In 2017, Alexandra Rowland posted the following on Tumblr:

The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.

Little did she know that three years later, a storm in a bottle would be opened. 2020 gave us a forest fire that threatened indigineous life in Australia, a global pandemic that we continue to feel the affects of, political tensions from the US election, and racial tensions as a result of police brutality in the US and beyond. It was a hard year. It was an unprecedented year.

And yet we’re still here.

Writing. Crafting. Drawing. Singing. Meeting up to talk online, despite it all.

Hopepunk is about the unrelenting fight, not for the sake of victory but for the sake of fighting for something. We don’t win in the middle of a pandemic by talking to each other on Discord. There’s no victory there. But it’s a fight, and it keeps us going, even if each battle feels pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Rowland followed up on her Tumblr post some years later on Festive Ninja. She concluded her article with the following statement:

Whether the glass is half full or half empty, what matters is that there’s water in that glass. And that’s something worth defending.

This is where we come in.

We’ve fought, and we’ve struggled, and we persevered, and even though we’re still trapped at home and connected only by often unstable internet connections and a platform that likes to eject people from the conversation at random, we’re still doing it.

Fierce: A Hopepunk Anthology is our message following everything we’ve gone through individually and collectively since the world shut down in March 2020. Intended to be launched at Octocon 2021, a virtual convention with a focus on Hopeful content this year, Fierce seeks to explore the subgenre of Hopepunk through the lens of SFF.

In Fierce, five writers explore the bastion of optimism: Hopepunk. From explorations among the stars, to invasions of aliens and zombies and the resolve of humans and mechs, Fierce focuses on one important message: the fight is worth it.

Writers: Cameron Armstrong, Paul Carroll, Quinn Clancy, Kat Dodd, Axel Kelly.