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.
This might be interesting to look at in a navel-gazing way when it comes to fandom trends mirroring the real world. However you can pry fluff out of my cold dead hands. Because I've heard this concept of "drama = mature and correct" and "fluff = immature and wrong" for over a quarter of a century. "Tradwives" is a new one for fluff. I have seen people called Republicans over it though (lol).
I really hope no one sees this and abandons writing some fluff just because they fear being called a tradwife/fascist.
I think there is a fairly significant element of escapism, too (which is mentioned above, but then kind of glossed over). Like, the fantasy is too real and the real world is too real, so I'm just going to cocoon these characters in place where NONE of us have big problems. Because in the "real" story, getting more of the narrative almost ALWAYS equals Bad Things Happening.
Also, I have seen these exact same arguments applied to DARK fanfic, and the defense is the same: it's fictional. Like, darker stories aren't hurting people, and neither are fluffy stories helping them. Because they're not real. You require as much suspension of disbelief to accept the coffee as you do the dragon.
So while I get the impetus to hang a name on these trends, I don't think you can ever do it completely or comprehensively, because being a tradwife influencer hurts real people, but writing a coffeeshop AU where everything is aggressively okay does not.
