This is a friendly reminder that Holmes canonically uses the word ‘doggy’ when talking to his favourite furry friend
Watson’s description of Toby - “Toby proved to be an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown-and-white in color, with a very clumsy waddling gait.“
Holmes’ description of Toby - “I would rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force of London.“
IE:
Watson: “This is a weird dog.”
Holmes: “Let’s get one thing straight, my guy, this is the BEST dog!”
This is why I hate when people depict Toby as a bloodhound. Not that bloodhounds are terrible dogs, I love them and they do important work. But I think a lot of people don’t get how weird Toby was.
For instance, this is a spaniel:
Specifically, this is an English (Springer) spaniel. It’s typically bred as a game dog, to flush out birds or small animals from underbrush. They rely heavily on sight and sound, and are fast, energetic little boogers. Spaniels in general are squatty little dogs, built low to the ground. Given the brown and white color Watson describes, we can assume this particular breed is likely Toby’s spaniel side. Because a lurcher…..
Is a mutt. A specific kind of mutt, but it’s a mutt. It’s “the offspring of a sight hound mated with another breed, most commonly a pastoral breed or a terrier type of dog.” Sight hounds are dogs that are hunters by sight and speed, not scent. They include Greyhounds, Wolfhounds, Whippets, and Afghans. A pastoral breed is one that primarily works agriculturally. These are a HUGE group of dogs, including but not limited to: Sheepdogs, Collies, Cattle dogs, Shepherds (including German and Australian), and Corgis. Yeah, corgis are working dogs, or at least were bred to be. Again, these dogs rely on speed, agility, and sight, not scent. Terriers are much the same, but generally smaller. They are fast and driven by sight. They also have wiry, scruffy hair in general. So a Lurcher is a fast, sight-driven, scruffy little thing that looks really odd because the breeds its made from are widely different in size, body type, and structure.
Here’s a typical “lurcher” dog:
Look at that little goob! If the police rolled up with that thing strapped into a vest, would you trust them?
So yeah. Imagine that. Plus the above. You’ve got a freaking weird looking dog. Not only that, one that shouldn’t probably have a good sniffer, since it’s made from sight-based working dogs. A funny-looking, oddball, lanky mess that comes out of nowhere and does amazing, almost impossible detective work when people might not expect him on first glance to be worth anything.
I think I am among many who feel like they should love cozy fantasy and have found it an incredibly lacking genre.
This newly branded “cozy fantasy” genre that has taken readers by storm since 2020 and while it is new that books are now marketed as cozy, the genre itself isn’t new. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a great example of the genre before it was labeled and also how to make it work.
Cozy fantasy is defined by many as fantasy with low stakes. Fantasy aesthetic but less sword fights. On paper, it sounds great. But the execution has been less than stellar for readers like me. The lack of physical stakes has also impacted the emotional stakes of these books, creating forgettable characters with boring problems. As a romance reader, I find this frustrating. Romance is known for being a predictable and formulaic genre, the now defunct Romance Writers of America defined romances as needing happy endings, a term romances have continued to follow. Yet these romance texts manage to have low physical stakes (how to date your neighbor, how to confront your toxic friends, etc) while still maintaining high personal stakes that keep readers invested and begging for more. So I was initially confused why cozy fantasy authors struggle to write texts that connect to readers like me.
I think I have found the answer which is the genre is just here for vibes. It is all about aesthetic, not even worldbuilding that fantasy is known for as most cozy fantasy I read have so many problems as soon as you ask one question. It is hard to acknowledge that a genre that is pitched to work for readers like me doesn’t work for many of us. Especially because occasionally there is one that works beautifully to my taste.
I often say my favorite cozy fantasies that are more contemporary are short and visual, which I plays into the idea of the genre being an aesthetic. The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz is a good example because it is a simple story that is given the perfect amount of pages and gorgeous visuals without dragging on when the message is very clear and easy to understand. Books like The Phoenix Keeper and Legends and Lattes have absolutely nothing for me, their very clear message hitting the reader over and over so the readers don’t miss it and focusing on the aesthetic of worldbuilding rather than the reality of the fantastic elements within the world.
I guess my point is… I realize this genre isn’t for me since I have realized it is more of an aesthetic than anything. .. .but I want it to be. Should I let it go and put my efforts elsewhere? Or should I keep exploring this new trend and find the hidden gems?
I think you nailed it on the head but also:
So many cozy fantasies seem to do no work to make you like the characters. They feel like the epilogue to another story, or like fanfic in the sense that you’re expected to already care about these people, but they’re skipping the leg work to get you there.
Legends and lattes worked for me mostly because I had fun with the exploration of how a fantasy setting would reinvent a coffee shop. It also felt a bit like a videogame, delimiting tasks and creating new, small problems each time one goal was reached. Which is to say, it appealed to the part of my brain that likes puzzles, but failed to reach me with its characters. I don’t remember a single thing about the love interest aside what she looks like on the cover lol
Stories with high stakes immediately make you see what your character cares about: justice for murdered parents, saving their home from the armies of evil, and so on. In low stakes fantasies, you’re handed a character whose values are just the bland goodness people pretty much universally strive for. It makes them both forgettable and unremarkable. And a story that has no plot and very little worldbuilding cannot afford to have weak protagonists on top of it.
