lizbee | (Reply)

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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.