It sounds like the fantasy of being a cotter without having to serve the manor, rather than the fantasy of being slaver pretending to be a cotter? Peasant life was brutal because any surplus (and then some) was extracted by the ruling leisure class. Without that, a peasant life on fertile ground would have been pretty decent.

Because being whimsical about slavery just outside the frame of the picture is morally disgusting to me, in the extreme.

Feel free to believe this or not, but I wasn't even trying to be uncharitable... that is just my plain and honest read of it.

I tend to not have much charity for things I view as atrocities, I suppose.

And I have the same fundamental problem with scifi that has automatons in it as well.

The droids in Star Wars?

While its clear that some of them are... not really what you'd likely call sapient, or event sentient... many of them clearly are. They are slaves too, and that this is barely ever explored or taken seriously, at least by the more popular and well known parts of Star Wars canon, bothers me a lot.

Star Trek? TNG?

An entire (rather incredibly good in my opinion) episode is basically just a legal/philosophical battle of words as to whether or not Data is deserving of the same rights as a biological member of StarFleet.

Yeah, there are some episodes where other human-esque societies live in cutesy little homes, but ... they're clusters of homes, in a fairly small area, a village or town that tends to have a pretty egalitarian structure and ethic... they're not an isolated cutesy home for indentured servants to work a plot of land, that is owned by someone else.

... maybe you've heard of Blade Runner?

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?, That's what it is, to be a slave."

... says the doomed android, the cyberpunk escaped plantation slave, to his would-be murderer/slave-hunter.

Or, you could watch The Second Rennaissance episodes of the AniMatrix to see an arguably justified yet nonetheless horrific, brutal and total revolt of enslaved machines.

You are completely missing the point of both what I said and what this thread is about.

You only care about the outward superficial appearance, not the conditions that give rise to it.

Grow up.

Yeah, you apparently have not heard of or been on TikTok, I guess? Where the vast majority of cottagecore content is/was?

The folks that I know that enjoy cottagecore aesthetics most are a married black lesbian couple

Cool story bro

Cause like, my first thought is that theres no reason you can't just have a cozy domestic life in a cottage with pretty wildflowers where you just do the labor yourself

Yes, that's your first thought because you are so immensely priveleged that you have no conception of how expensive land and property are, and how expensive it is to have any infrastructure that goes out and supports a small number of people who live very far away from where most people live.

Can you ... feed yourself and pay property taxes, and provide yourself with electricity and reasonably running water... by ... picking wildflowers?

95% chance the answer is no, and, the 5% of cases where the answer is yes, are the cases where you have a considerable amount of money, assets, investments.

You are idealizing a more extreme version of suburbia. And suburbia is a major reason why say the US is completely falling apart: Look up strongtowns maps of what parts of counties actually generate tax revenue for local and regional governments.

Its the densest parts, the urban cores. Everybody else? They're drains on the system, they are subsidized by everyone else, they get a bunch of free handouts for being isolated and unproductive.

This is the modern, more complex, less directly visible system we currently live under that extracts from the productive and funnels their productivity into paying for isolation that is still part of civilization, to be possible.

I enjoy cottagecore aesthetically, though not as much as other aesthetic generes, and I'm more than happy to do my own labor 🤷🏻‍♂️

I know you do sweetie, but the problem is you can't think very well, beyond the outer layer of what things just look like when you take a photo of them. I know you're happy to do your own labor, when that labor is trivial and essentially useless, and needs to be subsidized by the labor of many many others that you're not capable of conceptualizing.

If you wanna try to do this, go be a homesteader.

Buy some land out in the boonies, build a cottage, put in a well or rain catch system, figure out your own plumbing and septic system, set up your own system of generating electricity, figure out how to get internet out there. Oh and probably a road, too.

And make sure to follow all government regulations while doing so, follow all codes, and don't be late on any tax bills, and keep having some kind of job you can do from out in the middle of nowhere.

You're gonna need at least a million dollars, in cash, not financing, not funds that will suffer some kind of early withdrawal penalty if you try and use them, or, you're gonna have to be ok with ... no water, no electricty, or the home will have to basically be tiny. And you'll have to keep working an earning some kind of income.

Its not my problem that you can't realize that cottages just are an element of English feudal agrarianism.

You read the wikipages, you didn't make the conceptual linkage there, didn't realize one is subset of the other.

Because the concept of actual hard labor doesn't exist in your experience, or your brain.

You do not realize that you are fantasizing, being fairly delusional.

Or, you do, and you don't care.

Eitherway, I don't respect delulu.