Artistic License Geography: Difference between revisions
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[[File:world.jpg|frame|[[Blatant Lies|Mars, accurately drawn to scale.]] [http://bigthink.com/ideas/21162 (source)] ]]
{{quote|''"Where did all those majestic cliffs go in the interim 500 years?"''
|'''[[The Nostalgia Chick]]''' on the towering cliffs [[The Mountains of Illinois|of coastal Virginia]] in ''[[Pocahontas]]''.}}
A writer may want to set a story in a location, but that doesn't mean they want or need to be accurate- or even see it. This form of [[Artistic License]] can happen in a number of ways. The most common seems to be setting a story in a particular city without consulting a map, thus placing locations that are nowhere near one another quite close by, underestimating the time it would take to get from one to another, and sometimes transplanting whole landmarks from somewhere else entirely.
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{{examples}}
== General ==
* The idea that the Great Wall of China is visible from space is incorrect, even at the closest point that could be considered space. The variations for being visible from the space shuttle or the moon are even more so; from the moon, only massive cloud systems, continents, and the oceans are distinguishable with the naked eye. If you ever want to try, consider trying to pick out the highway systems of [[Russia]] in the same view, as they are wider and longer- but it's ''still'' too small.
== Anime and Manga ==
* In 'London Calling' from the ''[[Beyblade]]'' series, the main characters are ditched in Southampton, England, on their way to Russia for a tournament battle. As the ship pulls into harbour at the start of the episode Southampton appears to have [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMj70pnY2T0 green mountains and picturesque brick houses]. It's actually a large modern city and its docks look something like [http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/24/83/2248380_e9b83cbe.jpg this]. Definitely no mountains, too.
** Then the show redeems itself only a little, relying mostly on [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]]. The scene suddenly jumps from Southampton to London, which means a distance of eighty miles. Kenny has previously mentioned that they have no money, and it's not said whether they walked, hitchiked or anything else. However their arrival on foot does suggest that they walked. Yet the sky is still bright when they get there, and the only thing to suggest that Southampton is not [[Britain Is Only London|right next door to London]] is Kenny's (vague)comment that seeing Big Ben reminds him of how much time they've lost.
* ''[[Blood
** In one episode in Vietnam, Kai ''walked'' from Hanoi to a port and back in a day. Firstly, if you look at the map, Hanoi has no port, the nearest one from there is in Hai Phong, which takes 4 hours to travel by car (assuming it doesn't cross the speed limit), and another 4 hour to go back, and somehow Kai traveled back and forth between the 2 places on foot... in a day... before the sunset. And no, Kai is a human character in this vampire series, and even for the vampire characters, only the Schiff variants have sonic speed power.
** Averted, though, in ''[[Darker than Black]] 2'', where they've ''did'' the research. Sure, the weather was shown to be a bit too balmy for a season, but warm spells ''do'' tend to happen around New Year, and everything else was pretty much spot on.
* [[Invoked Trope|Invoked]] in ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket|Gundam 0080]]''; Bernie, disguised as an enemy soldier and claiming to be from Australia, talks about how much it would snow in December. Minutes later, the soldier to whom he was speaking [[Eureka Moment|realizes]] that the Southern Hemisphere's seasons are flipped around, exposing Bernie as a spy.
** Most
* ''[[Shinzo]]'' takes place 300 years in the future; apparently, geography has changed until New York is nowhere near an ocean and the Statue of Liberty is partially buried by the land. At the same time, Egypt is entirely covered by ocean, and you can reach it in half a day starting from the Alps while moving in a vehicle that goes about 30 miles per hour.
* Parodied in ''[[Excel Saga (anime)|Excel Saga]]''. New Zealand is a massive desert filled with monsters, which Excel kills and sells their pelts in order to get back to Japan.
** A massive desert filled with deadly creatures? That's probably just the usual mistake of thinking New Zealand is Australia.
* In the manga version of ''[[Chrono Crusade]]'', Rosette's journey from NYC to San Fransisco to rescue her brother goes as follows: She takes a pilgrimage to the time-frozen Seventh Bell Orphanage in Michigan. From there she drives to Washington DC (Roughly 500 miles the wrong way), where Satella destroys her car. Then she takes a train to Chicago (which gets hijacked and wrecked). From there, her superiors get tired of all the accidental destruction and charter a plane to take her directly to California. Since this rescue mission was the most important thing on Rosette's mind for the four years leading up to this trip, there are only two possible explanations for such a roundabout route: Either the mangaka forgot to plot the journey out on a map, or Rosette is incapable of cross-country navigation. Even with the story taking place 30 years before the creation of the interstate highway system, there ''had'' to be a more direct route than that.
