Against hopepunk
Dec. 30th, 2018 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeIt'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:
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:
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 forcoffeeandink 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.
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.
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:38 pm (UTC)*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.
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:47 pm (UTC)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.
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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:51 am (UTC)Though picturing John Calvin on tumblr gets me through.
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Date: 2018-12-30 02:22 am (UTC)(Calvin and Tumblr's nsfwbot would totally be besties, tho.)
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Date: 2018-12-30 06:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 09:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 10:00 am (UTC)But you need quite an author to pull that off.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:44 am (UTC)Hear hear!
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Date: 2018-12-30 02:53 am (UTC)Yes, thank you.
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:42 pm (UTC)(Also: I think I throw up in my mouth a little every time I hear someone use “comfy” unironically. Gak.)
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:49 pm (UTC)(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.)
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 06:40 am (UTC)There's a Youtube essayist called Kyle Kallgren who described the current trend for nostalgia and hating everything that might challenge it such as the new She-Ra cartoon as "adults who are furious that they are no longer children," and I'm starting to wonder if that applies to a lot of tumblr culture such as the cutesy twee stuff as well.
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:35 pm (UTC)(I realise a lot of it is self-directed by teens, but I HATES IT PRECIOUS.)
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:04 am (UTC)Uncomfy to me - when I think to use it - means "I feel like this is setting up something that will squick me", but it has a connotation of wrong, as though things *should* be comfy. Whereas squick is absolutely a comment about one's personal taste/reaction and makes no statement about the value of the text.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:33 am (UTC)It's that whole "you have to curate my enjoyment" thing, wrapped up in cutesy language.
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:52 pm (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2018-12-29 10:54 pm (UTC)And sometimes you need to go through the darkness to earn your happy ending!
Do you also start to worry that there's something fundamentally wrong with you? Or is that just me?
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 08:59 pm (UTC)I guess I don't like the notion that reading should always be a 'comfy' experience. Part of why I read is to expose myself to varying perspectives and experiences in the world, and sometimes that means reading something that challenges my worldview or makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't think you should keep reading something that makes you miserable if you don't want to (I've certainly nope'd out of many a book for various reasons), but to say that everything should be 'wholesome' feels to me like covering your ears and going "LALALA NOT LISTENING" about the state of the world.
Edit: I also feel like something is wrong with me sometimes when I see absolutist statements on tumblr. Stuff like "oh, women want to see soft boys in sweaters!" Uh, no, give me shirtless Chris Hemsworth, please. Or how it's hard to find F/F stuff that isn't soft, pastel (and mostly white) aesthetic. Argh, give me complex or difficult relationships between women, please!
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 10:57 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:00 pm (UTC)Maybe some video games?
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:26 pm (UTC)However, I found Albert Camus's The Plague to be uplifting, because even though nearly everyone dies, while they live, they try to support each other, and the message I took away was: "People are worth fighting for, even if it's a losing battle."
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 12:50 am (UTC)The required reading of 1984 is going on 40 years ago, for me, and I've deliberately put as much of it as I could out of my head. But I recently came across an analysis of the book aimed at high school students that pointed out that since there's a glossary at the end of the book, explaining Winston's vocabulary, and that this glossary was written in the future. So therefore, the regime that Winston was living under must have been defeated. Therefore, the book is actually happy.
But since Orwell never showed us how civilization moved past that, that doesn't give the reader anything to hang their hope on, so to speak. There's no scaffolding or even architect's drawings to support that idea.
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:55 am (UTC)Yeah, Atwood does a similar thing at the end of Handmaid's Tale -- altho her ending is much less awful -- with the symposium in the future talking about the book we've just read, and we know from just reading Offred's story that obviously she made it out and told someone. (Which is at odds with the very stream-of-consciousness day to day diaristic ((sp)) quality of the narrative, but anyway.) But yeah, like you say, there's no evidence in either Atwood or Orwell to show how civilization moved on from that nadir, so there's a kind of hollow quality to the reassurance.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 02:04 am (UTC)Basically, because Newspeak fails to "take" and replace English (ref. the subplot about the "revised dictionary" in the book), historical literature is still available, and thus the Party's mission to basically reshape the populace's psyche into unthinking compliance never comes to pass. So the "hope to hang one's hat on" is a refusal to reduce the world to simplistic black-and-white terms, a refusal to abandon constructs like love and family, a refusal to abandon art and literature and history, and so on.
