that guy

queeranarchism:

queeranarchism:

thelibrarybat:

clytemnestraaa:

clytemnestraaa:

i’m going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.

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.

As some people have pointed out, statistically there is no actual increase in the % of coffee shop AUs or decrease in violent fics, but the last analysis here still slaps.

And like, pastoralism or ‘nostalgic escapism’ isn’t always fashy it’s an aesthetic that many people can be drawn to. Queer cottage core (far removed from the material realities of argiculture and of land ownership) was a whole thing and it wasn’t necessarily a sign of queer conservatism.

But fiction like this does say something about the zeitgeist that produces it, just as much as a trend is utopia science fiction says something about the society that produces it.

#like how horror trends shift during different decades to reflect cultural anxieties#during the cold war we had zombie movies and invasion of the body snatchers bc americans were scared of ussr sleeper agents#during the satanic panic and stranger danger era we got slashers#post 9/11 got us american torture porn and movies like hostel#then the 2010s brought the purge and midsommar about religious extremism. get out focusing white supremacy. etc etc

Yes! Horror trends tell us something about what the society that produces it is afraid of, as do dystopia trends. Utopia trends tell us something about what the society that produces it would consider desirable social change.
And escapism trends tell us something about what society wants to escape. Pastoralism and cottage core are both about escaping the city and escaping modernity.

I think Coffee Shop AUs are about escaping big threatening events and potentially life-changing decisions. Characters that usually have a lot of shit going on are transported to a setting where everything is low-risks and low-stakes. It’s not hard to imagine why that would be appealing in the 2020s.

So it makes sense that Coffee Shop AUs defang capitalism. The pain of capitalism is big and stressful and high stakes. That doesn’t fit the genre.
Coffee Shop AUs are also far more often non-sexual than other fanfic genres. You can see this as prudishness, but it might also be inherent to the genre. In fiction about relationships, sex often raises the stakes and Coffee Shop AU’s are a world of low stakes.

(via demimonde-semigoddess)