Seeing "toxic yuri fan" in their blog header and skimming their last few dozen posts to see whether that's toxic yuri as in "I have ambivalent feelings about the central relationship in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a PG-rated cartoon for children" or toxic yuri as in "I want them to kill and eat each other".

people always try to play the "but you're a lesbian" card whenever i say odd shit about men and i think that's because people are too cowardly to accept the truth: these are pure, objective observations. i don't have a leg in this race. when i say Gene Wilder has a kind of evil warlock's raw sexual charisma in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory you can't write me off as being too horny. because i'm literally not. i'm making a statement of fact here. and you'll just have to cope with it.

Cozy Fantasy and Why It Doesn't Work

I think I am among many who feel like they should love cozy fantasy and have found it an incredibly lacking genre.

This newly branded "cozy fantasy" genre that has taken readers by storm since 2020 and while it is new that books are now marketed as cozy, the genre itself isn't new. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a great example of the genre before it was labeled and also how to make it work.

Cozy fantasy is defined by many as fantasy with low stakes. Fantasy aesthetic but less sword fights. On paper, it sounds great. But the execution has been less than stellar for readers like me. The lack of physical stakes has also impacted the emotional stakes of these books, creating forgettable characters with boring problems. As a romance reader, I find this frustrating. Romance is known for being a predictable and formulaic genre, the now defunct Romance Writers of America defined romances as needing happy endings, a term romances have continued to follow. Yet these romance texts manage to have low physical stakes (how to date your neighbor, how to confront your toxic friends, etc) while still maintaining high personal stakes that keep readers invested and begging for more. So I was initially confused why cozy fantasy authors struggle to write texts that connect to readers like me.

I think I have found the answer which is the genre is just here for vibes. It is all about aesthetic, not even worldbuilding that fantasy is known for as most cozy fantasy I read have so many problems as soon as you ask one question. It is hard to acknowledge that a genre that is pitched to work for readers like me doesn't work for many of us. Especially because occasionally there is one that works beautifully to my taste.

I often say my favorite cozy fantasies that are more contemporary are short and visual, which I plays into the idea of the genre being an aesthetic. The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz is a good example because it is a simple story that is given the perfect amount of pages and gorgeous visuals without dragging on when the message is very clear and easy to understand. Books like The Phoenix Keeper and Legends and Lattes have absolutely nothing for me, their very clear message hitting the reader over and over so the readers don't miss it and focusing on the aesthetic of worldbuilding rather than the reality of the fantastic elements within the world.

I guess my point is. . . I realize this genre isn't for me since I have realized it is more of an aesthetic than anything. .. .but I want it to be. Should I let it go and put my efforts elsewhere? Or should I keep exploring this new trend and find the hidden gems?

I think you nailed it on the head but also:

So many cozy fantasies seem to do no work to make you like the characters. They feel like the epilogue to another story, or like fanfic in the sense that you're expected to already care about these people, but they're skipping the leg work to get you there.

Legends and lattes worked for me mostly because I had fun with the exploration of how a fantasy setting would reinvent a coffee shop. It also felt a bit like a videogame, delimiting tasks and creating new, small problems each time one goal was reached. Which is to say, it appealed to the part of my brain that likes puzzles, but failed to reach me with its characters. I don't remember a single thing about the love interest aside what she looks like on the cover lol

Stories with high stakes immediately make you see what your character cares about: justice for murdered parents, saving their home from the armies of evil, and so on. In low stakes fantasies, you're handed a character whose values are just the bland goodness people pretty much universally strive for. It makes them both forgettable and unremarkable. And a story that has no plot and very little worldbuilding cannot afford to have weak protagonists on top of it.

Which honestly might bring me back to my main theory of what makes a story good: it's a balancing act of Plot, Worldbuilding, Characters, and usually the stronger a book is in one of these aspects, the more likely I am to overlook flaws in the others. But by definition, cozy fantasy starts off with only two of these, so it makes it all the more important and unforgivable when an aspect is weak. Its like trying to build a stool with two legs.

Hello, professional author here, I have a *slight* tweak of a suggestion to offer, or an alternate take from a slightly different perspective. First, I 100% agree with the meat of what you're both saying here, and I absolutely share your frustrations with the genre of cozy fantasy as a whole -- so many of them have something going wrong with the engine of the story. The car won't start. You turn the ignition and all you get out of it is a weak grumbling. So what's happening here from a mechanical perspective?

