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Do 'Cozy' Stories Have To Come With Death And Horror? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-27
A brief literary interlude. Yeah, yeah, “but you write about tech! and how Guy Carbonneau doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame! This is bad for your brand!” One day I will fully go off on the brand people, but I write what interests me, and what interests me today is this little essay on why most cozy fiction is bad. Don’t worry — someone will do something stupid, probably in a Signal chat that includes a reporter — soon enough. For now, enjoy random musing on a random genre.
This essay about cozy sci-fi/fantasy is making the rounds. I encourage you to read it because, as always, the writer’s argument is a bit more complex than a response to that argument can be, and the piece is thoughtful and well written. There are actually two points in this piece, I think. One I disagree with and one that I think is being ignored and that I do agree with. Let’s start with the disagreement.
The first part of the thesis is that cozy fantasy does not work because it does not, as a rule, contrast the coziness with anything serious the characters are experiencing. They compare the movie Babette’s Feast with cozy novels:
Much is written about the healing power of coffee, community, and croissants in this cozy little book. It’s all warm smiles, gestures at jokes that aren’t actually jokes (though characters laugh anyway), and #goodvibesonly for our characters throughout. The thing is, it is hard to see the healing power of food and community, when there is nothing to heal from. The coffee shop’s customers are not fractured people, nor are they particularly unkind toward Viv. Despite their initial confusion at the concept of coffee, they accept Viv’s free samples in stride. By contrast, Babette’s community is initially terrified at the exotic French cuisine looming on their horizon. They have nightmares that this strange woman they’ve allowed into their midst is going to serve them a witch’s feast. They’ve spent so long in cold darkness, that light and warmth look evil to them. It is a low stakes conflict, but speaks to the hurt the community feels, and even when this is played for comedy, our hearts are moved for them.
The point is that cozy works best when contrasted with pain and suffering, regardless of the degree. A cup of cocoa and a warm fire are all the better when its thundering outside, as the writer points out. And I don’t think that they are entirely wrong, but I do think they are neglecting the reader.
There is a genre of storytelling I call “Wow, man, look at how fucked up things are! Ain’t that bad?” that I personally cannot stand. Yeah, buddy, things are fucked up and bullshit. Thanks for pointing that out, as if I do not live in the world where things are fucked up and bullshit. In a different time and place, those pieces didn’t bother me. I suspect some of this is age — I didn’t truly appreciate all the ways things were fucked up and bullshit when I was much younger, so the stories felt more like revelations. I suspect some of this is circumstance — I mean, things are really fucked up and bullshit now in obvious in your face ways. Something similar happens, I think, with cozy fiction.
The world inside the book may not have conflict and pain, but the world outside the book, the world the reader inhabits, certainly does. Again, things are really fucked up and really bullshit. Readers know this and carry that awareness into the reading experience with them. Cozy fiction, at least now, does not really need to make their characters suffer because the readers carry into the book with them the knowledge of how things are fucked up and bullshit. The book, then, becomes the cozy cup of cocoa and the warm fire buffering the storm outside. You can argue that writers should not assume that, but writers specifically setting out to write cozy fiction today are aware of the context. Indeed, that is the point of the books they write — to help themselves deal with the fucked up and bullshit. Ignoring that context, I think, is a mistake and a way to misread the effect the books have on the readers.
Their second point, and one I am not seeing addressed, is much more interesting to me. The author points out in most cozy fiction, the books do not deal with the moral questions they raise very well if tall. I will take Legends and Lattes as the example, as it is the one I have read (though Goblin Emperor is on my TBR list). In that book, the hero is a former mercenary who uses her gains from that life to set up a coffee shop, protected, in part, by a magical thingy (technical writing term) that she also acquired from her previous life of killing things for money. She sets up a coffee shop and eventually is a success, despite some minor hardships along the way. One of those hardships is a mob boss that she buys off with good pastries. You can see, probably, the potential issues here.