* The novel ''[[A Dog of Flanders]]'' is very popular in Japan. This of course lead to many anime adaptations of the story. Even though the story takes place in Antwerp, Flanders, some of these films depict the country in a stereotypical version of a neighbouring country, the Netherlands, complete with boys and girls on clumps walking in tullip fields.
* According to episode 4 of ''[[Miami Guns]]'', there are mountains close enough to Miami that the local police have jurisdiction there. (Yes, the Miami in Florida.) Granted, the anime runs on [[Shout-Out]]s and [[Rule of Funny]], so they might have done the research but simply didn't care.
== Comic Books ==
* The first edition of ''[[Tintin/Recap/Land of Black Gold|Land of Black Gold]]'' took place in British Mandate Palestine, and Bab El-Ehr is a local insurgent against British rule rather than fighting directly with the Emir of Khemed (a name not heard until the revamped edition). As Tintin is led away into the desert, he eventually meets the oil-rich Emir Ben Kalish Ezab. Israel/Palestine famously has no oil in it. And Emir of what, anyway? Later editions have the story take place in a fictional country called Khemed.
** "[[Tintin/Recap/Tintin in the Congo|Tintin in the Congo]]" also fell victim to huge controversy. The continent is depicted as if all black people are lazy, stupid or in general big children. Of course, the album was originally drawn in 1930 when creator Hergé worked for a Catholic newspaper without doing any kind of research for his albums. In those days Tintin actually visited Belgian Congo, not "Africa" as a whole. Later, when he did start doing research before drawing an album, Hergé felt regret for "Tintin in the Congo", even though it was drawn in a time when European colonialism was still vivid and many Europeans shared the same stereotypically ideas about Africa.
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== Fan
* In a case of failing canonical geography, ''[[Legolas By Laura|legolas by laura]]'' has Mirkwood, Mordor, and Rivendell about five minutes' walk away from each other, as opposed to the hundreds of miles separating all three in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' canon. Then again, [[Rouge Angles of Satin|Mirkwood and Mordor are persistently called "Milkwood" and "Mondor"]], which may be entirely different places that are closer together.
* A lot of fanfic writers think that California is sunny all year long, when the weather from September to mid/late May is completely unpredictable. Winters on the coast are also extremely rainy, windy, and cold.
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** To clarify, in canon the train trip from London to Hogwarts begins at 10am and ends just before dinner time. This is not geographically possible unless a) Hogwarts is in northern Scotland, b) the train travels at approximately walking pace, c) the train was traveling in circles, or d) at some point the train crossed the Atlantic Ocean without noticing. The island isn't really that large, y'know.
* ''[[Hogwarts Exposed]]'' has one scene in which Hermione watches the Sun set at 4 pm on the 1st September. If there's ''anywhere'' in the northern hemisphere where this is possible, it certainly isn't in Scotland. For the record, it's ''over four hours'' too early. An earlier scene had it still dark at 5:50 am in August.
* ''[[Light and Dark -
** The author butchers London (hell, all of Great Britain) just as badly. The Channel Tunnel goes directly to London, from which you can catch the Tube to "whales", home to cliffs from which you can jump into Loch Ness.
*
* Far too many [[Fuku Fic]]s say that Ranma can get from Nerima to Minato quickly, or the Sailor Senshi can make the inverse trip just as quickly, by roof-hopping. In Real Life, the two wards are as far apart as Baltimore and [[Washington DC|Washington]] are.
* In the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' fic ''[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12562072/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Daft-Morons Harry Potter and the Daft Morons]'' by "sinyk", it's pretty obvious that the author (who is Australian) is unfamiliar with the geography of the American Northeast, when he mentions that Harry has a real estate agent looking for properties for him in the Hamptons in upstate New York. For the uninformed, the Hamptons are on the far eastern end of Long Island, more than a hundred miles east-southeast of the southernmost locations anyone could reasonably refer to as "upstate New York". More succinctly, one goes ''north'' from New York City to go "upstate", and ''east'' to get to the Hamptons. "Sinyk" also apparently thought that Wales was an island separate from Great Britain, describing a Welsh estate purchased by Harry as being "in the center of the island".
