History Main / Arcadia

When a science fiction (rather than realistic or fantasy) story is set in Arcadia, that's PastoralScienceFiction.

[[caption-width-right:350:''Art/AChildhoodIdyll'' by Creator/WilliamAdolpheBouguereau, 1900]]

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Cars}}'': the quiet rural town of Radiator Springs teaches Lightning [=McQueen=] what is important in life.

** In the series 2 finale, the Doctor alludes to "the Fall of Arcadia", a battle during the Time War. As we later learn from Day of the Doctor and the earlier minisode Last Day, Arcadia is considered the safest and best-defended city on Gallifrey during the Time War. Until the Daleks broke through the sky trenches.
** Another Arcadia was a pastoral human colony planet, introduced in the Literature/DoctorWhoNewAdventures.
** In "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS9E4TheMutants The Mutants]]" Ky assures us Arcadia was the BackStory of his planet.

* The ''Series/NightVisions'' episode ''A View Through The Window'' involves a man seeing an idyllic world of this sort through an interdimensional window, and longing to go there. [[spoiler: Subverted when he does so; to find it populated by carnivorous aliens, who begin to look for a way through themselves.]]

* Ironic usage on ''Series/TheXFiles'', with a planned community ''called'' Arcadia that's really a TownWithADarkSecret.
* In the classic ''Series/{{The Twilight Zone|1959}}'' episode "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 died and he was taken to Willoughby and Sons Funeral Home]].

* [[Music/LudwigVanBeethoven Beethoven's]] Sixth, the Pastoral Symphony, was inspired by his love of nature and his vacations in the countryside outside Vienna.

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

* The ''VideoGame/MegaManZero'' series had Neo Arcadia, the last utopia for humans.
** Which, in a bit of irony, is a technological paradise rather than a pastoral one. It's not ''Neo'' Arcadia for nothing. [[spoiler: The guy running it even tries to make the environment outside Neo Arcadia uninhabitable at one point.]]

* Fiddler's Green in ''ComicBook/TheSandman'' is an Arcadia GeniusLoci.

The CountryMouse or the FarmBoy often comes from a (more or less idealized) Arcadia. It often features as HomeSweetHome for an adventurer. Many a RetiredBadass and OldMaster live here full time, having jumped at the CallToAgriculture. If the question of social relations comes up, it will always turn out to be a CloseKnitCommunity. The NatureLover often appreciates it for the greenery.

** Oddly enough, an actual city of Arcadia exists a little north of Los Angeles, nestled against the mountains. It is pleasant enough, though still obviously a suburb of LA. However, it does contain a very beautiful arboretum home to many different trees, plants and a population of free-roaming peacocks.

** Oddly enough, an actual city of Arcadia exists a little north of Los Angeles, nestled against the mountains. It is pleasant enough, though still obviously a suburb of LA.

* ''VideoGame/SeaSalt'' has Hogstead, a farming village to the east of Rotwood Forest. Wheatfields abound, as do farmers, woodsmen, and their AngryGuardDogs.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': Ned Flanders briefly moves his family to Humbleton, Pennsylvania, home of the "Humble Figurines" ([[{{Expy}} expies of sorts]] for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummel_figurines Hummels?]]), where everyone looks and acts like idealized Rockwell characters, and are super polite and SickeninglySweet--[[{{Utopia}} an ideal type of place for Flanders' manner and idealized worldview]], and he acts like this is the place he's longed to be all his life. However, he is pressured to [[GoodHairEvilHair shave his mustache]] to be accepted into the town... and he moves back to Springfield instead.

* In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'', there is a village named Arcadia where humans and dragons lived in peace (dragons had been extirpated from the rest of the continent a millennium prior). In Chapter 14 of [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade The Binding Blade]], [[spoiler:it is rescued by Roy’s army from an occupying force of Bern troops, and with permission from the village elder, Roy borrows the divine anima magic tome Forblaze, which is housed in a temple underneath the village.]]
** In [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade The Blazing Blade]], which takes place 20 years earlier, the heroes [[spoiler:meet Athos, the original wielder of Forblaze, who reveals his relation to the BigBad, and tells them that Arcadia’s libraries were the place where he obtained his ability to drain and consume [[LifeEnergy quintessence]].]]

The good landscape may be responsible, posing in contrast to EvilIsDeathlyCold, the {{Shadowland}}, GrimUpNorth, urbanized Shadowlands such as the DecadentCourt or ViceCity, or the Shadowland equivalent found in the GreenAesop; the PollutedWasteland. In older works (as late as the early nineteenth century), wilderness was not considered attractive scenery; a pleasant view was one of the cultivated countryside, usually with human figures in it) it contrasted with the WildWilderness and TheLostWoods; making this aspect something of an EvolvingTrope.

Suffice it to say that in RealLife, things are much more complicated. Rural areas may have major advantages, but may also come with serious disadvantages. Some people can't stand life in sparsely populated areas, others can't imagine living anywhere else. In both cases, utopian societies generally don't exist in the real world, and presenting any place as such usually involves ignoring its flaws. For more on Arcadian life portrayed as being easy or trivial, see TheSimpleLifeIsSimple.

Suffice it to say that in RealLife, things are much more complicated. Rural areas may have major advantages, but may also come with serious disadvantages. Some people can't stand life in sparsely populated areas, others can't imagine living anywhere else. In both cases, utopian societies generally don't exist in the real world, and presenting any place as such usually involves ignoring its flaws. For more on this misconception, see TheSimpleLifeIsSimple.

