Not so cozy after all

Bleakglow? Whump? What are we even talking about anymore?

Around this time last year I discovered the emerging cozy fantasy niche and thought to myself, “yeah, this is exactly what I’ve been working towards all these years!” As I said in the welcome post (that I’m now going to have to change), my reading sweet spot has pretty much always been those stories that feel like a warm blanket and a mug of coffee on a rainy day. Books that whisk me away from the everyday stress of frustrating life circumstances that never seem to ease up. I’m a big fan of escapism, and my ideal escape from reality doesn’t usually involve the kind of blood and guts grittiness that’s been popular for a while now. I don’t particularly care about Big Bad Evil Entities threatening to destroy the world, and I don’t really need my characters to feel like they’re facing death at the hands of a violent enemy at every turn. That’s not to say I’m completely averse to the threat of danger, as evidenced by the early chapters of Whisper of the Wilding Woods, but rather that I generally prefer my threats to come from either the environment or a character’s own need to overcome obstacles and either prove something to themselves or discover what they’re capable of.

As the cozy genre has grown and become more defined, it’s become painfully clear that I slapped my own notions of cozy onto the subgenre and kind of ignored the genre constructs other people were erecting around their beloved niche. The most frequently recommended examples of cozy fantasy haven’t particularly resonated with me, and so I’ve been left wondering what exactly it is I’m trying to do here. I almost called this post My work transcends genre... and other lies writers tell themselves. Genre is something all writers have to think about when it eventually comes time to sell our work, but none of us really want to squash our lovingly crafted constellation-shaped stories into the generic square holes of the classic marketing buckets we call subgenres. The thing is, subgenres are useful. We readers are faced with so many choices when we go searching for a new book, and it can be overwhelming. Often we’re looking for a particular tone or trope, and it helps to be able to go straight to a category like epic, urban, grimdark, cozy, romantic, or gaslamp. We want to know what kind of world we’re dipping our toes into, and we don’t want to accidentally buy a bleak tale of moral ambiguity and the harsh realities of war where everyone dies in the end when what we really wanted was a more hopeful story where the righteous protagonist prevails over evil and saves the world. Imagine going into a hip, indie record store¹ where there are no categories and everything is just filed by artist in alphabetical order.

At a glance, can you tell which of these albums is high-energy indie rock, which is baleful country/folk, and which is drum-loop driven hip hop? The answer is in the footnotes, but I’d love to see your guesses in the comments.²

Annoying as it is to have to label art as being this or that, it does help steer people in the right direction.

Though, at times it can all get to be a bit much. Like when people try to get this granular: Tone & Setting Alignment Chart. Now we’re really starting to overlap with indie music classification.

“Yeah, I don’t really believe in labels, but I guess you could say my latest book is sort of a graycore-noblebright fusion with an undercurrent of bleakglow vibes.”³

So what the hell am I actually writing?

I don’t know how popular a term this is, but I’m dropping the cozy and switching to branding my work adventure fantasy. I really loved the connotations of backpack fantasy, but it seems there’s a desire to stuff backpack inside the cozy niche, and I just don’t want to confuse anyone if they try one of my books and aren’t getting those light, cozy vibes they’d anticipated. There’s plenty of satisfying camaraderie, emotional intimacy, indulgent eating and drinking, and exploring snug environments like libraries and country cottages, but sometimes I drag my characters over the coals a bit before letting them enjoy those things. If you’ve done any extended traveling, you’ll understand how bittersweet an experience it can be. You’ll also know better than anyone else how the painful and rage-inducing pitfalls of travel make the reward of kicking back the beach with a cold drink in your hand to watch the sun sink into the ocean all the more satisfying.

This is where I realize I may be writing ‘whump’.

I like to think I’m decently familiar with trope jargon, but this one was entirely new to me. I only learned about it while browsing a list of fanfic story prompts, and the more I think about it, the more I think this might actually be my thing. Whump is a popular term for the hurt/comfort trope. Here’s what TV Tropes has tot say about it:

Also known as "whump", a Hurt/Comfort Fic is a Fan Fic about comforting one who is hurt. Usually based on either Break The Stoic or Break the Cutie, often to the point of Woobiefication: a regular character is damaged, either emotionally or physically, and another character (usually the character's partner, love interest, or a teammate) must comfort them.

As always, TV Tropes reminds me that I know absolutely nothing about how some people think about story. I don’t know how closely I adhere to that definition of whump, but it’s tough to deny how much I like beating up my characters and then having someone give them physical and emotional comfort that gets them back on their feet and moving forward again. Spoiler for the first two chapters of Whisper of the Wilding Woods, but I don’t think there’s anything very cozy about killing off everyone around my two main characters and then shoving them out into the wilderness where they can’t stop running if they want to survive both the natural elements and the soldiers hounding them every step of the way. It does sound a little whumpy, though, doesn’t it? In the first chapters of The Traveling Librarian, the main character faces his own set of unpleasant events that leave him in dire need of comfort and kindness.⁴

At the end of the day, readers have to take risks and crack open new books to see if they’ve discovered a story they can truly fall in love with. Once you hit that point where all you can think about is finding time to read a book, the genre labels aren’t worth a damn thing. Stories are unique and complicated things that ultimately do transcend the promises and limitations of any one genre, but that’s part of the fun of reading, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but for me, the most rewarding thing about getting lost in a new book is when the author lures me in with comfortable familiarity and then gently leads me off into territory I’d never thought I’d enjoy. No one book can be all things to all people, but I hope that when you read my work you’ll discover some satisfying amalgamation of epically cozy adventure whump. Whumpy cozy epic adventure? Adventurous epic whump coziness?

I don’t care what you call it, as long as you’re having fun.

Until next time, I’ll see you among the whump stacks.

-mark

1. I’m sure those of you who’ve never physically been inside a record store have at least seen one on TV.

2. From left to right: Country, Rock, Hip Hop.

3. In all seriousness, I think I might predominantly write graycore?

4. Will he find the comfort he seeks? Stay tuned and buy the book to find out! (If I could footnote a footnote, this is where I’d just tell you that yes, he does find plenty of comfort along the way.)