Real Place Allusion

When choosing a location to set a fictional work, an author has a few possible choices. Choose a real place and play this straight (for instance, NYPD Blue is expressly New York City and Cheers is distinctly Boston). Choose an entirely fictional place (like Alice in Wonderland). Choose a generic place name like Springfield, which belongs to multiple towns and could be Anytown. Or, lastly, use a real place allusion to create a town which purports to be fictional – but which is actually an obvious caricature of a real place under some other name (Bland-Name Product style) or a composite of multiple, identifiable real places.

Sometimes the real place being alluded to is only disguised thinly, much as the Ink Suit Actor hides a person under a very thin disguise. Conversely, sometimes the idea that this is a "fictional place" can be used as Artistic Licence to build the fictional place in some larger-than-life manner or to create a fanciful composite of multiple real places and landmarks.

A form of Reality Subtext, this differs from the Actor Allusion tropes where the allusion is to one of the stars of a work, or that actor's prior roles.

Film

 * "Baxter Falls" in It's a Wonderful Life is modelled on various real locations in Seneca Falls in central New York's rural Finger Lakes region.
 * "Radiator Springs" in Cars. Oklahoma historian Michael Wallis led Pixar's crew on research trips over a 1200-mile stretch of the former US Route 66 through many little places from Baxter Springs, Kansas to Peach Springs, Arizona before that crew their created cartoon caricature village as a composite of multiple real places. The fictional town's location (in the map in the flashback) matches Peach Springs, but there are so many references to individual landmarks, people and businesses in every town along the way that Radiator Springs makes an entire itinerary of this. "Ornament Valley", for instance, is Monument Valley in northern Arizona – the same iconic scenery often seen in historic Westerns, while the "Motor Speedway of the South" is a larger-than-life version of a NASCAR track in Bristol, Tennessee.

Literature

 * The "Hundred Acre Wood" in Winnie the Pooh is based on Ashdown Forest (and the adjoining 500 Acre Wood) in the United Kingdom. Winnie is named for a real bear, unofficially the mascot of Canada's World War I mounted Fort Garry Horse regiment, who in turn is named after Manitoba's capital city Winnipeg.