Suffice it to say that in RealLife, things are much more complicated. Rural areas may have major advantages, but may also come with serious disadvantages. Some people can't stand life in sparsely populated areas, others can't imagine living anywhere else. In both cases, utopian societies generally don't exist in the real world, and presenting any place as such usually involves ignoring its flaws.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': Ned Flanders briefly moves his family to Humbleton, Pennsylvania, home of the "Humble Figurines" ([[{{Expy}} expies of sorts]] for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummel_figurines Hummels?]]), where everyone looks and acts like idealized Rockwell characters, and are super polite and TastesLikeDiabetes sweet--[[{{Utopia}} an ideal type of place for Flanders' manner and idealized worldview]], and he acts like this is the place he's longed to be all his life. However, he is pressured to [[GoodHairEvilHair shave his mustache]] to be accepted into the town... and he moves back to Springfield instead.

* The Picard Family Orchard is depicted this way in ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''.

** The [[{{Hobbits}} halfling]] homeland of Luiren in the ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'' campaign setting. It's not ''completely'' free from danger (this is ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' after all -- why go somewhere if not to kill and loot stuff?), with a dangerous forest at its border and the occasional monster, but all in all, it's one of the safest places in the Realms.

* The Old South before the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar Civil War]], though there was obviously slavery and supposed threats of "black rebellion" against whites to break the idyllic image.

* In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'', there was a village named Arcadia where humans and dragons lived in peace (when everywhere else, dragons were made extinct by humans). However, its giant libraries were also the place where the BigBad obtained his ability to drain and consume LifeEnergy.

** 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 good landscape may be responsible, posing in contrast to EvilIsDeathlyCold, the {{Shadowland}}, GrimUpNorth, urbanized Shadowlands such as the DecadentCourt or ViceCity, or the Shadowland equivalent found in the GreenAesop; the PollutedWasteland. In [[SocietyMarchesOn older works]] (as late as the early nineteenth century), wilderness was not considered attractive scenery; a pleasant view was one of the cultivated countryside, usually with human figures in it) it contrasted with the WildWilderness and TheLostWoods; making this aspect something of an EvolvingTrope.

Suffice it to say that in RealLife, things are much more complicated. Rural areas may have major advantages, but may also come with serious disadvantages. Some people can't stand life in sparsely populated areas, others can't imagine living anywhere else. In both cases, utopian societies generally don't exist in the real world and presenting any place as such usually involves ignoring its flaws.

* ''Film/WonderWoman2017'': The Amazon's home is a lush green island where the beauty of nature is even evident in their more built up areas.

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

* In Creator/PGWodehouse's ''Uneasy Money'', Elizabeth starts to be reconciled with the notion of Bill as a house guest when it turns out he's kept bees, and when their talk turns to dreams of living the Arcadian life in a farm, she is quite reconciled.

* 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.
* ''Literature/TheAnderssons'': As much as this series applauds progress in most other areas, it is very protective of the increasingly marginalized countryside. Elin is determined to live on the family homestead until she dies, and Elisabeth and Saga also live on the countryside. The commune "Fyra systrar" is located on the countryside too and gives several women (including members of the Andersson family, like Judith and Maria and Nina and Louise) a place to live in the 1970s. Of course, some members of the Andersson family have other interests and prefer to live in the nearby town of Växjö. Anna, Cecilia and Åsa even spend most of their lives abroad. But still, Saga writes a series of books about the family. And that reminds them of where their origins are.

* Russian folk-rock band Music/OtavaYo set lots of their music in a timeless Russia where people are either pre-revolutionary village muzhiks, or else have gone back to the land to recreate a simpler older Russia. the video to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wjLI2eslv8 Иванушка-рачек]] (''Ivan the Crayfish'') is set in an idealised Russian summer with an extended peasant family living barefoot on the land and dressing in a way that hearkens back to over a century ago. The video evokes the idea of "Rodinia" - Mother Russia, sustaining and nurturing.

* Present-day Winhill in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII''. It's the only town where the primary party does not engage in combat, the townspeople are mostly friendly, and is the site of two of the relatively few peacefully-resolved sidequests.

* ''VideoGame/TheSims2'', the ''Seasons'' expansion, added the very rural neighborhood of Riverblossom Hills, with an archaic country architecture and a heavy focus on seasons, gardening and fishing (major features introduced in the expansion pack).

** This, and any other views of old-fashioned Arcadias in the United States would be subject to dissonance nowadays, as formal lawns are a relatively recent thing. Those gentle agrarian places of old used to have either no grass in the yard, or whatever bushes, trees, and wild plants grew up instead, with household trash tossed in. That's just where people threw their trash in rural areas back then. Either that, or they planted vegetables.

* Acadia was historically a French colony consisting of modern-day New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Maine. Maine still has a reputation for being old fashioned and idealistic. In spite of the [[UsefulNotes/CanadianHistory mass deportations]] by the British in 1755 there are still some French-speaking descendants of those colonists, particularly in coastal New Brunswick, the Saint John Valley on the Maine-New Brunswick border, and the Louisiana Cajuns.

* Most small rural towns seem like a real-life Arcadia to those who don't live in them, and everyone's home-town from their childhood seems like Arcadia when looked back upon twenty or thirty years later.