People living in small towns often want to go big, but the opposite is also equally occurrent. The opposite trope to Small Town Boredom, this trope involves characters who live in a big city or a suburb wishing they could move somewhere smaller, more traditional, or more natural, including a small town, a rural village, a farm, a ranch, or even just the plain old wilderness. In almost all of these cases, expect a heavy emphasis and focus on Arcadia, and the setting being an embodiment of it. As can be expected, it will pretty much always have a big emphasis on the city and the country. Will very often overlap with From New York to Nowhere.
Though this trope may be the opposite of Small Town Boredom, they still share several characteristics. Both of them are subtropes of Grass is Greener and involve a character in one place wishing they were somewhere else. Both of them are also quintessential examples of Hated Hometown, as the characters' hatred for the place they live in is the entire reason for both of these tropes existing.
The reason and specifications of this trope can vary. In almost all cases they will be looking for a purpose in life, although the specifics can vary. In some cases, it may be a Call to Agriculture and the character simply wants to take up farming and live the associated simple life. In other cases, the character may be a Nature Lover who wants to be in a more natural place without skyscrapers, warehouses, factories, strip malls, and houses. In cases like these, the Suburbia, Polluted Wasteland, or Vice City could potentially be seen, although the city the character lives in does not necessarily have to be dangerous, corrupt, or polluted, and the character simply dislikes it for being a city. Many examples of this trope will go with the more traditional route of someone who wants an escape from their busy or unhappy life and to settle in a more quiet and peaceful place. In cases like this expect something heavily akin to The Shangri-La, either in landscape, the sense of peace and relief a character feels within it, or both. However, contrary to popular assumption, it's also possible that they want to go somewhere more rural or small for an adventure or mission. In cases like these, they may be searching for a Call to Adventure they can only find in a smaller or more rural place, in which case it's very likely to see the jungle adventure or the small town mystery.
Furthermore, other reasons for the character wanting to move there could be that they wanted to feel normal somewhere or that they wanted to be special. In cases of the former, maybe they've always felt their values are different from the fast-paced or materialistic city or suburb, or maybe they even had a physical difference that made them feel alienated. In cases of the latter, maybe they knew they would be just another number if they continued to stay there, and their qualities would only be appreciated in a simpler place. Whatever the case, expect a heavily romanticized vision of the place in the character's mind or its actual depiction as well, depending on the story.
Examples:
- The first part of Anyway, I've Been There deals with Dipper and Mabel dealing with the existential ennui that comes from returning from the Supernatural Hotspot Town that is Gravity Falls, where they had new adventures every day, to their painfully ordinary hometown of Piedmont, desperately waiting for next summer when they get to go back.
- An American Tail: Fievel Goes West: Fed up with the crowded, crime-(and cat)-ridden slums of New York City, the Mouskewitz family (and a number of other mice) move out west to the countryside.
- In Cars, this is how Sally Carrera, an attorney from LA, ended up in Radiator Springs. One day she simply got tired of the big city, drove off, and kept driving until she broke down there. The locals repaired her and took her in, and Sally loved the local scenery so much that she decided to stay.
- The Adventures Of The Wilderness Family is based on the true story of a Los Angeles man who, having gotten fed up with the stress of big city life, moved with his wife and two children to a remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains.
- One of the most famous examples of this trope, the novel Lost Horizon is about Conway, an unhappy British officer who seeks something more, who gets to move to the utopian Shangri-La and finally find some peace. However, he is counteracted by his friend who hates it and wants to go back.
- At the start of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent is living in a house in the West Country, within walking distance of a pub but pretty isolated, having left London because it made him irritable. Over the course of the books, he runs through the bizarreness of the universe before he retires to a beautiful, Arcadian planet at the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, where he is free to pursue his skill of falling and missing the ground.
- In Anna Karenina, Levin is the Author Avatar, who prefers to live in the countryside rather than Moscow or St. Petersburg, like all the other members of high society. He also has a highly idealized view of the common peasant, occasionally dressing in simple peasant clothes and even participating in some activities, such as cutting wheat.
