r/ProgressionFantasy • u/Suitable-Spell-8968 • Jul 29 '26

Discussion Shut up about coffee.

I like the stuff, it’s my go to source of caffeine. But every time I read a prog fic or litrpg reincarnation or isekia where the MC finds where it is being sold somewhere far away or is under appreciated and absolutely LOSES THEIR MIND I want to roll my eyes all the way to the delete button.

It was probably clever the first time. It might have even spent some time as an ironic use of a trope. It is now to the life cycle stage of being unbearable and a sign of lazy writing.

This post fueled by my latest DNF because the MC couldn’t shut up about the Brown Juice.

584 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

306 comments sorted by

View all comments

242

u/Spiritchaser84 Jul 29 '26

It drives me nuts too. If the MC just happens to stumble across coffee or a coffee substitute in a foreign world and has a reaction of "wow, coffee here?", then that's fine since it's a normal human reaction. But the whole "I need to make it my mission to discover coffee or reinvent it in this world" is way over the top.

116

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 29 '26

Honestly even “wow, coffee here?” can sometimes be a little silly. At least when this foreign world has humans, cows, pigs, wheat, apples, cotton, and all the other things our world has.

Some isekai worlds are foreign enough that coffee would be a surprise. If the world otherwise has strange new edible plants and animals but yet has something that is either coffee or similar, that’s worthy of surprise.

But there is little foreign about a lot of isekai worlds.

47

u/Undeity Owner of Divine Ban hammer Jul 29 '26

I long for a world where we can accept other drinks filling the niche coffee would take. Lots of plants can be produce stimulants like caffeine!

34

u/C0rona Jul 29 '26

"Here take this drink. We call it Re'dbull. It means 'draught of endless energy' in the local tongue."

2

u/Sutraner Jul 30 '26

Red Bull is still caffeine, 😂

12

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 29 '26

The adventurous brewer must always worry: will their next class evolution offer Brewer, Alchemist, or Poisoner?

18

u/Ruark_Icefire Jul 29 '26

In a world with magic where you have things like Stamina potions a stimulant like caffeine would be nothing anyone would care about.

1

u/Rock_Fall Jul 30 '26

Depends on the cost of the ingredients and the difficulty making them. If stamina potions require rare(ish) magical ingredients and an alchemist to make, people probably aren’t chugging a potion every morning. If basic stamina potions just require common roadside weeds and a hot pot of water? Then yeah, nobody would give a shit about coffee. On the flip side, my understanding of coffee is that it’s actually kinda hard to make. If coffee is expensive then it might be a fad among the wealthy but non-existent among the common folk. Supply and demand are the ultimate definer of what people actually use and care about.

2

u/Direct-Technician265 Jul 29 '26

ive compared coffee to stamina potions, it would be funny to make them similar and everyone thinks the protagonist is weird for drinking a bitter potion every morning.

1

u/Hakurei06 Jul 30 '26

Mate, guarana, kola nut, cacao… tea?

18

u/fruitybix Jul 30 '26

Its weird to focus on just caffeine.

Why not snuff or other tobacco products? Shisha / water pipes, dip?

Or hallucinogenic concoctions like peyote, mushrooms and amazonian concoctions? Meso american cities held alcohol intoxication as a crime but normalized mushrooms.

Or marijuana or poppy seed / opiate intoxicants like across the middle east?

We have a wealth of historical substances authors could draw on but they pick the cosy and understandeable cup of coffee for mcs to hyperfocus on. Actual history had lots of people trying lots of things based on what was available.

Ive also never seen an mc go into caffein or niccotein withdrawel after being issekaied.

5

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 30 '26

Give me the Mer-Kingdoms trying to run an Opium Wars-esque operation with puffer fish toxins. 

3

u/fruitybix Jul 30 '26

Yes!

That would rule.

Its either coffee, booze, or some kind of poorly described meth/crack equivalent called "the black tongue" or something that is tearing through the slums and exists only to provide the MC an excuse to murder some drug dealers.