▲* ''Invoked in [[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series]]'' has a flashback where Bakura is introduced as a new student from Britain and some generic student yells "Go back to Russia!"
== Film ==
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**** So they'd take a detour. It is possible to go from Salzburg to Switzerland without ever leaving the mountains.
***** And if you're trying to avoid being caught by the Nazis, sticking to remote wilderness routes rather than cutting directly across the flat ground is a ''good idea'', even if it means taking a longer trip. At least you run into fewer traffic checkpoints in the mountains.
* Parodied in ''[[Team America: World Police]]'', where Team America's operations regularly destroy historical landmarks that are [[Theme Park Version|nowhere near each other]] (for example, the Pyramids and the statues of Ramses).
* The film version of ''[[I, Robot (film)|I Robot]]'' features an enormous, derelict suspension bridge on Chicago's waterfront. This is presumably the remains of the Chicago Skyway, an elevated expressway that connects industrial Northwest Indiana with the South Side of Chicago. The real Skyway, however, doesn't now and never did have a suspension bridge. Presumably the [[Rule of Cool]] says suspension bridges are cooler than steel truss bridges.
** Actually its appears to be the remains of the Mackinac Bridge, due to a land-reclimation project having drained Lake Michigan. The only problem is that the Bridge is located ''200 miles'' from Chicago.
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* In [[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Charlie and the Chocolate Factory]]'', Düsseldorf is depicted as [[Yodel Land|a quaint little Alpine town with half-timbered houses and tall mountains in the background]] instead of the modern industrial city on the Rhine, not in plain view of any mountains.
* In the opening of ''[[Left Behind]]'', a shot labeled "Israeli-Syrian Border" shows tanks driving over desert. The border of Israel and Syria, which is called the Golan Heights, is actually green and mountainous (and is a subject of dispute partially for this very reason).
** Fred Clark, in his brilliant analysis of the ''[[Left Behind]]'' series, is ruthless in [https://web.archive.org/web/20110907100605/http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/11/lbtm-thats-our-buck.html his dissection] of this series of shots. The film opens with a shot of Jerusalem, with the ''morning'' sun glinting off the ''eastern'' face of the Dome of the Rock, and the subtitle, "Jerusalem, 6:00 '''p.m.'''" A moment later we see the title "Iraq, 6:03 p.m.", as Iraqi fighter planes stream west into the setting sun; and then, "Syrian-Israeli border, 6:03 p.m.", and flocks of helicopters and tanks with their shadows stretching out ''in front of them''—except that Syria is east of Israel, so these helicopters and tanks appear to be invading ''Syria'' from ''Israel'' (Clark gave up after the next shot, "Mediterranean Sea 6:04 p.m.", which showed fighter planes with the sun directly overhead).
*** Not to mention that Iraq is an hour ahead of Israel and Syria.
* Parodied repeatedly in the ''[[Austin Powers]]'' movies. In the second, Austin and Felicity are driving through "[[California Doubling|the English countryside]]", and Austin remarks how "[[Lampshade Hanging|the English countryside looks nothing like southern California]]". In the third, special effects were purposely used to put Mount Fuji in the background of every single exterior shot in Japan.
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* Fictional example of a Geography error: in ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]'' live-action film adaptation, Legolas proclaims "the Uruks turn northeast. They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!" If the Uruks were taking the hobbits to Isengard, they would be going ''west'' (as shown in [http://www.strefarpg.pl/gfx/tworcy/middle-earth.jpg this Middle Earth Map]).
* In ''[[10,000 BC]]'' the protagonist lives in a massive Ice Age mountain range, filled with tundra, glaciers, and mammoths. He then treks down from those mountains, almost immediately entering a verdant jungle with a transitional climate about ten yards across. On exiting said jungle and crossing another ten yard transition, he's in an arid desert.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20130731203018/http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/teamt/fbv/bmbe/28660-10000-bc Film Brain] from [[That Guy With The Glasses]] has a lot to say about the absurd geography in this film.