- In My Side of the Mountain Sam grew up in a small New York City apartment with a large family. Eventually he runs away to live on a mountain upstate where he sometimes spends weeks without seeing another person.
- In Small Game Mara's parents leave their middle-class jobs to buy a plot of empty land in the country and build their own homestead. Over time they become more insular and conspiracy-minded until even Mara avoids them.
- In The October Child, the Mariners originally live in the small seaside village of Chapel Rocks, but when Carl is three, they move to Sydney so he can attend a special school. Oldest child Kenneth, who is fifteen at the time, hates being trapped in a city and misses surfing and dirt biking at home. He counts the days until he turns sixteen, when he can legally drop out of school and move back to Chapel Rocks.
- Green Acres was a Sixties sitcom about a New York City couple who moved to a rural farm for a fish-out-of-water experience involving laconic locals and a smart pig. The show's theme song summed up the conflict between the husband who wanted "farm living" and the wife who preferred "city life."
- In the classic The Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby", the protagonist is very sick and tired of the rat race of urban 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 his body died and he was taken to Willoughby and Sons Funeral Home.
- This is one of the multiple main themes behind Green Day's American Idiot. Jesus of Suburbia has found his normal life in the suburbs to be a drag, so he leaves his broken home behind and makes his way to the big city. It starts off as a daring escape from the post-9/11 political unrest as detailed in "Holiday", but it all comes crashing down afterwards as the stress of unfamiliarity causes Jesus to recede into his mind and give birth to his sociopathic alter-ego St. Jimmy. After falling in love with a woman he calls "Whatsername", she lays it on thick that Jesus is a fraud, and St. Jimmy is just dragging her down with him. It's through this "letterbomb" that Jesus realizes he was being just as victimized in the city as he was back home, so he returns to the suburbs and ultimately tries to forget everything that happened in the city.
- Tim McGraw has "Where the Green Grass Grows" and "Meanwhile Back at Mama's," both about the oppressive unfriendliness of city life and a longing to return to move to the country.
- Keith Urban's "Where the Blacktop Ends," about escaping the city for the country for a breath of fresh air.
- The narrator in The Chicks' "Cowboy Take Me Away" professes a desire to "look at the horizon and not see a building standing tall" and "be the only one for miles and miles" (except the cowboy in question she's asking to take her away).
- Alabama's "Down Home" is both this and Small Town Boredom. As a child, the singer couldn't wait to leave for larger pastures, but as he's gotten older, he's realized the only place he wants to live and raise his family is back home in his small town.
- Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town opens with the protagonist returning from work to her apartment in the city and feeling empty and unfulfilled. When she finds a sale advertisement for a farm in Mineral Town, she immediately quits her job and moves out of the city to take the farm offer.
- Harvest Town has the protagonist swing into this from their previous Small Town Boredom. Formerly a native of the titular Harvest Town, the protagonist had moved to the metropolis during their youth and had lived there for decades. Now an elderly person, the protagonist realized that they are unhappy in the metropolis and regrets moving in the first place. Then they inexplicably experience a Mental Time Travel and find themself back in Harvest Town as a youth. Overjoyed, they promptly cancel their plan to leave the town and try to find a fulfilling life on their farm.
- Hundred Days begins with Emma working a Soul-Crushing Desk Job in London until one day, she gets a letter from Bepe to come work at her vineyards in the bright, sunny town of Langhe.
- At the beginning of Stardew Valley, the protagonist lives a dull life in an unnamed city, working a Soul-Crushing Desk Job for Joja Corp. In their moment of greatest depression, a letter from their grandpa convinces them to abandon that life and move out to the hamlet Pelican Town of Stardew Valley and take up farming.
- The Batman: The Animated Series episode "Girls' Night Out" has Batgirl and Supergirl talking about their hometowns. Supergirl has Small Town Boredom, whereas Batgirl has the inverse, wistfully describing the beauty of the countryside.
- The entire Transcendental movement focused on how good nature was for the soul in comparison to civilization, and its adherents frequently lived in nature, the most famous of whom was Henry David Thoreau.
