History Main / Arcadia

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* Ukraine before certain events started. It was called the breadbasket of Eastern Europe for a reason.

[[caption-width-right:350:''A Childhood Idyll'' by Creator/WilliamAdolpheBouguereau, 1900]]

* ''VideoGame/AirshipsConquerTheSkies'' have you fighting over these, as much of the world are infertile due to [[ToxicPhlebotinum Suspendium]]. Rural landscapes of rolling hills and copses of trees bear witness to steampunk airships fighting for supremacy, their burning hulls crashing down below into the fields of grass.

* A majority of the ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'' games are set in this type of area.

* Creator/AlgernonBlackwood presents his ideas about the connection between Arcadia and Cosmic Consciousness -- a sense of Nature and earth as a living, conscious being -- in ''The Centaur''. O'Malley journeys to the Caucasus and in the "hills of the ancients" experiences a great vision. The key is to downsize, free ourselves of material concerns as much as possible and live in harmony with nature, as in "[[TheSimpleLifeIsSimple the simple life"]]. (The prose in this section is positively [[Creator/HPLovecraft Lovecraftian]], in the sense of that author's early dream stories like "The White Ship" or "Celephais".) He tells people what he's learned, but even those who believe him say [[RomanticismVersusEnlightenment you can't convince people of a truth about feelings and emotions, by talking and appealing to their intellect]]. Each person must find it in their own time. He even thinks he'll be better able to nudge humanity in the right direction after he dies.

* ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower: The Grove to which the Harfoots migrate every year when the autumn is an orchard planted by the Big Folk before being abandoned by some reason. Is one of the safest places for them, where they enjoy the fruits and a peaceful cold season.

* The ComicBook/PostCrisis version of [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Smallville]]. The portrayal carried over to ''Series/LoisAndClark'' and ''WesternAnimation/SupermanTheAnimatedSeries''. ''Series/{{Smallville}}'', well that is slightly more [[BuffySpeak mutant-y]].

* ''WesternAnimation/YellowSubmarine''. Pepperland before the Blue Meanie attack.

* The Pastoral Symphony in ''WesternAnimation/{{Fantasia}}''.

* ''[[Film/{{Hausu}} House]]'', a SurrealHorror cult favorite, subverts this trope. Many of the victims initially enjoy the rural charms of the house, but just under the surface lies decades-worth of supernatural resentment from heartbreak and neglect. And it manifests in really, really bizarre ways - with all the subtlty of a 4-year-old invited to color outside the lines.

* One of Creator/{{Horace}}'s odes ("Beatus ille") begins by extolling at length the supposed joys of living in the countryside. How wonderful it must be, the narrator muses, to have a small, self-sufficient farm in the country, to turn the soil with his own oxen, to enjoy the grafted pears and grapes and drink wine fermented in his own home with a sweet wife who spins his flock's wool and makes cheese from the milk and with [[ValuesDissonance gentle home-bred slaves]] to help them... and the narrator turns out to be a Roman moneylender who has no intention of actually giving up his job. Good thing, too, because (as Horace knew personally) actual country life was nothing like the narrator's imaginings.

* In ''Literature/DonQuixote'', at the end of the book, Quixote considers leaving being a [[KnightInShiningArmor knight]] to become an Arcadian shepherd instead. Pastoral tropes in general are deconstructed and parodied in the novel: The real shepherds are {{Country M|ouse}}ice -- ignorant people who have enough common sense and work as shepherds by need. They want to help and are sympathetic enough. The problem comes when a lot of {{City M|ouse}}ice try to invoke this trope:
** At the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote [[ConversedTrope converses this trope]] with the goatherds in Chapter XXI, delivering an AuthorFilibuster, “Discourse on the Golden Age”, comparing the goatherds with {{Noble Savage}}s. [[GenreBlindness None of them understand a word]]. One of the goatherds sings a song, but he didn’t compose it (because he doesn’t know how), it was his uncle who composed it, a cleric who has studied.

** Parodied in chapter LVIII of the Second Part: Don Quixote meets some beautiful shepherdesses who are part of a crew of noble and rich people who invoke this trope by retiring to a forest to play at being shepherd and shepherdess. They are so sophisticated that they have studied two poems from Creator/GarcilasoDeLaVega (In Spanish) and Camoes (in Portuguese). [[{{Irony}} Only the truly rich CityMouse can afford to live in a happy Arcadia]].

* In [[Literature/AesopsFables Aesop's]] ''The City Mouse and the Country Mouse'', the CityMouse scorns the country life as simple, but when the CountryMouse visits, he discovers that the city is dangerous, and he is better off content in the country.
* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'':
** The Shire is a subversion. It's a nice place to live, definitely, but it's not utopian, and while the hobbits are generally friendly, generous, and bucolic, they are also unimaginative, clannish, parochial, and prone to gossip and TallPoppySyndrome. The ease with which Saruman sets up a tin-pot dictatorship there is quite telling.
** Tom and Goldberry Bombadil ''really'' live in an Arcadia. Many people like to think this is JRRT's BigLippedAlligatorMoment from the first part of the story, but it might be the only place on Middle-Earth that would be safe from Sauron's ravages should he win.

* In Creator/DanAbnett's Literature/GauntsGhosts novel ''Honour Guard'', [[JeanneDArchetype Saint Sabbat]]'s background, as a herder in the mountains. [[spoiler: Consequently, Vamberfield's visions of her are also visions of Arcadia.]]

