Take a break, sit and relax, put your feet up. Maybe enjoy a refreshing hot beverage or a home-cooked meal. If you have time, you can read one of the panic pieces about how a new-ish genre is ruining literature. Obviously, this is a cozy fantasy episode, where we not only talk about what cozy fantasy is but why cozy fantasy is. Plus, a look at all the books falsely categorized as cozy fantasy and a glimpse at our own totally real upcoming bestseller.

Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: It’s a rainy day, but we’re all snug inside with some hot tea and our kitty cats, making content for our struggling small business with big dreams.

Oren: Whoa, hang on. It–it can’t be struggling too much, right? It’s gotta be – like – just a little struggle.

Chris: Just a little struggle, yeah. In fact, you know what we really need here is a magic amulet that automatically makes Mythcreant successful.

Oren: Yeah. There. Solved. Easy.

Chris: Yep, yep. I would very much like one of those. [laughter] If anybody makes magic amulets.

Oren: Okay, technically speaking, it doesn’t directly make Mythcreant successful. It just mind controls talented, driven people and brings them to us to work for free. [laughter] And we do have some of those, but we need more. So we need to strengthen the amulet …

Chris: …maybe so that as soon as I try anything to bring in more fans, suddenly it just works really well and I’ve got droves of fans.

Oren: It just makes sense.

Chris: Or it does in Cozy Fantasy.

Oren: Yeah, yeah. That’s true.

Chris: So, what is Cozy Fantasy? If you have not heard this genre term before, it’s relatively new. This is a sub-genre of fantasy: it’s light in tone; we’ve got no violence, no deaths – there could be deaths in the backstory, but generally no deaths during the current story; definitely no gore. The scope tends to be small: instead of it being like an epic over the fate of the world, we’re dealing with personal scale or the welfare of the community. I think the thing that really sets it apart the most is just the focus on idyllic living. We’ve got usually a plot that features problems that can be pertained to running a household or a business or an institution generally. And it’s got a lot of wish fulfillment when it comes to opening your new coffee shop or running a library or whatever cute thing that you would like to do – but only if it’s easy. [laughter] And not like a real business.

Oren: It’s a combination of wish fulfillment and low tension in a, if not domestic, then a comforting setting. Wish fulfillment can be a lot of things for different people, but this is a specific type of wish fulfillment. 

The chaos gremlins over on Goodreads will put anything in this category: you got The Hobbit, you got Howl’s Moving Castle, you got A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking – which I get, that one. That’s a trick, ’cause it has “baking” in the title.

Chris: And it is cute baking magic, it’s just there’s – too much tension.

Oren: There’s like an assassin running around. People are getting murdered.

Chris: There was a book that came out this year, The Library of Amorlin, and we looked at the description like “is this a Cozy? Is this not a Cozy?” And it was kind of, maybe it’s borderline a Cozy. And then when I started reading it, the main character is, like, being forced to kill these magical animals,and we describe the bodies of these dead animals. Like nope, nope, nope: that is not something you put in a Cozy.

Oren: Doesn’t sound very cozy, I would think.

Chris: I mean, later what’s gonna happen is she’s gonna join the love interest who is trying to protect the magical animals, and protecting magical animals is something you might do in a Cozy, but you would never actually show them dying or dead, right? That is not part of that.

Another interesting case is right now I’m reading Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, and this book is a Cozy, but it has a problem, which is that it’s about a cat shelter, but it’s not. Because the plot is about these magicians making trouble…

Oren: What?

Chris: …and how we need to get rid of them. So instead of focusing on running the cat shelter, Agnes is like, “Nope, I don’t have any time to deal with the cat shelters now because I need to go and categorize this magician’s magical artifacts.” And in most stories I’d be like, “Yeah, cool, magical artifacts,” but in this story I’m like, “Hey, I wanted to hear about the cats.”

Oren: Ugh, I don’t have time to eat this delicious meal. I guess I have to go snack on some leaves. No, thanks.

Chris: The plot is built around something that in another book could be just fine. Having magic battles between misbehaving magicians. To get their power they have to go into this creepy forest. In another book that would all be great and I would be very interested in it, but in this one there’s cat shelters and I wanna hear about the cats because that’s what the Cozy is typically about, and that’s what we set up, right? We set up that she’s desperate to find a location for her cat shelter because nobody wants to lease their location to her once they hear she’s gonna bring in cats. It’s a very compelling problem that gets you attached to the cat shelter, and then suddenly having the plot be like, “No, we have to leave the cats behind to deal with these magicians now,” now I just hate the magicians.