We're talking about cozy fantasy being "low stakes", and that's certainly how it bills itself. But low stakes are not the source of the problem -- there are plenty of stories/movies/tv shows with very low stakes that we still enjoy watching! Great British Bake Off, for example. The stakes are only "Will the cake come out right" and "how will the judges react". Right? Those are low stakes! The world is not ending, society is not in danger of crumbling to pieces, there is no great battle between Good and Evil for the fate of all humanity. But we watch GBBO and we're ENRAPTURED. We're INVESTED. Why?

Not because of the stakes, but because of the tension.

wait hang on i need to say this in the loud font because it's crucially important

IT'S BECAUSE OF THE TENSION

Both readers and apprentice writers often confuse "stakes" and "tension" because, frankly, increasing the stakes is often a cheap and easy way to increase the tension. Here's the difference, just to make sure we're all on the same page: Stakes are an external, objective thing -- "will the cake come out right, how will the judges react" -- but tension is internal. It is the pull between two things: On one hand, how much this contestant wants to win, how hard they've been trying, how emotional they're getting about a mishap, and our knowledge from an earlier episode about how their mum always believed in them and how they've struggled to believe in themself but since making it onto GBBO they've been thinking that maybe... maybe they can believe in themself.

And what's pulling from the other side is: How their nervousness and lack of confidence is causing them to make mistakes; how we as the audience don't know whether this challenging thing they're trying is going to turn out well; how they're ever going to recover from a cataclysm like forgetting to turn the oven on; whether they could do their absolute best and try so so so SO HARD and it might not make any difference because the other contestants also were all trying their hardest.

Man, I don't know about you, but even just as I was writing that out, my heart was in my throat and I was getting a little choked up.

THAT'S tension. And that's what a lot of cozy fantasy is lacking, because they say "low stakes" and they think that stakes and tension are the same thing, and so they forget that YOU STILL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS CARE PASSIONATELY IF YOU WANT THE READER TO HAVE ANYTHING THAT THEY CARE ABOUT. As readers, we care when the character has something that really, really, REALLY matters to them. We literally cannot help it -- look up "mirror neurons" if you want the neuroscience explanation for why we literally cannot help it.

High stakes is a cheap cheat code to tension because something like "We have to save the world to keep the Dark Lord from invading the kingdom and slaughtering everyone" is sort of self-explanatory about why it matters. Ah, yes, We Don't Want To Be Slaughtered. Got it. No explanation necessary. You can get away with not really showing whether it matters to the character, because the audience just naturally ASSUMES that it's a Good and Important thing to be doing.

You can't get away with cutting corners like that if you're doing low stakes. Here, look:

So that's my two cents on where a lot of cozy fantasy is going wrong. And like, I can kind of see where my colleagues are coming from and why books like this keep being produced these days??? Like the pandemic really fucked up everybody, and so many of us are incredibly burned out and running on fumes... And so sometimes it feels impossibly challenging to write any book except one where nothing bad happens and nothing is in danger and nobody is really bothered or worried about anything and everything is mostly fine and there aren't any major setbacks.....

But that leaves readers cold. And frankly, I don't feel like it does much of anything to nourish either our souls or theirs. It feels like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner instead of going to the effort of even just heating up a frozen dinner that has a vegetable in it.

idk, man. I've taught university classes about this shit, but what do I know. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. (Also, if you would like an example of cozy fantasy where it really fucking matters to the person going through it, may I humbly suggest Yield Under Great Persuasion? I wrote it partially as an illustration of how there's a difference between Stakes and Tension. :D)

*things such as video game systems are not included in this poll

**your own, not a family/shared computer

reblog for reach/bigger sample size!!

Apple sponsored post

🦊👻The Ghost Fox Bride👻🦊

@foxgirlplushie

You've been isekai'd into a fictional setting. Spin this wheel to find out which one.

I had this idea in my head back in mid September and it refused to leave my head. Enjoy babies. Edit: Fixed up a few mistakes I was getting annoyed with!

@mikkeneko

Western passport holders will never understand. To go anywhere with a third worlder passport like a Filipino one, you need your tax returns, certificate of employment, bank statements, marriage certificates, sometimes a recommendation from a citizen of the country you want to travel to, everything possible to prove that you have a job and a family at home and you're not planning to be an illegal immigrant, JUST to get hit with a rejection because the embassy didn't believe you had enough proof.

Did you have travel plans? Already booked the plane tickets and hotels? Fuck you, better hope they issue refunds (they don't).

