The City vs. the Country

It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

These are two very common plots in fiction and naturally occur quite often in real life too. But their execution is extremely different and often leads to a Double Standard.

Plot A: Alice is a sweet Country Mouse who grew up in a sparsely-populated rural area, either on a farm or simply a small town in the middle of nowhere. Either of her own desire or against her will she moves to the big city. She doesn't like it because it's so much bigger, city people aren't as friendly and they look down on her because they consider her a backwoods hick. This kind of plot is usually resolved by Alice getting to move back to the country and appreciating it more if she originally hated it, or acclimating to city life and making new friends who appreciate her good nature.

Plot B: Bob is a City Mouse who lives in a big city with lots of friends and loves to go everywhere. He's likely very independent and materialistic as well. Almost always against his will, he is moved to a much smaller area be it the suburbs or a small town. He will hate it because it's boring, there's nothing to do, and country people are completely different from city people. If it's a farm he'll resent having to help out on the farm. In the process, he may learn how hard farming really is, or he may not. But by the end of the story, he'll have learned An Aesop and come to like his new home, realizing it is much better than his old life.

Plot B2: Alice used to be a Country Mouse but moved to the big city and has now become a City Mouse with a glamorous life and career, and is usually embarrassed by her humble origins. Then she's forced to go back home for some reason, either temporarily or permanently depending on the story. Similar to Plot B, although there will usually be a rekindled forgotten Childhood Friend Romance as well.

Plot B3: Alice used to be a Country Mouse, but rather than leaving her hometown for the city, she has witnessed the town growing into a city through one circumstance or many. She will be overwhelmed by the rapid urban development and the people moving in droves, and the pros and cons they bring with it. She'll either accept the changes or leave to another quieter place away from the noise.

The Double Standard decrees that a country person who doesn't like life in the city is free to move back home, or their down-home nature works to their advantage and they never learn the plus-sides to living in the city (and the story will imply that there aren't any); meanwhile, a city person will just have to put up with the country and learn to accept a simpler life. Some works will portray the city as being full of criminals and shady people, often with a lot of drugs thrown in while the country people will be more innocent. Compare Welcome to the Big City, Country Mouse, City Mouse, and Country Cousin. It's worth noting that the characters who move do not necessarily have to fit the Country Mouse/City Mouse character types.

Heroic protagonists are often simple farm boys who are thrown into a larger world. One of the supporting characters may be a more urban, streetwise character who is initially depicted as cynical and dubious at best. This is in sharp contrast with the country boy hero's wholesome nature. Characterizations frequently gloss over the fact that people of rural upbringing are often conservative, traditional, and possibly unaccustomed to ethnic diversity.

So or so, the story will often depict how different people (and life) of the city/country are. To the point that they may not understand each other anymore.

Blitz Evacuees is often a very specific form of plot B (and one of the few kinds where the city-loving characters in the country might end up going back — after the war is over, of course). Compare Arcadia and From New York to Nowhere. There's a strong tie to New Media Are Evil too, the city representing new media in this case.

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Examples:

Move From Country To City:

Anime & Manga

• Hideki from Chobits is rather eager to move away from the farm, specifically to get an education in order to avoid being a boring farmer for the rest of his life. When he first enters the city, he's quite amazed at all the technology and stuff. He even says that he can't wait to get a computer with the internet so he can finally look up the fabled porn that he's heard so much about. Then he finds Chii in the trash in the back alley, wakes her up, and the plot starts up. All in all, though, his country upbringing isn't treated as an issue.

Fan Works

• In the Pony POV Series, the Awful Truth that Applejack faces when she looks into Truth is that, despite not fitting in at first, she could still have been as happy in Manehattan as she is in Ponyville. Worse, she arguably could have been happier.

