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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Joyce''': Why '''''Canada'''''?
'''Head Alien''': I figgered "Who'd f***ing notice?" God''damn'' was I right.
|''[[Walkyverse|It's Walky!]]''}}
Looking for a place to set the disaster of the week/alien invasion/supervillain's base/origin of the bad guys etc? Well, you can use the classics: [[Big Applesauce|New York]], [[Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe|Tokyo]], [[Britain Is Only London|London]] or [[Gay Paree|Paris]] for the first three and places like [[Commie Land|Russia]], North Korea or the Middle East for the last. Of course, you may think that's too cliché. Another alternative is having the last three take place in [[Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here|a fictional town in the middle of nowhere]] and have the villains come from some equally-fictional [[Ruritania]] or [[Qurac]].
Or you may [[Take a Third Option]]. Have the center of the plot be in an actual place, but some relatively harmless semi-known non-exotic location which makes you ask "Why THERE, of all places?". That is the basis of '''Aliens in Cardiff'''. Are aliens landing in [[Flying Saucer|UFOs]]? They'll land in [[District 9|Johannesburg, South Africa]], or
This is sometimes [[Played for Laughs]], though in most cases it rather realistically points out events do happen in the world outside its largest cities. The trope namer is ''[[Doctor Who]]'' and subsequent spin-off ''[[Torchwood]]''. This is [[Creator Provincialism|due to to the fact]] that the revived Doctor Who was produced by BBC Wales. Though Cardiff very often found itself [[Doubling for London]] or New York, Space, the Scottish Highlands for that matter.
This trope has a complicated relationship with [[Creator Provincialism]] and [[Small Reference Pools]]. What seems obscure to the global West/North can be the center of the universe to locals; the aforementioned Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa with millions of residents. Or consider Jakarta, which outdoes NYC in every population metric and is capital of Indonesia, which has two thirds the population of the US, but you'd hardly hear of, never mind see playing a major role, in most non-Southeast Asian media. Even the trope namer, while only crossing 1 million pop if you stretch like Hell, is still the capital and biggest city to native Welshmen.
Not to be confused with [[Aliens of London]] (though this doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive). Contrast with [[Canada Does Not Exist]], where it's forbidden to name the semi-known location.
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==▼
* In ''[[Soul Eater]]'', Death City, the home of [[The Grim Reaper]] and his school, is located in Nevada. It's a play on the grimly named desert, Death Valley, which spans parts of California and Nevada. This lead to anomalies like the world's most powerful ''[[Ninja]]'' setting up base in Nevada.▼
▲== Anime ==
* Vladivostok
* Mizuho-sensei of ''[[Please Teacher!]]'' lands her spacecraft in Lake Kizaki, Nagano Prefecture, presumably for the [[Scenery Porn]]. The spinoff
▲* In ''[[Soul Eater]]'', Death City, the home of [[The Grim Reaper]] and his school, is located in Nevada. It's a play on the grimly named desert, Death Valley, which spans parts of California and Nevada.
▲* Vladivostok, gets to feature not just in one, but in ''two'' completely unrelated shows with a supernatural touch. But while ''[[Darker than Black]]'''s representation is [[Real Place Background|completely accurate]], [[Blood Plus|Blood+]]'s was [[Hollywood Geography|almost unrecognizable.]]
▲* Mizuho-sensei of ''[[Please Teacher]]'' lands her spacecraft in Lake Kizaki, Nagano Prefecture, presumably for the [[Scenery Porn]]. The spinoff, ''[[Onegai Twins]]'' is set in the same area.
* The Maguar and the aliens fighting them in ''[[Figure 17]]'' are confined to rural Hokkaido.
* In ''[[Code Geass]]'', one would have expected the capital of [[The Empire|Britannia]] to be somewhere on the North American eastern seaboard, perhaps in one of the original thirteen colonies or the other Britannian (British) New World settlements. Instead, it's located in the middle of OTL Arizona, either around where Yuma (as it was located on a map) or Phoenix (going by the surrounding mountains and southwestern desert landscape) would have been.
