So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
Here I am with more addendums to this post: Seems like a lot of people are saying the word “noblebright” at me, and I just want to be really clear about this: Noblebright is not hopepunk. Noblebright does not espouse the same ideals that hopepunk does. They are two distinct, separate, coexisting things.
Noblebright is Arthurian legends. The world is a good place, people are essentially good. The codes of chivalry are in full effect. People in positions of authority are there because they are wise, prudent, caring leaders. They rule because they deserve to rule. They protect the weak, they uphold their ideals, there’s people practicing chaste courtly love in every bower and garden. Things are fine, and people have adventures in which they triumph because (see: all of the above).
Hopepunk is (as many wonderful people in the comments have pointed out) Discworld: The world is the world. It’s really good sometimes and it’s really bad sometimes, and it’s sort of humdrum a lot of the time. People are petty and mean and, y’know, PEOPLE. There are things that need to be fixed, and battles to be fought, and people to be protected, and we’ve gotta do all those things ourselves because we can’t sit around waiting for some knight in shining armor to ride past and deal with it for us. We’re just ordinary people trying to do our best because we give a shit about the world. Why? Because we’re some of the assholes that live there.
Examples of hopepunk media include:
Guardians of the Galaxy: “Why do I want to save the galaxy? Because I’m one of the idiots who lives there?”
Thor Ragnarok: “Asgard is not a place… It is a people.”
Leverage: “Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide… leverage.”
The Librarians: (“I have seen you all die so many times when it didn’t matter, I can’t let it happen now that it does.” “What do you need us to do?”)
Scorpion.: (”If you try to tell me about the greater good one more time, I will hit you.”)
Star Wars: (”There is good in him still.”)
Star Trek (the original universe): (honestly, there’s no one single quote, but like, the entire damn thing is solid hopepunk.)
Wonder Woman: (”It is not about deserve, it is about what you believe.” also “Who will sing for us, Charlie?”)
Also, Mad Max: Fury Road. Angharad is a hopepunk queen, and Furiosa and Max get pushed and pulled on to that path by the end of the movie through their connection to each other and the people they fight with.
More HopePunk quotes, cause I think we all need them:
It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes
rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I
haven’t abandoned my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.— The Diary of Anne Frank
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.
If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake
levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.
This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without
exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re
massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had
billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?— Andy Weir, The Martian
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin,
or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if
they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother
would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who
are helping.”— Fred Rogers
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime
yet for every criminal there are ten thousand honest, decent, kindly
men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could
not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the
obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the
patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I
believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that
goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.— Robert A. Heinlein
Sure, humans kill each other. We kill for passion, madness, rage, love,
war, and lord knows other things. And yet, we’ve got six billion people
running around the planet. Almost as if people who kill other people are
the exception rather than the rule.— Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall Marville #4 review
“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” – Robert Ardrey
Mom and I were talking about traveling to different planets and colonies on Mars and meeting aliens and stuff like that, and she paused and said, “If life on Earth ends and we need to flee to a different planet, we’ll all need to work together. But also the first time a man pulls some shit, all the women need to murder him so everyone’s clear that we’re restarting society and we’re not bringing that shit with us. We’re not doing this again.”
are you saying that engagement rings aren’t just cool rocks
They sloth is my favorite
STORY TIME!
Ok so when I was doing a security job on a college campus, the geology club on said campus was having their mineral and fossil sale (which is where the club gets the vast majority of its funds for the year). They had some really cool shit but their sales techniques were… uh, they were bad, just really terrible. They set up the tables, put all their stuff out, hung a sign up… and then sat there, occasionally mentioning quietly to one or two passersby “Hey we’re having our mineral and fossil sale if you want any.” Very boring, overly factual, not very attention grabbing.
Now I’m a fuckin nerd so I’m all over this shit (the sale was literally a foot away from my security post so I wasn’t even getting in trouble for spending literal hours ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the really cool stuff they had). And me being the type of nerd who must SHARE ALL THE THINGS when I find cool stuff (and who also has 18 years of customer service/retail experience to draw on), I start trying to get some of the literal hundreds of students walking by to get some of the cool things. The club only needed a couple hundred bucks and we were on the largest campus in the state so they should have been making their goal easy but almost no one was biting. So my “must share the thing” nerdiness teamed up with my “must help all the people”-ness and I did my best to pitch in and get them more sales.
Now, it was two days before valentines and a lot of the people walking by were dudes. So I start trying to get them interested with comments like “hey come check out the cool stuff you could get for your bae!”
One group of dudes paused but it didn’t seem like they were gonna stop and get any of the cool things, so I go “No, seriously, chicks dig this shit, you literally cannot go wrong here. There’s fossils and cute little carvings of manta rays and kitties, and literal gemstones here; that box is full of fucking EMERALDS that are 3 for $5. GET. SOME.”
They didn’t believe me that the ladies would go nuts for “a bunch of shiny rocks.” So I decide to prove it to them. And in the most booming voice I can muster (and I can muster quite a bit after a decade of choir classes) and yell “THEY HAVE SHINY ROCKS OVER HERE AND THEY’RE REALLY COOL!”
Literally instantly, three separate groups of ladies look straight at the tables and make a beeline for them, all of them saying some variation of “Wait, did you say shiny rocks? WHERE?! WHAT KIND?! OMG!” Suddenly a dozen or so different gals (and several dudes), who seconds ago were only thinking about getting to class, stopped in their tracks to detour to the table full of shiny rocks. Only two left without buying at least one thing.
The dudes I’d been talking to before were bewildered but convinced, so they start looking for the best shiny rocks they can get to give their SOs. Several of them came back a few days later to inform me that my seemingly ludicrous advice of “get them shiny rocks” had gotten them laid or scored them a date.
So, remember kids, GET THE BAE A SHINY ROCK. That shit WORKS.
I was in line at Aldi and this girl with two toddlers in front of me had her card declined and she looked so fucking sad and said “let me call my husband real quick” and it was only 18 dollars, so I just paid for it, and she was very sweet and then as she walked off, the lady behind me said `”You know that was probably a scam, right?” and like, even if it was, like what a sad fucking scam, right? 18 dollars at the Aldi. If you’re “scamming” me for some Tyson chicken and apple juice and cauliflower, then just take my fucking money.
“A scam” people are fucking wild.
This happened to me, too. A woman had used WIC for the majority of her stuff (which I say from personal experience is such a long and embarrassing process) and to buy the remainder of her groceries, which included diapers and wipes, she used a card, and it got declined. I bought the other $30 of her groceries because hey, I’ve been there, and now I’m not. She was extremely emotional and began to cry and even hugged me. My mom called me on the drive home and could tell I had been crying myself, asked what was wrong, and when I told her what happened, she berated me for being “duped.” I couldn’t believe she could be so disappointed in one of her children for doing something- nice? Is that the hill you want to die on? Getting mad about people needing groceries?
I once paid for a woman’s bill at the vet…it wasn’t a big one, but she was trying to pay for some medication for her dog, and her card was declined. And her lip started trembling, and she says “I don’t get paid until Tuesday, would he be ok until then?”
So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.
And I don’t care if it was a scam or not. Just do nice things for people sometimes.
Do good recklessly.
I think “Do good recklessly” would be fantastic word art to hang on one’s wall. Artistic people, go!
DustAndFundamentalists 