It's also worth remembering there were apparently two different editions of 1984 with two different endings in circulation in Orwell's lifetime; one in which Winston is "broken" and one in which he isn't. Its unknown which printing is the "correct" one---the more depressing ending is the most common in circulation now, but notably not the version that, for example, the film was based on---but Orwell did make statements to the effect he'd intended the book to have a less bleak ending that most people took it to have. It's also worth remembering that Winston himself is a member of the Party, and so is pretty much everyone he interacts with, an thus is an unreliable narrator. There are plenty of hints throughout the book that Party ideology is not particularly prevalent or accepted among the proles, for example, thus leading to an eventual revolution and overthrow of Ingsoc.
(Sorry to tl;dr, but I have Strong Opinions on this book and how I think it's done very dirty by forcing schoolkids to read it... Ditto Lord of the Flies, for that matter. D:)
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:28 pm (UTC)(Sorry to tl;dr, but I have Strong Opinions on this book and how I think it's done very dirty by forcing schoolkids to read it... Ditto Lord of the Flies, for that matter. D:)
Don't apologize. I like literary rants, even if I don't like the literature they're ranting about.
...And I have similarly strong feelings about Shakespeare, and how his work is also done dirty by school curricula.
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Date: 2018-12-30 10:11 am (UTC)I couldn't find and peace in hope, because I did (and do) believe that there's no happy ending coming. But I couldn't stop myself from fighting for it anyway. And most philosophies I found said you can't fight without hope. There was something incredibly comforting in finding someone who said that you don't need hope to keep going, and even to keep sacrificing and fighting.
On that note, any recommendations for what Camus to start with?
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 11:48 pm (UTC)George Orwell didn't have copy and paste tech available to him, but he might as well have. I gave up a little over half-way through, because I didn't want to have to sit through the same torture twice.
...And then, I learned that Orwell was dying of tuberculosis when he was writing that, and thought: "Well, that explains it!" all his energy was taken up with being sick, and he didn't have anything left to imagine a different ending.
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 10:54 am (UTC)XCOM as a purely pessimistic game?
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 11:46 pm (UTC)SERIOUSLY
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:25 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:33 pm (UTC)Three of the people you just mentioned are women, that's a strong point against them.
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.
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Date: 2018-12-29 11:42 pm (UTC)RIGHT
RIGHT
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.
HEH. -- And there's another movie, Das Boot, which I love because it's incredibly well done technically, but it's like the opposite of R1 -- there's a similar kind of ending but it just makes you want to punch through the screen.
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Date: 2018-12-30 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 05:50 am (UTC)I think the less gut-punching ending was the one they did first and then decided wasn't going to work with the intended theme of the story they were telling, which was essentially spun from the (subsequent-in-time-but-this-theme) line "many bothans died to get us this information."
(I'd love to see the original cut, though.)
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Date: 2018-12-31 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 05:03 am (UTC)The book I really liked for how it expressed something I thought was a (bleak) useful and important point about dystopian societies - most people aren't going to turn out to be heroes of the resistance, and will often do little or nothing heroic, because when it gets that bad, just surviving and looking after a few people who are close to you takes so much, and resisting is so dangerous with such horrible consequences, and there are so few opportunities to do it successfully, that it rarely happens. A lot of dystopian fiction is the backdrop for the story of being an awesome heroic revolutionary, and can make it almost appealing to have things get that bad, or invite people to be really judgmental about all of the ordinary people who don't become revolutionary heroes, and I liked the story being about a woman who said what she was supposed to, mostly did what she was supposed to, and didn't become a rebel hero, and it making total sense why she reacted that way.
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Date: 2018-12-30 06:36 am (UTC)A lot of dystopian fiction is the backdrop for the story of being an awesome heroic revolutionary, and can make it almost appealing to have things get that bad, or invite people to be really judgmental about all of the ordinary people who don't become revolutionary heroes
I loathe that later attitude, SO MUCH. And bringing back Solnit into it (because I love Solnit) a lot of the time the real helpful heroism isn't the one individual doing the Huge Dramatic Gesture, but a lot of 'little people' banding together to do one immense coordinated thing, like the Katrina rescues.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, there needs to be organization and coordination, not just "I personally will be heroic", and taking action is often heavily about things like figuring out what kind of action is worth taking when, and pushing past awkwardness and doubts and "Is it really worth the risk when I don't know how much of a difference it makes?", and a lot messier and less cinematic than people think.
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Date: 2018-12-30 10:07 pm (UTC)I've noticed a trend where people approach activism as though it's their opportunity to live out their personal Mockingjay fantasy, which is so not what effective activism is about and also a misreading of The Hunger Games, because Katniss didn't set out to be this heroic figure, it was a largely a persona created for her for propaganda purposes.
