[Earw0rm]

Accurate.

This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire.

"Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners".

Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?

[renewiltord]

That’s amusing. Not anywhere near the same but The Last Ringbearer has Mordor as an industrializing society unfairly maligned.

[arethuza]

I did always wonder about the general standard of living in the Shire - always seemed suspiciously high to me.

[Earw0rm]

Decent amount of manufactured goods, always enough food, no sign of a serf labouring class or any manufacturing to speak of.

It's 18th(ish) century rural England, without all the stuff that made 18th century rural England a relatively comfortable place, which is to say colonies, the slave trade, the early industrial revolution and so on.

[partdavid]

Because it's attempting mythisimilitude, not verisimilitude.