Cozy Revolutions

I am archiving some of my long-form Twitter threads as blog posts. Today, cozy revolutions, originally posted here.

I’m coining a new lit crit term: “cozy revolution.”

You know cozy mysteries, where someone gets murdered but it’s carefully presented in a way that’s soothing to the target audience? It’s like that, but with books and movies where people overthrow the government.

Hallmarks of a cozy revolution:

It’s set in a fictional society, and the oppression they’re fighting against is something that doesn’t exist in the real world.

Violence, especially violence committed by the protagonists, is abstract and sanitized.

The Man, regardless of what he officially represents, is generalized enough that you can apply him to anything.

The members of the resistance are chummy, quippy, and hot. They have cool clothes, gestures, and slogans. They’re organized enough that they feel official.

Last but not least, it probably stars white people.

We (writers) often praise these stories for inspiring real-life protests (when they’re protests we support). But that’s the tail wagging the dog. Young people have always had the impulse to rise up. These stories just soak up that impulse.

Cozy revolutions are generic enough that they don’t point anyone towards any specific real-life path of action, and anyone can claim them for any cause.

If your metaphor gets co-opted by friggin’ Men’s Rights Activists, your metaphor is not clear enough.

The authors of these cozy revolutions may have had the noblest of intentions. I don’t know. I don’t live in their brains.

But I know why big media corporations love cozy revolutions so much:

Because they make you feel like a rebel for doing nothing.

Big media companies, like all corporations, have a vested interest in the status quo. So if they give you a movie about fighting The Man, they’ve made a calculated bet that your rebellion will be limited to buying a licensed T-shirt.

Cozy revolutions are meant to defuse your revolutionary impulse in a way that doesn’t harm the status quo.

And, well, for a lot of white people, it’s working.

Based on discussion, here are three more hallmarks of a cozy revolution (thanks to everyone who brought these up):

It probably involves a Chosen One.

Large portions of the plot are spent on a macguffin hunt, staged competition, quest to learn magic, or other mission that has no real-world counterpart.

And finally, it ends without showing the aftermath.

These three elements all serve the same purpose: They discourage you from actually doing the work. Either it’s a job for someone more special than you, or it’s something inapplicable to real life, or we just don’t see the hard part at all.

Cozy movies don’t show you how to really start a revolution for the same reason Breaking Bad doesn’t show you how to really make meth: They don’t want you to. They want you to enjoy watching someone else rebel, get that rebellious feeling out of your system, and buy a sticker.