* In ''[[Speed]]'', the freeway depicted as I-10 is actually I-105, which was already complete in real life, and the I-105 sequence was filmed on I-110, which actually was unfinished at the time.
** The bus also exits the east I-10 freeway onto Western (south) using a cloverleaf ramp that doesn't exist in [[Real Life]], then goes from there to the I-105 in El Segundo (around 18 miles away) in ''under a minute.''
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* The Jean-[[Claude Van Damme]] film "Double Team" shows how Van Damme visits a huge bordello in Antwerp, which can not be found there in real life. What makes this mistake even more perplexing is that Van Damme is actually a Belgian himself!
* In ''[[Mr. and Mrs. Smith]]'', at the start of the film, [[Brad Pitt]] and [[Angelina Jolie]]'s characters claim that they met in Bogota, Colombia. Flashback to said moment, and they show Bogota, a real-life big metropoly city with a very cold climate, portrayed as a small river-side town where sun always shine, people listen to flamenco music and there's no need for clothes. To make things worse, a soldier speaks with a heavy Mexican accent. Even the actors said that they've never been to Bogota, or Colombia, for that matter. Colombians were ''so'' not happy.
* In ''[[Entrapment]]'', the protagonists head off to Malaysia to carry out a heist in the Petronas Towers at Kuala Lumpur. The movie portrays rural, ramshackle slums with open views onto the fabulous towers themselves. Kuala Lumpur looks [https://web.archive.org/web/20131005033733/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/KL-Skyline_Night_HDR.JPG like this].
* In ''[[X-Men: First Class]]'' there's a scene where Magneto kills some bad guys that supposedly takes place in the Argentinian city of Villa Gesell. The establishing shot shows snowy mountains and a beautiful lake surrounded by hills, the only problem is, although you can find a lot of cities that look like that in the southern part of the country, the real Villa Gesell is a beach city located nowhere near that area.
* In ''[[All the President's Men]]'', Woodward and Bernstein's car seems to teleport around [[Washington DC]], from shot to shot, at random.
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* The obscure American 1940 movie, Ski Patrol, follows a group of Finnish soldiers in the 1939 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. The movie depicts the countries' border as a [http://www.elitisti.net/web/public/captures/reviews/001750/001993-b.jpg Middle European mountain range] - for reference, [[Did Not Do the Research|even the highest points of the countries' border doesn't rise above half a kilometre in height.]] Reportedly, the first panorama of this sight made the Finnish audience [[So Bad It's Good|burst in laughter]].
* The [[Tommy Lee Jones]] vehicle ''[[Blown Away (film)|Blown Away]]'' culminates with a car careening, in a straight line, through the Back Bay of Boston while our hero tries to defuse a bomb attached to the dashboard. If you traveled through the Back Bay, for that long, that fast, in a straight line, you wouldn't need to worry about the bomb, because you'd be ''underwater.''
* ''[[Stealth]]'' has an ''interesting'' relationship to geography. As [[Roger Ebert]] noted
{{quote|Various unexpected developments [in Tajikistan] lead to a situation in which Wade's plane crashes in North Korea while Gannon is diverted to Alaska (they get such great fuel mileage on these babies, they must be hybrid vehicles).}}
== Literature ==
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** She also seems to have forgotten that, yes, the Pacific Northwest does have a summer. A very sunny summer. It could go all of July and August, and sometimes September, without being completely overcast. Do the Cullens go on a three month camping trip every year? Not to mention that most areas in the Pacific Northwest aren't under complete cloud cover all day.
** Meyer was working from a grain of truth. Thanks to the Olympic Mountains blocking clouds coming in off the Pacific, Forks is beside a [[The Other Rainforest|literal rainforest]]. Forks really does get a lot of rain, even compared to the rest of Western Washington State. Grain of truth or not, however, it's still a nasty stereotype about a geographic location that came from inadequate research. Simply googling "Rainiest Town in America", which is more or less all Meyer did by her own admission in the introduction, does not adequate geographic research make.