Film — Animated

• Inside Out: Riley and her family have to move from Minnesota to San Francisco and part of Riley's growing depression is her missing things from home. But the things she misses are not tied directly to the country — namely her friends and certain activities she did — and the city people aren't portrayed nastily at all. Her character development comes with readjusting to the new environment.
• Zootopia: Judy Hopps grows up and moves from Bunnyburrow to the titular Zootopia to pursue her dream of joining the Zootopia Police Department. Along the journey, Judy's unlikely origins are scrutinized in a critical light, but she doesn't lose her way despite having a Darkest Hour near the end. As it turns out, Judy's return to Bunnyburrow allows her to learn some crucial botany that factors into the case she's investigating.

Film — Live Action

• In Big Business (1988), which is a 1980s update of The Comedy of Errors, two hick sisters come to town to protest an Evil Corporation — that unbeknownst to them, their sisters (one of each set of twins was Switched and Separated at Birth) work for. A rare case of one of them being more comfortable in the city and deciding to stay.
• This is the plot for Babe: Pig in the City for both Babe and the farmer's wife.
• The Incredible Jessica James: Jessica makes a meager living in New York City trying to pursue her theatrical dreams. She visits the Ohio town where she grew up and remembers that she feels out of place among her family members, even if they have romantic notions of their big-city daughter.
• Made in Mongolia: Two nomadic herders from the countryside come to the capital of Ulaanbaatar after one of them inherits a house. They find the city confusing and hostile and way too Westernized, and that's before the Corrupt Corporate Executive tries to steal their house.
• In Scanners II: The New Order, David lived all his life in the countryside and finds his move to the city jarring. Justified due to being a psychic who can't drown out the telepathic chatter, so he finds city life inherently noisy and confusing.
• Twister evokes this with Bill — who is a country boy that became a scientist. The love triangle is between his stylish City Mouse of a fiancee and his down-to-earth country ex-wife. The country girl wins out, though at least the fiancee isn't portrayed badly.
• King Cobra (1999): Brad wants to move to the city because he doesn't want to remain a small-town doctor, while his girlfriend Jo is comfortable remaining in the town they grew up in.
• The Tattered Dress: Blane is unpopular in town because he’s a New York lawyer defending the accused (and actual) murderer of a local.

Literature

• In Aesop's Fables the Country Mouse visits her friend the City Mouse and is terrified by the city, swearing never to go back again because the country is simpler and safer.
• The Bell Jar has Esther Greenwood struggling to survive in New York City.
• This is the premise of Black Beauty when the titular character ends up in London driving cabs. Of course, it's completely justified since he's a horse and would be better suited to living in the country.
• A standard bit in Discworld novels involves people from rural parts of the Disc (usually Lancre) heading for Ankh-Morpork. The most notable is Carrot, a big simple lad who is so mind-bendingly honest that he actually gets the city to work by his rules, at least a bit. There's also Imp y Celyn in Soul Music, who in the space of his first day is robbed when he tries to busk, extorted by the Musicians' Guild for performing without a licence, and has his harp broken, although that was an accident that could have happened anywhere. And countless bit-players who just keep their heads down and send some money home regularly. In Equal Rites, Granny Weatherwax's immediate reaction to Ankh is that it's too big to be a city, but she quickly learns that people are people everywhere and they always need a witch sometimes.
• Fire Engine By Mistake tells the story of a sentient vehicle that was supposed to be a road sprinkler in a quiet country location, but was accidentally built as a fire engine in a large city.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fall of Númenor: Ancalimë was raised in her mother's country state Emerië until her father Aldarion demanded that she was brought to the capital of Númenor, Armenelos, to be raised as befitting the Kings Heiress. Nonetheless, she did not like the city, missing the countryside to the point of being unable to sleep peacefully without hearing the sounds of sheeps. Even so, Ancalimë stopped going to Emerië after her husband played a prank on her, since she was unwilling to stay in the place where everybody witnessed her humiliation.
• A Hole in the Fence: Grisón and Prune leave Courquetaines and travel to Metropolis to meet their biological mother. After spending some weeks in the big city, both kids declare the big city is...alright, they reckon, but it is not home, and they really want to return to their peaceful town. Saura is more than delighted to go back with them since she always hated the city life.
• A Long Way from Chicago: The protagonists are two children from Chicago who are sent to visit their grandmother for a week each summer over the course of several years. They fear that it will be boring compared to life in the city, but quickly find out that there is never a dull moment with their grandma.
• The Magician's Nephew: Diggory Kirke is very unhappy that he has to move from his country home to a house in London when his mother falls ill. When she recovers he is overjoyed to return to the country. Frank the cab driver is also from the country and is thrilled when he becomes King of Narnia.
• The Secret of Drumshee Castle plays both plots out. Both Grace and Judith are country girls from the south of Ireland and visit England. Grace decides she prefers the simple life of the countryside but Judith stays in England, loving the lifestyle.
• Beatrix Potter's The Tale Of Johnny Town Mouse inverts the fable from Aesop twice: Timmy Willie is brought to the city first, and then Johnny Town-mouse visits him; and, while Timmy Willie is convinced it plays out as in the fable, the narrator makes it clear that in fact both of them don't notice the problems with the place they know already, and are frightened by the strange ones. The story does try to give credence to both country and city, though it is significant that the "city" is a thriving English village.
• The Yellow Bag: Raquel's family used to live in a farm, but moved away for unexplained reasons. She outright states that her life used to be perfect there and sometimes wishes that she could return, even keeping a picture of the yard in one of the bag's pockets.

