Continuing our trend of discussing subgenres, today’s topic is Hopepunk. How is it different from utopian fiction, and why can’t anyone agree on what it means?
Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to the Fantasy Inn podcast, where we share our love for all things fantasy and discuss the broader speculative fiction industry. Welcome to the Fantasy Inn.
Jenia: Uh this is another episode of uh the Fantasy Inn podcast.Today will be joining us: me, Jenia, and also my friends… Tam, you’re next!
Tam: Oh, I’m Tam! (laughs)
Travis: I’m Travis.
Kop: I’m Kop.
Travis: So today we’ll be talking about hopepunk. Alexandra Rowlands, author of the fantasy novel A Conspiracy of Truths, first coined the term back in 2017 in a Tumblr post, saying: The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk.
In December of 2018, Rowlands elaborated a bit further in a live radio episode by 1A called “Do Get Your Hopes Up, Rocking Out with Hopepunk.” To paraphrase a bit, she said that grimdark approaches human nature as the glass is half empty. Everyone has a core of petty selfishness that can’t be overcome, similar to, say, Game of Thrones. The total opposite of that would be noblebright, where everyone has an essential core of goodness and light, similar to say, Arthurian myth and moralistic legends.
Hopepunk falls somewhere in the middle. It’s not about whether the glass is half full or half empty, so much as there’s water in the glass to begin with. We’re all capable of both good and evil. So with that intro, does anyone have any thoughts on hopepunk?
Jenia: I thought we’re doing all the books that we’re reading this week first.
Travis: You’re right. (everyone laughs)
Kop: What are we, a book blog?
Travis: Okay, Jen, what have you been reading?
Jenia: So I’m reading a Russian book right now, a Russian fantasy book called Finist – Yasnyy Sokol ( Финист – Ясный Сокол by Андрей Рубанов). And the author is Andrey Rubanov. So it’s translated to Finist – The Bright Eagle, no, The Bright Falcon.
And it’s a book based on a traditional Russian fairy tale of the same name. So the book is only out in Russian so far. So actually it’s a bit useless to tell you guys about it. But I’m really excited about it. Because it’s really based on Russian culture. And specifically it’s set in pre-Christianised Russia. So it has all these old gods, the pagan mythology and so on.
And the book itself, I think is going to be a good one. I’m only at the beginning and I’m really slow at reading in Russian. So it takes me a while, but I really hope that it’s translated to English sometime because it seems to be a lot of fun so far.
Tam: Oh shit you people actually expect me to read something. I’m actually reading The Mad Ship at the moment, book two of The Liveship Traders, I started it last night and am already halfway through—which is saying something, given it’s 900 pages long—the author is Robin Hobb. Book one is Ship of Magic. Probably start there instead of with The Mad Ship. Unless you’re Kop and like reading things in the wrong order.
Kop: Hey.
Tam: But it’s really good, as you can probably guess by the fact that I’ve read half of a 900 page book in two days. And in audiobook I am listening to King’s Dark Tidings by Kel Kade. I’m not far into that yet, but it seems interesting and really well narrated, so I’ll see.
Travis: So I’m actually not reading a book at the moment. But I am listening to an audio drama, so fairly on brand for me at the moment. So what I’m listening to right now is called The Far Meridian, and that’s written by Eli Barazza, and produced by The Whisperforge. So it’s a little bit different. It’s not really plot oriented. I’d call it magical realism and maybe literary if I were entirely sure what that means.
And the basic gist is, it’s about an agoraphobic young woman who lives in a lighthouse that magically shows up in a new location every day. It’s all about the main character learning to go outside again after some personal tragedy and interact with other human beings. So it’s really beautiful so far, really emotional. I’ve been bingeing it recently, listening to each episode back to back, which is really not the best emotional decision (laughs). But it’s really powerful and I highly recommend it.
I’d also say that it’s a good example of hopepunk because, I guess tying that into our topic today a little bit, it’s very hopeful and it’s message is kind of on humanity and being able to interact with others and have relationships and kind of overcoming our own personal fears.
