The Rise of Cozy Fantasy - Reactor

Pour yourself a cup of tea or a mug of hot chocolate, cuddle up with your (winged) cat, and come sit by the fire... Hello and welcome! Let's talk cozy fantasy, a subgenre rising in popularity.

Cozy fantasy didn't spring out of Zeus's head, fully armored and sipping tea. There are plenty of older novels that, if they came out today, would be called cozy fantasy (to name just two: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede). But cozy fantasy blossomed into a distinct and popular subgenre with its own label in 2020.

Yeah.

That year.

Born in a time of pain and fear and loneliness and discontent and boredom and ever-present existential dread, it rose to fill a need. We (okay, not everyone, but me and a whole lot of other readers) needed to escape. And not just escape-we needed to escape someplace that felt warm and gentle and safe.