Live-Action TV

• Mostly averted in CSI: NY. Danny likes to tease Lindsay about moving to New York from the country (Montana), but she can handle herself in the city just as well as any of her coworkers. And she sometimes teases him right back about being a city boy.
• Perfect Strangers is mostly about Country Mouse Balki Bartokomous moving to Chicago and living with his American cousin Larry Appleton. Balki remains a Fish out of Water throughout the series, but unlike other examples, Balki takes to city life quite well. Played straight in that any episode where it comes down to Balki's Country Mouse methods vs. Larry's City Mouse methods, Balki's would almost always succeed while Larry's would fail.

Music

• The video for The Script's "For The First Time" has a young Irish couple living in New York for work and missing Ireland. At the end of the video, they buy tickets to move back home.
• Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" is about a person who has grown disillusioned with life in the big city and decides to return to the countryside.
• Country Music in general will have a strong preference for the country. Any song where a country boy moves to the city will almost always have that boy back in the country (or at least wishing he was) by song's end. A good example is the Waylon Jennings song "Where Corn Don't Grow" (Covered Up by Travis Tritt later).
• "One Way Track" by Prairie Oyster. The country is rundown, so Billy moves to the city as the narrator claims that he's on a "one-way track" because no one ever returns to the Dying Town. This turns out to be true, as Billy dies at the end without ever coming back to the country.

Theater

• Bernice Bobs Her Mullet, a musical adaptation of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, has Bernice from a hick town visiting her cousin in the City (pretty much the opposite of the original story, though the rest of the plot is exactly the same).

Video Games

• One of the possible backgrounds for your Player Character in Cyberpunk 2077 is that they're a member of a Nomad clan from the countryside who has recently moved to Night City. Characters with this background are described as having a sense of honesty and integrity that many of Night City's residents distinctly lack, leading to a great deal of Culture Shock. How your character responds to said culture shock is up to you.
• Given a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi spin in Primordia (2012). The protagonists are two robots who live a peaceful life in the untamed wasteland that makes up most of the world, only to be forced to trek to Metropol, the last city standing, after their power supply is stolen. They quickly find Metropol is not the bastion of civilization it makes itself out to be...

