rocketverliden:

theaudientvoid:

dagny-hashtaggart:

another-normal-anomaly:

cyborgbutterflies:

I feel like that “hopepunk” thing someone made up a while back depends on strawmanning and forcefully redefining noblebright stories into something simplistic and lesser to then present “hopepunk” as the superior and realistic alternative.

I have no idea What’s going on in this discourse, but it has words like noblebright and hopepunk, so I approve.

Noblebright refers to the opposite of grimdark. This expanded into a two-variable classification (3x3 square, with a neutral category in between the two extremes; Gary Gygax haunts the dreams of many). Bright to dark is pretty much what it sounds like; while bad things happen in bright stories (have to create drama somehow), they’re basically surmountable, and at the end of the day you’re pretty sure the good guys are going to win. A dark story is much more likely to have a sad or bittersweet ending, and/or feature protagonists for whom the term “good guys” is a bit of a stretch. The noble-grim axis deals with the extent to which individual agency can affect the setting. Noble settings, regardless of their position on the light-dark axis, are full of heroes and villains who bestride the narrow world like colossi. Individuals have much less power in grim settings: the weight of history, economics, and mass social and political trends far outweighs the power of individual action.

Star Wars (the original trilogy) is probably the archetypal example of a noblebright story.

Interesting. By this definition, Madoka Magica is Neutral Dark.

What would nobledark or grimbright look like, then? Doom and post-post-apocalypse?