Kop: I am currently attempting to read Jack and the Beanstalk in Mongolian, so it’s Жек ба шидэт шош (Jek ba shidet shosh). It’s about a boy who gets the magic beans and they turn into a giant beanstalk. It’s by anonymous.
Jenia: Anonymous? (laughs)
Kop: It’s going. One day I’ll get past this first page.
Jenia: Kop and I could do, could do a whole episode about reading in a, in a language that you’re not really familiar with (laughs).
Kop: Yeah.
Jenia: It’s so sloooow.
Kop: So like I know what this word means. And I know what this word means. But I don’t know what the next word means.
Travis: Do you find yourself like having to look up words all the time, or do you just power through and hope you get the gist of the story?
Kop: Uh… Yes. I mean sometimes you can power through, but sometimes you realize like oh wait a second these two individual words together mean something completely different.
Travis: That’s interesting.
Kop: I mean it’s the same thing in like English, too.
Jenia: I’m know Eng – Russian a little bit better than Kop knows Mongolian, let’s say, but there’s definitely these words which come up which are just not used anymore. So for example, it’s like “the sacrificial altar” like people don’t do ritual sacrifices in Russia (laughs) it’s not a word I’m familiar with but–
Kop: Wait, they don’t? (laughs)
Jenia: (laughs) Maybe out in the country. Somewhere in Siberia. Now I’m just… No, no, that’s a bad stereotype to give, I guess.
Kop: No no yeah yeah yeah.
Jenia: But it’s, uh, yeah. So those kind of words, it’s actually quite nice for me to look up because I feel like oh, I’m getting in touch with my roots from 1000 years ago, I guess. Yeah. Or it’s like an actor who beats a certain drum and he runs around and tells stories. And this was popular in the Middle Ages. You know, I mean, maybe in English I know this, because I read fantasy books in English, but not- not the Russian word for sort of thing. Yeah.
Kop: They use the like, more literary language, as well. Like in English, no one is walking around, going “once upon a time.”
Tam: Speak for yourself. That sounds like how I narrate my day.
Kop: (laughs) Once upon a time, I woke up.
Travis: I guess moving a little bit on to our topic of the week. In general, hopepunk, like any subgenre, is not always easy to define. So do you guys want to share kind of how you understand hopepunk? What you think it is?
Kop: Yeah I was gonna say, just really quickly, I think to me, hopepunk is a feeling of everything is not that great. You don’t know if things will get better. But you still try. And you still try and build a sense of community to make things better. And you don’t know if it will all work out. There’s still that sense of uncertainty. But nonetheless, you still attempt, you still make that effort, to push for something better.
Travis: Yeah, okay. So I kind of think hopepunk is a little bit of a blend of utopian and dystopian genres. So one thing about utopian that I’m not always a fan of, is it tends to homogenize the world and assume everyone has the exact same needs, which may be true on a broad level, but not really true on the individual level.
A utopia might show an ideal world without any indication of how we get there, or whether it’s achievable in the first place. And on the other hand, dystopias tend to make a statement about the dangers of continuing along our current path by showing extreme examples of a future society. So books like 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, or even more recently, one of my personal favorites, 84K by Claire North. All these are examples of dystopian literature.
And I think hopepunk tries to split the difference. So it shows characters struggle against oppression found in dystopias as they journey towards a world that’s just a little bit better and a little bit closer to a utopia for everyone.
Jenia: To be honest, I think I never quite got the difference between hopepunk and noblebright and so on. I feel like people sometimes use the different terms to mean the same thing, with just some people preferring hopepunk and some people preferring noblebright or whatever the term is.
Kop: So in this article on Vox.com that talks about hopepunk, there’s a part that says: Instead, he argues that love may be beautiful, but it’s also messy and painful. And far from being naive. It’s a conscious, hard-won, and fully self aware choice. That self awareness is a vital element of hopepunk, because it sits partly in opposition to the fantasy trope known as noblebright, in which social systems are good because the leaders we choose are inherently good. The Chosen One is chosen because they’re mythically wise, noble, and just, and heroes win the day by virtue of being heroes.
