Tired of bad news? Time to join the hopepunk set
Could a fortnight immersed in nothing but uplifting, lifeaffirming culture and news change Tom Ough’s outlook for good?
Ican’t say I had particularly high hopes, as it were, for my fortnight of “hopepunk”. Coined a couple of years ago on microblogging site Tumblr, the term refers to any art – novel, podcast, music, television or film – that has an uplifting current of hope running through it. There are various definitions online – most are nebulous and many are off-puttingly schmaltzy so I reckon a few case studies are the best way of making clear what is hopepunk and what is not.
Let’s start with Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, a classic example of Not Hopepunk. Watching those films yields about as much spiritual joy as a night in a morgue. They’re dystopian and horrifying, and the general assumption seems to be that pretty much everybody is in it for themselves. The same, to some extent, goes for Game of Thrones. This kind of genre has been called “grimdark” by the same communities that use the word “hopepunk”. On the other hand, something like Queer Eye in which five irrepressibly kind-hearted gay guys administer sorely needed physical and emotional makeovers to slobs, is plainly hopepunk. Stuff with noble heroes probably isn’t; the more developed definitions of hopepunk exclude stories such as the
Star Wars saga, in which heroes often have destiny on their side.
As you’d imagine, hopepunk fans are a very friendly, generous-spirited bunch. I found Ella March, a 21-year-old from Swindon, on Reddit. She told me that hopepunk “is a conscious effort to take a positive look at our world and recog- nise everything that’s good about it. It highlights all the good things that we are capable of and have done, and encourages us to be positive about the future.”
Google searches for “hopepunk” spiked around the turn of the year, when news explainer site Vox wrote about it (“It’s all about weaponised optimism”). Even Ben Fogle has heard of it now. “Let’s be kinder. More hopeful. Let’s be more hopepunk,” he wrote on Instagram. For reasons that escape me, his words captioned a picture of him wading through a wooded river in a threepiece tweed suit.
I didn’t want to emulate the riverwading, but I was still interested in hopepunk. For a couple of weeks, I decided, I would consume various kinds of hopepunk media and as little as possible of everything else. On the one hand, it would probably scrub every scintilla of jeopardy from the literature and television I tend to consume, hence my low expecta
tions. On the other, it could plausibly make me happier and more relaxed, which is what hopepunk’s fans say they get out of it. An almost-too-easy explanation for it becoming a thing in the past couple of years, is that it’s a response to the election of you-knowwho in 2016 and the rancour that has followed. I doubt my current affairsrelated stress is anything like that of, say, various minorities in Trump’s America, but, news-wise, I think my faith in humanity would be much greater if I knew less about what it was up to. So I locked myself out of Twitter – pretty much a large stadium in which to observe daily outrage brawls – and bookmarked Positive News, a site that does exactly what it sounds like.
It got more complex. Consuming news is part of my job, yet I would sooner not read newspapers than I would give up bleak television dramas. But I like Queer Eye, and I enjoyed starting
Sense8, a hopepunkish Netflix show about eight people across the world who start seeing things from each other’s perspective. I still craved the moral squalor of
Mad Men, but the hopepunk television I watched was entertaining without being cloying.
On to podcasts. The Vox article, which has a well-researched list of hopepunk art, suggested among others a podcast in which a couple talk about things they like, and one which stages an inanimate object telling its life story. My usual auditory diet consists of unsentimental non-fiction audiobooks and, um, Arsenal podcasts. Following Arsenal epitomises the hopeless grimdark experience. So on both counts, the hopepunk podcasts seemed almost transgressively empathetic and cheerful. I didn’t stick with them.
I read some hopepunk literature, though, and had fun with The Goblin Emperor, a fantasy novel praised for its warm tone and (unusually) its interest in hoi polloi. It’s a favourite of Stevie Finegan, a 29-year-old in publishing. Finegan told me the novel, by Katherine Addison, wasn’t picked up by her industry for years. “Traditional publishing is now catching up to the fact that people want hopeful stories.”
Becky Chambers, award-winning author of the Star Trek-like Wayfarers series, is Finegan’s current favourite: “She writes a sci-fi future that unashamedly portrays the world how it should be – gender equality? An end to racism? Why not just solve climate change and the economy while you’re at it? She poses the question: but what if it all went right? And the possibilities that hope opens up are limitless.”
By the end of the fortnight, much of my scepticism of hopepunk had been allayed. It’s not about saccharinity so much as empathy, a cornerstone of most great art. I hadn’t enjoyed the podcasts but that’s not to say there’s much inherently wrong with them. I didn’t find them challenging, but there are times when – and no disrespect here to the immortal work of art that is
Friends – I deliberately watch unchallenging television, for the same rough reasons that people listen to the podcasts. I enjoy some darkness and jeopardy in literature, film and television, and I’d argue they’re essential to any narrative experience, but I can well imagine wanting slightly different stuff from art if my life were tougher.
At the beginning of the fortnight, I’d felt hopepunk was a bit twee and undemanding. By the end, I’d realised that to feel that way is a luxury.