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Date: 2018-12-31 12:05 am (UTC)I know what you mean about the Mockingjay fantasy. And like you said, the story was very much not that, it was about a costly revolution with flawed and less-than-trustworthy leaders using a troubled teenager as propaganda and her suffering horribly in multiple ways, but a lot of people act like it's actually possible and feasible to be propaganda!Katniss.
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Date: 2018-12-31 09:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 12:37 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:23 am (UTC)Bonus points if you can turn them into the Team Mom! And/or the Matchmaker!
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Date: 2018-12-30 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:08 am (UTC)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
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Date: 2018-12-30 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 09:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 06:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 06:53 am (UTC)That hopepunk was more like - working to make hope possible in an apocalyptic situation as a radical act. There is nothing comfortable or comforting or easy or soft about it. To maintain hope in the face of overwhelming odds (Rogue One), to trust in the general goodness of humans in society as punk.
It is ok to not be punk! It is ok to want comfort and gentleness and promise of an easy future in one's life/fiction/consumables. In the moralising spaces is this seen as conservative? and therefore to maintain their sense of self identity as liberal/progressive they have to reframe their fiction choices and daily lives as also radical and progressive?
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:12 am (UTC)In the moralising spaces is this seen as conservative? and therefore to maintain their sense of self identity as liberal/progressive they have to reframe their fiction choices and daily lives as also radical and progressive?
Someone seriously needs to throw that Emma Goldman quote at them, and the real one, not the T-shirt slogan:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]
Like, THIS IS NOT A BRAND-NEW PROBLEM, FOLKS! PEOPLE HAVE DISCUSSED THIS BEFORE. But one of the really maddening things about Tumblr is like this wilfull blindness to look at anything historical (because Old stuff = Conservative and = Bad?) and to try to reinvent the wheel with building blocks.
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Date: 2018-12-30 05:37 pm (UTC)Yes! Except that there's a weird dichotomy in Tumblr culture where you can only choose between "everything historical was bad and oppressive, don't look at it unless you're going to condemn" and "you know that thing from history? Actually it was completely amazing and feminist and perfect and pure." Use whichever supports your purpose.
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Date: 2018-12-30 10:18 pm (UTC)I had to block a post about Ancient Egypt because it had so much misinformation I would cringe whenever it came onto my dash.
Don't get me started on the "this ~exotic~ culture was/is so feminist and cool!" posts which often involve Western people shouting down people who are actually from said cultures if they dare to point out that this view is lacking in nuance. Also, everything can be directly compared to socio-political situations in the US. EVERYTHING.
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Date: 2018-12-31 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 09:12 am (UTC)I really like that idea.
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Date: 2019-01-01 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:11 am (UTC)“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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 04:57 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 03:34 am (UTC)nods My own emotional reactions tend to be a mix of the two, needing just the right mix of dark and light. Which can be hard to navigate, and makes me annoyed by both "everything should be soothing"/"everything should be dark".
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Date: 2018-12-30 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 03:31 am (UTC)nods It being associated with progressiveness isn't new either, as I recall. I'm pretty there's been "depressing fiction is counterrevolutionary" etc.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:39 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:42 am (UTC)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.
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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:46 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:52 am (UTC)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).
Yeah! Dark 'n' gritty isn't inherently bad, it's just been overvalued for the last decade or so.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:58 am (UTC)And I think tumblr sees overvalued = bad, which is hilarious because tumblr fandom overvalues everything. I mean, yeah interrogate books that seems to delight in the hopelessness without any other redeeming qualities but don't hate on an entire genre.
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Date: 2018-12-30 04:50 am (UTC)God, this! They're very binary about things, and when something gets overvalued, it's seen as moving it from Good to Bad, so the same people who were praising it through the skies when they realized it had good qualities are suddenly declaring it cancelled because...it has flaws! Like there's a whole range of opinions other than "This is perfect, what's wrong with everyone that you're sleeping on this?" or "This is bad and you should feel bad for liking it"!
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:03 am (UTC)Yeah, I think it's seen as Macho, and as More True than the 'triumph of the human spirit' type stories, when in reality a lot of the time those are two sides of the same coin.
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Date: 2018-12-30 03:34 am (UTC)This is what I thought hopepunk was. More of a way a character reacts to their surroundings than a genre in and of itself.
I can think of dozens of character moments that make me think hopepunk, but apparently I've misunderstood what it was.
(I was seeing it more like Kelsier at the end of The Final Empire in the Mistborn series or Egwene throughout The Gathering Storm in the Wheel of Time series.)
