On "Cozy" and Trans Joy
I have never waded into the waters that are the discourse around the "cozy" descriptor for media, but I ran into an observation about different pieces of cozy media today that made me think about my own work.
Personally, I've never used "cozy" to describe Magica Riot, to my knowledge. It always seemed like a term that had become fraught for a variety of reasons, and besides, I never used it as a guiding star in the creation of the books and their world. At no point did I sit down and think "I'm going to write a cozy novel," you know what I mean? It was not a part of the calculus.
Now, of course, one cannot control how people react to one's work once it is in the world. And sure enough, I've seen at least a few readers call the Magica Riot books cozy. And I've never thought they were wrong, because I can't tell somebody they're wrong for feeling a way about my books. That's just how it works, right? But I always did find that interesting, and have kept intending to circle back around to it in my own mind and sort out how I feel about it.
Today, I was watching a video by the YouTuber Moony. I'd first watched his channel today because of a video recommended to me by my editor, but I kept watching because I enjoyed his work. And the video that hit me in a way that was perhaps not intended was this one, a mostly straightforward tier list of "cozy games" that I was a bit curious about. Cozy games have never been a genre I play in, but I thought "this guy's a thoughtful person, I'll see what he has to say."
Something Moony points out is that quite a few games in the genre suffer from a "Disneyland" sort of presentation, where none of the characters are ever allowed to be sad or experience real troubles, because that breaks the Disneyland-style facade. Everybody has to be happy in Disneyland, after all! It's the happiest place on Earth! It doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad as a result, but it can dull its impact somewhat.
And in putting Stardew Valley at the "S" tier, he points out that Stardew does let its characters be sad, go through troubles, and experience pain...but the cozy vibes come from the hope and optimism that lets the player experience making that situation better. The way he puts it is that it's cozy not in an "escape from reality" sense, but in a "this is a picture of what reality could be," via community and hope, sense.
And that struck me, for reasons that are probably obvious to any of y'all who have read the Magica Riot books.
I don't view my work as an escape from reality, personally, though I do know people who have said that and it's totally valid. I do view it as that "picture of what reality could be," though. Rowan, my editor, has called it a "ten good years in the future" vibe, wherein "trans people could be this accepted if we got ten good solid years of progress." Because the characters in Magica Riot do have real-world troubles to deal with, in addition to their fantastical ones. They are allowed to be sad sometimes. It's not a completely friction-free sort of coziness. But it is a kind of coziness, in that we see the characters get through their sad times via the power of community and hope. I'd just never thought to put this into perspective re: perceptions of coziness before, and I really appreciated the insight in that video.
In a review of Full Bloom, the reviewer Phenn remarks on the depiction of trans joy in my books, and I think it gets to the same kind of thing as that observation about different kinds of cozy media:
I’m always hesitant of queer joy as a selling point, so often it means a narrative and story so smooth and edgeless it would make a great ball bearing, but not an enjoyable or engaging piece of fiction.
But Full Bloom is queer joy that understands you can’t have joy without loss, without having to know why it’s worth fighting for.
I want to call it childish, if that didn’t have such a derisive connotation. It has that energy you normally only see in kids the first time they find out a system isn’t fair and they get, intuitively, then we should change it so it is.
This all might not get me marketing my work as "cozy" fiction, but it does make me gain a new perspective on a term that I wasn't sure how to feel about. I'm proud to have made art that proclaims loudly and with its full heart that hope, optimism, and community are powerful things.