* [[Makoto Shinkai]] has done this multiple times:
** ''[[Voices of a Distant Star]]''{{'}}s Earthbound scenes take place in Saitama City, capital of the prefecture of the same name. While to the immediate north of Tokyo, it is otherwise much less populous and famous than its southern neighbour, and the average foreigner is more likely to have heard of [[One-Punch Man|the namesake caped baldy]] than actually set foot there.
** ''[[The Place Promised in Our Early Days]]'' has "the Union" build their mysterious tower in Hokkaido. The film starts in cold, desolate Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of Honshu, and while a midway detour to Tokyo has vital plot significance, heads back up north for the climax.
** While ''[[5 Centimeters per Second]]'' starts in Tokyo and returns there for its third act, much of the first act concerns Takaki's cold, lonely journey up north to Iwafune in Tochigi Prefecture. The second act takes him even further away, to the remote southern island of Tanegashima.
** ''[[Your Name]]'': While Mitsuha's hometown of Itomori is technically fictional, it is based on the real Hida City in Gifu Prefecture, a part of central Japan largely unknown to the outside world before this, and it is there that {{spoiler| a fragment of the comet Tiamat lands.}}
** While ''[[Suzume (film)|Suzume]]'' does have vital scenes in Tokyo, it starts and ends in the Tōhoku region, and various intermediary scenes are set in the less well-known Miyazaki, Ehime and Hyōgo Prefectures.
* ''[[Kamichu!]]'' is set in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. While no tiny town and genuinely having many religious sites in reality, it's still quite out of the way and a far cry from Kyoto, Ise or any of the other places most might think of as significant.
== Comic Books ==
* In ''[[Halo]]: Uprising'', when a captured UNSC Soldier is [[Cold-Blooded Torture|tortured]] by the Covenant, he tells them the "Key of Osanalan" is in Cleveland. {{spoiler|It was a ruse to keep them from glassing the city where his brother was living.}}
* In ''[[Gold Digger (Comic Book)|Gold Digger]],'' the Diggers family lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Consequently, all the supernatural and superscientific friends, enemies, and acquaintances they make during the course of their globe-trotting and multiverse-hopping adventures inevitably end up finding their way there.
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* Post-[[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]] [[The Mighty Thor|Asgard]] floating over Broxton, Oklahoma, anyone?
== [[Fan
* The [[Mega Crossover]] shared-world story ''[[My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character]]'' both plays the trope straight and plays with it. Hoping to find a displacee in [[New York City]]? Sorry, try [[Joisey|New Jersey]] instead... at least until the Muppet Theater shows up or somebody actually sees [[John Munch]]. [[London Town|London, England]]? No, Kent County, UK and [[In Dublin's Fair City|Dublin, Ireland]]. [[Toronto]]? Try heading up the road to Ottawa. [[Motor City|Detroit]]? You'll have to cross the river to Windsor. And the largest collection of [[Artificial Intelligence|AI]] displacees are nowhere near Silicon Valley, having ended up in [[Boston (useful notes)|Boston]] instead. However, some displacees did appear in [[Montreal]] and [[Los Angeles]], including in the latter group [[Cardcaptor Sakura/Characters#Tomoyo Daidouji|one with an interest in cinematography]].
== Film ==
* [[Cleveland]] is where ''[[Howard the Duck (film)|Howard the Duck]]'' took place, complete with aliens trying to take over the world.
* The ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000|MST3K]]'' B-Movie ''[[The Giant Spider Invasion]]'' takes place in Merrill, Wisconsin.
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* Lampshaded in the opening title of ''[[Little Shop of Horrors]]'':
{{quote|On the Twenty-third day of the month of September, in an early year of a decade not too long before our own, the human race encountered a deadly threat to its very existence. And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do, in the seemingly most innocent and unlikely of places...}}
* ''[[Bloodshot (film)|Bloodshot]]'': Rising Spirit Technologies is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and other rarely-seen places featured include Mombasa, Kenya, Budapest, Hungary, and East Sussex, England.