Americans and Western Europeans will never understand how insanely hard and bothersome it's to travel anywhere with a weak passport, let alone immigrate.

You want to study abroad? Show us proof that there is a quadrillion dollars in your bank account. Oh, an average monthly salary in your country is $400 and you plan to work when you arrive? You can't do that, silly, a student visa only allows you to work 2 hours every third Wednesday, and if we find out that you're working a second more we will deport you.

You want to work abroad? Better be a programmer, then of course you are welcome. Doctor, scientist, white-collar or, god forbid, blue-collar worker? You can fuck right off, your visa application goes straght into trash.

But if you marry one of our first-world citizens, then fine, you can come. Because we can't upset them, after all, they are a real person, unlike you.

i don't want to sound like i'm forcefully shoving identities on people who don't want it (who am i to do it, the patriarchy?), but.

"lots of people with PCOS/gynecomastia don't identify as intersex/don't want to be called intersex!" may it have something to do with all this aggressive gatekeeping around intersex label? with medical workers and scientists purposefully narrowing the definition of being intersex to exclude as many people as they can? with medical workers NOT SAYING even the actual diagnosis and being like "oh your hormones are messy you need to take these pills/get surgery?" with all these terfs screaming about "just disordered women/men?" with blatant misinformation around the definition of intersexness? with these ideas that intersex = visible difference at genitalia (at best) / bigenitalia (at worst)? with all these ideas that intersex people are rare freaky freaks, and it's nearly impossible to even see one of us, not to say BE one of us? may it have something to do with this?

"but we can't just say that 10% of people are intersex!" WHY? what makes you so scared of this idea? what makes you think that being intersex has to be something extremely rare? what you're afraid of?

i don't want to push labels on someone and pressure someone to identify with community they don't want to. but i'm really sure that gatekeeping and stigma play a big role in choices of people who don't identify as intersex while have body traits that fit the definition (not the narrow gatekeepy one but the community one).

Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free

I really wish more ADHD mental health care told you WHY things like this matter to our quality of life.

The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it's about having a "hyperactive central nervous system" because it's a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.

But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.

So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told "hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking" rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn't safe.

Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic "busy" feeling isn't a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.

Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.

So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.

When you no longer feel like the world is actively killing you, it's a lot easier to navigate it.

S++ tier addition to the post, thank you tumblr user butts bouncing on the beltway

@recreationalnecromancy

So, I have a friend who recently had fairly serious surgery, of the "high risk but lifesaving" kind, and afterward between the pain of recovery and the painkillers to deal with it, he understandably had issues with focus. He couldn't read anything longer than an email for about six weeks; even audiobooks were too difficult. He spent a lot of time falling asleep while watching nature documentaries on Netflix.

This week he finally felt like he could concentrate enough to start reading books again, so I asked him what book he'd chosen to start with, and he said, "Don't judge me for it being Tom Clancy."

Now of course I wouldn't. Genre fiction, especially your average thriller or romance novel, are easy to digest, so it makes sense. But it got me thinking, if I couldn't read for six weeks, what would I choose to return with? New book or old favorite?

I think for me it would be something familiar, but I'm torn. On the one hand something easily digestible like Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong would be simple and well known. On the other, something like Jack London's The Sea Wolf which I read almost ritually every few years, has deep emotional resonance...but is a bit complicated as a first book back.

I think I've settled on The Great Gatsby, which I reread often like The Sea Wolf but is slightly less philosophically complicated. And shorter than East of Eden, another strong contender.

Either that or a Rex Stout novel, but I feel like a whodunit would be stressful.

I’m taking the words “cortisol,” “dopamine addiction” and “vagus nerve reset” away from marketers and influencers and putting them on a shelf.

“Cortisol face” you mean light water retention?

Because what you are talking about is NOT cortisol face. Cortisol face (moon face) is a medical condition stemming from various causes, and I promise you, “hormone balancing bath salts” aren’t going to do shit.

Look at this shit. Look at it. Aaaaaahhh.

“Did you know that dopamine addiction just completely shuts down the vagus nerve?”

Worstie, that’s called death.

If your vagus nerve shuts down, you’re dead.

It can become damaged and dysregulated, but I fucking promise you it’s very much not shut down.

Only Queen and Maiden are allowed to drink water!

Everybody else spit until your dehydrated. It’s the only way to balance your dopamine.

Do y’all want to know something really fucking funny?

I’m a chronically ill person with a disease known as MCAS. Both the symptoms of MCAS and the treatment can lead to secondary adrenal insufficiency.

