lizbee | Against hopepunk

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.