solarpunk memes

I mean, that's part of it. Cottagecore (in the US) isn't just about living on stolen land, it's valorizing the settler culture that stole that land in the first place - a culture based on not just land theft but unpaid female labor, unpaid child labor, patriarchy, theocracy, slavery/servitude, and a whole host of other moral cultural toxins. Hopefully you can see the problem with living like an antebellum Southern plantation owner and calling it "plantationcore" while ignoring the whole, you know, slavery thing? Same principle.

Thing is, cottagecore as an aesthetic is just fine. Fill your mason jars with beans from your garden, knit yourself a lace tablecloth, draw little mushrooms on your wall, follow your bliss. The problem is where influencers take moral and cultural lessons from settler culture and are like "wouldn't it be wonderful if we all followed the old traditional ways and raised our children on books instead of screens and let them play outside in the fields with other kids and walked to the local market and farmed our own food and studied the Bible at night and lived in ethnically homogeneous communities and had the right to shoot migrants as trespassers". Because far right ideologues and traditionalists and so on love the idea of returning to the traditional life ways and traditional values of white American settlers and they use the aesthetic as a selling point in the same way that solarpunks use green aesthetic as a gateway drug to anti-capitalism.

Also, there is the issue of economic justice. How many people can afford a little cottage and an acre of land to farm? How many people can afford the time to do that traditional labor without worrying about earning money? Cottagecore influencers are mostly rich people playacting at an idealized version of poverty, which is classist and frankly insulting.

And a bunch of other stuff but this rant is long enough already.