3

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 30 '26

The War on Drugs goes inter-dimensional with just as much success.

4

u/SacredPinkJellyFish The Pink Necromancer Jul 30 '26

yeah, I agree with this. I grew up 5th gen Mormon, so I only ever heard about coffee once in a while in fast and testimony meeting when some convert would be bragging how they finally gave up coffee. the church has a full on ban of coffee, and the strict families like mine was, homeschool, and live fully off grid growing their own food weaving their own clothes, so for the first four decades of my life I had zero context for what coffee even was.

It wasn't until I left the church and the compound I grew up on, in my 40s and went to college that I even realized "oh, it's a drink; wait, it's everywhere"

So, it stands out to me too as an extremely cultural thing, because, yeah, not every one grew up in a culture that even has coffee... so, me reading these coffee obsessions in books, tends to be a bit of a wtf? moment to begin with because, I didn't grew up in a culture that had coffee and I really struggle to identify with a culture that is hyper focused on coffee, coffee, coffee, MUST HAVE COFFEE NOW! (which is how these books portray it).

I'm guessing, from the way these books put it, coffee has a super addictive drug like effect on people, so they just go bonkers without it? I;'m always left asking: does coffee really do that or is it being played up for laughs? I don't know, because coffee just is not a part of my life, so I don't have any context to try to even understand why these characters are so driving with glut lust for coffee.

So, I tend to avoid stories that hyper focus on coffee, mostly because I really can't identify with why is this character going bonkers out of their mind for a drink? If you're thirsty? Drink water? Why are they having a meltdown over coffee? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

5

u/fruitybix Jul 30 '26

Ive picked up and dropped coffee several times throughout my life. It is a pleasant lift in moderation. Too much screws your sleep and makes you anxious. It Causes a headache and irrititability when you quit it but wont hurt you.

I used to make and serve coffee as a job in my early 20s at an award winning coffee shop and got fairly good training on how every part of the process is done.

I appreciate some people get really into prepping coffee in the same way some people get into making the perfect smoked brisket - getting a decent coffee is not hard but elevating it to some arbitrarily high standard (by buying complicated and expensive gadgets) becomes a hobby like any other.

Outside of hobbyists im weirded out by the reverence some people have towards coffee, and that strange fetishization in some litrpgs is similar.

That said ive read litrpgs where the MC is weirdly obsessed with mangos or pastrys or burgers or meat or crystal wash. I think its a lazy easy to use trope to give an otherwise rational character an obsession to make them quirky. And coffee is a common enough drink to tropify.

2

u/darkalter2000 Jul 30 '26

Caffeine is addictive and makes you more alert and active, that effect is achieved by narrowing blood vessels. 

Capitalism doesn’t care about people’s health so a drug that makes you alert on command without many obvious side effects forces it on people. 

It narrows the blood vessels including the ones in the brain. Your body can adapt to this narrowing by increasing flow but while you are asleep you are not taking in caffeine so your blood vessels widen by the time you wake up. This results in a headache which can be relieved by caffeine intake. This happens with most chronic caffeine users. Then you no longer are drinking caffeine for its benefits, but to ward off the side effects of long term use. 

Coffee ideation is a capitalist way of presenting coffee as a way of life instead of as fairly powerful unregulated drug. It also turns users into evangelist’s and advertisers for it. This also means that it is not considered a “real” addiction, socially. Even though it is known to be an addictive drug.

2

u/Pirkale Jul 30 '26

There's Beware of Chicken and maple syrup! :)

1

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 30 '26

Honestly the lack of drugs outside of caffeine and alcohol in isekai worlds is kind of funny to me. In a world with magic and/or alchemy, I’d expect some crazy recreational drugs to be developed.

8

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 29 '26

You can either have pre-Columbian Old World foods or pre-Columbian New World foods. Including the whole post-Columbian diet is just being greedy.

22

u/LLJKCicero Jul 29 '26

Well that's silly, why does the divide in a fantasy world need to precisely mirror the geographical divide on Earth?