Oren: Get outta here, magicians.

Chris: [laughter] Now I’m sure it’ll come together at the end. Again, this is why a typical Cozy is about the success of the shop or the household or the institution. That’s what the plot is about and those are the activities that the protagonist engages in. Like in Legends & Lattes, it’s about a coffee shop. To engage in the plot and solve problems, the main character runs her coffee shop and finds new solutions for her coffee shop. She doesn’t, like, run off and deal with the mafia.

Oren: The way that that happens does have some problems, but it is definitely focused on the thing the story is about. The same thing with The Spell Shop or The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I’m not saying these are perfect stories, but they know what they are about, and they don’t introduce it and then try to take you away from it.

I do get why stories like The Hobbit and Howl’s Moving Castle and Defensive Baking get on Cozy lists: it’s because they have cozy elements within them. There are all the food sequences in The Hobbit, there’s the taking care of Howl’s castle when he’s not around in Howl’s Moving Castle, and then of course there’s the baking in Defensive Baking.But I wouldn’t sell those as Cozies because I think someone looking for a Cozy is gonna pick these up, and it’s not gonna meet what they are looking for.

Chris: I would say the book Howl’s Moving Castle definitely feels lighter and lower in tension and, and more cozy than the movie. Than the anime movie.

Oren: Sure, that’s true.

Chris: Technically they do have a villainous witch in the book that they kind of fight at the end, but it has a lot more just hanging out, cleaning Howl’s castle, that kind of thing. I do think that things like Howl’s Moving Castle and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which is another one that is not really cozy because it has too much danger. Generally in a Cozy, the protagonist is not facing a villain that is threatening to kill them. If they face any threat that could endanger, like cause injury, it’s usually something like a storm or some other natural disaster. It’s not like “somebody’s gonna murder me.”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So Going Postal is not a Cozy, but this process of finding this old post office with all of these undelivered letters, and then inspiring the two remaining postal workers, and then starting to redeliver all those letters again and cleaning it up and coming up with new ideas to revitalize the post office: those are all activities that are just prime cozy activities.

Oren: Right. And a story where you take over a beloved institution and bring it back from the dead and strengthen it, it could not be a Cozy, right? It could be very high tension, but it will have some of the same wish fulfillment as a Cozy.

Chris: Yeah. If it’s good.

Oren: Yeah, if it’s good.

I was sad to discover that I think the era of Cozy Fantasy panic pieces may be over.

Chris: Oh, no. We need more silly pieces to make fun of.

Oren: ‘Cause there used to be every so often someone would publish a panic piece about “how Cozy Fiction was destroying literature and maybe also turning us into fascists”, depending on how spicy they felt. And I can’t help but feel like, maybe those went away because we suddenly had a lot of real problems to deal with and we had fewer people who had their heads far enough up their ass to write something like that. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.

Chris: It just feels so unfair to me. It’s like we had so many people pushing grim dark stories for so many years, and it’s like– look: the people who are sensitive to tension just wanna have their own stories to read, okay? Just let them have their stories.

Oren: It’s bad to want those, Chris. It is a moral failing. [laughter] I tried to find another one for today’s podcast, and the closest I could find was some guy on Bluesky being mad when a reviewer mentioned that they take the book’s genre into account when deciding how to judge it because in theory the publisher might have misfiled it in the wrong genre, so how could you punish the author for that? [laughter] Which was silly, but not nearly as silly as a Cozy Panic piece.

Chris: Another kind of Cozy Fail I’ve seen is at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse, which is the sequel to Spell Shop. There’s just a sequence that some readers would find very harrowing. I think the author just assumed this was not a big deal. We heard about this happening in the first book, but it was, you know, happening to a minor character and was not shown in detail. The protagonist is turned into a statue, a wooden statue, and at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse we find out she was conscious the whole time she was a statue.

Oren: Blah

Chris: And hear all about her being a statue in detail. That’s just – again – that’s the stuff of nightmares. It just doesn’t belong at the beginning of a Cozy. The whole point is this is a feel-good fantasy, and we’re going for positive feelings. 

