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.
reblogging this again cuz I feel like the canary in the mine.
"What's wrong with Coffee Shop AUs?" Dude nobody shat on your coffe shop AUs I beg you to read the post.
"Stop grilling people for liking Coffee Shop AUs!!!" Again please read the post, this is not about you.
"People have always written fluff!! [cites some example]!!" Nobody said it never existed before, please read the post.
"Not everything was better in the past, you know! It's fascist to say things were better in the past!" Actual comment from another post. I beg people to raed
"Is there really more fluff tho? Sure, people demand wholesome fics now and low-stakes happy-ending-only stories for queer characters, BUt.... are there really more coffee shops?" .......dude is so close so getting it... they notice the trend too... they are just confused by the absence of Coffee.... I'm gonna scream.
"What do you mean there is no darkfic/whump anymore? [cites example]" Do I say it again? Nobody claimed that. ReAD the PoST.
Some of this really fit with my personal experiences over the last 15 years (increasing volume and vigor of backlash based on moral judgments; increasing demand for tidy happy endings) and some did not (less fic with violence; more wholesome/kid/cafe fic), and I wondered to what extent my fandom bubble was insulating me from broader patterns. Or if other people are thinking of a different timescale for these patterns.
I pulled some data from the most commonly used tags as well as the basic archive warnings and ratings and some other relevant ones, covering the last year and then the 2010-2015 time period. Red means less common in in 2025 than 2010-2015; green means more common in 2025. The 2010-2015 range is just the time I personally was curious about. I did also look at the data 15+ years ago, but that period has a glut of older works being uploaded: