This wordpress article got me thinking. Things are erupting on twitter again, maybe I need to be on it less. Along with some interesting responses. Ursula Leguin, hm.
As a rise of that response to that original article on the cozy genre, along with that, please don't throw shade to the writer.
Genre is a useful social construct of sorting, via the audience uses to market their expectations. It's useful for the creator to consider this useful fiction used to help sort a taxonomy.
It's as real as a psychological desire, if I was to pin it with a conceptual distinction.
Is the cozyification a reflection of dumbing down? Staying safe? Depends.
It's out there now, in the public space, forming tribes, what's the problem is more children/adult genre not being clear with its commercial or literary intentions.
This happened with superhero movies with their 13. (Content warning, gore) The same argument was used in reverse with superhero movies. When there were marketed to adults.
This kerfuffle is simply the confusion of genre, its relation to the marketing. All related towards what type of age audience the creator does. Confusing the other when the other is done. This applies less to self-publishing, so whatever comes and goes. It's all good.
All this has made me think about interpassivity within storytelling, of course, with my own ending given within the romance. The interpassivity and mass-cult appeal, the real enemy to the creative.
That's my attempt at the discourse.
After notes, there's this cussy long article on the origins of cozy horror, 30 min-ish read.