"Cozy" works

Can’t say I agree with cozy romances can’t be explicit and can totally imagine a work of cozy erotica… and as often as it features bloody corpses on screen/page, I still feel like Detective Conan is rather cozy for a mystery franchise… Granted the premise of DC is a teen prodigy gets drugged with an untraceable poison that due to a two-in-a-million fluke puts him physically in the body of a 7-year-old instead of killing him, our shrunken detective ends up living with his childhood friend and primary love interest and her bumbling alcoholic father of a private eye, uses a tranquilizer gun wrist watch and voice changing bowtie to routinely ventriloquist dummy said bumbling P.I. since no one takes a child prodigy seriously as a detective, said watch and bowtie are only the tip of the iceberg of gadgets out little detective gets from his eccentric inventor neighbor, plus our shrunken detective often has to wrangle a trio of actual children with aspirations of being detectives… The whole thing is so farcical it’s easy to overlook things like a man getting decapitated in the first episode and the core cast tripping into murder scenes on a seemingly daily basis.

But yeah, like a lot of descriptors, “cozy” is rather subjective, and it makes sense that it would have been diluted by marketing attached to media that’s all flash and little substance.

1 Like

The first thing that came to my mind when reading the thread tittle was the “cosy catastrophe” genre, but while that’s similar in some respects, it’s sort of hard to imagine such a situation ever really being low-stakes? I suppose you could argue that cosiness is a relative property—a war story could be cosy if it presented war in a certain way, and so on.