Western Animation

• Big City Greens has this as its central plot with the Green Family being forced to move to Big City after losing their farm and having to adapt to their new lives as urbanites.
  • The story of Big City itself has shades of this; Big City was once Big Country, a rural farming town, but after the city was founded, it gradually grew larger and larger, swallowing up the country until the only remnant of the former rural town left is the Greens' family home, as family matriarch Alice refuses to adapt to city life or sell the only home she's ever known. The end result is a broken-down country-style home literally surrounded by a city.
• Zigzagged In Hey Arnold!; Lila moves from a farm to the big city and the girls assume she'll be a country hick, only for her to immediately outshine them all in intelligence and style and become the object of all of the boys' affections. The girls still hate her but it's because they see her as too perfect, not her country heritage and even they warm up to her after realizing she's not as perfect as she seems^note  her mother is implied to be deceased, her father is unemployed and they live in a run-down apartment in the low-rent district of town .
• In Hilda, this is a major source of conflict for the eponymous character and her mother, because she dreads the thought of being forced to move to the city from her idyllic life in the wilderness.
• In The Legend of Korra, Korra runs away from the relatively rural Southern Water Tribe (where she was raised in virtual isolation and seclusion to protect her from assassins) to the bustling metropolis of Republic City to master airbending with Tenzin. At one point, Korra teases Republic City native Mako by calling him "city boy".
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode 'The Cutie Mark Chronicles', Applejack relates how when she was younger she decided to leave Ponyville and live the sophisticated life with wealthy relatives in Manehatten. She returned home once she realized she didn't fit in and was happier on the farm.
  • In the episode "Simple Ways", famous travel writer Trenderhoof, on whom Rarity has a crush, comes to town to see the "small-town chic", but becomes enamoured with Applejack and her rustic lifestyle (or, rather, with his own image of what rustic lifestyle is like), while Applejack sees him as a nuisance. Near the end of the episode Rarity, who has been preparing the Ponyville Days Festival and trying to show Trenderhoof that she is rustic too, finally decides to change the theme of the festival shortly before it's due to "Simple Ways", a ridiculous caricature of the rustic lifestyle, in a drastic attempt to win over his affection. Fortunately, Applejack sets her straight, both Rarity and Trenderhoof acknowledge their mistakes, and Rarity manages, through a lot of effort, to pull off the festival using its original small-town theme.
• The The Powerpuff Girls episode "Town and Out": the Utonium family moves to the metropolis of Citysville, only to realize that it can't compare to Townsville, their original home. It's rather strange since Townsville seems like a pretty big city in and of itself.
• In the Strawberry Shortcake's Berry Bitty Adventures episode "A Star is Fashioned," Raspberry Torte goes to Berry Big City to talk with a fashion designer about her designs, and is given her own studio in the city. However, when she returns to pack up her things, the behavior of city folk juxtaposed to the behavior of her small-town friends makes her change her mind and decide to stay, even though this means giving up fame and fortune.
• The Radioactive Man episode of The Simpsons parodies the "well-meaning small town folk cheated by city slickers" by inverting it: The LA movie producers are cheated by the greedy citizens of small-town Springfield who make up fees for the production, and are forced to go back to Hollywood, where "people treat each other right". Of course, that's just the final scene, as through out the episode, the Hollywood visitors are portrayed as callous, abusive, lazy and dishonest.

Moving From City To Country:

Anime and Manga

• Blend-S: Variant. Hideri comes from a family of farmers but hates working there and would rather stay in the city to wear fashionable clothes and be a glamorous idol than going back home. His country origins pop out once in a while, however, especially in his speech style.
• Sword Art Online: Kyouko Yuuki was born to a farming family in a small village in the Japanese countryside. She's now a professor at a prestigious Tokyo university but in the Mother's Rosario arc, we see that her rural background is still a point of shame for her, no matter how hard she pretends otherwise.
• Sand Chronicles begins with the protagonist Ann and her mother moving from Tokyo to the mother's hometown in Shimane, one of the least populated prefectures of Japan. Ann is irritated by the lack of fun things to do compared to Tokyo and dislikes how nosey and chummy the people in the village are, but she gradually warms up to the kids her age and happily settles there for a few years. Her mother is unfortunately a lot unhappier coming back, having been so desperate to leave the town for similar reasons to Ann when she was an adolescent.

Comic Strips

• In For Better or for Worse, Elly and John like to send their teenaged children to a farm owned by some of their relatives over at least one summer break for each child. In this case, they're deliberately Invoking Break the Haughty. Notably, the only one of the trio who comes to enjoy working on the farm is The Unfavorite April, who still suffers the usual Humiliation Conga.

