capitalist coziness in legends and lattes
i wrote an essay pitch about legends and lattes after i read it
Serving Up a Cup o' Cozy Capitalism
Travis Baldree's debut novel Legends & Lattes shot to fame after being self-published in 2022, becoming a NYT bestseller, a BookTok sensation, and picked up for a reprint by Tor. It's a star among the budding "cozy fantasy" genre, which brings low stakes and fuzzy feelings to imagined worlds. But Legends & Lattes is selling more than a cup of orcish coffee: it's selling a world where comfort depends on not looking too closely at the source of startup capital or considering the ethics of supply chains.
Legends & Lattes' real fantasy is one of benign entrepreneurship, where real innovation consists of identifying market gaps and employees can attain the ultimate dream of ownership if their managers notice their hard work. At best elided, at worst presented as neutral or positive, exploitative social structures provide the context in which cozy fantasy can be imagined. More than pointless details, they are precisely what enable the low-stakes escapism of the setting.
i'm not gonna write a whole essay for it- at least not yet! but i wanted to list a few of my points because it keeps coming up in conversation
- the orc MC, viv, has startup capital from adventuring, a narrative highly entwined w/ colonialist ventures
- she hires one character to build her shop, another to do marketing and be a server/barista, another as a baker...a lot of the 'coziness' comes from her position as a property owner with money.
- she imports an entire coffee machine from "gnomish lands" so she doesn't even have a unique way of processing or making coffee
- as the shop gets more popular, viv magnanimously offers her workers shares in store ownership--but what does viv herself bring to the table? her only 'asset' is purchasing power
- it has a bit of a bootstraps feel of workers eventually becoming partners through their own hard work and committment - but again, they were already the ones DOING everything - viv just happened to be the one with the money and the idea
- she's introducing coffee to the region and somehow supply lines already exist for this previously unknown item
- who grows the beans? where do they come from? who ships them and who roasts them? all this stuff just exists neutrally in the setting w/o viv or the reader having to think about it
- it elides the mechanisms of empire that make logistics of this scale/ubiquity even possible
- it really is just like...an amerikkkan starbucks appears in this fantasy realm out of nowhere and it's portayed as inevitable/neutral (insert that ursula k leguin quote)
- also the menu deploys marketing tactics that are unmarked on in the narrative, as if it is a style of writing that comes up 'naturally' but NO it is specific, historical, and crafted! even if unintentional, it's still effective propaganda for capitalism.
these are all "easy choices" in the sense that it is "easy" to switch out the trappings of a contemporary coffeeshop for fantasy ones, leaving the structure unchanged, and i'm sure baldree didn't "intend" for it to come off as capitalist apologia. however, by not stopping to think for a second about why anything is the way it is in this world, not only did it come off that way, it also comes off as...profoundly uninteresting. like, i'd WANT to read a novel that did a logistical deep dive on where gnomish coffee comes from, figuring out how to source it through existing trade routes or creating new ones, and actually having to deal with the people who pick the coffee, those who pack and ship it, sellers, producers, etc, every step of the way. obviously there will be some shitty practices in there! but that's why you can't set your escapism within a coffee shop.