It’s emblematic of the way predators in the arts and entertainment industries are tolerated by colleagues and fans until the accusations become too detailed and too numerous to ignore. It is the insistence of ignoring material reality and uncomfortable truths because to stand on moral principles might be inconvenient. It’s DNC-goers covering their ears so they don’t have to hear protestors shouting the names of Palestinian children blown apart by bombs sent by the Biden administration. It’s taking a big sip of delicious warm coffee and refusing to consider the enslaved children who picked those beans and congratulating ourselves on being so virtuous.
This is not uncommon within the cozy fantasy genre. TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea takes inspiration from the infamous Sixties Scoop, in which the Canadian government stole indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools with upper middle class white families. Klune takes this genocidal horror and uses it as fodder for cozy pastoral fantasy about found families. Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor functions almost entirely on a refusal to interrogate power structures, portraying its emperor protagonist as an entirely helpless but kind individual, all the while ignoring that empires by their very definition plunder and devastate entire regions.
These books are about characters in fantasy settings who must be important enough for big events to still happen around, who ultimately decide that their best solution for happiness is to ignore them. We move the camera away from the horrific events of the world to run our cozy businesses, our found families of employees entirely subservient to us. These stories might be more healing if they focused on ordinary humble people surviving a brutal world through acts of kindness, but that is not the ideology at play here. It is one of dominance and pastoralism, where everything must go the protagonist’s way while still enshrined in the virtues of inaction. They are benevolent dictators preserving their wholesome and cozy way of life, all the while ignoring the horrors just out of frame. Garden walls to keep us from seeing the empire’s watchtowers looming in the distance.
Posted 8 days ago.