So, and it goes on to talk about how noblebright gives a sense of things 100% will be better. The hero is here, the hero will save the day. And it gives the example in Lord of the Rings, it compares Aragorn as a noblebright hero, versus Sam and Frodo as the hopepunk elements. Because with Aragorn it’s a sense of this is—uh slight spoilers, I guess—Aragorn you know, is the chosen King, the one who will unite the realm of men and save the day, whereas Frodo and Sam don’t know if things will work out. They don’t know if they can even destroy this ring. But they still try. Even when they’re at the base of Mordor, they still are doubtful that things will even work out, even up to the very end, everything is in doubt for them.
And so I guess that’s the main difference that the article points out. Noblebright is certain that things will work out. And so because you have a chosen one, you have a chosen hero, whereas hopepunk is doubtful that things will work out yet, you still, you still try and you don’t have a chosen one. You don’t have a chosen hero, you just have each other.
Jenia: But I feel like, in terms of how people actually use the two terms, I don’t think there’s that much difference. Because, for example, one of the books that often comes up is The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette or rather her alias, Katherine Addison.
Yeah. And I feel like that book is, I wouldn’t know whether to classify it as noblebright or hopepunk because I don’t think that Maia, the main character there, he becomes, he’s thrust into the role of Emperor and he basically, for people who don’t know the book, he basically succeeds by being a decent guy. And a lot of people like this book because it just shows somebody succeeding not by being a plotting asshole, but just by being decent, nice, and good.
And I would say that he’s not a chosen one. But at the same time, I always see this book described as noblebright as well. So I think in terms of how people use these things, it’s such a fluid category.
Kop: Mhmm.
Travis: So I agree. I think there’s not probably a lot of different types of terms and genres that we, as like, broader fantasy and science fiction readers are familiar with that can describe positivity for the most part. We’ve got all kinds of different things like grimdark, but yeah, hopepunk and noblebright… I don’t know, specifics on the timing for when each term came about, but they’re fairly recent things.
So yeah, I think there is a lot of fluidity and overlap between what they mean and the average person disagrees on the boundaries for subgenres anyways. We’ve had a whole episode on that. I think a lot of people probably do use the terms interchangeably.
So I actually found a quote as well that kind of contrasts noblebright and hopepunk. That doesn’t mean that this is how people use those words, though. And so this is actually from Alexandra Rowland again, who coined the term. So it says: “Hopepunk knows that everything is impermanent and that nothing is promised. Noblebright says that we can eventually win the fight and have a happy ending. And hopepunk says there’s no such thing as winning and that we have to keep doing the work every single day for the rest of civilization.”
That’s an interesting thing where hopepunk is kind of how do we make the best of a bad situation, or how do we make a situation better, whether it was bad with to begin with or not. And noblebright is kind of just saying, I don’t know, being optimistic again in contrast to grimdark. So I guess my personal experience is noblebright is the direct opposition to grimdark and hopepunk is kind of a message of saying things can be better. It’s going to take work but things can and will hopefully get better.
Kop: What are your thoughts, Tam?
Tam: Um. Well, personally, I don’t think I’ve ever used the term hopepunk or noblebright before. I was supposed to look them up before we did this podcast, but I didn’t. (laughs) But effectively, I’ve just kind of reffered to both generically as feel good fantasy, which is, you know, as the name kind of suggests, fantasy that makes me feel better. And so books that kind of… inspirational or, well, hopeful I suppose, as you’ve probably guessed from the name hopepunk. Yeah.
Jenia: And you can tell that we have all these different categorization and opinions of how to call it by the fact that on The Fantasy Inn, we have no good tag for these kind of books, there is something like hopeful, nice, feel-good, and wholesome and so on. (everyone laughs) So if you try to search for our reviews and for books that fit this category on the Fantasy Inn site, you will not find them. (laughs)
Travis: We really don’t have any good tags in general, though.
Jenia: True.
Kop: Yeah, that’s a different topic. I’d say the term itself is fairly new. Alexandra Rowland, the person who coined it, actually mentions how she didn’t invent the feeling of hopepunk. She just put a name to it. But I think in terms of is there anything that is 100% pure hopepunk, I would say harkening back to the subgenre episode, things can have multiple layers to it.
