Quote Originally Posted by Lunaxia View Post
You answered your own question.

Women - and some men, to be fair - have fought for many, many years and continue to fight for a diverse representation of men and women that goes beyond defining women by their femininity and their appeal to men, and men by their strength and how they adhere to traditional depictions of masculinity. We've made some progress, but look at Western media in general and you can see it's still fairly rampant, the messages are merely more subtle these days. Gaming in particular has often been a hotbed of misogynistic viewpoints and male gaze parades, and it's taken a long time just to get to where we are now, which isn't terribly far. Doubling back on that to return to haggard tropes that undermine quite literally all of that under the pretext of "variety" is pointless, unnecessary and self-defeating.

As for your point on Cottagecore, women enjoy it because they feel they can now freely enjoy the idea of a rural, country life on their terms, without all of the stereotyping and sexist misery that used to go along with it. Most fantasies and aesthetics revolving around it actually exclude men entirely.
Well, it wasn't really an answer to my question, because what I was asking was "it doesn't do this, so why are people getting so upset about it?"
And that's true for Cottagecore, it's even probably why it's popular in sapphic circles.