Oren: It is definitely a case of– if you do get readers who are like, “Hell yeah, trapped in a statue unable to move, but conscious of your environment for years, give me more of that,” and then they keep reading, they’re like, “What the heck is this greenhouse?” [laughter] “What’s, what’s, why, what did you trick me for, right?” There’s no win in that. That’s a lose-lose scenario.

Chris: I do think it is worth talking about Cozies and tension in general because I think a good Cozy has just the right amount of tension, it does have some tension. Like, for me, the sample Cozy reader is my mother, who is real tension-sensitive: she doesn’t like adversarial contests between people; she wants everybody to get along. And definitely prefers not to have violence in her stories, so she … Cozy Fantasy, as far as I can tell– if it’s not her favorite genre, is at least one of her favorite genres. But she even has a point at which she’s like, “Yeah, that was kind of low tension,” even though she doesn’t typically like tension that much.

I also think that, okay, there are always the readers who are like, “Yeah, I don’t care if this has tension as long as some characters I like are hanging out,” and that’s fine, but I do think having just that right amount of tension definitely helps broaden the audience. Some people liked, for instance,Bookshops & Bonedust, which was the sequel to Legends & Lattes. I was so bored because Legends & Lattes has a real tight plot, cohesive plot with problems. Bookshops & Bonedust is just fragmented and has no tension to speak of, and I couldn’t get through it. So again, I think there’s just a sweet spot to be had here, where we have just enough that there are actual problems that feel like they matter for the protagonist to tackle, but it is not supposed to be scary. 

It’s not supposed to be a thriller, it’s not supposed to be particularly exciting. Basically, don’t want high stakes usually, and by “high stakes” that means somebody’s life is threatened. Instead, you want stakes that are, like, medium to low, where the institution is at risk or the business is at risk or something like that. A lot of times emotional stakes: somebody’s emotionally hurt and they need to heal. Or you could have somebody’s threatened in a lesser way, right? They’re gonna be conscripted, they’re gonna be jailed, they’re gonna be sent away, and that’s gonna cause them deep unhappiness and that’s enough.

Oren: Legends & Lattes is actually a fascinating example to consider tension in Cozies through, because it’s clear that the author, Baldree, does know the story needs some tension because he sets up problems. Not huge problems, but real problems, like getting the coffee shop off the ground, and then he sets up this distant but more serious problem of the local mobster wanting to charge protection money. And those are, I’d say about right for a Cozy. The mob’s not gonna break down her door tomorrow, but it’s something we have to deal with. And then, you know, not getting the kitchen extension on the coffee shop’s not gonna kill anybody, but it matters.

The problem is that every single problem is then resolved by her having magical friends who do everything for her. And by her, I mean the protagonist, Viv. So that’s an interesting case where the author knows that some tension is needed, but actually the problem is that he doesn’t know how to resolve problems satisfactorily.

Chris: Or in The Spellshop, the stakes are that “we’re not supposed to have these magic books because we’re kind of in an uncertain political situation in The Spellshop. But there was a previous empire that basically wanted to hoard all the magic for itself, so nobody else is allowed to have these books. But the community is suffering because it is actually dependent on magic, but because of the hoarding of magic, things on this idyllic little island are falling apart.” So the protagonist is trying to solve these problems, but also is trying to not get caught by any potential authorities that come by. And then later we have an inspector come by so we can worry about the protagonist getting caught. But that is as much tension as we have for the most part. And then they deal with a storm, but it doesn’t really feel in that storm like anybody’s gonna die. I mean, we have one, I think, situation where people are out in the water and we’re a little worried about them, but for the most part, you know, we’re not worried about people dying here. That’s kind of the level that you want for a Cozy. 

I will say though that if you want lower tension, it does really help if the story keeps moving and has good novelty. So for instance, Teller of Small Fortunes, that one is a Cozy that has probably some of the lowest tension I’ve seen in a Cozy, but it actually kept my attention despite how low the tension was. It helped that it was a traveling story, so the characters moved around and encountered new people and did new things. That variety also helps retain attention. In Teller of Small Fortunes, instead of having a community problem, we just have four people that each have their own personal problem that’s not particularly urgent, and they travel around together and kind of work on their problems.

Oren: Yeah. If you have a high novelty that you can maintain, you can make up for a lot of other problems with that.

