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.
I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.
Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?
That's a Problem.
It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!
And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.
The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into “fluffy stories bad” (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trends—see: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural “purity”, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
Obviously, the presence is easier to spot—you can actually see something that is present, but you can’t directly see something that’s absent—so it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.
Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just can’t only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into “fluffy stories bad” (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trends—see: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural “purity”, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
This whole thread is incredible and you're encouraged to read it all and share it. But if you read nothing else after the opening, let it be the above.