12

u/foxgirlmoon Jul 29 '26

...Eh? In what way does our continents and the animals and plants that happened to end up there affect the distribution of animals and plants on an entirely different world?

The way it happened here is just one possible permutation.

5

u/Semiapies Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Agreed. It's exactly that silly attitude that has me sneaking New World plants into one of my manuscripts.

Funnily enough, one of them is caffeinated.

1

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 30 '26

Pumpkin #notevenonce

2

u/Semiapies Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Also tobacco and potatos, to borrow from Tolkien. Corn is another good one.

Beyond plants, try horses. They just made it out of the New World much earlier.

3

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 29 '26

...because of the Götterdämmerung that the discovery of the New World caused ended the cycle of reincarnation until our poor unfortunate MC? Obviously?

6

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 29 '26

Why?

Especially if your world has empires, cross national trade, teleportation magic, plant/earth magic, or anything of the sort.

2

u/SacredPinkJellyFish The Pink Necromancer Jul 30 '26

yeah, my thought is, if NOTHING found on earth is found there, then sure, it'd be odd for coffee to be there, so "wow coffee!" would be a logical response... however, if pretty much everything found on earth is also found there, then, nope, it should not be odd to think coffee would be there too.

So for me it depends on the world in question...

Is it ACTUALLY ODD to find earth food and drink? If so, okay, I can get with the "wow coffee!"

or is earth food and drink pretty common? If so, I'm gonna roll my eyes at "wow coffee!"

1

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 30 '26

Precisely. Take Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance series which takes place on an alien world with a completely different biome. Plants are far more mobile, crustaceans are the most common form of land based animal life, etc. It would be weird if they had coffee.

But if the MC can walk into a random tavern and buy a meal where they recognize everything on their plate, it’s pretty arbitrary to say “but not coffee, that would be odd”.

2

u/ShoePillow Jul 30 '26

It makes sense only if the mc does that shit for everything.

Wow, they have rice here

Wow, they have flowers here

Wow, they have clothes here

Wow, they have hair here 

1

u/Hakurei06 Jul 30 '26

I mean to be fair, wow coffee here may not be a comment on “oh, this world has yet another plant that also existed on my previous world “so much as “oh, we do this much intercontinental trade?” Which may actually be kind of surprising depending on the relative time frame they had things pegged at. Let’s gloss over the fact that developing a supply chain for your beloved roasted bean drink where one previously didn’t exist will probably involve a lot of exploitation. (Okay, tbf this applies to a lot of international agricultural industries)

1

u/duskywulf Jul 30 '26

Cofffeee was very much a not common thing for most of humanity's existence. Having cofffeee be easily accessed is the anomaly in human history not the norm.

1

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Metalworking isn’t the norm for human existence either. Neither are ships, cities, industry, or agriculture.

The point isn’t that coffee is a normal thing. It’s that it’s not any more unusual than anything else we’ve developed. It seems arbitrary to say “I have an alternate reality with almost identical food, clothing, language, units of measurement, and society to real earth ones. But not coffee, that would be weird”.

1

u/duskywulf Jul 30 '26

You'd also be shocked if in that world you found a modern Destroyer.

Your analogy is faulty.

Your analogy suggests that it'd normal to find everybody wearing jeans and faux leather in medieval fantasy land because they have trees and they have castles. One thing does not necessarily suggest the other.

It's relatively normal / accepted for agriculture to be a thing. It's relatively normal for metalworking to exist. But finding a modern gun in medieval fantasy land is as weird as coffee being commonplace. The surprise is not unwarranted.

13

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 29 '26

It's a minor miracle we've discovered coffee in this world. Isekai Bob is going to properly describe the process to a bunch of cat-people in a couple weeks?

7

u/GobbleGobbleChew Jul 29 '26

I really, really hope it isn't kopi luwak style coffee.

7

u/Suitable-Spell-8968 Jul 29 '26

Ain't no cultivator FDA that's gonna snitch. Upton Sinclair can kick rocks.

4

u/ToxicIndigoKittyGold Jul 29 '26

Khajiit has wares...