Films — Live-Action

• In the Lifetime channel movie 12 Men of Christmas, the protagonist is a bigshot publicist in the Big Applesauce. After her fiance's affair is revealed and the other woman blackballs her from every New York career opportunity, she decides to start over, albeit incredibly reluctantly, in Montana. Once there, she falls in love with a local man and finds a community with the humble, good-natured locals, and ultimately decides she prefers life in Montana over life in New York.
• Arachnophobia has a young doctor and his family move into a small town. The townspeople immediately resent him for being from the city.
• In Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, the City Mouse Mary "Lola" Steppe with her family moves from New York City to the suburbs of Dellwood, New Jersey.
• Doc Hollywood has a hotshot plastic surgeon on his way to a new job in Hollywood crash his car and has to do community service as a doctor in South Carolina.
• Hannah Montana: The Movie: Robby Ray takes Miley on a private jet which is supposed to take Miley to World Music Awards in New York, to their hometown in Crowley Corners, Tennessee for her grandma's birthday, due to Miley's alter ego as pop-sensation Hannah Montana that starts to overwhelm her life. Miley engages in Childhood Friend Romance when she gets there.
• Horse Sense has Michael, a rich LA preppy college student, being forced by his parents to spend his summer helping out on a farm his aunt owns in Montana. He quickly learns that being a farmhand is very different from his normal carefree lifestyle. It doesn't help that his 11-year-old cousin deliberately sabotages his work (by not giving enough instructions) in order to make it even harder, as revenge for neglecting him, when the cousin visited LA earlier. Later on, though, Michael learns to appreciate the farming life and has trouble fitting in back in LA. He ends up helping his aunt save her farm from foreclosure and offers to stay on a bit longer.
• Hot Fuzz features a London supercop who is forced to move to a little rural village. Subverted because the village harbours deadly plots and crimes as well.
• Jersey Girl has Ben Affleck's character forced to give up his publicist job and move from New York to New Jersey in order to raise his daughter. He tries to get his publicist job back and suggests moving back to the city but of course he learns his Aesop.
• The Nephew has an American teenager moving from New York to a remote and conservative Irish island. After clashing with his uncle he decides to go back to America but eventually is convinced to stay.
• In Sweet Home Alabama, a woman from Sweet Home Alabama who has become a fashion designer in Big Applesauce has to go home to sever ties with her Childhood Marriage Promise who she actually married and he never signed the divorce papers before she can marry her New York fiance.
• Disenchanted: In this film, Morgan hates moving to the suburbs, and initially has ire with the situation. However over the course of the movie, she develops a love with her new life, falls in love with the villain's son, and has an Aesop, better appreciating her family.