She does not use her money to, say, help the orphans of the people she has killed, or in any other way repair any of the damage she has likely done as a mercenary Now, you can argue that there was no damage done. This is a fantasy after all and you can argue that in her world, it is possible to be a mercenary and be still have completely clean hands. However, that runs right into the world of fucked up and bullshit that we just discussed. You know that people bring context into the piece, at some level you are counting on it. You cannot then argue that people should not read a mercenary in the book as they would a mercenary in the real world. Context cuts both ways. But even if you want to ignore the context, the text itself still has issues.
The aforementioned mob boss is not a cozy mob boss. She demands protection money from the neighborhood. The mercenary hero could deal with her, but she and her lover don’t make that choice. They want the hero to renounce her violence and live a different life than the one she had before for her own sake. The hero even turns down violent help from her mercenary friends in the name of being a better person. She buys off the mob boss, for herself only, with pastries, and leaves the neighborhood to fend for itself. No one seems to think this is even slightly off. When a different bad guy burns her shop down, the neighborhood, including the mob boss, shows up to help her rebuild. There is a much more interesting story, I think you can see, hiding in the text that the text refuses to deal with.
What do we owe other people? The mercenary has the capability to end the mob boss’s rule for the entire neighborhood but chooses to prioritize her own mental health over that possibility. Is she wrong to do so? As a part of a community, where and when does the capability to help, especially if it is a singular capability, turn into a reasonable expectation that you should help, if ever? How much complicity in a bad system until you become an agent of that system and thus responsible for at least some of the damage that system does? How much do you owe your community versus how much do you owe your own health, mental or otherwise? Should people harmed by something you could prevent accept your decision, or are they right to feel you have harmed them? I could go on, but you get the point. None of these are especially unique questions, but they are still important ones. More importantly, they are ones that the text itself sets up and then just basically ignores. And that, I think, is the stronger critique against cozy fiction.
In Legends and Lattes, the hero is self-evidently correct. We never see the neighborhood suffering for her choice, and we never see the neighborhood try and resist the mob boss and the subsequent cost, and the neighborhood rewards the mercenary when she most needs help. The text just assumes, without really interrogating the question, that the mercenary is correct to keep her gains for her own benefit and to prioritize her health over the health of the community that, at the end of the day, supports her business. This refusal to interrogate the premise is apparently endemic to cozy fiction. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Cozy fiction is meant to make individuals feel better, or give them a reprieve, from the fucked up and bullshit. The problem, however, is that pesky context.
By creating cozy fiction in worlds that suggest deeper questions and then never admitting to those questions, you get a fiction that inevitably privileges the selfish over the generous, the self over the community. Sometimes, those are appropriate answers. But by just assuming they are correct, cozy fiction both fails to make a solid, interesting moral case for the propositions and discourages their readers from seeing their response to fucked up and bullshit as anything other than a personal one. After all, if the cozy solution to fucked up and bullshit is to prioritize yourself and only yourself, well, then maybe that’s the solution in real life.
It often is not. During fucked up and bullshit is often when we need community most, when collective solutions are the only solutions. The balance between your own safety in the short term and in the long term, versus community, are not easy questions. Cozy fiction seems to pretend that they are, and the writer of this essay is absolutely correct in the contention that as such, it shows at least a lack of moral imagination. At worst, it endorses self over community in all situations at all times, as if power systems and community itself do not exist.
So no, cozy fiction does not have to be filled with pain to contrast the cozy vibes. The outside world takes care of that, at least right now. But that same outside world demands, I think, that writers of cozy fiction deal honestly with the hard questions of dealing properly with fucked up and bullshit and keeping yourself safe and healthy that are implicit in that context. And, frankly, often explicit if overlooked in the text. Not only will you get more interesting stories, but you will do what good fiction does — engage readers in the real morality of the times. Unless all you want to do is praise selfishness over everything else, you need to take the questions inherent in the context of the world and the text seriously. It is not cozy to save yourself on the backs of others. Even fictional others.
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[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/27/2312654/-Do-Cozy-Stories-Have-To-Come-With-Death-And-Horror?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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