Fine, I read the hopepunk explainer (vox.com/2018/12/27/181…) and yes I have feelings.
There are a lot of ways to hit this thing: the Hollywood logic; the disinterest in the subaltern; the poor choice of inspirational texts. But I wanna zoom in on this bit, specifically.
There are a lot of ways to hit this thing: the Hollywood logic; the disinterest in the subaltern; the poor choice of inspirational texts. But I wanna zoom in on this bit, specifically.
Hopepunk is useless for motivating real political change bc it's directionless. There's no explicit end goal. To borrow language from a piece I wrote earlier this year, "I believe I can do things" might be fuel for some, but it's not a specific destination.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the line "Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength." How can you hold this and also think hopepunk is applicable to your particular ethos? Doesn't _everyone_ believe something?
And the answer for the milquetoast, status-quo-nostalgic, US center left "resistance" is no. Anyone who disagrees with them is "a russian bot." They cannot contend with the possibility that others may have arrived in genuine and sincere, but different, beliefs.
There are two outcomes from this. First, the left is dismissed as disingenous, and their strongly held beliefs are called attention-seeking showmanship (just look at McCaskill's recent lines about ACO.)
Second, and as important: It underestimates the right, esp. the far right
Second, and as important: It underestimates the right, esp. the far right
It would be so much easier to believe that those who disagree with us about the world are just fakers, and you know, there certainly are liars and rhetoricians out there. But they are still driven by a worldview. Failing to engage with that worldview isn't hopeful, it's cowardly
And look, I like hope. @Friends_Table just did a 140 hour season ALL ABOUT hope. But one thing we learned doing that was that hope is never netural, worth praising on its own. Noone just "hopes." Everyone "hopes for" something. What is that something? That's their politics.
Anyone who says otherwise, anyone who simply "hopes," either hasn't outlined their own vision for the future yet or they're pining for some imagined, unspoken past where things were (for them) more stable. Push on this. Make them elaborate. Everyone invovled will be better for it
And if (like many) you're frazzled by this pushback from me, please sit with that for a few. _Especially_ if you're a creator who wants to make "hopeful" work, which again, you knwo know I actively do. What do your characters hope for, specifically? Who do they hope against?
For the record, the one thing about Rowland's expanded comments on hopepunk here that land for me is this. I just actually wish more of the "foundational texts" for the genre actually recognized/leveraged this perspective
Last note on this for people who (like me) want to make "hopeful" works. You owe it to yourselves to consider stuff that does not hope, & I don't mean the strawman of "grimdark." Find the afro-pessimists, postcolonial, & subaltern writers who do not see redemption on the horizon
Your hopeful stories, music, movies, comics, whatever, will all be better, more powerful, and more precise for having considered the perspectives of those who (non-ironically) believe there is no way to incrementally reform fundamental problems in our culture from within.
