ladybusiness | Thoughts (Reply)

From:

>> I've only become more frustrated with what's being marketed as cozy SFF and the discourse around it. I find the stuff being published isn't digging into the themes that I want to see. Meanwhile the discourse is both dismissive and full of moral panic. I think both that domestic labor and community building are important and worth telling stories about and shouldn’t be dismissed, and that it's ok to read soft comforting stories. I wish people would calm down a bit.<<

Well, it depends on what you are looking at and what you want. Specifically, I think a lot of the problem is "marketed." I've found commercial SFF so disappointing nowadays that I can go into a bookstore and find nothing worth buying, which is so very wrong.

But crowdfunding?

dialecticdreamer has one whole prompt call, Feathering the Nest, that always has a cozy theme. Kickstarter, I just got my copy of Anti-Caste Speculative Fiction, which I suspect will have a lot of domestic labor and community building although I can't guess as to tone yet. On the fanfic side, where I find a lot of the best material currently, there's a whole branch called "curtainfic" or "cottoncandy" that aims small-scale and cozy. The beauty of crowdfunding is that it lets you ask for and get what you want, so your prompts and sponsorships put more of that into the world. Given the taste of today's commercial publishing houses, I find this a good thing.

>> “Cozy SFF generally has small stakes, focusing on small moments, not the fate of the world. These lower stakes generally go along with much less on-screen violence in these stories. Another key aspect of cozy SFF is that it focuses on community-building. And finally, cozy SFF honors the importance of domestic labor and other undervalued jobs”. In retrospect I don’t think this definition was very helpful because it was more about what I want cozy SFF to be than about what cozy SFF actually is. And because I ignored the issue of feelings, but how cozy SFF makes people feel is important to the conversation even if people can have wildly different emotional reactions to the same work. I find the the subjectivity of emotional reactions leads to very frustrating conversations, and I wanted to ignore that, but it’s important to how people talk about cozy SFF whether I like it or not.<<

I think I see what went wrong here. "Cozy" is a mood-based subgenre, the way "horror" is a mood-based genre. It's about how a story makes the reader feel. Then you have parameters that support and create that mood. For instance, the Sleepytime Bear Bingo from

allbingo lists a bunch of things in the picture that evoke coziness, such as tea and a cat. Small moments and lower stakes on your list are also things that support coziness. Less/no violence onscreen is a parameter shared with cozy mysteries. So in defining cozy SFF, I would look for core requirements (the mood), supporting elements (community building, etc.), and dealbreakers (like violence) that could disqualify a story.

I write a lot of cozy SFF myself. My readers frequently prompt for it and sponsor it, so that adds up. One thing I find very interesting is how dominant the mood really is. They'll call something cozy that has quite rough elements, as long as the protagonist has good support. The wide-angle world can be a wretched mess, as long as the immediate context allows the characters to accomplish something. I shit you not, they asked me to create a postapocalyptic setting inhabited by poor, brown, queer, disabled, and/or female characters and then labeled Daughters of the Apocalypse as "postapocalyptic hopepunk." Conversely, a much less edgy plot may not rate as cozy because the protagonist is alone or it just doesn't have the supporting elements to create that mood.

Also worth considering is the Chobani yogurt solarpunk ad, which I analyzed:
The Chobani Solarpunk Ad (Part 1: Things I Like, Part 2: Things I Question, Part 3: The Most Interesting Part, Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland)