Image description: Screen capture of mobile notifications: HuffPost 2h ago Biden commutes death sentences of nearly all on federal death row: “I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.” Breaking News (from the AP) 2h ago Biden gives life in prison to 37 of 40 federal death row inmates so Trump can’t have them executed.
Screen capture from Associated Press article: It means just three federal inmates are still facing execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Rober Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the dealiest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
Apparently this is a controversial take now but just FYI spreading misinformation is still bad even if you think it’s funny or have decided it’s for the One True Cause.
This week, I read a fic that was around 20 years old, which had originally been posted on the author’s personal website and which she added to AO3 a few years ago. She listed her email address with the fic, so after I finished reading, I sent her an email saying how much I enjoyed the story, how much I appreciated the work and effort she obviously put into it, and thanked her for uploading it to AO3. She responded the next day and thanked me for my message, then said she had a few more stories in the same series that she hadn’t gotten around to uploading. I checked this morning–she added a 35,000 word novella and thanked me in the summary.
I think I am among many who feel like they should love cozy fantasy and have found it an incredibly lacking genre.
This newly branded “cozy fantasy” genre that has taken readers by storm since 2020 and while it is new that books are now marketed as cozy, the genre itself isn’t new. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a great example of the genre before it was labeled and also how to make it work.
Cozy fantasy is defined by many as fantasy with low stakes. Fantasy aesthetic but less sword fights. On paper, it sounds great. But the execution has been less than stellar for readers like me. The lack of physical stakes has also impacted the emotional stakes of these books, creating forgettable characters with boring problems. As a romance reader, I find this frustrating. Romance is known for being a predictable and formulaic genre, the now defunct Romance Writers of America defined romances as needing happy endings, a term romances have continued to follow. Yet these romance texts manage to have low physical stakes (how to date your neighbor, how to confront your toxic friends, etc) while still maintaining high personal stakes that keep readers invested and begging for more. So I was initially confused why cozy fantasy authors struggle to write texts that connect to readers like me.
I think I have found the answer which is the genre is just here for vibes. It is all about aesthetic, not even worldbuilding that fantasy is known for as most cozy fantasy I read have so many problems as soon as you ask one question. It is hard to acknowledge that a genre that is pitched to work for readers like me doesn’t work for many of us. Especially because occasionally there is one that works beautifully to my taste.
I often say my favorite cozy fantasies that are more contemporary are short and visual, which I plays into the idea of the genre being an aesthetic. The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz is a good example because it is a simple story that is given the perfect amount of pages and gorgeous visuals without dragging on when the message is very clear and easy to understand. Books like The Phoenix Keeper and Legends and Lattes have absolutely nothing for me, their very clear message hitting the reader over and over so the readers don’t miss it and focusing on the aesthetic of worldbuilding rather than the reality of the fantastic elements within the world.
I guess my point is… I realize this genre isn’t for me since I have realized it is more of an aesthetic than anything. .. .but I want it to be. Should I let it go and put my efforts elsewhere? Or should I keep exploring this new trend and find the hidden gems?
I think you nailed it on the head but also:
So many cozy fantasies seem to do no work to make you like the characters. They feel like the epilogue to another story, or like fanfic in the sense that you’re expected to already care about these people, but they’re skipping the leg work to get you there.
Legends and lattes worked for me mostly because I had fun with the exploration of how a fantasy setting would reinvent a coffee shop. It also felt a bit like a videogame, delimiting tasks and creating new, small problems each time one goal was reached. Which is to say, it appealed to the part of my brain that likes puzzles, but failed to reach me with its characters. I don’t remember a single thing about the love interest aside what she looks like on the cover lol
Stories with high stakes immediately make you see what your character cares about: justice for murdered parents, saving their home from the armies of evil, and so on. In low stakes fantasies, you’re handed a character whose values are just the bland goodness people pretty much universally strive for. It makes them both forgettable and unremarkable. And a story that has no plot and very little worldbuilding cannot afford to have weak protagonists on top of it.
Which honestly might bring me back to my main theory of what makes a story good: it’s a balancing act of Plot, Worldbuilding, Characters, and usually the stronger a book is in one of these aspects, the more likely I am to overlook flaws in the others. But by definition, cozy fantasy starts off with only two of these, so it makes it all the more important and unforgivable when an aspect is weak. Its like trying to build a stool with two legs.
Hello, professional author here, I have a *slight* tweak of a suggestion to offer, or an alternate take from a slightly different perspective. First, I 100% agree with the meat of what you’re both saying here, and I absolutely share your frustrations with the genre of cozy fantasy as a whole – so many of them have something going wrong with the engine of the story. The car won’t start. You turn the ignition and all you get out of it is a weak grumbling. So what’s happening here from a mechanical perspective?
We’re talking about cozy fantasy being “low stakes”, and that’s certainly how it bills itself. But low stakes are not the source of the problem – there are plenty of stories/movies/tv shows with very low stakes that we still enjoy watching! Great British Bake Off, for example. The stakes are only “Will the cake come out right” and “how will the judges react”. Right? Those are low stakes! The world is not ending, society is not in danger of crumbling to pieces, there is no great battle between Good and Evil for the fate of all humanity. But we watch GBBO and we’re ENRAPTURED. We’re INVESTED. Why?
