Recently I’ve been very drawn to cozy fiction. I focus on SFF and mystery for the most part, but not exclusively; my consumption also tends to (but doesn’t exclusively) fall under fantasy. (I do also continue to read and watch other kinds of stories like competence porn). But regardless of genre, the works I enjoy the most share a certain element of comfort in them.
Thematically I need:
- lower stakes—the problems must be smaller. (They can be large-ish for the characters, however.) No cataclysms or world-enders (i.e., quests that only the protagonist can complete before the looming threat will irrevocably ruin life in the whole universe), and absolutely nothing gloomily post-apocalyptic. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree amply fills this criterion. (Although if L&L had had any more faffing about with coffee than it already did I might have screamed.) His Bookshops and Bonedust was good, too.
- protagonists who either already have or within the story make at least one reliable, supporting connection. The Earthsea world by Ursula K. Le Guin has quite a few characters like this. (Nostalgia does also help.) A found family counts for me, too, of which the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers is a delightful example. (The Monk & Robot duology, however, I emphatically bounced off of.)
- antagonists who form reasonable obstables, but aren’t too far-out or vile. I might mention The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.
- things to eventually settle into a comfortable state. If not an outright happy ending like in The Princess Bride movie, then at least a kind of a happy ending. As Erik put it, as happy an ending as possible under the circumstances. Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher comes to mind.
- and last but not least, protagonists who know themselves and are comfortable with themselves and their place in the world, like Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael stories. (Sadly, you can’t binge read the series without quickly noticing what a boring copy-paste job Peters does with the featured young women—they tend to be perky and pretty and often strong-willed. That’s all fine and good, in itself, but there are already enough Smurfettes, thank you.)
As always, learning to work together is a huge bonus for me. Plus, the focus characters need to come across as rounded personalities, not paper dolls being carted around delivering plot-advancing lines. The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells handsomely fit these two criteria (even if some of the problems are larger), as does T. Kingfisher’s The Saint of Steel paladin series (even if there’s a little more romance than I’d generally care for).
There are also a number of works that fill some of the wishlist points but not others. Katherine Addison has added to the fascinating world of The Goblin Emperor in the excellent duology The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones, which I’d count cozy otherwise (or cozy enough, like Christie’s mysteries), but the protagonist Thara remains troubled throughout, with just the tiniest glimpse of contentment at the end of TGoS.
The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott also follows a protagonist with a number of established allies, but the problem was too grand and some of the characters too snide to fit it into my comfort reads category. And the otherwise excellent Thorn by Intisar Khanani has a very nice but ultimately helpless human who remains far too helpless for far too long.
In the visual media, if possible I would like to pull everything concerning the village of Ta Lo in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings into its own story; there isn’t too much of it in the Marvel Cinematic Universe version, but what there is is lovely. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit show snippets of the ultimate cozy setting, the Shire, but, alas, they don’t amount to a long sequence either.
Character-wise, the Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series features a delightful growing friendship between young Leia and Obi-Wan, but I couldn’t call the series cozy otherwise. To venture into the historical, most Jane Austen adaptations and the Miss Marple series with Joan Hickson always deliver. In fact, we just finished a most satisfying Miss Marple rewatch. 🙂
There is, however, something elusive about my sense of cozy fiction which I haven’t yet been able to quite put my finger on. Oddly, as much as like tea, taking a mystery and slapping in ample servings of tea doesn’t necessarily cut it. For instance, Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles were complete misfires for me.
Some commentaries on the rising popularity of cozy fiction talk about foregrounding sensory details. That might have something to do with the appeal, although I think an overload is an overload regardless of what you’re overloading. (Hello there, Legends and Lattes, faffing about coffee.) I suspect, though, that the crucial factor for me is the protagonist’s sense of comfort with their situation; a comfortable amount of self-knowledge or self-awareness. I’ll have to think about it some more.
Apart from this mystery ingredient, it seems the works I enjoy most right now are basically about recognition of the ordinary. They have ordinary people persevering, or, in case of people with extraordinary skills, characters who nevertheless know how ordinary they are in other respects. Quite ordinary motives behind even the most elaborate murder plots. Or perhaps simply the enjoyment of commonplace situations and routines—but in a SFFnal setting, because I do still want a little bit of a twist in my fiction. 🙂
With the past three years having been very trying, I don’t wonder at taking comfort in a slower pace, lower-stakes challenges, more familiar burdens, and happy endings. With tea and yummy noms, if possible.
I may, in fact, be turning into an old cat, LOL! 🙂
Anything you could recommend along these lines? Do chime in! Also, if you have any cozy gaming experiences, I’d love to hear about them.
Images via Unsplash: Hygge essentials by Mariah Krafft. Cat sleeping by Sebastian Latorre.
Story Time is all about story-telling and how stories work, and what makes us love our favorites.
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