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
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. ❤
This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out.
Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit.
Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.
WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.
Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror – the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.
Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!
I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane
Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.
consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years
Eoin Mc Hugh – The Ground Itself is Kind, Black Butter, 2014
Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life
If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.
in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.
My dad is a musician at the Naples Philharmonic orchestra hall, and let me tell you, there is nothing more terrifying than being no older than 4, wandering out to the courtyard at your dad’s workplace, and feeling this horrific aura of cosmic judgement from the masked Phillip Jackson sculptures just looming there. Their height and limbs are just tall, twisted and elongated enough to not be human, and you can totally feel it in person.
Aries: A knight in armor made of glittering emerald chitin. Blades wielded in reverse, fighting with an alien grace.
Taurus: Towering knights decked in the hides of long-dead beasts. Colossal greatbows hewn from ancient oak trees heft arrows that could split a man in two.
Gemini: Proud knights, gilded chains worked into their helmets to resemble a lions mane. Their stature a demonstration of the wealth and power of their empress.
Cancer: A holy knight (of sorts). Their ceremonial hammer cocooned in spines, their armor blackened with soot.
Leo: A bodyguard. A legendary elite, now forgotten to the march of time. They wander the halls of the palace, now frozen and abandoned, searching for their young lord.
Virgo: Knights veiled in silk, every inch of their skin is covered. Their armor host to a hive of stinging insects. Long, thin, swords for piercing maille, the tip soaked in poison with intoxicating effects.
Libra: Sorcerer knights of a far western land. Pointed scarlet helmets and long barbed torches that function as halberd and a conduit for spells. Their armor jingles with medals and pendants covered in arcane scribbles.
Scorpio: A lonely knight in a thick cloak, illuminated only by the lantern they carry, light glinting off the silver spade in their other hand. They patrol the field of corpses, scanning for signs of movement.
Ophiuchus: Zealots of a forbidden faith. Slaves to their fervor, masks made from shed skin. Young, feeble wings stitched to their shoulder blades.
Sagittarius: Knights from an age of powder and shot. Sloped armor deflecting rounds as if they were blades. A shield on one arm, a revolver on the other.
Capricorn: A knight with heavily reinforced gauntlets. Forgoing weapons and shields for simply bashing opponents with their fists.
Aquarius: Trailblazers and pathfinders. Bows and axes double as weapons and survival tools. Old, dog eared books of spells, hand drawn maps folded into the pages. Searching for their lost brethren.
Pisces: Dancing knights. Flexible pikes used to vault over bulwarks. Bags and straps full of daggers and firebombs. Colorful domino masks a nod to their origins.
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