Literature

• The Cat Who... Series: Qwilleran is a big-city journalist who moves to a small town in Moose County under the terms of his Aunt Fanny's will. Several early novels in the series detail his adjustment (and that of his cats).
• On the flip side of the Discworld examples, when the wizards arrive in Lancre in Lords and Ladies, Morpork-born Ponder Stibbons says he bets there isn't a single delicatessen in the area. The novel ends with him deciding to stay there as advisor to King Verence, although later books reveal he doesn't.
• millenium@drumshee has English brat Emma get moved to the South of Ireland and not getting along with the locals at all. She eventually bonds with a local girl on their mutual love of dogs and becomes happier there.
• In Refugees, the new arrivals miss urban Vancouver and are not content with their new living off-the-land lifestyle.
• The fifth Rivers of London book has Peter Grant (who somewhat unironically believes that Britain Is Only London) stay in rural Herefordshire to help solve a child kidnapping case.
• Mansfield Park: Much of the conflict arises when the fashionable London-loving Crawford siblings arrive at the quiet, retiring country estate of Mansfield Park. Mary and Henry are both unfamiliar with life in the countryside and bring in a lack of morals that has disastrous effects on the Mansfield family. Henry's shameless flirtation with the Bertram sisters and Mary's falling in love with Edmund but refusing to respect his chosen profession (or really, treat anything with respect) end up causing a lot of heartbreak.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied on the season four episode of 30 Rock, "Stone Mountain". Liz and Jack travel from their home base in the Big Applesauce to the titular town of Stone Mountain, Georgia to find an actor that will appeal to the "real America". Liz becomes miserable when there as she almost immediately gets food poisoning and complains about the backwoods ways of the locals. Jack says she is being a stereotypical coastal City Mouse snob and opines that the people in Middle America are kinder and more genuine than their big-city counterparts. After seeing Liz get insulted at a local standup open mic, however, Jack comes to realize that no matter what the environment, a Jerkass can always be found, and that both the city and country have their pluses and minuses.
• The reality series Escape To The Country which is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Everwood: The show's premise is that of a New York City doctor moving his family out to rural Colorado after his wife's death.
• Gaby Estrella: In this Brazilian series, the titular character used to live in the city until her mother got a job in New York and couldn't (initially) take Gaby with her. Gaby was then sent to her paternal Grandmother's farm.
• The George Lopez Show features a subversion. George moves the family to a rural Colorado town after he and Angie feel it will be a better environment for their kids. However, once they move there, Carmen and Max spend all of their free time with the town's teens drinking, smoking marijuana, and shoplifting because there is literally nothing else for them to do. This, combined with George and Angie not getting along with the gossiping, judgmental adults, makes them realize that every town in America has the same problems as L.A. and they go back.
• Played with in Green Acres. Oliver is tired of city life and moves to Hooterville to live the idyllic (he thinks) life of a farmer. He finds, however, that Hooterville operates by its own peculiar set of rules, and is often frustrated by its colorful denizens. His socialite wife Lisa is always begging him to return to the city, but, ironically, she is the one who fits in, as she is as loopy as the Hootervillians.
• In How I Met Your Mother Ted and Stella debate over whether Stella and her daughter will move to New York or Ted will move to New Jersey to live with them. Stella wins. Subverted when Stella and her daughter move in with Tony in the city. In the series finale, Marshall and Lily decide to move to the suburbs due to having another child.
• The Kenan & Kel two-parter where Kenan's family moves to Montana, so Roger can live out his dream of being a park ranger. Subverted when the whole family hates the run-down house, Kenan hates his new school and Roger finds his job boring and the family can't wait to move back to Chicago.
• Northern Exposure: Joel is a New York City boy fresh out of medical school; the state of Alaska paid for his education in return for him practicing in Alaska for 4 years. He's supposed to be posted in Anchorage but they overbudgeted their doctor payments. He thinks that means he doesn't have to work in Alaska at all, but instead they send him to the tiny town of Cicely, where he spends a couple of years resenting being there before finally blending in, and eventually Going Native — when the government of Alaska is forced to let him out of his contract early, he leaves Cicely but stays in unincorporated Alaska.
• Perfect Strangers was mostly about a Country Mouse moving to the City, but two episodes went back the other way.
  • On one visit back to Mypos, Balki brings Larry to his old home, and the City Mouse falls in love with it.
  • Balki meets his cousin Bartok, a Country Mouse who became a City Mouse named Bart and lost his old-world accent and mannerisms. Bart comes looking for money, which Larry believes is Bart trying to take advantage of Balki, but Balki gives him the money anyway; this leads to an emotional moment as Balki wrote the check to "Bartok", as he doesn't know "Bart", and Bartok regrets losing touch of his old Country Mouse self.
• Schitt's Creek features the once-wealthy urbane globetrotters The Roses forced to move to a rural town that is probably somewhere in Canada. In a lovely subversion, the town may be aesthetically not what the Roses are used to but turns out to be a very lovely place to live and the Roses find a home there.
• An episode of Sex and the City featured Carrie spending a week out in the middle of nowhere with her boyfriend and his cabin. She had a mental breakdown by the time a squirrel tried to approach her.
• Suburgatory: When George found a condom in her daughter's drawer, he decided to move with his daughter, Tessa, from their home in New York City, to the suburbs of Chatswin.

