Anybody Seen a Plot Around Here? A Bad Take on Cozy Fantasy

I’m back on social media enough that I’m seeing bad takes, and whew, do y’all have some bad takes. I want to leave aside the general state of everything—lots of bad takes to be had there—and focus on more bookish things.

Specifically, I want to take to task a bad take I saw the other day.

Let’s start by saying people are allowed to enjoy what they enjoy and dislike what they dislike. That’s fine. So the post I saw indicated the poster did not enjoy Travis Baldree’s cozy fantasy Legends and Lattes. I did enjoy the book, which is how I know this person was dead-wrong when they gave their reason.

Reader, they said that the book had no plot.

I Have Yet to Meet a Book with No Plot

As I said, I read the book, so I can tell you with certainty that this cozy fantasy does, indeed, have a plot. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that doesn’t have a plot, in fact. It would be fairly difficult.

Real life does not have “a plot,” yet humans are uniquely dedicated to crafting narratives. We do it all the time. Think about the last time you told someone about an anecdote in your life. Chances are it followed typical plot structure: you opened the story (“So there I was in the library, minding my own business.”)

Then you have your inciting incident: “Guess who walked in! That jackass Brad.”

Now, we want to hear about what happened when Brad arrived. Did you confront him? Did you overhear a conversation he was having and now you have blackmail material? Maybe you bumped into him and he apologized, because hey, he’s actually not that bad? Or did you run away?

This is a story: it has a plot. Someone does something; something else happens, which causes a chain of events. Then we find a solution to the problem, and the story wraps itself up with an ending.

In Legends and Lattes, the plot is that an orc is tired of being a for-hire assassin, does one last job, gets a magical object, and retires to open a coffee shop. The magical object is meant to ensure her success, but there are quite a few challenges and not a few lurking problems that would see her fail.

Confusing Plot with Stakes

The poster in question said the book had “no plot,” but what they likely meant was that they felt it had no stakes.

This is a huge problem I see all the time as an editor: stories where it feels like the characters are risking nothing or their actions are totally inconsequential.

There is nothing at stake. Win or lose, it matters not. In some stories, it doesn’t matter because we know the characters will succeed anyway—they’re the heroes, after all. In other stories, the scenarios are simply inconsequential—they don’t add to the larger overall narrative.

Comic books can be bad for this. Comic book characters die all the time, but they are almost inevitably brought back to life. Suddenly, we live in a realm where no one can die (or at least, they don’t stay dead). So life-or-death struggles lose all meaning, because death is impermanent.

A very good example of this is Kingdom Hearts III, actually. In this story, people die but are resurrected repeatedly. What should be “sad” moments where characters say tearful goodbyes end up being somewhat laughable—one character even comments on the fact he’ll be resurrected, saying, “See you soon.”

When the main character dies and cannot be resurrected, it feels inauthentic. The player cannot buy the idea that Sora will not be resurrected like literally everyone else. Death is too impermanent. And indeed, we’ll see this intrepid hero in yet another video game, so he’s not actually dead.

Death Doesn’t Just Upend Stakes

Life-and-death stakes are thus easy to upend, simply by having death become inconsequential. Inconsequentialness contributes to “lack of stakes” in many other scenarios, though. When characters are overpowered, for example, the narrative may try to hype up a fight, but we know the character will win. The fight may feel inconsequential as a result: it doesn’t matter, because we already know the outcome. The same thing can happen if something happens that doesn’t “advance” the plot: it feels pointless.

A good example of this is actually V.E. Schwab’s A Gathering of Shadows. The middle book in her Darker Shade of Magic series, it is almost completely inconsequential. I described it as an “anime filler arc.” It introduces a bunch of new characters, but its ultimate purpose is to set us up for Book 3. All of the fights that happen in Book 2 are, thus, inconsequential. Its most important work is introducing the characters who will matter in Book 3.

Thus, everything that happens in Book 2 doesn’t bear weight.

This then wraps into the biggest problem around creating stakes: you have to get the reader invested.

Why Does the Reader Care?

