Cosmic comfort

"Cosmic horror" is a recognized genre. I'm thinking there's also an opposite genre, or perhaps more of a trope than full genre but still -- cosmic comfort. (So, I'm still struggling to coin new fictional trope names -- see "grimdark preach" and "hot fair slut", that I mentioned in my Poor Things review, for previous efforts.)

 If cosmic horror is showing the universe to be cold, uncaring, evil, incomprehensible, maddening -- one or several of the above -- cosmic comfort shows everything to be kinda nice and safe at the end of the day. It doesn't count as cosmic comfort unless the story goes into cosmic stuff -- I'm not thinking of cozy stories exclusively concerned with earthly matters here. Moreover, I think cosmic comfort can be divided into two sub-genres or sub-tropes: first, it might show a cosmos ruled by nice guys. Semi-nice, at least, not evil, and perfectly comprehensible and relatable. Second, it might show a cosmos ruled by assholes, but they're weak enough for humans to defeat.

Gaiman's and Pratchett's Good Omens is cosmic comfort of the first kind. The antichrist is born, but he's a super sweet little kid! Couldn't hurt a fly! There's an angel and a demon but they're both so very nice and become the best of friends! There's some vague apocalypse threat in the background but what with everyone being so sweet and nice, it's easily averted in the end. (Btw -- that joke with the guy who can't get near a computer without wrecking it should really have been scrapped when they turned the book into a TV show. It made sense back when the book was written, when computers were far less user-friendly, and people often worried about the possibility of completely wrecking the machine if they as much as looked at it wrong. It makes no sense today.)
And it's not just this Pratchett collaboration. The Sandman is much darker than Good Omens, but still contains its fair share of cosmic comfort. The Endless are said to be inscrutable and ageless and quite different from humans, but they're shown to have completely human psychologies. They may be immortal and powerful sort-of-deities but don't you worry, they're not scary or inscrutable in the slightest, they're just like us! Dream is recognizable as a brooding goth boy, Death is recognizable as an annoyingly cheery kind of person -- this was really a big improvement in the TV show, btw, for I couldn't stand the comic book version. I'm not personally comforted by the idea of dying and being greeted by this manic pixie death goddess harping on about Mary Poppins and shit, and sprouting fake-profound statements like "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" to dead babies, but lots of other people love the character and she's clearly supposed to have this comforting role. 

Time to go off on a tangent before I move on: When I was young, there was Sandman merch you could buy, including an ankh necklace with "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" engraved. But this isn't a profound statement! It's fucking stupid! Imagine that I discover that other people at my job are paid twice or thrice as much as me. Angrily, I ask my boss why they get so much more money, and he just looks me in the eye and solemnly says: "You get what everyone gets: a salary". This isn't a profound answer! This is just him dodging the question and being an asshole!
Also, back when I was young (i.e., ages ago), when someone wanted to flatter me they'd say I looked just like Death. I always felt torn about this because yeah, I get it's supposed to be a huge compliment from goth to goth but I hated the character so much.
Fortunately, that stupid "you get what everyone gets" line wasn't in the TV show, big improvement on Death all around. 

Back to topic. All urban fantasy stories where there's heaven and hell and perhaps a whole host of gods but everyone is kinda okay, no one is truly evil, fall into cosmic comfort.

Then there are also those stories where Satan is evil and God is a dick but good news -- somehow, mere mortals are capable of taking them on and winning, so we don't need to worry about them too much. You can beat them if only you're manly enough (Preacher) or street-smart enough (Hellblazer) or, um, believe sufficiently hard in academic freedom, I guess (His Dark Materials, though I've only watched the TV show, not read the books). Writers start by painting this really bleak picture of the universe -- it's ruled by assholes, both from above and from below! -- and then back-pedal on the bleakness by showing that, at the end of the day, humans can beat the gods. 

Of all the stories I've mentioned, I enjoyed the Sandman comics overall despite some problems (Death, but not only Death), I've enjoyed the Sandman TV show so far, I read Preacher as it was published and really enjoyed it, Hellblazer has obviously been really uneven during it's super long run but I like lots of it too ... So I'm not hating on all of the above. (His Dark Materials, though, was a pretty-looking show but got increasingly stupid as it went on and was pretty much unbearably stupid by the end.) But I still dislike cosmic comfort as a trope. In my personal opinion, cosmic comfort always detracts a bit from the story. But your mileage may vary.

In any case, it really should be a recognized trope! Cosmic horror, and its opposite, cosmic comfort. 

One more musing, courtesy of my husband: When I discussed this with him he said "cosmic comfort -- or, as you might also call it, religion." First I protested and said yeah ok I get what you're saying, religions exist to comfort people about the cosmos, but I'm talking fictional tropes here, which is a different thing ... but then I realized this is an interesting point. Because stories like Preacher and His Dark Materials try really hard to be anti religion. So it's interesting that they still end up giving people these comforting messages about the cosmos.