‘Hibernation Starts Now! Collect as Many Nuts as You Can Find and Get in the Cave!’: 17 Hopecore Memes to Kick Off Fall With Energy

Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor

Oct 13, 2026 11:45 AM EDT

The best time of the year has just begun

Something peculiar happens in autumn. The changing, falling leaves underscore that time is actually passing, and we feel a little melancholy beneath our everyday mood. The light changes, trees are less colorful, and days are shorter. It seems like nature is inviting us to a more contemplative state.

Things acquire a whole new intensity when they seem to belong to a disappearing world. I've always wondered how different the passage of time feels for people who live in places with no seasons where the weather is perpetually cold or super hot.

Seasons might be one of the few remaining aspects of true human connection to nature that remain in big cities. They are one of the few natural things we still have to adapt to. We don't have to hunt or grow our food anymore, and we have houses that protect us during the night, but when the seasons change, we still have to adapt our wardrobe and nutrition to fit the weather's requirements.

Because seasons inevitably change, all we can do is romanticize that change and fall in love with the rituals and traditions every season has. I don't know about you, but I love pumpkin, and I plan to be adding pumpkin to every recipe I make for the next three months, lol.

Something you don't know about me is that I love horror films, and I purposely watch them when this time of year comes around, so it feels more thematic. Pumpkin spice lattes, butternut squash, and horror movies kinda lose a little bit of flavour outside of fall. Saving the tradition for this time of year adds a little expectation to it that just makes everything better. Walking home after watching The Exorcist at the movies late at night just hits different when your block has no leaves left, and there are only bare branches underneath a greyish sky.

This year I'm going to watch Bram Stoker's Dracula, by Francis Ford Coppola, with a friend. They're showing it for free at a movie theater that's located in an old part of my town, and I think that adds to the gothic scenery. I usually have to rewatch horror films (don't get me wrong, I love to), but this year I'll watch one I've never seen before.

I know the movie is kind of a basic cult movie, but guys! I've only read the book; I'm snobbish like that. I'll be that unbearable person who compares the film to the book at the end of the movie, and my friend will have to bear that!

Dracula was a very important book for me, as it was the first book that made me an avid reader. This is a rather funny story, but I didn't start reading because I naturally wanted to. Actually, my English teacher once asked the whole class if anyone had read Dracula, and I wanted to be better than everyone, so I said I had. Then she started asking very specific questions about the book (lol), and I was humiliated because I couldn't answer them, so I swore to myself I would read it to fix my mistake, and I ended up loving literature.

Anyway, sometimes the most random, cringey things take you to good places! So enjoy this hopeful, seasonal meme list: