Basic Trope: A fictional Eastern or Central Eastern European country that is often portrayed as backwards or quirky in some or many regards.
- Straight: Ruritania is years behind Western Europe, lacks most modern technology, its people are highly superstitious, have weird customs, and are led by some form of oppressive government.
- Exaggerated: Ruritania has been in a Medieval Stasis for centuries. Its people think mobile phones are Satanic magic and eat only potatoes. Its leader is an old fashioned Tsar or Kaiser.
- Downplayed: Ruritanian infrastructure isn't the best and technology is a few years behind, but it's otherwise a modern country. Its people are more culturally conservative than Western Europe and its government is a bit corrupt, but the nation otherwise is better off than third world ones.
- Justified:
- Ruritania's oppressive government or enemies effectively keep the population poor or Locked Out of the Loop to prevent them from getting modern ideas that would allow them to rise up.
- Ruritania's people are so superstitious towards change that they end up bringing this trope upon themselves.
- Ruritania is so small or geographically isolated that no one ever bothered to visit or trade with it to help advance the nation.
- Ruritania is a poorly developed post-Soviet country, a la Moldova, and either didn't industrialize as well as Russia or was caught up in one of the multiple ethnic wars that tore up the USSR and Yugoslavia and left its people and development crippled.
- Subverted:
- Ruritania is just a small village in the middle of an Eastern European country while the rest of the nation is pretty modern when the characters visit the city.
- Ruritania merely performs large scale reenactments in the historic districts that are popular with the tourists.
- Double Subverted:
- Until the modern city is just a facade used to fool tourists and it turns out most of the country is like Ruritania and even said city has crumbling infrastructure, dirt poor workers and super strange customs.
- While the reenactments have Ruritania stuck in the 1400's, that doesn't mean the real Ruritania isn't stuck in the 1930s.
- Inverted: Ruritania is a modern and ideal nation while Western Europe as a whole is backwards and poor while under a repressive leadership.
- Parodied: Glorious Mother Russia tropes apply here, but with the bonus of Ruritania probably not even having a regional power or modern nation status.
- Zig Zagged: Ruritania is a mostly agricultural nation next to industrial Western Europe, but its people have access to modern consumer technology, but they dress like old peasants, but are otherwise quite welcoming to outsiders, but still have weird cultural quirks, and their government is benevolent but horribly inefficient.
- Averted: Ruritania is a modern nation where the only thing separating it from Western Europe are language, accents and a few traditions that aren't portrayed as strange.
- Defied:
- Ruritania runs on Soviet Super Science and is the bastion of technological and cultural progress on Earth.
- After World War II, the Soviets take over Ruritania and force it to modernize to defy this trope no matter cost which is Truth in Television. Or a thinly veiled expy of the Bolsheviks takes over Ruritania and does the same thing locally, ignoring all costs in modernization.
- Lampshaded: "It feels like we walked into last century here".
- Implied: Ruritania is shown having a poor GDP, HDI and otherwise bad performance in quality of life indicators. What people we do see from Ruritania are dressed like stereotypical poor peasants.
- Invoked: Ruritania is meant to be a reference to the Warsaw Pact nations so the creators of the work order it to be shown as the worst place on Earth.
- Exploited:
- Ruritnaia's image is used to drum up Xenophobia against it by its enemies.
- Ruritania's status is exploited by opportunists to cease power, promising people a better life akin to Western Europe.
- Deconstructed: Ruritanians are belittled when they leave their country due to stereotypes and there's nothing they can do about their home situation due to certain structural and institutional factors that prevent the nation from modernizing.
- Reconstructed: Ruritania develops a massive tourist industry for Western Europeans who are fond of a nation resembling their own years ago and just because the people of Ruritania are weird doesn't mean that they don't have big hearts, free of the cynicism of modern life.
- Played For Laughs: Ruritania is juxtaposed next to modern Western Europe by having an extremely backwards village right next to a shining city.