== Literature ==
* The first Martian ship to reach Earth in ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'' lands in Horsell Common in Woking, Surrey. Orson Welles' radio production, and many subsequent adaptations, move it to Grover's Mill, New Jersey.▼
▲* The first Martian ship to reach Earth in ''[[The War of the Worlds]]'' lands in Horsell Common in Woking, Surrey. Orson Welles' radio production, and many subsequent adaptations, move it to Grover's Mill, New Jersey.
* The small town of Illium, NY, is where the world-destroying substance Ice-9 is developed in [[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s classic ''[[Cat's Cradle]]''.
* In ''[[The Puppet Masters (novel)|The Puppet Masters]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]], aliens invade Grinnell, Iowa (changed for very little good reason to Ambrose, Iowa, in [[The Movie]]).
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* ''The Gerosha Chronicles'' makes heavy use of this for almost all its entries. ''The Tragedy of Lord Zeras'' happens somewhere outside Rome. ''First Meethlites'' and ''Rise of the Phaelites'' may happen on other worlds, but are immediately followed by stories like ''A So-Called Heretic'', which happens in Lynn, MA. ''Experiments and Offspring'' shows Centipede Charlie being recruited ''in Joplin, MO.'' Emeraldon begins his superhero career in Evansville, IN. Ciem was born as Candi Flippo, in the town of Gerosha which was built on the remains of Boonville, IN. The Gray Champion's ''Modern Legends'' tales take place in Boston and Miami. ''Navyrope'' takes place in Oklahoma City. ''Pilltar'', however, takes place in Ankeny, Iowa. Both ''Blood Over Water'' and ''Sorbet'' happen in Big Rapids, MI. Things finally culminate in ''Sodality'', where everyone finds themselves eventually in Houston. Even in ''Centipede + 49'', well-known towns that aren't DC or Boston are avoided. And New York is avoided ''like the plague''. Only the non-canon ''Percolation'' takes place partially in New York - and only because it's a crossover with ''Marvel: Avengers Alliance''.
== Live
* The Trope Namer is the [[Whoniverse]], which ever since the new series started made Cardiff, the capital city and most populous county of Wales and the headquarters of BBC Wales (the producers of the show), a [[Weirdness Magnet]] courtesy of a dimensional rift. This trope is repeatedly lampshaded by several characters in both ''[[Doctor Who]]'' and ''[[Torchwood]]'' by their dumbfounded reactions to the thought of supernatural stuff happening in Cardiff. While the Doctor only visits Cardiff on occasion (to "refuel" the TARDIS) the first two series of ''Torchwood'' are set there.
* An episode of ''[[My Hero (TV)]]'' had Thermoman stop an abandoned Russian space station from crashing into the center of Grimsby.
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*** And it does [[Cleveland Rocks|Rock]].
* The Roswell episode of ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' had Nog fabricate a story about alien conquest of earth, randomly pointing to the initial landing site on a map (next to a 'blue blob'). The soldier who is listening to him leans in and exclaims, "Your people are going to invade... Cleveland???"
* One of the 'unseen' scenes from ''[[Harry Hill's
** It's ''[[Eleventh Hour]]''. They were listing cities that would be destroyed by [[Hollywood Global Warming|rising sea levels]]. The paradox was that they wanted to list a British city for impact but retain scientific accuracy, and that was the [[narm]]y [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|result]].
* In the pilot of ''[[Star Trek:
* The state of Ohio in general seems to be awfully prone to this. Midway through season 7 of ''[[24]]'', Colonel Dubaku targets a pesticide plant just outside Kidron, Ohio (pop. 30,000), for his next terrorist attack.▼
* ''[[Being Human (UK)]]'' has vampires planning a vast global empire from their headquarters in Bristol, England.