Chris: Just having the story move and having people encounter new things and do new things. Whereas if you take longer for everything that you cover, that is gonna make it a little bit harder to keep attention.

Oren: And when you’re planning your story, assuming that you do plan your story, it’s important to think about, “okay, is the activity that I’m selling, the thing I am putting in the title to let people know what this is, do I know how to create in-character problems around that?” And if the answer is no, you may wanna rethink things, because that’s partly what’s going on with Mystical Cat Shelter, is that we’re often just being dragged away to do other things. But there are lots of things you could do with running a mystical cat shelter, right, that could be fun little cozy problems to solve.

Chris: I kind of wonder if part of the issue is that the Mystical Cat Shelter author just wants to write Howl’s Moving Castle.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: ‘Cause the love interest in that book definitely feels like he’s inspired by Howl.

Oren: Does he go to Wales?

Chris: He does not, no. No.

Oren: The best part of Howl’s Moving Castle, when they go to Wales.

Chris: Actually, this story takes place in, like, historical Europe somewhere.

Oren: Huh. So it is Wales. Or it could be. Probably not.

Chris: Actually, they could all be in Wales for all I know. I’m not exactly sure where they are. But Howl is French.

Oren: All right. Yeah. He could be in Wales. He could be stirring up dissonance against the, uh, against the English.

Chris: So it’s actually not in a fantasy world, no. That was very, very silly. Howl should not come from Wales.

Oren: Yeah. [laughter]

Chris: For anybody who has not actually read the Howl’s Moving Castle book or seen the movie, it takes place in, like, a fantasy world. So it’s just very random when we discover that Howl comes from real world Wales and has, like, a door to go back there.

Oren: To be clear, the issue is that he comes from the real world, not Wales specifically.

Chris: Not that he’s from Wales specifically, no. It’s just weird that, like, it’s not important to the story in any way. It’s just a random thing that takes some time. But he has a portal door to, like, go back to Wales, and it’s like, “why are we doing this?” I dunno.

Oren: Which is funny because you can tell in the animated movie that they were like, “Okay, we’re obviously cutting this real world backstory bit, but we still wanna have that, like, mysterious magic door. Where does it go? Like, I dunno, like a black place maybe? Don’t worry about it.”

Chris: I liked the black mysterious mist, the weird black void. I thought that was a good addition. 

Oren: Yeah, kind of interesting. It’s just by the end I feel like they maybe didn’t really know what they were doing exactly with that movie.

Chris: Another book that is not cozy, but I think it’s inspired Cozies is Dealing with Dragons. 

Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure.

Chris: Where basically she goes to live with a dragon, and then she organizes the dragon hoard. There’s knights who are coming to rescue her and keep threatening her dragon, so she has to find ways to make them go away because she wants to stay. Then she’s visited by the other princesses who are the captives. I mean, they’re technically the captives of other dragons, but this is like a fairy tale setting where this is just a traditional thing for princesses to do.

Oren: Yeah, it’s more like an internship.

Chris: Yeah. Ugh, unfortunately, reading this book again recently brought up how misogynist it is, which is so sad.

Oren: Yeah, it is, for sure.

Chris: For me, it’s … you know, I read it as a girl, and so did many other people, I’m sure, in our generation. It still has a lot of fun stuff in it, but the misogyny is very apparent now.

Oren: I mean, it could be worse. It could be Wheel of Time.

Chris: That’s true. It could be Wheel of Time.

Oren: That’s, that’s what I read as a kid and then went back to and was like, “Oh, no.”

Chris: But Dealing with Dragons has a great example of how you take a scenario like that and you add little problems that are fun for the protagonist to solve to give it some, like, plot structure. 

Oren: We should also note that one of the most useful sources on how to write a Cozy is the article “What Is Cozy Fantasy And How To Write It” by Chris Winkle.

Chris: You flatterer.

Oren: And importantly, it has tables that you can roll on to generate a Cozy premise, which is – as everyone knows – the most important part of writing.

Chris: People certainly had a lot of fun with that Cozy Fantasy story generator.

Oren: And so I would like to do that together now, as a family. Because once we’ve done that, we will basically have written a Cozy novel. Just to be clear.

Chris: Yeah. That’s all it need.

Oren: So first, if we start with step one:

I would like to run a… and then I will put 1 to 21 into my little random number generator. It’s 15. Oops, sorry, that should be 1 to 12, not 21. My bad. 

