Ada Palmer holds up several novels as examples of hopepunk in "Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work". Hopepunk is a neologism initially intended to be the opposite of grimdark but as she elucidates in that excellent essay, it's come to mean more: stories about imperfection, about the hard work of trying to make things better even as we know they might get worse:

We also need stories of people who are tired like us. Who are trapped between crises like us. Who are grungy, and sweaty, and compromised, and struggling like us.

One of those examples was The Goblin Emperor and I loved Maia's goodness, perfectly-rendered to fit with the world-building. I love slow-burn slice of life stories where people are basically good to each other despite life's many imperfections, and while very different than my go-to examples of that genre, The Goblin Emperor joins that list.

And not just because of Maia's honorable approach to life. I have never read a novel where the time or the date are routinely mentioned: I love seeing Maia and his entourage play what my boss calls "calendar Tetris" of trying to fit in appointments. Such a humble mechanism but it adds such zest to the excellent world-building, which includes allusions to economics that fans of Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Hasekura Isuna's Spice and Wolf will love to see.

I am sad it ended.