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 08:10 pm (UTC)I love radical kindness and spiteful hope. I have a handful of authors where I'll read most anything they put out because these are recurrent themes in their writing.
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Date: 2019-01-01 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 03:40 am (UTC)It's an ongoing theme in a lot of Brandon Sanderson's work. The Emperor's Soul, The Final Empire, Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, and Warbreaker in particular I think. I really enjoy that the motive of one of the protagonists in Warbreak could be summed up as "Because fuck you, that's why" and she's amazing for it.
The Watch books for Discworld.
I haven't finished the series yet, but The Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee.
Eliza Crewe wrote a book called Cracked that I believe is now a series. It's been like 5 years since I've looked at it, but it sticks with me because the protagonist is from a born-evil race and has to eat souls to survive. I remember it being good.
YMMV on Seanan McGuire, Pippa DaCosta, Will Wight's Travelers Gate series and Elder Empire series, and maybe Tamara Piece.
And I wanna say Diane Duane just because "Fairest and Fallen, greeting and defiance" is such an iconic line.
I mean, YMMV, on everything. Very subjective proto-subgenre.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:48 am (UTC)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....
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Date: 2018-12-30 02:45 am (UTC)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?
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Date: 2018-12-30 03:04 am (UTC)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!)
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Date: 2018-12-30 09:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 03:19 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:05 am (UTC)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.'
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:16 am (UTC)That was why my husband quit The Walking Dead (too grisly for me to watch) -- he just said "NOPE" after Glen bought it -- and why I quit buying Saga in trade even well before the notorious before-hiatus "totally not final" issue we got.
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Date: 2018-12-30 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 04:26 am (UTC)...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
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Date: 2018-12-30 04:41 am (UTC)Is that short enough to put on a t-shirt? :D
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 11:32 am (UTC)And YES to the sense of compromise and moral complicity that comes with every choice I make in every aspect of my life.
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Date: 2018-12-31 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 04:39 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 04:46 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 02:17 am (UTC)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?
yeah, I tend to think that thinking that the Other Side doesn't sincerely believe in their ideology is doing Resistance a fundamental disservice. And you know, I would like more than one atom of justice, but that's just me.
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Date: 2018-12-30 08:10 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:45 pm (UTC)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
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:51 pm (UTC)(I've been in totalitarian countries, and places where horrible things happen and keep happening, and two things that get used to maintain the horrible status quo are encouraging denial of how bad it is, and encouraging hopelessness about it ever getting better. "Look at all of these nice and pleasant things! Okay, not for those people, but they're all flawed and disruptive and have done things wrong, so don't look at them! Look at all of these good things, enjoy how you can have pleasant and comfortable things and don't think too hard!" is up next to "Don't think you can change things, it's all going to go wrong, accept failure and defeat, change for the better is hopeless" on the list of ways to maintain the status quo.)
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Date: 2018-12-30 09:53 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2018-12-30 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 01:05 pm (UTC)(Who incidentally picked a fight recently on twitter with Carmen Maria Machedo, while claiming literary fiction is more snobbish and cliquey than SFF.)
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Date: 2018-12-30 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 02:18 am (UTC)Wait what?
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Date: 2019-01-01 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 06:29 am (UTC)Rowland's take on the concept is better, but I still dislike it. She describes a lot of things I really like and think are valuable in fiction, but the tone is like nails on a chalkboard.
Having said that, I think Rowland and I just don't click -- she's very much of the school of thought that says fan fiction is literature and literary fiction (which I think exists about as much as "grimdark" exists, but anyway) has no value, and I think that whole stance is a bit embarrassing.
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Date: 2018-12-31 06:53 am (UTC)she's very much of the school of thought that says fan fiction is literature and literary fiction (which I think exists about as much as "grimdark" exists, but anyway) has no value, and I think that whole stance is a bit embarrassing.
Oh god, that stance is so embarrassing. I love fanfiction. I love writing it, I love reading it. A lot of fanfiction is of a very high standard. However, original fiction and fanfiction fulfil very different functions and needs. They're two different mediums, and that effects the writing. I've noticed that a lot of fanfiction doesn't include many details of settings because there is no need to, the audience can already visualise it. That familiarity and visualisation is a key difference. You don't have to put down original fiction to praise fanfiction.
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Date: 2019-01-01 02:30 am (UTC)....//just cries
(That grates on me as much as the people who insist the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy and Hamlet are all fanfic. EVERYTHING IS FANFIC AND NOTHING HURTS! And I'm just like, no, no no no, it's not the same concept, those people were not doing the same thing. ARGH.)
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Date: 2019-01-01 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 06:22 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 07:26 pm (UTC)