Tillie

char should have improved his ramen with mushrooms and kimchi. he might have been able to foster warmer interpersonal relationships with the clarity allowed by the additional nutrition

madocactus

sitting on the throne, as emperors do

what the hell is hopepunk it sounds like i should hate it

so I should come clean: I've been unfair to hopepunk. this isn't me saying I'm going to start being fair, but it's disclosing that you're not going to receive an unbiased or objective answer on it from me. I'm pretty open about how I personally find it to be incredibly irritating, like putting my hand on hot metal

ramble below the break

do you guys remember when people were trying to make “hopepunk” a thing for a while there . like a literary genre/genre of media

looking back on it not really a fan. seems like a very contrived 2018 liberal concept to me. feels worlds away at this point

also generally not a fan of when people see sad/grim/dark stories and go “erm. but what if it was happy instead! what if it was… optimistic” which is literally where the concept originated from so. it was terminally annoying from the beginning i guess

which isn’t to say i don’t like stories that are hopeful or kind but i think hopepunk as a specific cultural moment was kind of positioned as some sort of activism against trump which always made it feel well meaning but ultimately very silly to me

and even though lots of hopepunk content from back in the day had that kind of steven universe witch finding her neighbors lost cat in the alps vibe it’s also it’s totally incoherent as a genre because people would claim anything as “hopepunk” if it had a character doing something good despite some odds. which is a lot of stories.

stripedroseandsketchpads

It’s incoherent because it was coined in a blog post that just said “the opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. pass it on.” and then the person who made that post (an author) had to pull a definition out of their ass when asked what on earth that meant because they just made up a word and dropped it with no clarification.

And unfortunately said person (who was already known for making up shit online, sometimes about things from real life/history, and then going “Look at me, I’m an expert!”) was very obviously just winging it when they wrote the ‘manifesto’ of what this alleged genre was supposed to be like.

In my opinion “hopepunk” was doomed to be ineffective at describing any real sort of genre and hence not something people could actually attempt to write in, and instead had to retroactively apply to other works, which fit the “vibe” because it’s fundamentally reactive. It exists only in contrast to “grimdark”, another vibes-based pseudo-subgenre which is based on subjective opinions about whether something with heavy content (which can be in any number of genres—tragedy, horror, war stories, mysteries/thrillers, historical fiction, etc…) is being gratuitous/over the top with said content. “Grimdark” is also a nothingburger because people’s lines for “too much” and opinions on what’s “necessary” vary wildly (there’s not an objective line you can draw on when a tragedy is too tragic, or horror is too horrifying). Similarly, trying to pin down what the “right” amount of defiance/resistance and positivity and happy-endingness that supposedly constitutes hopepunk is a losing game because it’s basically about whether you feel like it does.

The thing that makes both of them the most subjective, though, is that unlike other genres they’re dependent on value judgments of works to categorize them. Not every tragedy is “grimdark” because is not a neutral term, it’s describing bad writing—bungling of dark topics that leaves you bummed out in a bad way, not a cathartic one. “Hopepunk” is supposed to describe good writing, a kind of Goldilocks “not too twee and saccharine, not too intense about what’s being resisted, but juuuust right”.

You can’t define either without group consensus on what is good/bad writing, which makes sense when you take into account that it was invented by a semi-professional opinion-haver who is known for doubling down on everything they say being the correct opinion no matter what. It was always just What I Say It Is so everyone will come up with a different book list and the repeats will mostly be books which are popular.

Oh and the author now lists “inventor of the hopepunk genre” as one of their credentials. Because of a 1-sentence tumblr post with a made-up word. I only include that because it’s very funny.

Your hatred against hopepunk is truly inspiring i remember your earlier posts about it

I've been on it for years. I was on it when that post reached me shortly after it was made. I will be on it when all memory of that post ozymandias' out of the collective conscious

at the core I'm just viscerally repulsed by any idea that can be summed up as "art today is degenerate and rude, so what if the REAL subversive narratives are the ones that dare to be comfortable to me" and hopepunk/cottagecore were very pervasive forms of this

while I understand the impulse to view violence and tragedy as easy to write, it requires a solipsistic view of the world where art is conjured up and presented to you, to make you feel things, to harvest your opinion of it and correct the mistakes of individual voice. people write responses to the world they live in

the urge to view optimism and pessimism as moral virtues with different degrees of ease based on the quantity of them you see around is, fundamentally, an urge to believe that everything which is written was written for you by people who share your inner world, speaking back like desynced reflections of you with their own mouths, who ought to be set on the course of making what you need, because it's what you all need

your insecure jerkoff about hopepunk is really funny

I've made enemies of the entire theoretical coffee shop community

I think what gets me about the concept of "solarpunk" specifically is that it's so much worse than steampunk or dieselpunk or whatever because it's entirely shallow and largely carried by "this is morally correct"

as much as I find steampunk bland and annoying, the seminal piece of steampunk art isn't a chobani commercial

you absolutely could do an interesting setting with widespread embracing of solar power, but you'd first have to deal with the uncomfortable parts of it, like that solar power isn't actually the most environmentally friendly power source, or that a solar utopia inherently requires rare earth metal mining

and just because they're both equally manufactured and people keep pairing the two, I'll swing at the hornet's nest a little harder

"hopepunk" as a genre is fake because it's characterised by being an inversion of "grimdark", a genre which also does not exist

Warhammer 40k? I'm not familiar, but is it kind of like a sci-fi AU for the Horus Heresy?

aqualiems

Someone had to do it

Pre-orders available on my ko-fi

Body pillow keychain of Jax from the amazing digital circus! Us shipping only (for now) Ი𐑼•° ~5” acrylic keychain Ი𐑼•° Silver ball chain c

If demand is high enough I’ll make actual body pillow cases with this design

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially obnoxious I'll start describing the merely unusual as "anomalous". It's technically correct, and lends a certain gravitas to the mundane. I've done this in work emails and nobody has called me out yet.

I totally understand why, of all the playable species first introduced in the Planescape campaign setting, tieflings would be the one to make the jump to the D&D core, but sometimes I like to imagine the world where it had been rogue modrons instead. The standard D&D species are humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and cubes.

Tell me this isn't a face that would be welcome at any table.