Coziness and Conflict

Small drama, and leisure without end

Today, I’m publishing a quest for Follow: A New Fellowship by Ben Robbins. It’s called the Feast, and it’s available for free on my itch page now! Everything you need to play this GMless, prep-less game is free and ready to go.

In the Feast, you'll tell the story of a family preparing the dinner of a lifetime in order to bring lasting reconciliation, union, or peace between you and your approaching guests.

Will you master that recipe in time? Will you finally break through to that wayward son, or win the approval of a feisty elder who won't pass down the family secrets? Will you find that one perfectly preserved ingredient for the main dish in time? Will you heal the divide between your family and the visiting guests that's been holding you apart for generations?

No preparation. No facilitator. One session. One meal to remember.

Inspired by books like the Redwall series, and films like Babette's Feast (1987), Pig (2021), and Phantom Thread (2017).

I didn’t intend for this to come out in time for Thanksgiving, but here we are. I hope you’ll play it, or read it, and let me know what you think. It was copy-edited, of course, by the impeccable

Joseph Krausz

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On that note, I’ve been struggling with myself over idea of coziness, particularly the idea that the “cozy” genre of media, “cozy games” or “cozy sci-fi” or whatever, is typically described as a genre that has “no conflict.” I’ve cobbled together some notes.

On Coziness

1.

I’ve never liked the idea that cozy fantasy and cozy games can be described as being “without conflict.” Rather, I believe coziness locates the conflict of the story in the intimacies of small relationships. 

Coziness reduces the stakes below certain thresholds by lowering the threat to home, the threat to society, to body, to family, to safety and sustenance, not to create perpetual safety and euphoria, but by allowing a subtler element of friction to shine out.

There’s a video of Fred Rogers, a canonized saint of coziness, speaking to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, discussing his concerns with the growing tendency toward violent conflict in children’s’ media. “We don't have to bop somebody over the head to...make drama on the screen,” he says of his show. “We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively.”

2.

From “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by 

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

3.

Then again, the definition of coziness as being “without conflict” is held so widely. Why do I shake my fist and rage at all at a perfectly functional definition, one that helps people find three more books just like Legends and Lattes? Fans of Spiritfarer aren’t routinely misled to their next game by failures of categorization, are they? And yet here I am, blogging.

A close friend described coziness, similarly, as without violence, drawing the boundary line in the wrong place all over again. When he says this, I grow frustrated with him. Doesn’t he get what I’m getting at here? Fred Rodgers, an ordained minister, would remind me that all of this teeth-grinding isn’t a war with another, isn’t a failure to love him, but rather a failure to love myself.

“It's very important to look inside yourself and find that loving part of you,” Pastor Rodgers says. “That's the part that you must take good care of and never be mean to.”

I’ll mull this over with prayer beads, on a walk in Prospect Park this warm November. I block off time for this walk on a Google Calendar.

4.

There is a book called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a lexicon of words that puts a name on otherwise unnamed feelings of loss, yearning, aching, sorrow. Some words are new, some are old, others are tailor-made by the author, John Koenig, “not necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake.”

Here’s a good one:

Ringlorn

adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

Here’s another:

Etherness

n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won’t always be this way—that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time when you’ll look back and try to imagine what it felt like to have everyone together in the same place.

One of the most powerful tools we have for self-making, recreation, and restoration is resonant language. Resonant language is the set of words that put shape and form on the unformed chaos of our inner life. If you’ve ever seen your horoscope, or a Meyers Briggs, or your Enneagram number, or a medical diagnosis, or anything that gave you that, “Aha, that’s it! That’s me.” That’s resonant language. A feeling of being known.

Coziness cannot be about impermeability, because resonant language pierces the heart from without. The language came from another. Coziness cannot be about protection only.

“It’s a calming thing, to learn there’s a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else” Koenig writes. “It’s even oddly empowering—to be reminded that you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.”

5.

Make your cozy list! Tea, candles, fireplaces, feasting. What is the role of comfort in coziness, besides that the genre is named for comfort? Perhaps because comfort softens us, which allows for the vulnerability of small things to enter in.

