read a couple cozy mysteries the last couple weeks which is a genre i haven't really touched despite reading a lot of mysteries. learned that i don't like cozy mysteries lollllllll.
friend of mine and coworker at the library is a big fan of cozy mystery (also cozy romance, cozy fantasy, etc.) and it's very interesting to talk about genre tendencies and tropes with her as an avid reader of pretentious grimdark tomes #mytomes. anyway she says that a very common trope in cozy mystery is to have the murder victim be unsympathetic so you don't feel too sad about them dying which is somehow more unsettling to me than reading about fictional people getting murdered period. and cozies also usually avoid Gritty Real World Issues like sexual violence or domestic violence so by "unsympathetic murder victim" I mean like...a grumpy old codger. Something about like...welcome to our town full of nice sweet people who bake muffins and knit and then someone gets murdered but oh welp! it's a mean old dude with no friends so it's not THAT sad. This somehow feels dystopian to me.
on the subject I obviously don't think writing about murder in fiction is necessarily exploitative or bad and I do read murder mysteries but I do think it's very sociologically interesting how differently sexual violence is treated in fiction/by readers than other types of violence. like the entire existence of a genre of cozy mystery that centers on homicide (even if it typically avoids graphic descriptions of violence) while completely eschewing depictions of sexual or gendered motivations for homicide. I think also of the way that ASOIAF fandom tends to be much more critical of depictions of sexual violence than murder and war crimes both in terms of criticizing its inclusion in the series in the first place and in terms of whether characters who perpetrate violence are seen as redeemable or sympathetic. I think this largely stems from the fact that sexual violence feels real and immediate to readers esp female readers and war and murder feels much more remote. But I think there's this false understanding of separateness there and also a belief that no one in the prospective audience could have also been affected by other types of violence. Like obviously it is less common by several orders of magnitude but I personally know several people who have parents or siblings that were murdered. I'm probably not articulating this well but there's something very othering about this seeming perspective that murder is a fictional dramatic plot point while sexual assault is a real world trigger.