Adrenal insufficiency can lead to the body not producing enough cortisol.

I need you all to understand the sheer malicious glee I feel in my soul when one of these wellness frauds message me about having excess cortisol and how their 30 day program of bath salts and dopamine deprivation plans will cure my idiopathic anaphylaxis, and I get to laugh like a maniac as I inform them, actually, because my body is constantly over burning adrenaline to keep me alive, I don’t have enough.

Ahahaha

DOPAMINE DEPRIVATION

Joy you're going to murder me with this what the fuck

So, let me break it down.

“Dopamine addiction” was a phrase casually coined a short while back to describe the phenomenon of people engaging in harmful behaviors, specifically things like doom scrolling, because even harmful behaviors can give you a dopamine fix.

I’m sure it’s been used before that, but it started trending recently in that context.

It was a simple way to explain why so many people struggle to give up social media even though it might actively be making their mental health worse.

What these wellness influencers frauds have since done was take the phrase and run with it to such an extreme that any behavior that gives you “dopamine” (and I put it in quotes because I don’t actually think these assholes know what dopamine actually is) is bad.

Actually any form of dopamine seeking means you’re an addict and that’s why you’re miserable. It’s not burnout or trauma from having just gone through a massively traumatic and ongoing event (the pandemic) it’s you.

You personally, are out of alignment with your core self—your spiritual self. Your female archetype, if you will. And by golly gosh have they got all the products for you to buy to fix it while simultaneously making you feel guilty about all of it.

It’s pseudoscience with a spiritual twist.

A lot of the marketing spiels are bastardized versions of indigo child starseed shit. You don’t have ADHD or Autism, you’re actually a witch—what kind? Take our personality test and we’ll tell you. That’ll be $50 please.

And one of the things they talk about to “reset your alignment” is getting yourself into a state of “dopamine deprivation” because again, they don’t have a fucking clue what the word actually is or how the body works.

If they did they’d know that dopamine deprivation leads to debilitating mental and physical health problems.

But it sounds good, doesn’t it? Because they’ve got you believing you’re too reliant on dopamine and well. You really have been on your phone too much… maybe you should give it a try…

And thus they’ve taken a very reasonable, “hey, quit torturing your brain by exposing yourself to harmful shit on your phone and relearn how to engage with things meaningfully and intentionally” and turned it into a wellness scam that people are unfortunately buying into because they’re desperate and at this point they’d crawl into a meat grinder if someone told them it would make them feel better.

It’s the new age cult shit I was raised in and I hate how prevalent it’s become again.

No, actually I’m not secretly a maiden witch archetype who needs to eat certain foods according to the moon cycle.

I’m a fucking traumatized ADHD, major depressive disorder mess with multiple disabilities. I need dopamine. Give me dopamine, please, for the love of gooooooood.

Inverted ballpoint pen drawing!! The first picture is what I drew and the second picture is the inverted final piece

I have an important update to this post, for any who enjoyed this drawing, I finally got the opportunity to scan it and I just had to share the scanned versions of it here because it captured the colours astoundingly better than my original photos taken with my phone camera 😅

Certainly still one of my proudest creations to date! :3

on the thirteenth day of christmas my true love was investigated for his many flagrant violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918

So while the birds are a terrible idea, your true love is legally in the clear! Remember, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is only an agreement with the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Russia- and only protects birds that occur in the US and aren’t game birds, which can’t be taken out of season. Are any of these birds subject to the MBTA? Let’s find out!

Partridge- not subject to MBTA, none are US species.

Turtle doves- not subject to MBTA, European species.

French hens- not subject to MBTA, these are domesticated.

Calling birds- this could be any songbird, so just pick a non-native species, like canaries or something. Alternatively, this may once have referred to colly birds, which meant the Eurasian blackbird… so not subject to MBTA.

Geese a-laying- not subject to MBTA, these are also domesticated.

Swans a-swimming- this is trickier since a lot of swans do spend time in North America, but if you use something like an Australian black swan, you won’t be in violation of the MBTA. While swans do have a hunting season in many states, these are swans a-swimming, not swans a-dead, and live take is not permitted.

So you see, none of these terrible gifts have to violate the MBTA! Local bylaws, quite possibly, but nothing federal.

The Mute Swan is considered an introduced/invasive species in North America (as of 2005, it is not protected by the MBTA) and is very commonly kept in captivity, so you're in the clear there as well!

get to know me meme: [6/10] female characters ⇢ josephine montilyet