress created by bleak sociopolitical times. Embedded into this idea are trends like the high-end sleep industry; the popular home and lifestyle trend hygge, which emphasizes comfort and coziness; the rom-com resurgence; the ever-growing popularity of kawaii, or “cute” culture; “JOMO,” a.k.a. the joy of missing out; and the online shift away from cynicism to wholesome memes.

oh my fucking God

I'm so personally offended the word "punk" is anywhere near this cotton candy fantasy

[nam_jai]

So what this is telling me is that a primary way to embrace "hopepunk" is consumption. But I guess if my budget doesn't allow the likes of high-end sleep, I can experience the joy of missing out.

[sqbr]

As I said on tumblr (because I felt like ranting somewhere people would see >.>)

“ascribing wholesomeness to a work of fiction is as useless as ascribing a moral value to a food” is such a great line.

I mean I wouldn’t say “hopefulness” is entirely subjective (even if the people who laud it do tend to stretch the definition to breaking point), but there’s legitimate artistic (and, where relevant, political/moral etc) merit to getting across a feeling of despair anyway. I tend not to seek out deliberately depressing works, but some people do, and they’re not being ~problematic or ~privileged for doing so. Just like I tend to avoid bitter foods, for both taste and health reasons, and find all the rocket/arugala in salads these days annoying, but am not going to act like that make me morally superior to someone who likes it.

[wolfy_writing]

Something I've noticed with at least some of my friends is that you get people who feel overstimulated by life - stretched thin by responsibilities, by stress, by other personal issues, and a lot of them tend to look for comforting aspects in fiction. Like works that hit their personal comfort zone (often comedy or romance, but really individually variable) and come with a certain sense of safety, like they're not going to have too many negative experiences in the story

And then you get people, more like me recently, who feel understimulated, and tend to crave intensity, and are a lot more likely to enjoy dark work as long as it's interestingly intense dark. And stuff that feels too safe, too predictable, or too intended to be comforting, can worsen the sense of understimulation and boredom.

It's not a Grand Unified Theory of People's Tastes, because I'm sure there's a lot I've left out, but multiple people in my writing group thought it fit their situation, and I thought it was interesting how it was one example of why people's tastes and reactions can vary without anyone being morally superior for liking what they like.

[deird1]

Specifically, Catholic guides to popular culture, with ratings for morality, wholesomeness, good messages and so forth.

I'm glad to hear that Catholics have those too! The Protestant version is very similar - but warns against depictions of overt Catholicism. :) I tended to use them for finding good movies, by looking at all the ones they were heavily warning against...

One of Aja's suggestions for "hopepunk" in television is The Expanse.

Oh boy would I be angry if someone recommended The Expanse to me based on its optimism and hopefullness. I've read the first book - for me, that series is the definition of grimdark.

[lizbee]

I tended to use them for finding good movies, by looking at all the ones they were heavily warning against...

I will say that I sometimes find the modern website versions quite useful for content warnings -- they're pretty consistent about warning for violence, and most can tell the difference between consensual sex and rape these days.

Oh boy would I be angry if someone recommended The Expanse to me based on its optimism and hopefullness. I've read the first book - for me, that series is the definition of grimdark.

Yeah, the optimistic and hopeful elements, to me, come in around the third book and beyond. Which is also, by coincidence, around the time the treatment of women becomes MUCH better.

[syncytio]

Those are really really good points. I have to be honest, I love the concept of Hopepunk. I really do, but having read your piece and ruminated on it, I've realised I don't know that it's necessarily what I would consider a "genre" the way I think most advocates do.

For me, hopepunk is more like....a trope? Like a chunk of the narrative structure where we are shown that people are more than base instinct and violence. And it acts as a counterpart to the narratives where people are cruel and awful to each other, and anyone with optimisim or kindness is naive and/or wiped out of the narrative. Way I see it, hopepunk in a story can't exist without grimdark elements. The point of hopepunk is fighting against the oppressive narrative of "everything will suck (usually for minorities) and nothing will ever be better" so without anything to really fight against, hopepunk is just some kinda of strawman argument.

As a quasi neo-genre, there are proponents who do see and want a purity in the term that will probably do it harm in the long run. Grimdark stories have a cultural value for a reason and insisting that grimdark is a "bad" genre is....stupid.

For me, personally, it's more like I am tired of reading books about people being needlessly and pointlessly cruel to each other in dark times without those books also showing the way people can be kind and find communities in dark times.

[lizbee]

Way I see it, hopepunk in a story can't exist without grimdark elements. The point of hopepunk is fighting against the oppressive narrative of "everything will suck (usually for minorities) and nothing will ever be better" so without anything to really fight against, hopepunk is just some kinda of strawman argument.

