What is Cosy Fantasy?

Okay, for episode one, we're going to be talking about defining cozy fantasy.

So when Angie and I first started talking about cozy fantasy and about her writing a cozy fantasy, I think we both kind of assumed that it was somewhat of an established genre or subgenre.

And it's really quite nascent.

And there's not a lot of... kind of like strict criteria around what makes a cozy fantasy.

So now that we've read a lot of books that can be considered cozy fantasy and have kind of like immersed ourselves in that, I think we can speak pretty confidently about what our definition of cozy fantasy is.

So that's what we're going to talk about now.

So certainly for me, like before I started writing a cozy fantasy, I thought, like you say, I knew what cozy fantasy was.

Then I started reading widely in the genre and I realized maybe my expectations of what a cozy fantasy was were different than the reality.

So like maybe we start with what did we think cozy fantasy was before we started reading the genre.

Okay.

Yeah.

I agree.

Yeah.

So I, so for me, cozy fantasy, I had read before I started writing my book land underways, which is my current novel.

Um, I had read the first quote unquote cozy fantasy book I'd ever read was legends and lattes by Travis Baldry, which is probably the book that sort of ignited the cozy genre, cozy fantasy genre as a, um, label that publishers use now there have been cozy books in existence forever for years and years and years but we only really recently i think started using the term cozy fantasy with with the publication i think of travis baldry's book that's when i first heard of cozy fantasy that's the first time i heard of anyone using that term and on the publishing side of things um So I read that book and then I thought I knew what cozy fantasy was.

And in some ways I kind of did because that book is kind of a blueprint for a lot of very popular, commercially successful cozy fantasy books.

And many of those books will be, will use Travis Baldry's books as comparison titles on the back of the book or when the publisher's promoting the book.

So a lot of the books that are coming out in the cozy fantasy genre are always being referred to travis baldry it's so so common so in some ways i wasn't wrong thinking having that book as kind of a blueprint for my understanding of cozy fantasy but it's incredibly limiting and it does a disservice to the genre so i thought cozy fantasy was you know, a cute, a cutesy setting.

It has a cutesy tone, very low stakes.

It's about found family.

I think it often has, I felt like it probably often had queerness as an element.

Um, Anyway, there's more I can say about what we mean when we talk about queerness in cozy fantasy, but there are certainly gay characters in cozy fantasy.

I felt like that was probably something that was happening in that genre.

And it was in a setting that had a lot of sort of cutesy things, very romanticized, romanticizing things.

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