sholio: A box of chocolates (Chocolates)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2019-05-30 05:10 pm

Coming this fall: grimpunk

A discussion at [personal profile] rachelmanija's blog on hopepunk and how to define it has made me realize that you can take all the components of the various fuzzy-edged new genre descriptors mentioned there and in the comments (grimdark, valorbright/noblebright, solarpunk, etc) and combine them to produce new genre descriptors that are actually surprisingly useful.

Hopedark, for example! Useful for canons like Handmaid's Tale or V for Vendetta, where it's certainly dark, but not precisely hopeless.

Grimbright! Rachel suggests this would be like the decadent luxury worlds of SF. I think it could also be used for those Stepford Wives/Get Out types of canons, where everything is bright and beautiful and shiny and awful in a 1950s-suburbia kind of way, and it's all fun and games and neighborhood potlucks until you find out a little too much about the robots/aliens/cultists/pod people next door.

Solargrim! (The world has been taken over by plants and EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.)

What about Valorpunk/Noblepunk? I think this should be a thing; I mean, to the extent that any of this should be a thing. In fact, I kind of have ideas for it.

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