Which honestly might bring me back to my main theory of what makes a story good: it’s a balancing act of Plot, Worldbuilding, Characters, and usually the stronger a book is in one of these aspects, the more likely I am to overlook flaws in the others. But by definition, cozy fantasy starts off with only two of these, so it makes it all the more important and unforgivable when an aspect is weak. Its like trying to build a stool with two legs.
Hello, professional author here, I have a *slight* tweak of a suggestion to offer, or an alternate take from a slightly different perspective. First, I 100% agree with the meat of what you’re both saying here, and I absolutely share your frustrations with the genre of cozy fantasy as a whole – so many of them have something going wrong with the engine of the story. The car won’t start. You turn the ignition and all you get out of it is a weak grumbling. So what’s happening here from a mechanical perspective?
We’re talking about cozy fantasy being “low stakes”, and that’s certainly how it bills itself. But low stakes are not the source of the problem – there are plenty of stories/movies/tv shows with very low stakes that we still enjoy watching! Great British Bake Off, for example. The stakes are only “Will the cake come out right” and “how will the judges react”. Right? Those are low stakes! The world is not ending, society is not in danger of crumbling to pieces, there is no great battle between Good and Evil for the fate of all humanity. But we watch GBBO and we’re ENRAPTURED. We’re INVESTED. Why?
Not because of the stakes, but because of the tension.
wait hang on i need to say this in the loud font because it’s crucially important
IT’S BECAUSE OF THE TENSION
Both readers and apprentice writers often confuse “stakes” and “tension” because, frankly, increasing the stakes is often a cheap and easy way to increase the tension. Here’s the difference, just to make sure we’re all on the same page: Stakes are an external, objective thing – “will the cake come out right, how will the judges react” – but tension is internal. It is the pull between two things: On one hand, how much this contestant wants to win, how hard they’ve been trying, how emotional they’re getting about a mishap, and our knowledge from an earlier episode about how their mum always believed in them and how they’ve struggled to believe in themself but since making it onto GBBO they’ve been thinking that maybe… maybe they can believe in themself.
And what’s pulling from the other side is: How their nervousness and lack of confidence is causing them to make mistakes; how we as the audience don’t know whether this challenging thing they’re trying is going to turn out well; how they’re ever going to recover from a cataclysm like forgetting to turn the oven on; whether they could do their absolute best and try so so so SO HARD and it might not make any difference because the other contestants also were all trying their hardest.
Man, I don’t know about you, but even just as I was writing that out, my heart was in my throat and I was getting a little choked up.
THAT’S tension. And that’s what a lot of cozy fantasy is lacking, because they say “low stakes” and they think that stakes and tension are the same thing, and so they forget that YOU STILL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS CARE PASSIONATELY IF YOU WANT THE READER TO HAVE ANYTHING THAT THEY CARE ABOUT. As readers, we care when the character has something that really, really, REALLY matters to them. We literally cannot help it – look up “mirror neurons” if you want the neuroscience explanation for why we literally cannot help it.
High stakes is a cheap cheat code to tension because something like “We have to save the world to keep the Dark Lord from invading the kingdom and slaughtering everyone” is sort of self-explanatory about why it matters. Ah, yes, We Don’t Want To Be Slaughtered. Got it. No explanation necessary. You can get away with not really showing whether it matters to the character, because the audience just naturally ASSUMES that it’s a Good and Important thing to be doing.
You can’t get away with cutting corners like that if you’re doing low stakes. Here, look:
High stakes & high tension = Think Mad Max: Fury Road. It is a LOT and you can’t look away but you might feel sort of exhausted afterwards and need a nap.
High stakes & low tension = Many Marvel films. Sure ok yeah we’re saving the world, that’s fun, whatever. Probably saving the world is a good thing to do so that’s fine
Low stakes & high tension = GBBO as previously mentioned. Also pretty much any sport (sorry, sports fans, but “will they win the big game” is not high stakes, it just SEEMS like high stakes because of ow much you care about it – which is TENSION!!!) You will be on the edge of your seat, you will be crying about how amazingly well that border collie/papillon mix did in the agility course.
Low stakes & low tension: Legends & Lattes. Probably if Plan A doesn’t work out, the character could just wander off and try Plan B and it wouldn’t be that personally upsetting.
So that’s my two cents on where a lot of cozy fantasy is going wrong. And like, I can kind of see where my colleagues are coming from and why books like this keep being produced these days??? Like the pandemic really fucked up everybody, and so many of us are incredibly burned out and running on fumes… And so sometimes it feels impossibly challenging to write any book except one where nothing bad happens and nothing is in danger and nobody is really bothered or worried about anything and everything is mostly fine and there aren’t any major setbacks…..
But that leaves readers cold. And frankly, I don’t feel like it does much of anything to nourish either our souls or theirs. It feels like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner instead of going to the effort of even just heating up a frozen dinner that has a vegetable in it.
idk, man. I’ve taught university classes about this shit, but what do I know. Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. (Also, if you would like an example of cozy fantasy where it really fucking matters to the person going through it, may I humbly suggest Yield Under Great Persuasion? I wrote it partially as an illustration of how there’s a difference between Stakes and Tension. :D)
I suspect this is one that survived because of its sheer impracticality
like
how often are you really going to Don The Bead Armor, as a random woman living in the 1880s
that’s a glove-fitting bodice, as was popular at the time, and with the entire surface covered with beadwork, I feel like the stretch of the fabric would be severely limited. it’s absolutely gorgeous, but it’s very much a Sometimes Garment