The difference between myself and the poster who complained L&L has no plot is our level of give-a-fuck, if you will. I cared about what happened to Viv the orc, her succubus crush-cum-girlfriend, and their coffee shop experiment. I wanted them to succeed.

The poster didn’t care. For one reason or another, this reader was not invested in whether Viv and her crew succeeded or failed.

That is the difference in our perception of stakes. “Business may fail” is a pretty standard premise for a lot of contemporary novels, movies, comedies, and so on. The stakes are not terribly high in the grand scheme of things. A business failure, usually, affects the business owner and their employees. Depending on the business, it also affects customers and, in some cases, the community or neighborhood that has spring up around the business. Think of a  band with a cult following: if the band “fails” and breaks up before having a major breakthrough or a hit, then the band members, the people they employ, and their fans—and maybe friends and family—are the only people affected.

High Stakes Are Often Compelling

Compare this to the usual “stakes” of fantasy: do this or the world will end. LOTR uses that formula: if Frodo doesn’t get that ring to Mordor and throw it in the fire, the world will end.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, in Phase I and II, hinged on this as well. Thanos was going to murder half of all creation. In fact, he succeeded, before the Avengers figured out how to reverse it. They failed, and fifty percent of everything died. Wow. That’s pretty epic stakes—for humanity alone, that suggests four billion people just poof, vanished out of existence.

Plenty of shows are like this. Avatar: The Last Airbender is one; anime as diverse as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagan and Akira use high stakes as well.

So when we come across something like L&L, it can feel a little weird. L&L is part of a movement known as cozy fantasy—or low-stakes fantasy. These stories aren’t interested in the big, sweeping, world-saving adventure. They’re interested in looking at more of the everyday, run-of-the-mill type of stuff—like a business owner succeeding or failing. You can think of it as a mishmash of contemporary and fantasy.

This is likely what failed to capture the poster. They didn’t care about Viv’s success or failure for one of two reasons. One was that they were blindsided by cozy, low-stakes in a fantasy setting—they were expecting higher stakes, which often accompany these settings, as I pointed out. Or they simply didn’t find Viv to be a compelling character, such that they didn’t care whether she succeeded or not.

Either way, what they were complaining about was a lack of stakes—not a lack of plot.

Plot vs. Stakes in Cozy Fantasy

Plot and stakes often go hand-in-hand, but they are two separate things. The plot is the literal occurrence of things: X happens, so Y follows. Z is the solution.

The stakes are what is at risk when things happen. In a cozy fantasy like L&L, the stakes are very low. Viv very much wants her coffee shop to succeed, because she is tired of living life as a hired assassin. She’s a coffee enthusiast, and she wants to introduce it to other people. She can only do that if she succeeds in her business. She eventually hires employees, who are then also relying on the success of the shop, and there comes to be a community of customers and friends who like the coffee shop.

If Viv fails, then the community and her dream of serving up coffee in a cafe go poof. Her problem is figuring out how to ensure her success. She starts off with the magical item, but it’s later revealed that she doesn’t need magic to succeed—she needs people who are supportive of her.

Again, that’s incredibly low stakes. Some people are bored by low-stakes stories, and they prefer high-stakes narratives to keep them invested. They love the drama of the do-or-die. Other people find that too stressful and prefer the lower stakes.

Compelling Characters Matter More When Stakes Are Low

Lower-stakes novels can also be more character driven—romance novels are a great example. Very rarely do you have save-the-world stakes in a romance novel (my own work likes to play with that, and I like to read authors who give their characters mysteries to solve). Usually, the stakes are whether the characters will hook up and get their HEA.

And it’s fine to like either or both. I’m not critiquing the poster for that. I am critiquing the idea that low-stakes or cozy fantasy stories don’t have a plot (or stakes). They do. It’s just that they’re on a smaller scale—and that smaller scale can feel inconsequential, especially in a genre where we’ve learned to expect the do-or-die stakes.

That doesn’t mean L&L is a bad book. And it certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a plot. It just means it’s not a book that’s going to save the world—but it might have a cute barista serving you coffee.