Clearly, leisure is some major of coziness. I’d argue, with one last addition, that cozy leisure is unhurried. This leisure is limitless, a cathedral in time. Respite gives us a calm before the storm, to recover before we re-enter the fray. Leisure is willing to wait out the storm, and the next storm, and the rest of the season if needed, without pressure or measure.

During the pandemic, Andy Serkis narrated the entirety of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. It’s about 100 hours of audio, and he did it for free, with voices for all of the characters. I’m doing my first listen-through, and one thing I underrated as a fan of the moves is how much more unhurried time passes between major events. The movies are a triumph, but they are also a cinematic triumph with the demands of dramatic tension, and so it doesn’t represent some of the following major periods of downtime:

• 10 years: The time between when Gandalf visits the Shire for Bilbo’s final birthday party and when Gandalf returns to set Frodo out on his quest.

• 5 months: The time Frodo spends preparing to go on his quest, selling properties, buying properties, giving things away, taking long walks with his friends.

• 2 months: The time the Fellowship spends in Rivendell after its formation but before they actually leave Rivendell,

How do they spend that time? Feasting, observing the weather, sitting by the fire, composing songs. Enjoying it, to the very brim, without hurry.

6.

Funny, then, that “cozy science fiction” is a genre that emerges. Science fiction has no candles, no fireplaces, often no open flames of any kind, or elaborate feasting. And yet we have The Wayfarers books.

I confess, I ran aground on The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Somehow it felt as though the fantasy of such a story is being bound up in small space with your coworkers, who are also your polycule. It wasn’t for me.

Then again, there are some folks in my day and age who don’t look nostalgically back at hearth and home, who jump ship from their place of birth as soon as they can get out. Part of me wonders if cozy sci-fi resonates with people who first found their quiet room for personal flourishing not in their childhood, but at college.

7.

I watch a YouTube essay about Animal Crossing. It turns out to be a YouTube essay about how Animal Crossing is about the comfort of a capable capitalism.

There is a discourse about cottage core, about the concept of “coziness,” consumption, Whiteness, cultural cannon, volkishness, nostalgia. You can spend your life staring askew at comfort and its reflection in the looking glass of digital media.

This year’s most overhyped trend is a wholesome Danish concept of cosiness, used to sell everything from fluffy socks to vegan shepherd’s pie. But the version we’re buying is a British invention – and the real thing is less cuddly than it seems.

That’s the beginning of a 6,000-word feature in the Guardian about the Danish concept of hygge. I put the article in my Instapaper to read later. Actually, just a few days ago, the New Yorker published a sneering piece about “cozy tech.” I put that in Instapaper, too. Maybe it would be better as an audio essay?

I look for it in Spotify, but then I see that I still have like 6+ hours left in the Andy Serkis Fellowship of the Ring. I delete both articles, and my heart breaks hearing Samwise agonizing over that poor old pony and how frightened he is of the mountains. Speak friend, and enter.

8.

“Maybe you’d like Stardew Valley,” I tell my fiancé. She’s never taken to video games, but another couple we know is playing their own couch co-op sessions while stuck at home with the new baby, and my fiancé will watch a trailer for anything. I pull it up on the living room TV.

Learn to live off the land…

She’s already shaking her head and bringing her hands to her chest defensively, like a cat being carried slowly toward a tub for a bath.

Become part of the local community…

“That’s not your local community!” she screams at the television, gesticulating wildly around the apartment, pointing to the apartments out of our window and across the barren courtyard of our pre-war building, “This is your local community!”

9.

One more:

Occhiolism

n. the awareness of how fundamentally limited your senses are—noticing how little of your field of vision is ever in focus, how few colors you’re able to see, how few sounds you’re able to hear, and how intrusively your brain fills in the blanks with its own cartoonish extrapolations—which makes you wish you could experience the whole of reality instead of only ever catching a tiny glimpse of it, to just once step back from the keyhole and finally open the door.