What Hope Looks Like Now: Hopepunk and Stories That Refuse to Give Up

I find it fascinating how the idea of hope has evolved in children’s books over the past few decades. I grew up on stories like The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle in Time, and Anne of Green Gables—books that treated hope as a superpower, something that could heal and change the world. But then came works like A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Giver, and The Hunger Games, which began to paint hope as naïve, maybe even silly. Somewhere along the way, the idea of hope was shifting—from something brave and precious to what children were expected to outgrow.

(How—and Why—to Put Hope in Writing.)

It didn’t help that the term "toxic positivity" became part of our everyday vocabulary, turning optimism (and by extension, hope) into a potentially harmful topic. Because how do you stay positive when the world feels so uncertain? How can you tell someone to look on the bright side when they can’t even move forward? At some point, as author Holly Schofield noted in her article “Optimism is the New Bleak,” optimism in fiction became “cheesy, childish, or uncool,” and hope, so closely linked with optimism, started to seem like a luxury, even out of touch [1].

When hopepunk was first introduced by author Alexandra Rowland in 2017 with a call for stories that rebelled against the idea that hope no longer mattered, it signaled a real need to detangle hopeful stories from just the feeling of good [2]. Besides, it seemed as if the word “hope” had become too broad, too passive. Stories needed a way to reclaim hope as something active, something that takes effort and also carried real stakes. Like in the ending of Pandora’s Box, hope might be what remains after all the evils of the world escape, but hopepunk asks us to go one step further: to protect that hope from harm, nurture it, and start fighting evil alongside it.

That idea—the act of protecting hope even when the whole world seems to be going against you—became the heart of what I wanted to explore in my story.

In my book, hope is the belief that something is possible. I believe that people work hard toward their dreams because they know those dreams could be real for them. That’s what makes hope so powerful and why it inspires us to action.

Caput Mundi: the Head of the World is a story about kids finding their own answers to the problems their parents chose to ignore. They’re forced to face the consequences of their parents’ mistakes and fight to make things right. At first, their world seems dazzling, filled with flourishing innovation and alchemic wonders, but the protagonists start to see the cracks: the greed, the corruption, and the ways the system has been built to keep them down. But instead of giving in, they take action to step out of their comfort zone and face those challenges head on.

When I first started writing this section, I wanted to explain why hopepunk matters to young readers. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized they don’t need hopepunk; rather, hopepunk meets them where they are. Because that’s the reality of the world they’re growing up in right now.

Major institutions like education, housing, and healthcare are struggling to serve the generations coming up next, with studies showing that majorities in most surveyed countries are pessimistic about their children’s future financial well-being [3, 4]. What used to work for the Boomers no longer holds true. And instead of following the same trajectory that has led Gen X and Millennials to lose hope in the system, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are choosing different routes and redefining their version of what stability and success look like.

They’re questioning the value of college, taking unconventional career paths, and creating their own opportunities. You can see this in Gen Z and the rise of independent creators, small business owners, and the growing number of people rejecting rigid workplace hierarchies in favor of flexibility and autonomy [5, 6].

Though much of this shift comes from necessity as much as choice, it captures what hopepunk is all about: redefining what’s possible, even when the world keeps telling them it isn’t. It’s not just about having hope, but how hope does in the face of adversity. It’s about persistence, reinvention, and the courage to fight anyway.

That’s why it feels so exciting to imagine the kinds of characters we’ll see next in books—rebels who embody this spirit of hopepunk through both grit and creativity. After all, heroes aren’t made in fiction; they are created in real life and reflected in stories. Gen Z leaders are already becoming the role models that Gen Alpha readers look up to, and in doing so, the kinds of main characters they’ll seek out in the books they read.

In the same way, I suspect we’ll soon meet young heroes who carry that hopepunk spark.

At least, that is my hope!

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