My first introduction to hopepunk was a link to its inciting Tumblr post, from a friend. I was intrigued, but by the time I finished reading that post by fellow author Alexandra Rowland, I was not only hooked, but convinced: hopepunk was the elusive genre I had been searching for since I began this journey in 2014.
So what is hopepunk?
It encompasses just about every walk of life, and they are all tied together with a silver thread of thought, a belief, a way of looking at the world. It is a way of thinking that I have personally ascribed to for most of my life, one which I refer to as "pessimisic optimism": the thought that yes, things can be pretty awful, but that will never mean they can't be improved. I've scoured the internet for others' thoughts on hopepunk and found that it is, as most things are these days, a pretty polarizing concept. Those who approve of it embrace it wholeheartedly, while others are quick to refer to it as "liberal nonsense" and "a word for something we didn't even need". (Most of those were comments in comments sections or forum posts, and were taken at face value. I have yet to find a longform. coherent article which has anything detrimental to say about hopepunk, which seems to say something in itself. Alexandra Rowland has this to say about it in her essay "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and The Empire of Unsheathed Knives":
So what is hopepunk?
It encompasses just about every walk of life, and they are all tied together with a silver thread of thought, a belief, a way of looking at the world. It is a way of thinking that I have personally ascribed to for most of my life, one which I refer to as "pessimisic optimism": the thought that yes, things can be pretty awful, but that will never mean they can't be improved. I've scoured the internet for others' thoughts on hopepunk and found that it is, as most things are these days, a pretty polarizing concept. Those who approve of it embrace it wholeheartedly, while others are quick to refer to it as "liberal nonsense" and "a word for something we didn't even need". (Most of those were comments in comments sections or forum posts, and were taken at face value. I have yet to find a longform. coherent article which has anything detrimental to say about hopepunk, which seems to say something in itself. Alexandra Rowland has this to say about it in her essay "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and The Empire of Unsheathed Knives":
There are no heroes and no villains. There are just people. That’s hopepunk: Whether the glass is half full or half empty, what matters is that there’s water in that glass. And that’s something worth defending.
So why are my novels hopepunk. and not urban fantasy, as I previously attributed them? Simple: hopepunk is the thread that they all share. From the Desk of Buster Heywood's eponymous and unlikely hero defends his little corner of Aviario from the corrupt forces trying to bend it out of shape, because it is his, and he believes it can be better. He doesn't have any magic at his disposal, but these decisions will lead him to people who do: people like Troy and Ral from In The Cards, who do their part to solve a string of disappearances, or like The Proper Bearing's Nicholas, who leaves his home behind in pursuit of his own answers, and in hope that he can help stop the people who turned his own world upside down. The Organization which Ral - and several other characters, omitted for the sake of spoilers - belong to is the very core of hopepunk: they believe in maintaining the balance of magic in the world, that everything has its time and purpose. They believe that in order to do good, sometimes you have to be a little bad... and no member embodies this philosophy more than the only character who has appeared in every single novel to date.
I didn't even plan it that way, to be honest. He sneaks into my outlines, at every chance he gets, whether I like it or not. There just always seems to be a place that he fits. He showed up to assist Buster under one of his many nicknames: The Spanner. As Ral's half-hearted mentor, we know him by his favorite name: Crowley. And we get a bit of a glimpse of his past as a former gallery owner when he helps Nicholas in tracking down his friends' kidnappers. No matter where and when he shows up, Crowley is quite happy to get his hands dirty if it means trouble for the people who cause trouble. He is as punk as punk gets, working for a group who is as hopeful as hope can get. If that isn't hopepunk, I don't know what is.
When it comes right down to it, hopepunk has been my personal aesthetic for a very long time. Examples that Rowland gives, such as Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, Star Trek ... all of these are things which I embraced as a book-and-film-loving Younger Me, stitching them into the patchwork quilt which would become my taste. I liked my fictional friends to be put up against insurmountable odds, to go through terrible things, to live in imperfect worlds. And I didn't always like it when they found perfect happy endings, either. As I grew older and learned more about the way the world is, I wanted what I read on the page to still ring true. Not everything could be put right, but as long as something could still survive and thrive, that was good enough for me. It's why I'm adamant that people who have defined hopepunk in other articles, such as Vox's piece defining the genre for those who hadn't found it through Tumblr, have missed the biggest hopepunk example of all: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. They start out as children's books, but evolve along with their protagonists to teach some important lessons about what "good vs. evil" really amounts to outside the pages of a book or, if you aren't a reader, the easily bingeable confines of a phenomenal, very faithfully created Netflix series.
I have long said that I aspire for my own series to be as tightly-woven as Snicket's books (attributing the talent falsely to his literary representative, adult author Daniel Handler), because there are plot points for the final books scattered liberally and cleverly throughout each Unfortunate Event. While I think I'm doing nicely on that front (wait and see!), I didn't realize that I'd carried along that same spirit. So while Buster, Ral, Nick, and this year's newcomer, Annick, may not have lives as tumultuous and dire as the Baudelaire orphans. they do share the same indominable spirit: the spirit at the core of hopepunk. I'll leave you with one final quote of Rowland's, from the Vox article mentioned earlier:
“Hopepunk is a feeling, and the feeling has been around for ages — I didn’t invent the feeling, I just put a word on it. All throughout history you can find examples of people standing up to terrifying regimes and holding the line against them, and surviving against all odds just by force of sheer, bloody-minded obstinacy.”
Standing up and surviving ... in the end, isn't that what the best stories are about? I like to think so. If you do, too ... if you haven't already crossed the town lines into Aviario, you might find it worth a visit. If you have any personal favorite examples of hopepunk, or thoughts on the genre, I'd love to hear them! Please leave them in the comments below ... I may end up with some things to add to my growing read & watch list!
Until next week, friends....
Until next week, friends....
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