Fellas, is it counter revolutionary to eat.

This is a reminder that any insane extreme position can be couched in progressive sounding language to try and persuade you of its validity, even positions that are totally contrary

Sketchy Wolf Himeko, no horror, no violence, just :P

okay actually this is a great phrase for it

Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.

Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.

However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.

The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.

The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.

To me, there's something very uncanny about it.

Coffee Shop AUs are rom-coms. As in, they are very explicitly influenced by the structure (particularly the meet-cute) of romantic comedy films and then (often) use that structure as a means of exploring queer love rather than the expected man/woman pairing. Yeah, they're unrealistic and escapist and tooth-rottingly sweet... because they're supposed to be. That's the genre. Though obviously they don't have to be anyone's cup of tea, they're no more unexpected than a Hallmark movie smoothing over the capitalistic hellscape of running that Christmas tree farm.

Are there there reading and writing trends we can trace over the last few decades that coincide with political changes and major world events like a pandemic? Undoubtedly! (The rise of "COVID fics" and the use of AI immediately spring to mind.) I'd love to see more of that research. But it would take research and I guarantee the conclusion will not be 'Fandom is fascist now because a some people like simple, escapist fics.' Because there's emphasis on the word 'some.' Which fandoms are we talking about? How long have they been around? (And thus how long have they had to accumulate long, plotty, shockingly dark fics?) Who tends to be the demographic that engages with the original medium? Is the base story itself sweet and cutesy, or is it already grim and dark? Because one trend that has been seen is the urge to plop characters into opposing genres. What if the sweet protagonist from the kid's show has to survive a gruesome zombie apocalypse? And what if the immoral serial killer was navigating - not action-packed murders - but the simple conflict of having a barista get his order right?

Fandom has not suddenly lost complex and violent fics because one singular fandom does not exist. There are thousands of fandoms with thousands of social pockets and you curate the kind of fics you see via search engines and who you follow. More than that, the popularization of a new genre (Coffee Shop AUs) does not mean domestic fics weren't just as prevalent before. "kidfic" came before the coffee shop and "fluff' came before "kidfic" and "curtainfic" came before "fluff." That's not a symptom of fascism. That's a result of fans - a massive group that covers every demographic and identity marker possible - all writing together. We shouldn't be any more surprised to see fics that portray an unrealistic coffee shop in fic archives than we would be to find bodice rippers portraying unrealistic historical settings in libraries.

"You're smoking too much weed," says the guy who got addicted to manosphere podcasts on his orb and started a fascist militia with a side hobby of deliberate environmental destruction. Started cutting down trees to own the woke elves.