Everyday Utopia and the Politics of Love: Heartstopper as Up-Lit and Nicecore

ABSTRACT

Heartstopper is a fiction that models a positive, constructive, loving, and kind life world of relationships and friendships to its millions of readers and viewers. The webcomic and Netflix series exemplifies up-lit (uplifting literature) and nicecore media that are increasingly visible in popular fiction and media. This article argues that Heartstopper’s representation of kindness models a form of everyday utopia through an education of hope that performs love, care, and support for LGBTQIA+ characters and relationships as if these are already present and normalized in the real world. The overwhelmingly positive reader and audience response to Heartstopper suggests its media world is not interpreted as escapist fantasy but a pre-enactment of an everyday that fans bring into reality through their interactions with the text, its author, actors, and with each other. This article takes a literary postcritical approach that applies “utopia as method” to argue for Heartstopper as an example of a politics of love that is “both a critical affect and a methodology.” Up-lit and nicecore are thus politically motivated, offering radical but necessary representations of niceness that reflect the dreams, desires and ideals currently dismissed by mainstream western society as unrealistic, utopian and merely fictional.