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I thought that Hopepunk was just part of the broader what I'mma call Xpunk - where X is a thing, and punk actually just means future for some reason.
If grimdark isn't a genre, does that mean hopepunk isn't, either?
(With reference to this post here.)
"Hopepunk" is basically the culmination of nerd culture's mistaken propensity to treat genre as a prescriptive checklist of tropes. The term's proponents invented a definition of a genre of media they believed ought to exist, then went about looking for examples of media that fit that definition. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way – genres in media are something that can only be identified after the fact, as a description of emergent trends in the dialogue between creators. If you try to declare a genre into existence by fiat and work backwards to figure out which media belong to it by going down a checklist of tropes, you just end up with a random grab-bag of works which aren't meaningfully in dialogue with each other.
(Some definitions of "hopepunk" do admittedly somewhat resemble romantic fantasy, particularly the late 1980s to early 1990s strand, but as far as I can tell this is coincidental – it's abundantly clear that most of the term's proponents have never read a Mercedes Lackey novel!)