#my husband watched a Lot of free biology lectures during Covid lockdowns and more of them took than i thought

[liprairian]

So, I see in the notes that this has been said, but cozy mysteries were the first genre to have the "cozy" appended, quite a long time before the "cozy fantasy" thing got big. That said, I hope you don't mind if I expand a bit on that - I'd never actually consciously reflected on this and it was a lot of fun!

The cozy murder mystery genre has a ton of parallels to the Regency romance genre. Others have said the cozy murder mystery genre has been around since Agatha Christie - I haven't independently corroborated this, but I'm going by it anyway. It's been around at least for the literal half of my life (I realized today) that I've been working in libraries, at any rate. The parallel author there would be Georgette Heyer, who invented the Regency romance as we know it.

Since their inventions, these genres have crystallized into extremely recognizable tropes and forms. The original authors were prolific enough that you could fairly easily identify formulas for their work, and those formulas are by and large respected as foundational to the genre. The titles and covers are distinctive but the same - candy colours and punny titles for cozy mysteries, rank-dropping and dubious period dress for Regency romances.

Cozy fantasy owes a lot to cozy mystery as a genre - cozy mystery established a lot of the elements that get touted as staples of cozy fantasy, like the warm cast of fun side characters and the relatively low stakes for the protagonist. (For the protagonist! Everyone else can go hang - but often in, say, crime mystery, the stakes are much higher for the protagonist as well). Legends and Lattes, in particular, feels like a specific callback to the cozy mystery genre, from its punny title to its ultra-specific setting (I can think of at least two long and popular series of cozy mysteries set in coffee/tea shops off the top of my head).

It's been really interesting seeing which aspects of this established genre get usurped into the "cozy" prefix - particularly the ones that are more marketing than literary, like the punny titles. Personally I view it a bit like, oh, cladistics in biology maybe, where the reasons something is considered a 'dinosaur' have more to do with specific characteristics they share with their ancestors than with any ideas the rest of us have when thinking about what a dinosaur is. I'm fascinated to see where things shake out long-term re: what bits a book needs to have to be considered "cozy".

Help why are we sincerely throwing “cozy” in front of everything? “Cozy murder mystery” okay what’s next cozy international heist? Cozy body horror? Cozy psychological thriller? “Haven’t you always wanted a Stephen King book where they drink tea and knit sweaters and grow parsnips?” Someone is dead Rebecca. “It’s about a young detective trying to solve the disappearance of his neighbor’s evicerator in the alps.” Fucking free me.