So I guess in a sense, something could be noblebright and hopepunk, have threads and elements of both. Even in grimdark, in that Vox article I mentioned earlier, talks about how Game of Thrones is not hopepunk. But there’s a thread of hopepunk in the character of Jon Snow. I’ve never read Game of Thrones or seen it. So I’m going by with the article says. (everyone laughs) And trusting it.
Jenia: All the grim dark fans are going to be like *gasp* offended.
Kop: But I think in terms of classification, what is hopepunk, what do we tag as hopepunk on our blog, you just can’t. What are some examples of hopepunk materials, uh… books, movies, shows, etc. Audio dramas.
Travis: I was going to say, don’t leave out podcasts.
Kop: …and podcasts. That you think have elements of hopepunk in them.
Tam: Well the first one that comes to mind for me is Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, which starts off with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. And it’s very small scale. It’s not epic or anything. It’s focused around five or six crew members of the starship. I can’t remember exactly. It’s been a while since I read it. But it’s very focused on a very small crew and how they interact with each other. And it’s low stakes and just very character orientated about how they interact with each other. Friendships and stuff.
Travis: One thing I really liked about Becky Chambers and her books is she shows kind of this far future society where things are a lot better for most people. There’s a lot of issues with racism, and sexism, and all kinds of different things that we struggle with today. We’ve made progress on those things in her books. But we’re still not entirely there. There’s still conflict, people are still people. So there’s always going to be problems. But I liked how it showed an optimistic version of the future that’s still not perfect, if that makes sense.
Jenia: One of the books that I like the most, except for The Goblin Emperor, for hopeful books in general, is Station Eleven. It’s basically a post-apocalyptic sort of book where a huge flu has destroyed most of civilization, but the characters themselves who survive afterwards, and who we follow in the book, are actors in a little, in a little traveling acting group. And their basic idea is that without art, you’re not really living, you’re just surviving.
So they go from little little place to little place, and they put on Shakespeare, and they perform classical music and so on. And I just thought that was such a hopeful book, really, because even though, even though so many people are dead, even though so many terrible things happened, they still keep on trying to… Yeah, live and not just survive. And I thought that was, I don’t know, that just made me much more at peace, I guess, with the idea of ecological collapse in case it does happen. I don’t know that’s a weird thing to say. (laughs) But yeah, I don’t know, I just really like that book. And I really recommend it to everyone.
Kop: So I don’t have a book. I have a TV show an–bear with me–I would argue, based on what I’ve been reading about hopepunk, that the show–and game seriesl I guess–Pokemon-
Jenia: Yes, go on.
Kop: -could be classified as hopepunk. Okay, so in the article, the aforementioned article, it has a series of parameters for hopepunk. It says: a weaponized aesthetic of softness, wholesomeness or cuteness, or perhaps more generally, a mood of consciously choosing, chosen gentleness. Being soft is not a weakness. And that is a quote by Nikita Mor in a 2017 essay on softness. And she says, essentially, softness is what makes you strong. So, Pokemon are cute. A worldview that argues that the fight to build positive social systems is a fight worth fighting, an emphasis on community building through cooperation rather than conflict, a depiction of the fight to achieve human progress as something per minute with no happy end, and a sense of self awareness about weaponizing kindness and optimism.
And in one, the very first movie, Pokemon: The Movie, there’s a scene–and I want to preface this with a spoiler warning–there is a scene at the very end where all the Pokemon are fighting each other and I think Ash’s Pikachu is about to get in the middle… No, Mew and Mewtwo are fighting each other, and they’re about to blast each other with these very powerful attacks, and Ash runs into the middle of them, not knowing if everything will be alright, but still he runs out and he takes the blast and it seems like it’s the end for him. It’s very sad. But still, everyone in the community gathers together, all the Pokemon share their sorrows to revive him. End spoiler. So everything about this series deals with hopefulness deals with showing that power isn’t necessarily about brute force, that being loving, being soft, being gentle, can yield great strength, can yield great power. So that’s why I’d say Pokemon is hopepunk.
Jenia: As a counterpoint, it’s basically like dog fighting, right? In a way.
