A disgruntled angsty teen/ young adult/college student/ is working at the local non-starbucks coffee shop to earn money for whatever reason ( pay off student loans, trip to London, rent, parent’s hospital bills after a tragic accident etc.) in an anonymous New York-like city with obscene expectations for a social life, academic life, and sleep schedule. This teen-adult-hybrid character encounters an enigmatic regular customer who sweeps this teen off his or her feet in flurry of broodiness, “real world expectations,” and romance followed by an unforgettable summer of trysts, park picnics, and maybe after-hours coffee shop sex. This is the world of the Coffee Shop Alternate Universe (AU).
The Coffee Shop AU is a popular trope in fanfiction writing across genres. Whether the original work is in the Lord of the Rings, One Direction, or Doctor Who universe, there will also be a coffee shop adaptation. A search on FanFiction.Net alone turns up over nine thousand results and one on ArchiveOfOurOwn.Org, one of the newest fanfic sites to launch, churns out over five thousand. Why are young writers so obsessed with writing about coffee shops? Well, Heidi over at KeySmashBlog already covered part of that for us: the customizabiity of the coffee shop setting, the inability to screw up authenticity, coffee. But what else is there?
Generation Awkward 