That's a really good point! And articulates my vague feeling that happy endings should be earned (and that a bittersweet ending with a dash of hope is also pretty great, I love those).

Grimdark stories have a cultural value for a reason and insisting that grimdark is a "bad" genre is....stupid.

Yeah! Dark 'n' gritty isn't inherently bad, it's just been overvalued for the last decade or so.

[eight_of_cups]

Ah, one of those topics where I want to fly around with an airplane banner that says

STOP HELPING

I mean, I've been known to rant about literary fiction and its devotion for the past generation to the Assiduously Unhappy Ending, plus its fascination with the dis-integration of personalities. And I'm always keen to reblog that Ursula Le Guin quote about the banality of evil and the boredom of pain. But Ursula Le Guin would have no patience with this twee bullshit.

Some years ago, before I started saying "I'm getting too old for this shit" without joking, I wrote an essay about the much meatier concept of eucatastrophe, and I still think much of it holds true for me and my approach to writing and consuming stories. I mean, the Inklings aren't the answer to everything, but they very often do come up with better shit than this....

[amaresu]

I haven't read a lot about hopepunk, but I thought the punk part was as important as the hope part. If not moreso.

The rebellious edge. Flipping off and spitting in the face of grim dark narratives while being in a grim dark narrative.

If you're not going to be punk about it why bother putting it in the name?

[ironed_orchid]

After 9/11, stories like Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings films provided essential tales of optimism in response to widespread narratives of war and anti-globalization.

It's pretty weird to include LOTR as a post 9/11 work, even if the first movie did come out in 2001, it was written and shot before then and also based on a 50 year old book.

The works Aja lists as hopepunk are so eclectic and weird.

(Nick Mamatas linked to the article on FB and at least one of the authors listed was basically "OH FUCK NO!)

[ironed_orchid]

Relevant tweet is relevant

Existential Comics: The worst part about becoming an educated adult is that you realize that you can’t explain everything with just one thing. When you are young it’s easy to say: everything is sex! everything is greed! everything is science! But it turns out everything is…hopelessly complicated.

[sabotabby]

See, I like the idea, but mainly as a response to grimdark dystopias that I feel are—I don't know. Counterproductive, maybe? Which is to say Not All Dystopias and Not All Grimdark but a lot of it is grating on me when our world is as dystopic as it's been in my lifetime. I don't think it's a genre or should be, and I think it's something distinct from happy endings; I'd say that, for example, Rogue One is an incredibly hopeful movie with a depressing ending. The Expanse is one where I do agree; it's a dark setting where characters can still choose to fight back and act decently, as opposed to, say, Game of Thrones. So I think it's a useful concept.

I think it's a scale rather than a category. Sliding Scale of Optimism Vs. Pessimism works just as well as a framing device for those with an allergy to the punk postfix. Where I think it's a useful concept is in making a distinction (which the author doesn't) between optimism and comfort, which can both be valuable, but in radically different ways.

Broken Earth is full of sexual violence, holy shit. That's one of the underlying themes of the series. What the actual fuck.

[sugar_fey]

The Expanse is one where I do agree; it's a dark setting where characters can still choose to fight back and act decently, as opposed to, say, Game of Thrones.

Butting in to say that this is exactly why I like The Expanse. I found it really interesting that one of the main conflicts in Season 3 is between two characters (Drummer and Ashford) who both want what they feel is best for their people, but have differing ideas on what that means and how to achieve it. That led to some interesting moral questions and discussions. The actress who plays Drummer, Cara Gee, gave an interview where she made some interesting comparisons between Belters and her experiences as a First Nations woman and pointed out why Drummer's view as a woman of colour might be different to Ashford's view as a white man.

I stopped watching Game of Thones mainly because I was tired of the sexual violence, but also because I was sick of every character with even a shred of decency meeting a grisly end. While in some ways that might be more realistic, it's also unrealistic in others. Even in the darkest points of history there have been examples of people choosing to do the right thing, even if they didn't ultimately succeed. I found myself detaching emotionally from anything that was going on, and why continue to watch a show where I'm not invested in any of the characters because I know they will likely do something unforgivable or die horribly?

Compare this to, say, The Wire, which still manages to find moments of hope in situations that are overwhelmingly hopeless. It's bleak, because that is the point, but viewers are still invested in the characters because the show makes it clear that the evil is within the system and no person is entirely 'good' or 'evil.'

[hopelesse]

I was just having a conversation yesterday about how moral compromise is a thing that all people have to wrestle with. One can go buy makeup that wasn't tested on animals and feel very pure about your consumeristic choice without ever realizing that because the product wasn't tested on animals, it was instead tested on people in dire enough financial straits that they could be convinced to put untested products near their eyes for $50.

...ahem, pardon my hobby-horse.

The point being, moral choices that appear simple are often spackling over some information gaps that reflect a more complicated world.