Not because of the stakes, but because of the tension.
wait hang on i need to say this in the loud font because it’s crucially important
IT’S BECAUSE OF THE TENSION
Both readers and apprentice writers often confuse “stakes” and “tension” because, frankly, increasing the stakes is often a cheap and easy way to increase the tension. Here’s the difference, just to make sure we’re all on the same page: Stakes are an external, objective thing – “will the cake come out right, how will the judges react” – but tension is internal. It is the pull between two things: On one hand, how much this contestant wants to win, how hard they’ve been trying, how emotional they’re getting about a mishap, and our knowledge from an earlier episode about how their mum always believed in them and how they’ve struggled to believe in themself but since making it onto GBBO they’ve been thinking that maybe… maybe they can believe in themself.
And what’s pulling from the other side is: How their nervousness and lack of confidence is causing them to make mistakes; how we as the audience don’t know whether this challenging thing they’re trying is going to turn out well; how they’re ever going to recover from a cataclysm like forgetting to turn the oven on; whether they could do their absolute best and try so so so SO HARD and it might not make any difference because the other contestants also were all trying their hardest.
Man, I don’t know about you, but even just as I was writing that out, my heart was in my throat and I was getting a little choked up.
THAT’S tension. And that’s what a lot of cozy fantasy is lacking, because they say “low stakes” and they think that stakes and tension are the same thing, and so they forget that YOU STILL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS CARE PASSIONATELY IF YOU WANT THE READER TO HAVE ANYTHING THAT THEY CARE ABOUT. As readers, we care when the character has something that really, really, REALLY matters to them. We literally cannot help it – look up “mirror neurons” if you want the neuroscience explanation for why we literally cannot help it.
High stakes is a cheap cheat code to tension because something like “We have to save the world to keep the Dark Lord from invading the kingdom and slaughtering everyone” is sort of self-explanatory about why it matters. Ah, yes, We Don’t Want To Be Slaughtered. Got it. No explanation necessary. You can get away with not really showing whether it matters to the character, because the audience just naturally ASSUMES that it’s a Good and Important thing to be doing.
You can’t get away with cutting corners like that if you’re doing low stakes. Here, look:
High stakes & high tension = Think Mad Max: Fury Road. It is a LOT and you can’t look away but you might feel sort of exhausted afterwards and need a nap.
High stakes & low tension = Many Marvel films. Sure ok yeah we’re saving the world, that’s fun, whatever. Probably saving the world is a good thing to do so that’s fine
Low stakes & high tension = GBBO as previously mentioned. Also pretty much any sport (sorry, sports fans, but “will they win the big game” is not high stakes, it just SEEMS like high stakes because of ow much you care about it – which is TENSION!!!) You will be on the edge of your seat, you will be crying about how amazingly well that border collie/papillon mix did in the agility course.
Low stakes & low tension: Legends & Lattes. Probably if Plan A doesn’t work out, the character could just wander off and try Plan B and it wouldn’t be that personally upsetting.
So that’s my two cents on where a lot of cozy fantasy is going wrong. And like, I can kind of see where my colleagues are coming from and why books like this keep being produced these days??? Like the pandemic really fucked up everybody, and so many of us are incredibly burned out and running on fumes… And so sometimes it feels impossibly challenging to write any book except one where nothing bad happens and nothing is in danger and nobody is really bothered or worried about anything and everything is mostly fine and there aren’t any major setbacks…..
But that leaves readers cold. And frankly, I don’t feel like it does much of anything to nourish either our souls or theirs. It feels like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner instead of going to the effort of even just heating up a frozen dinner that has a vegetable in it.
idk, man. I’ve taught university classes about this shit, but what do I know. Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. (Also, if you would like an example of cozy fantasy where it really fucking matters to the person going through it, may I humbly suggest Yield Under Great Persuasion? I wrote it partially as an illustration of how there’s a difference between Stakes and Tension. :D)
Love seeing something from TikTok and going “girlie that is literally what led to the downfall of the Papal States”
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger, aged 81, has been absent from her duties in Washington, D.C., for the past six months while residing in a nursing home costing $4,000 per month.
According to the Daily Mail, despite being the longest-serving Republican lawmaker, Granger has not voted or visited her Capitol Hill office since July. Her nearly 30-year legislative career was scheduled to end in January.
Ironically, she’s been asking that same question herself for the past few months…
So to recap:
Age 81
Hiding from voters
Doing nothing
Unsure what year it is
Collecting $174,000 salary from voters
Oh, you’re upset about this? Fuck you. Deal with it.
Seriously. What are you going to do about it? Vote someone else in? That’s adorable.
“Men should put the seat down when they’re done peeing so that I don’t fall into the toilet when I sit down to pee”
“Actually women should be putting the seat back up when they’re done peeing as a courtesy so that I don’t have to touch it and put the seat up before I pee”
Actually, both the seat AND lid should be down when no one is actively using the toilet, because this prevents things from accidentally falling into / accidentally being dropped into the toilet. Also having the lid down when you’re flushing is important because it prevents the toilet from spraying out bacteria.
It’s called “toilet plume” or “fecal plume.”
Here’s a video of it.
#istg my acne improved once i learned abt this and put the seat down everytime
Now that you point it out, I’m just now realizing my acne went away when I learned about this and started flushing with the lid down
Holy shit! Finally someone else who puts the lid down!!!
shit man tomorrow is christmas eve i swear yesterday was June 2010
As is tradition in tumblr culture the locals unearth the corpse of a long deceased figure and drag it across the streets merrily, laughing at what is preserved of the person’s words. This custom, seen as morbid in other cultures, is instead done gleefully and with an unmatched enthusiasm
amhrancas 