Coffee shop AUs are misunderstood because more than any other AUs they inhere fantasies’ internal contradiction. Fantasies, indeed the very best fantasies, are simultaneously completely believable and fundamentally unrealistic. Believable because we are not in the realms of royalty and dragon slayers, no sir, we are in the food service industry, but unrealistic because nothing, and nothing can ever be so emptied of conflict and hermetically sealed like the world of Coffee shop AUs. Not even coffee shops themselves.

But why coffee shops? Cafes used to be the site of radicalism, but coffee shops are the site of tamed and neutered localism. They represent the last industry in the United States whose workers have not completely been alienated from their labor, and they promise a sort of small knit community a la the Bookshop around the Corner ideal. These, of course, are outright lies. And we know they are lies. Such is fantasy.

We swallow the lies because we long to be connected to what we do and we long to be connected to the people around us, connected in the simple and honest acts of feeding others and being fed by them. A deeply Millennial fantasy, of course, born out of profound alienation and ever increasing isolation.