I also love optimism in fiction! But the willful choice to consume primarily things that meet (particularly someone else's) ~standards~ for media is...worrying :/

Tumblr, I'll miss you for the tits, but not your take on neo-puritanism

[nenya_kanadka]

Tumblr, I'll miss you for the tits, but not your take on neo-puritanism

Is that short enough to put on a t-shirt? :D

[nenya_kanadka]

I have thoughts about, like, why I love ST: Discovery and how I feel it's in conversation with the kind of fiction where it's a crapsack world and anyone who advocates for gentleness or optimism is hopelessly naive. (I think we've had this discussion several times actually. :D)

But, as much as I'd personally have cut a few of the darker scenes from Disco (was the cannibalism necessary? every single one of Ash's flashbacks?), the show as a whole works for me because it's not 100% fluff. It's very much in dialogue with both real-world bad stuff and with the trend for hopeless endings. But it's at least taking a stab (heh) at treating that seriously. It's not just going "lalala utopia!" We are Starfleet because we have Seen Some Shit and we still say no to despair and every-man-for-himself. Etc.

And I mean, I like fluff and comfort and cozy things sometimes. They just have to work for me, and like you said, people's fictional happy places can be very different. (Goblin Emperor is one of the few books I've read multiple times in a row in the last few years, and for me it hit a very specific note that I needed to hear about the process of choosing to be better than the crap you grew up with. But anyone who notes that it's wall to wall dudes and not great on queer stuff isn't wrong. Meanwhile, I often have the same problem with romance novels and their preordained HEAs as you do.)

I think that, mostly, I can come up with depressing scenarios pretty damn easily all by myself, so I'm usually looking for some kind of hopeful note in my fiction. Some indication that shit may be pretty bad, but that isn't ALL there is to the world. Some examples of people making choices to be kind or generous, or of people who fuck up or are imperfect but who can still be heroic.

But "wholesome" (and to some extent, "soft" in the Tumblr sense) make me twitch. Gah.

[starlady]

Reading this post, my first thought was that the whole thing is a very sad commentary on what passes for optimism in 2018, and I think that's the most charitable take.

I saw a thread on Twitter which basically said, though not in so many words, that hopepunk as people have defined it relies on a very telling denial of (the possibility of, the hard reality of) politics, and that really seemed to be the key to me. As you say, it's very black and white, and that elides all the messy contradictions, disagreements, arguments, and work of politics, especially politics in a time of crisis. And that seems to me to be a very 2018 framing too, though one I have much less sympathy with.

And yes, sometimes I find myself reaching for doorstopper novels about totalitarianism where everything is terrible, because that's what I want or need to read at that point in my life. But that doesn't make me or the books Impure or Immoral.

[kore]

I liked the person who pointed out that people don't just "hope," they usually hope for or hope against something, and when you know what that thing is, you have a much clearer picture of their possible ideologies. Or "fight the good fight" -- what are you fighting for? What against? It's easy to say "fuck you buddy, this is the world I want to live in, where one atom of justice exists" but that's just basically grandiose rhetoric. It's directionless and non-specific and just kind of Homogenized Rebellion. Against what? For what? The most coherent position seems to be "the fight for the good never ends" vs. "there's a light at the end of the tunnel, you can kill the dragon, love wins" -- and to use THE LORD OF THE FREAKIN' RINGS as a supposed example of the former not the latter is really....anyway. (I love LOTR. But an example of "you never stop fighting, there is no nice, comfortable utopia at the end, evil cannot be vanquished only beaten back" it really truly is not.)

[hushpiper]

I think maybe the issue here is specifically the conflation of hopepunk (which I would think would be the struggle between cynicism and optimism?), and the dumbass, cloying Tumblr conception of "wholesomeness". What exactly about Parks and Rec speaks to the defiant fight to cling to hope in the face of despair? Nothing? Then why the fuck is it on her list?

The aesthetic of hopepunk can be seen as part of a broader cultural embrace of “softness,” wholesomeness, and gentleness.

Ah right, because it's ~wholesome~ and ~soft~. Because it's a warm comedy with lovable characters. Except there's nothing punk about that. There's this weirdly mashed-together feel to the article; it seems like Aja's thinking of two separate things, one of which is Sam's speech in LotR, and the other of which is something more along the lines of my "for bad days" tag: sweet, fun or uplifting things to be consumed unironically to help get me through bad times. I could give you plenty of examples of both (though I prefer the former), but they're two very different things.