Travis: (laughs)
Kop: Wait what?
Jenia: Ash treats his Pokemon well, but most I mean, a lot of trainers don’t. And it’s quite sad in a way.
Kop: Well…
Travis: Do you know Pokemon came about kind of as a combination of Shintoism and professional wrestling? So I guess I’d like to think it’s more professional wrestling than dog fighting, but eh, I can see the similarities.
Okay, so I actually have–staying on brand for me–a few audio drama examples. So the first is called Kaleidotrope. And so this is another one where in particular, it kind of straddles noblebright, where it’s more everyone’s pretty good, happy, feel good, and hopepunk. Uh, so it’s all about a love advice radio show at a university that’s known for helping people find their soul mates. So the university kind of has this magical ability to enforce the tropes commonly found in romantic comedies. Uh and each episode, the two male radio hosts help someone sort out their love life while slowly sorting out there’s, uh, with each other along the way. So it’s really a beautiful, short… the whole thing’s only like maybe four hours long. But it’s a great romance and it’s just so wholesome. And so even if it’s not really a struggle against something like a lot of hopepunk is, it offers an example of light that people can reach towards in their own life. So it might help them struggle against injustice or issues they face in reality.
Um and another one is called Flyest Fables. So it’s a hopepunk Black fantasy series about people learning to grow up and move forward with their lives. Each character is connected by a magical book that tells stories of a fantastical other world and really, it’s just absolutely beautiful. It’s all produced and narrated and written by one guy, Morgan Givens, and he narrates it, he does different voices like professional a audiobook narrator for each character, he sings original songs that he creates in it, and it’s, it’s just incredible. Honestly, I recommend it for anyone. And so again, that’s called Flyest Fables.
Tam: Oh, yes, there was one more that I’m very fond of which fits this genre quite well. It’s Sir Thomas the Hesitant and the Table of Less Valued Knights by Liam Perrin, which is quite the long title. It’s very hopeful. It’s about a young man named Thomas Farmer, who, as his name suggests, is a farmer who goes to Camelot to become a knight. And the tales of him and the other less-valued knights as they get into all sort of different shenanigans. It’s very light-hearted and quite fun, and about their friendships with each other. So I really enjoyed that one as well.
Travis: So I haven’t actually read Sir Thomas, but my understanding is, it stays pretty true to the original Arthurian lore, doesn’t it?
Tam: Yeah, mostly pretty true. Um. If you made it a whole comedic.
Travis: (laughs)
Jenia: Shall we wrap it up?
Travis: Yeah, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of hitting a lot of stuff. So one thing I want to talk about as well is, I mean, anybody can enjoy hopepunk regardless. But in terms of target audience, or for people who probably respond the best to it, something I’ve kind of noticed is hopepunk tends to be particularly valuable towards marginalized readers, they tend to gravitate towards hopepunk because optimism is needed now more than ever.
Um you know, women, people of color, disabled people, queer people, anywhere in between… now is not the best time in the world for them. And hopepunk kind of actively pushes back against reality in that sense. So I think that audience kind of can find a particular home in hopepunk.
Jenia: Yeah that makes sense to me. I think times when your life is not best at the moment, then it’s a little bit difficult to also read some really depressing grimdark books, where things, dark things are accentuated sometimes to an unnatural extent. Whereas reading something that is more hopeful, can give you a little bit of a boost to continue fighting in your everyday life, I suppose.
Travis: And uh one last plug, I think that podcasts in the form of audio dramas or, more broadly speaking, audio fiction, are a great medium for hopepunk to be explored, because they offer kind of like self-publishing in writing for books, a lower barrier of entry into the market. And so people of any and all backgrounds can tell any story they want, the way they want to tell it. Um, and so that can lead to some really beautiful stories, especially that wouldn’t necessarily be picked up by a big publishing company or put on a TV show or filmed in a movie. I think podcasts offer a good medium for that. Okay, any final thoughts?
Kop: Goodbye.
Jenia: I have no final thoughts. (laughs)
Travis: Okay, so thanks for listening, everyone. You can find us at TheFantasyInn.com or come and join the conversation with us on Twitter, @TheFantasyInn.