** [[Lampshaded]] by George, who directly asks the question of 'Why Bristol?'
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{{quote|{{spoiler|Mitchell}}: It can't happen like this! Not here! Not in ''WALES''!}}
* Charlie Jade takes place in three alternate universe versions - one dystopian, one ecotopian and one normal - of ''Cape Town, South Africa''.
* Other than the occasional Hollywood haunting, all of the action in ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' takes place in small- to mid-size towns, mostly in [[Flyover Country|flyover country.]] [[Big Bad]]s have been vanquished in [http://www.tv.com/supernatural/devils-trap/episode/677588/recap.html?tag=episode_header;recap Jefferson City, MO;] [https://web.archive.org/web/20110308223243/http://www.tv.com/supernatural/all-hell-breaks-loose-1/episode/1003161/recap.html?tag=episode_header;recap South Dakota]/[https://web.archive.org/web/20110308204308/http://www.tv.com/supernatural/all-hell-breaks-loose-2/episode/1003162/recap.html?tag=episode_header;recap Wyoming;] [http://www.tv.com/supernatural/no-rest-for-the-wicked/episode/1199072/recap.html?tag=episode_header;recap New Harmony, IN;] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20110312193409/http://www.tv.com/supernatural/lucifer-rising/episode/1267467/recap.html?tag=episode_header;recap Ilchester, MD.] Funny how all of the above (including Hollywood) seem to have the same general [[Stargate City|climate...]]
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' goes all over the place. The most prominent cities are major population centers (New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles), but plenty of other locations are visited. Claire Bennet (and one of Primatech's major facilities) is in Odessa, TX. The Volume Three finale is set in Hartdale, NY and Fort Lee, NJ. The plane carrying all the heroes at the start of Volume Four crashed in Oklahoma.
* ''[[3rd Rock from the Sun]]'' is set in Rutherford, Ohio. The place is fictional, but it's obviously meant to be a typical Midwestern town.
* ''[[24]]'':
* A season of ''[[24]]'' features a significant plotline involving terrorists in Palmdale, California, a mid-sized city several hours outside of the greater LA area. It's justified by the fact that the terrorists are hiding out and ''intend'' to target major cities when they're ready. {{spoiler|It's also small enough to get nuked without completely changing the world in which ''24'' takes place}}.▼
▲** The state of Ohio in general seems to be awfully prone to this. Midway through season 7 of ''[[24]]'', Colonel Dubaku targets a pesticide plant just outside Kidron, Ohio (pop. 30,000), for his next terrorist attack.
▲** A season of ''[[24]]'' features a significant plotline involving terrorists in Palmdale, California, a mid-sized city several hours outside of the greater LA area. It's justified by the fact that the terrorists are hiding out and ''intend'' to target major cities when they're ready. {{spoiler|It's also small enough to get nuked without completely changing the world in which ''24'' takes place}}.
* ''[[True Blood]]'', and ''[[The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries]]'' the show is based on, are set in Bon Temps, a fictional suburb of Shreveport, Louisiana. Most of the action is split between the two locations. The characters have also traveled to Dallas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Nevada.
* The flourishing gay community in the American ''[[Queer as Folk]]'' is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city otherwise almost never seen on American television—unlike the locale of its UK source material, Manchester, which [[Oop North|surfaces regularly]] on British TV. Pittsburgh was picked as a blue collar steel town with similarities to Manchester's industrial roots—not that you see a lot of blue collar types in the American ''QAF''.
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Subverted-by-[[Real Life]] example: The designers of ''[[Shadowrun]]'' originally picked Seattle for their game's home base, because as large North American cities went, it was relatively obscure in pre-90s pop culture. Little did they suspect that movies, TV shows, grunge and Starbucks would conspire to elevate Seattle's cultural prominence in the years to follow.
== Video Games ==
* In ''[[Tomb Raider]]: Legend'', we learn that King Arthur's tomb is under a tacky Camelot tourist trap... in Cornwall.
