so i like coffee far more than i really suspected

Randomly during lunch reading the coffee shop/high school AU thread on ffa and who writes them and why, I was trying to work out if I have ever even read a coffee shop AU because honestly, I couldn't think of one except the Inception one I was recced while in a three AM chat convo fugue state and I still don't know the title because the rec was The Coffee Shop With Delicious Pastry one or something. I mean, now I do since I'm looking at it, but I'll forget in about five minutes because it's, you know, The Coffee Shop With Delicious Pastry one.

Sidenote: okay, I mentioned doing this years ago, but I actually still log on delicious everything I read by fandom and pairing, month, year, month/year, author. No, not kidding. The new delicious is way too annoying now for me to achieve the most accurate reflection of my anal nature to have more tags than actual stories, but I figured on the theory that any fandom that I read more than 100 fic in, probability suggests I should have at least a few that involve coffee shops. I lost plausible deniability on my reading habits being highly driven less by quality or believability and far more by specific id buttons the day I read the surprise!magical cannibalism fivesome semi-RPS serial killer AU fic because unrepentant evil being cuddly with each other in the afterglow of violent crime that also seems to include a digression into a la carte-ing the remains satisfies the part of me that likes how strong relationships are based on shared interests. Apparently, adding in spontaneous shared snacking on human flesh is no longer a dealbreaker, and no, I'm just not even thinking about that too hard if i can help it.

I got off topic there.

Survey says; I apparently read a lot of these, but for reasons, I've never thought of them specifically as coffee shop AU fics because this more a thematic thing for me. Most of them, unsurprising, are what I re-read during periods one might call stressful and need to be soothed, but not all of them are exactly coffee shop AUs. All of them involve coffee, sometimes to the degree it could qualify as its own character, because I associate a triple espresso with comfort and meaning in life. A couple of these are not only fandoms that I have no knowledge of the canon of, but if I remember correctly, I was unaware existed, but somehow involve people in coffee shops, though not necessarily a coffee shop AU. I really don't even remember how I found some of these, to be honest. While I'm not sure on this being universal in my readings, I sense there's a high probability that there is at least one scene in most of them where a character's coffee order requires ten or more separate terms to describe it, because I just really seem to like complicate coffee products.

It vaguely bothers me that I very early on picked up my taste for dystopia, apocalypses, wholesale urban destruction, anything involving a lot of high powered weaponry including anything involving a sharpened blade, rain, and domestic efforts at remodeling a shared space (it's curtain AU, but like, with power tools and a working design theme by one of the characters), but that Inception fic was literally (from dates so far) the first of a whole series of I Feel Things About Characters And Coffee and I didn't even notice I've been engaged in a really intense relationship with coffee through the medium of a surprising variety of characters, some whose canon may preclude being corporeal, much less the existence of coffee.

Pastries seem to show up a lot, too, but that could be because I was hungry at the time and unconsciously gravitated toward vicarious eating.

I don't know how I feel about this development in my fannish habits.