Chris: I didn’t make that many options.

Oren: Six… Okay, I would like to run a garden. All right. Good. We’re off to a good start. Okay.

Chris: The story’s about a garden.

Oren: It’s about a garden that’s in a…1 to 16… that’s in a city. Okay. It’s a city garden.

Chris: That’s useful. Garden in the city.

Oren: Yeah. People in cities don’t see as much greenery as they would probably like to, right? Okay.

So we’re running an urban garden, and is filled to the brim with…here’s the 21…generating that to a…10…That is filled to the brim with stews…Oh, I see. We’re getting a little off topic here. 

Chris: Hey, maybe we use the garden ingredients to make stews. So we harvest the vegetables from our garden, and then we make stews outside for people.

Oren: Yeah, yeah. So it’s a food garden then.

It’s an urban food garden. For the benefit of… 1 to 19… 10 again: for the benefit of giants. Oh man, they would need that in a city, right?

Chris: I mean, we do have to keep them from stomping all over the city. So like maybe if we can generate enough stew, we can appease them and they’ll go away.

Oren: Right, and this has to be like a magical garden, ’cause how else are we gonna grow enough calories to feed giants, right?

All right, so it’s full of giants who have been…who have been lost. Hmm.

Chris: So maybe they’re heading to like, there was an old giant city nearby…that is either hard to find or fell, and so the giants keep coming and searching for this legendary city.

Oren: Right, and we’ve made this garden to get them stew every time that they come by as like a way to make, you know, to be good neighbors, right?

But thanks to this place, they have all found… healing. Well, that actually, that just basically fits already, right?

Chris: Yeah, so these giants are lost and they’re in bad condition after traveling. They’re probably injured, they’re probably tired, and they haven’t eaten enough. And, you know, when they’re in that condition, they probably make some trouble for our city. So we’re just gonna make big healing stews, take care of these giants so they don’t cause trouble anymore. 

Oren: That sounds like a pretty good Cozy Fantasy, actually. I’d read that

And you know, so into that, we would have little problems. Like, we would need to get magical fertilizer to prepare for the giants to arrive, and we’d need to be able to cook the vegetables.

Chris: Maybe we need to find a type of stew that the giants like. Maybe they have different taste buds than most people.

Oren: Yeah. And then while we’re doing that, we might have to keep the peace between some of the giants who are kind of stressed out. If there are townsfolk who are a little leery of the giants, we might win them over with our stew.

Chris: And maybe we need to expand our garden so that we have enough for all the giants so the giants won’t fight over the stew. So then we, like, end up befriending a giant, and then we convince the giant to plow an additional area so that we can kind of expand our garden outside the city a little bit.

Oren: Yeah. Or, like, we talk to some building owners and they let us use their rooftops.

Chris: Mm. Yeah, rooftop gardens.

Oren: Yeah, okay. See? Yeah, yeah. This could be great. We could have lots of fun little conflicts that end with the giants realizing that the real city they were looking for was actually this one with the great stew, and the friends they made along the way.

Chris: I can imagine for that one, I’m trying to think of, like, what would be the climactic– ‘cause there usually is a climax that’s somewhat exciting. Maybe what they were looking for actually appears, but it’s bad in some way, like they’re gonna fight over it. Or something is wrong there and we wanna keep the giants from fighting each other, and so we have to create peace. And of course, we do that by making the best stew ever, and they’re all in such a good mood they can’t fight anymore.

Oren: No one can fight when this stew is served. It’s just that good.

Chris: I think when I added the stew option, I was thinking about: what if you’re running a shop or a restaurant or something. It’s filled to the brim with stew.

Oren: What, you’re telling me that story elements aren’t 100% modular? You can’t just swap them in and out however you feel like?

Chris: With a little extra creativity, maybe….But yeah, no, that element of personal healing, where we’ve got this effort, this household, this business, this institution, this community – and it’s for a group of people that have been suffering, and now we’re gonna help them heal– is also really key to Cozy. Those healing themes and emotional wellness is pretty key. 

Oren: Well, on that actual wholesome note, we will go ahead and call this podcast to a close. 

Chris: And if you would like to join a cozy little community that has good feelings, consider supporting us on Patreon and joining our Discord and getting our little personal rambles. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First we have Amon Jaber: he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.