{{quote|'''Lara''': As in take the M5 to the A30 Cornwall?}}
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* ''[[Superhero League of Hoboken]]''. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]].
* Played for laughs in an [[Interactive Fiction]] game, where part of the backstory details Satan's arrival on Earth and his construction of a hellish citadel to house his legions and punish humanity for their sins... in New Jersey. Apparently it was a few years before people realized something was wrong.
* ''[[Persona 4]]'' has
* In ''[[MDK]]'', the population centres threatened with annihilation by the invading city minecrawlers were Laguna Beach, Lindfield, Livingston, Kirkaldy and Sparrow Pit. In ''[[MDK2]]'' the city minecrawler in the opening mission was targeting Edmonton.
* While most of the ''[[Ryu ga Gotoku|Yakuza]]'' games take place in big, famous Japanese cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and other prefectural capitals, ''6: The Song of Life'' spends a large amount of time in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. While not exactly tiny at over 140,000 residents in 2016, it's hardly well-known to the wider world.
* Some levels in ''[[Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance]]'' take place in Denver, Colorado. While hardly a nowhere as it's the capital of the state, it's also a place that rarely appears in popular culture.
* ''[[Generation Zero (video game)|Generation Zero]]'' is [[Robot War]] in the Swedish countryside.
== Web Comics ==
* In an ''[[
▲* In an ''[[Its Walky]]!'' storyline, Head Alien experiments with his new time freezing technology in a small town in Canada, leading to the exchange in the page quote. It's also an excuse for a [[Crossover]] with another webcomic, ''[[Avalon (webcomic)|Avalon]]'', set in small-town Canada, which was in the middle of a long hiatus.
* In the flash series ''[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/97573 21]'' (a parody of ''[[24]]''), plumber Al Johnstone has 21 minutes to save Norwich from a nuclear explosion.
* ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'' takes place in a heavily fictionalized version of Cumberland, Maryland. Nobody in the comic thinks anything of it.
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== Web Original ==
* The [[Protectors of the Plot Continuum|PPC]]'s main base in the real world (or "World One") is a city in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory. Nobody is quite sure why, though there are other doors to HQ scattered about Earth and the multiverse in general.
* [[Brental Floss]]' ''[[Civilization]]'' song includes the line "learn to write before you can read and build the Taj Mahal right in Cleveland".
== Western Animation ==
* An episode of ''[[The Tick (animation)]]'' animated series featured a bunch of supervillains known as "The Swiss". Who were dressed in uniforms bearing the Swiss flag and wielded giant Swiss Army Knives. Led to an hilarious [[Cassandra Truth]] moment:
{{quote|'''Die Fledermaus''': Listen to me! The Swiss are invading The City!
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== Real Life ==
* [[Roswell That Ends Well|The events of Roswell, New Mexico]] come to mind. Aside from the odd military base, the closest notable landmark are the Carlsbad Caverns, and even that is a bit of a stretch.
** Of course, Roswell is ''now'' a landmark, but that's because of the landing more than anything else.
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* The stereotypical monster/alien sighting is the redneck who lives out in the middle of nowhere.
* A non-alien example, but when the Live 8 concert locations were announced back in 2005, with concerts in places like London, Paris and Berlin, Canada's concert venue was held in ... Barrie, a cottage town about 60 miles north of Toronto. This was much to the bemusement of many, particularly residents of Barrie.
* The Tunguska event, largest asteroid/comet impact in recorded history, was in the middle of nowhere - fortunate, given had it hit a city it would have
* Without looking it up, can you name something about Hiroshima or Nagasaki other than the atomic bombings thereof?<ref>[[The Comically Serious|Well, Hiroshima is the place where ''okonomiyaki'' -- a crepe-like dish -- originated, and Hiroshima-style ''okonomiyaki'' remains one of the most popular varieties...]]</ref>
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Settings]]
▲[[Category:Aliens in Cardiff]]
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