Music

• Blur's "Country House" is about a businessman being so exhausted with city lifestyle, he ditches the city for a quieter life in the countryside, which soon he gets fed up with.
• Girls Aloud's "Live In The Country" follows a similar premise to the aforementioned Blur number, where they get tired of city life, they want to move to the country when they have enough money, with ducks in a lake and a stall at the village markets selling cakes. Bonus Last Note Hilarity for including animal noises at the end of the song.
• "The City Put the Country Back in Me" by Neal McCoy

Theatre

• One of Henrik Ibsen's early plays, St John's Eve, is based on this trope, with an urban lady moving to the countryside with her daughter, trying to steal the farm out of the hands of the true inheritor, her stepdaughter. This conflict is lampshaded throughout the play, showing just how different the mentalities were.

Video Games

• The basic premise of the early Harvest Moon games involve a big city boy/girl who just moved to a rural town to inherit a rundown farm whose owner had recently passed away. The goal of the game is to settle down in said farm and try to restore it to its former glory, although the Special Edition of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life allows the player to refuse the farm offer, which would lead to a game over.

Web Comics

• Can You Spare a Quarter?: Jamie considers that going with Graham to Valdez Island brings him away from the city and his problems there. Jason also mentions that the island's wilderness is a different environment than the city.
• Forest Hill starts with the Locket family moving from the city to a small town in The Appalachians.

Western Animation

• The Betty Boop short "Stop that Noise!" inverts the usual version of this story, as Betty goes out to the country to escape all the city noises because they keep her from sleeping. A bunch of bugs immediately proceed to bother her so much she decides she's better off going back to the city and its noises.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twilight Sparkle's sent from Canterlot to Ponyville in part to prepare for a celebration held there but is also told to make friends while there. She resents having to do this and focuses on work instead, but by the end of the 2-part pilot, she's warmed up to her newfound friends and wishes to stay with them.
• Cherry Jam from Strawberry Shortcake's Berry Bitty Adventures is a variation, as she purposefully chose to perform a gig in Berry Bitty City because it was a small town, and ended up liking the place so much that she made it her new home. She specifically points out the friendliness of the BBC residents over those of Berry Big City.

Real Life

• The implication that urban Americans are not as "American" or "patriotic" as their small-town relations is a well-known Berserk Button of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart (as well as many urban Americans; Stewart himself is a New York City native). The attitude itself can be found as far back as Thomas Jefferson, who maintained that America ought to be a primarily agrarian nation for democracy to survive (he lived before urbanization became a widespread phenomenon, so it's a bit more excusable).
  • The 2004 presidential election (the one where George W. Bush was re-elected) in particular brought the "red state vs blue state" divide to the forefront (red and blue are traditionally — since the 2000 presidential election, that is — assigned to conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats, respectively). This is even more noticeable when you look at election results by county. Counties in urban and suburban areas tend to go for Democrats, while rural counties tend to go for Republicans.
  • "Main Street vs Wall Street" is another common theme during election season.
• In 18th century England, one of the two main political factions referred to itself as the "Country Party" and accused its opponents of being a "Court Party" (as in the Court of the King, not the justice system) that cared only for the interests of powerful and well-connected people in the capital.
• The English Civil War and the Hanover-Stuart Wars were in part a war between the cities and the country. More specifically subcultures connected with the city tended to line up first with parliament and later with the Hanovers and subcultures connected with the country went Stuart. Obviously this is a very rough appraisal but there is some truth to it.
• In Switzerland this was the cause of the splitting of the former canton of Basel into the half-cantons of Basel-Stadt (litt. Basel-Town) and Basel-Landschaft (litt. Basel-Country), the latter feeling marginalised against in the political system by the former.
• The Roman Republic often had a romantic view of the rural past, and one of the folk heroes of the early republic was Cincinnatus, who was elected dictator at a time of crisis, and called to duty while plowing. He reluctantly set his oxen in the barn, took up the reigns of government, solved the problem at hand, and beat down the invaders. And after that, he humbly resigned his duties, went back to his farm to finish the plowing. Cincinnatus became an example of virtue for centuries.

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