* In Creator/GrahamMcNeill's TabletopGame/Warhammer40000 Literature/{{Ultramarines}} novel ''Dead Sky Black Sun'', Uriel retreats from ColdBloodedTorture to the memories of his childhood home, an Arcadian {{Shadowland}} to the [[{{Mordor}} Eye of Terror]]. Only when his [[DeadPersonConversation dead mentor Captain Idaeus]] appears to chide him does he return to the pain.

* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem {{Evangeline}}, the beginning of which is a description of the French colony of Acadie.
* The Two Rivers from ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' series, mostly shepherds with a scattering of farmers, check, GhibliHills in the mountains, check, believes in the GoodOldWays, check. Small wonder that the three heroes grew up there. There's a bit of deconstruction going on, since it's made plain that the farmers do actual work for their food (on one occasion some women are joking that men always faint during childbirth, and Rand reminisces about the rigors of lambing), and the area suffers the typical DoomedHometown phenomenon, though it manages to survive... and become a cosmopolitan economic center.

* Deconstructed in ''Literature/SherlockHolmes''; while Watson appears to hold the Arcadian view of the country as opposed to crime-ridden London, Holmes the hardened crime-solver does not. (He does end up [[spoiler:retiring to the Sussex Downs and keeping bees]], however.)

** This is paraphrased in ''Film/AllThePresidentsMen'' in the scene where they meet Sloane and his pregnant wife in their perfect StepfordSmiler Suburbia:
--> '''Bernstein.''' All these neat little houses on all these nice little streets. It's hard to believe that something is wrong in some of these little houses.\\
'''Woodward.''' No, it isn't.
* Many Creator/AgathaChristie novels are the deconstruction of this. In the countryside, everyone knows everyone. That's good, right? Well, everyone has a reason to hate others, and everyone had a reason to kill the victim.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Banished}}'', the aim of the game is to ensure the survival of a colonial-era settlement, and manage its growth. Most successful settlements will look like this, but unfortunately, you will need to build smoke-spewing mines, quarries, and heavy industry sometimes, which will tarnish the aesthetic.

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In the episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E30AStopAtWilloughby A Stop at Willoughby]]", the protagonist is very sick and tired of the rat race of 1960s American society. During a nap, he visits a town called Willoughby, which is this trope, as an idealized late 1800s American town. He cannot find the town on any map. When he decides to stay, he is deeply content, but [[spoiler:his body dies, and he is taken to Willoughby and Sons Funeral Home]].

* The entire plot of ''Film/TheVillage'' is [[spoiler: concerned with a desperate, generation-old ploy to preserve an Arcadia.]]

* The last segment of Film/AkiraKurosawasDreams''.

* The last segment of Creator/AkiraKurosawa's ''Film/{{Dreams}}''.

* Fortitude in ''TabletopGame/ChuubosMarvelousWishGrantingEngine'' is like this, only with a bit more of a focus on sailing and a culture of swashbuckling rats, and Little Island is if anything even more so. The area actually ''named'' Arcadia, on the other hand, is a huge shopping district haunted by tsukumogami, and with so much neat flashy stuff it probably has epilepsy warnings.
* Exodite Worlds in ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' are the closest you can get to paradise in this setting. Terraformed by the Eldar on the edges of the galaxy before the Fall, plenty of these Eden-like worlds became refuges for Eldar post-fall who yearned for a simple life or refused to repeat the past. Discarding a lot of the higher technology in favour of being closer to the land. Some of these paradises were discovered by the Imperium of Man and developed into luxury retreats emulating a theme-park version of this trope for the aristocracy.

* The forest and prairie regions in ''VideoGame/{{Wolf}}'' are apparently this to the humans in the game, since they're pleasant and good for grazing cattle. You'll wish they'd go home instead, because [[DemonicSpiders humans are the most annoying enemy in the game]].

** Parodied in chapter LVIII of the Second Part: Don Quixote meets some beautiful shepherdesses who are part of a crew of noble and rich people who invoke this trope by retiring to a forest to play at being shepherd and shepherdess. They are so sophisticated that they have studied two poems from Garcilaso (In Spanish) and Camoes (in Portuguese). [[{{Irony}} Only the truly rich CityMouse can afford to live in a happy Arcadia]].

** At the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote [[ConversedTrope converses this trope]] with the goatherds in Chapter XXI, delivering an AuthorFilibuster, “Discourse on the Golden Age”, comparing the goatherds with {{Noble Savage}}s. [[GenreBlind None of them understand a word]]. One of the goatherds sings a song, but he didn’t compose it (because he doesn’t know how), it was his uncle who composed it, a cleric who has studied.

** Skyloft from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'' is a FloatingContinent version.
** Hateno Village from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild''. It's a rural Hylian village on tallish hills overlooking beautiful green hills, and unlike the settlements of the other races of Hyrule, it isn't facing any imminent threat from the Divine Beasts.

The gentle, quiet life of the countryside, peopled by [[SimpleMindedWisdom souls of wise simplicity]] living InHarmonyWithNature. Arcadia is traditionally populated by shepherds and shepherdesses; more recent versions may also include agriculture.

Idealized often to the point of becoming a {{Utopia}}. Generally portrayed as a place where people still stick to the GoodOldWays, rather than being trapped in the city's bustle. ([[{{Jerkass}} Unkind souls]] may [[GoodIsOldFashioned sneer at them for being old fashioned]].) Though the [[CityMouse city dwellers]] may scorn them for their lack of luxury, they are happier for not having to rely on material things for happiness.