this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Cottagecore -> what if my entire life was based around routines of dainty activities, while the help does all the hard labor?
Yes. Its a fantasy of (specifically white) privilege, with style cues/motifs.
From the wikipage:
Cottagecore is a fantasy of being the wife of an American plantation owner, but with the setting transposed to England, where the required slavery/servitude to make this any kind of plausible has a slightly less ugly veneer of class or posh or whatnot over it.
None of it works without an inherently brutal class structure.
Its the Disneyification of being a plantation owner.
Its literally laughably obviously a power/status fantasy escapism. Its barely any different from 'I wish I was an actual princess.'
You wouldn't have had one person living in an actual cottage, you'd have had 8-12, they'd be cotters, and they'd be doing 12 to 16 hours of manual labor a day.
Cottagecore is where the lord and lady downsize from their nearby manor, move into one of the cottages of their serfs, because it is more quaint! ... and then the cotters I guess just sleep in tents outside of the cottage or are otherwise invisible or are ghosts that can till the fields or something.
Its a nostalgia that then gentrifies that nostalgia's version of a low income neighborhood.
Again, it is hilarious how un self aware one has to be somehow not notice the amount of privilege this all just presumes.
This is what happens when elitist white liberal women try to imagine an idealized living -> they completely disregard the labor and power relations of material reality, and invent a remixed version of plantations, with all the ugly parts ignored or denied, and then spend most of the time focusing on making up basically performative etiquettes to define the lifestyle.
I am so fucking sick of Tumblrinas.
It's not manorcore, or estatecore, or plantationcore. It's cottagecore. These people are dreaming of being cotters, not gentry.
Integral to the cottagecore movement is making handcrafted, small-batch items. Doing your own repairs, mending your own clothing. Like a peasant would do.
Not to serve some lord or lady. It doesn't need that aspect. It has more to do with the self-reliance and the resilience that comes with it.
That's why it meshes so well with solarpunk. You think a solarpunk village wouldn't have cottage industry, or people who can mend their own clothing?
By the way, cottage industry was integral to the satyagraha movement which ultimately pushed Great Britain out of power in India. So trying to equate it with the wealthy side of class conflict and colonialism is a huge mischaracterization.
Why would an oligarch care about mending their own clothes? They can just buy new ones. Cottagecore empowers the poor, and trying to stigmatize it as bourgeois does a disservice to the proletariat.
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.
Yeah, pretty much that
The folks that I know that enjoy cottagecore aesthetics most are a married black lesbian couple 😅
I'm kinda finding myself wondering if I just haven't really existed in the parts of the internet where the shittiest folks youre talking about exist and make up much of the culture
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 😅 thats what the friends in question I'm thinking of want. I enjoy cottagecore aesthetically, though not as much as other aesthetic generes, and I'm more than happy to do my own labor 🤷🏻♂️
Like even in the excerpt you quoted the people living in the cottage ARE the laborers. Maybe I just don't engage enough with cottagecore folks online, but I don't see anything that really links cottagecore to someone else doing the labor. You can do the labor. While living in the cottage.
Edit: Yeah the Wikipedia page for cottagecore isnt really giving the impression cottagecore means wanting someone else to do the labor for you either
Agrarianism:
Yeah, you apparently have not heard of or been on TikTok, I guess? Where the vast majority of cottagecore content is/was?
Cool story bro
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 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.
Yikes, sorry for trying to invite conversation about our different perspectives lol, clearly that is not in the cards unless I feel like being personally attacked repeatedly 😅. Maybe I need to do a better job of using tone indicators to convey I'm not trying to start a fight when talking folks online, or just try to more proactively distance myself from the possibility of reading an antagonistic tone into my message. I do use "😅" a lot, maybe that comes across as passive aggressive.
Yeah I like the idea of homesteading too, I see them as being closely related fantasies. Homesteading is just less of an aesthetic fantasy and more of a reality, but I see hokestreading as a lifestyle as being a component of the cottagecore fantasy. And no, I don't use tiktok, or tumbr, which is exactly what I meant by feeling like maybe I haven't seen the online spaces that created your resentment for the aesthetic. That resentment may be totally valid (for all I know those groups online suck shit and are super gross) taking it out on anyone you talk about cottagecore aesthetics with is less so; I am not those people on tiktok, believe it or not.
I don't think I really understand your position, cottagecore is explicitly a fantasy. Isn't that the point of it? Why would land being unaffordable make it unreasonable to fantasize about having land? Thats why its a fantasy? I'll probably never actually own land, does that mean I'm not allowed to enjoy the idea of it either?
Thats a really weird assumption given you don't know anything about me other than an internet comment. My last job was in the trades and regularly involved manual labor.
You seem to be indicating that any kind of discussion where I can enjoy chatting with someone about the different way we see things probably isnt gonna happen; I hope you have a nice day, take care
I think the missing link that you two are talking past each other about is that there's a venn diagram with a lot of overlap between "cottagecore" and whatever the whole "tradwife" thing is called.
They are both a fantasy, not a utopia.
Thats a fair point. Like I said, I haven't engaged much with people online around the cottagecore aesthetic, maybe if I had that crossover of the Venn diagram would have kinda poisoned the way I see cottagecore
That being said, I do think I did a reasonable job of addressing what I was hearing from them and inviting conversation 😅 I made a concerted effort not to talk past them, and acknowledged I don't really know what those spaces online are like
Why such an uncharitable take? Maybe people just fantasize about living in a post-scarcity utopia where robots do all the work and every human can cottage core as much as they like? Go watch some episodes of Star Trek: TNG, there's cottage core all over the place there. The setting has extremely advanced technology, but many folks live pretty simple lives in semi-rural settings.
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.