It's funny, because what I think hopepunk is "supposed" to mean is actually a huge story kink of mine. If you asked me instead of Aja, "hopepunk" would be stories where hope is deliberately contrasted against harsh challenges to that hope. "Punk" isn't punk unless there's some larger power or trend that you're asserting yourself against--in this case, the pressures of cynicism and despair. Hopepunk wouldn't be the opposite of grimdark at all--just grimdark with a different conclusion, which is a thin, thin line. It's "hope" because hope is its ultimate destination; it's "punk" because in order to get there, in order for hope to have any meaning, you have to take a long swallow from the grimdark keg.

I don't know what "comfort", "coziness" or "kawaii culture" have to do with that.

And honestly, her attempts to make rom-coms and hygge fit into the same slot as eternal resistance against oppressive forces come off... weird, shallow, tacky. Which I suspect is the real issue: "hopepunk" is frankly a pretty straightforward, emotion-based trope (character feels trapped and hopeless, character decides to embrace hope despite still being trapped: hopepunk!), but by giving it a name, it's become conflated with the particular subculture that named it, with all its value judgments and weird-ass purity culture baggage.

Or maybe what I've described is too broad, or maybe not broad enough (is Aja describing a genre, or a trend, or a new subculture?), and at this point, "hopepunk" as a term is so specific as to be hopelessly entwined with the Tumblr culture that spawned it, permanently tainted with Tumblr's pastel-colored infantilism and simplistic black-and-white views of the world. Hands up for ~uwu pure hopepunk~ I guess. I'll be over here in my corner with The Black Parade.

* I think I agree with @syncytio that this is really more of a trope than a genre, anyway. Especially if we're going to be comparing and contrasting it to grimdark, which also is not a genre--and which, like hopepunk and all other tropes, is pretty subjective.

[syncytio]

Fuck, man, at this stage I don't think Aja knows what hopepunk is, just thinking of jumping on the bandwagon. You know, like how she writes about fandoms and fanfic tropes without actually...understanding it, only that suddenly it's popular.

People seem to forget the whole "punk" aspect of hopepunk. -Punk has always been reactionary, and going against the norm. It doesn't mean sweetness and light. The original essay describes radical kindness and how grubby and dirty that fight can get, which Aja just....ugh

[notasupervillain]

Grimdark I think of almost as an aesthetic choice. If I use it to describe a show, it invariably has poor lighting and dirty sets. The dark Knight rises is grimdark by my definition. Little Drummer Girl, which is about the soul destroying things spies and terrorists do to protect their people, isn't, because plenty of the cinematography is brightly lit and vivid colours. Blade Runner is grimdark. Hunger Games is not. Lots of the first movie take place in a forest!

My husband's theory is that grimdark originated in Warhammer 40k, where the first illustrator was only given a month to do the art for the entire rulebook. So he did black and white sketches of a dystopia. Making grimdark an aesthetic choice there - it's physically dark as well as dystopia.

I often but not always dislike grimdark because it feels pretentious. I get the sense that people writing Tragedies think their work is more Important than those writing Comedies. And I get the sense that people writing Grimdark feel it's more Important than Bright Dystopia. And I don't agree! Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone dealt with child abuse and classism and all sorts of serious themes without undersaturating the colours. If you want to go grimdark, you'd better have a reason for it, not just do it cause you can. I like being able to see what I'm watching.

The same applies to books, but it's easier to explain my opinions with movies.

[jesuswasbatman]

Have you seen this essay, which doesn't have a timestamp, so I don't know whether it was written in response to the Aja one, but is by the person who first coined the "hopepunk" word?

[ironed_orchid]

That's by the person who Aja interviews and quotes extensively in her article.

(Who incidentally picked a fight recently on twitter with Carmen Maria Machedo, while claiming literary fiction is more snobbish and cliquey than SFF.)

[highlyeccentric]

I don’t have the same strongly negative response to the hopepunk meme as you, but it just... never manages to appeal to me as a framework. I really enjoyed this breakdown, thanks.

[chocolatepot]

I see a lot of black and white thinking bound up in "hopepunk". A lot of "I like it, and I found value in it, therefore it is optimistic and hopepunk, and self-care is hopepunk, and so are kittens and memes".

Definitely agree. That's the core of The Tumblr Problem, as I see it - "I found value in it, therefore it is objectively good." (Combined with "I'm radical because I'm the viewpoint character.") It's not okay to enjoy something just because it speaks to you personally/hits tropes you enjoy, and to understand when other people don't or to even agree with some of the criticisms without seeing yourself as Nobly Accepting That Your Fave Is Problematic. Your comfort reading has no value unless you position it as inherently better than other people's comfort reading.

(Also, I agree with what you said about the women in your Goblin Emperor review. Much as I enjoy the book, I would have enjoyed it more if that had been handled better, even if just with the love interest.)

[are_youready]

This is a really good post, thank you for making it

[sugar_fey]

Revisiting this post because it's the only place where I feel I can fully express my seething hatred for the phrase 'soft boys' and related cutesy terminology.