** Regarding the infamous "west coast of Brazil" line...although everyone remembers the line, it never occurs in Meyer's work. The actual phrase from ''Breaking Dawn'' is: ''The taxi continued through the swarming crowds until they thinned somewhat, and we appeared to be nearing the extreme western edge of the city [Rio de Janeiro], heading into the ocean.'' That last word is what has led to so much confusion. Meyer was wrong; the western site of Rio ''doesn't'' lead to the ocean, because the Atlantic Ocean is the southern border of Rio, not the western one. However, Rio ''is'' bordered on the west by Sepetiba Bay, as can be seen on the map [https://web.archive.org/web/20160401073604/http://www.rio.com/practical-rio/rio-de-janeiro-map on this site]. And Sepetiba Bay does feature a lot of day cruises to nearby tropical islands. Sailing from Sepetiba Bay to a private island is within the realm of possibility. So Meyer should have had Bella say "bay," not "ocean"--but she did not create an entirely new Brazilian coastline.
** Also referring to Lake Union as "Union Lake", not unreasonable...if you're only ever seen a map of Seattle. Actually there are multiple problems with Seattle geography. The shady part of town that Bella visits in the last book is vaguely reminiscent of some parts of Aurora Ave. but doesn't come close enough to any real part of the city to be believable.
* In ''The Terror of Blue John Gap'', the narrator at one point travels from the eponymous cave (which of course is a source of the semi-precious stone Blue John) to Castleton in Derbyshire, some 14 miles away. In reality, Blue John is found only in the vicinity of Castleton, a roughly 3-mile radius. Maybe this one is also [[You Fail Geology Forever]].
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* ''[[The Guns of the South]]'' has a scene where Robert E. Lee and his staff survey the heart of Washington D.C. from a nearby hill; in the author's notes, [[Harry Turtledove]] admits that this is impossible, remarking "Sometimes geography has to bend to suit the author's wishes."
** Of course, there's also the fact that he invents a South Carolina town out of the blue for the time-travelers to come from; it could have been [[Handwaved]] if it was just them, but the fact that one of the main characters is also from the town becomes an important plot point.
*** Considering what the author ''did'' to that town in the story its apparent why he didn't use a real one. Remember that one of the reasons to use entirely fictional places is to avoid offending real-world inhabitants of places.
* [[Stephen King]] did this on purpose in ''[[The Dark Tower]]'' series. In the foreword for ''[[The Dark Tower/The Waste Lands|The Dark Tower]]'', he notes that his New York readers will notice that he has taken "certain geographical liberties" with the city. In the later books, when he writers himself into the story, he distorts the geography of Maine (where he lives) because he doesn't want people harassing him in his home.
** The former becomes a plot point later on, when Eddie finds out that Co-op City, where he's from, is in a different part of New York City on Keystone Earth than it is in the version of Earth he's from.
== Live-Action TV ==
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** There are other issues, too, such as there being "Stockton State Prison" and a DOJ facility in the series. Neither exist in real life.
* In an episode of [[It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia]] Dee describes running down Spring Garden street, through fairmount park in order to get to Paddy's Pub which is canonically located on South Street. Feel free to look at a map of Philadelphia and try to figure out how that works?
* One of the first instances on TV likely occurred on ''[[I Love Lucy]]''. Lucy thinks that Ricky is homesick and decides to make over the house to look like "home." Ricky is Cuban, but she makes the house over to look more like Mexico (complete with sombrero-and-poncho stereotypes a la Speedy Gonzales). They both speak Spanish and are in the same general area, so, bless her heart, she was ''close,'' but then comes out and sings a song dressed as Carmen Miranda, who was a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian. Wrong continent, wrong language, wrong ''hemisphere.''
** Lucy and Ricky's address for the entire series is 623 E. 68th Street. In real life, that would be somewhere in the East River. (Although this is likely intentional. Many shows use [[555|deliberately fake addresses and phone numbers]] so the real places aren't constantly hassled by fans and pranksters.)
* An important plot point in Season 4 of ''[[24|Twenty Four]]'' occurs near [[The Mountains of Illinois|the mountains of Iowa]]. Take a good look at this [[media:iowa-state-map.gif|topographic map]] of Iowa. See any mountains? The highest point in the state is a little under 1,700 feet above sea level.
** ''[[24]]'''s real-time gimmick gets it into a lot of trouble geographically. Just one example: in the final season, set in NYC, Jack is in Middle Village, Queens and tells Chloe he's 10 minutes away from Houston Street. Maybe if he traveled by helicopter. Trying to decipher the geography of 24 is a foolish proposition.
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* In the series finale of ''Sisters'', which took place in Winnetka, IL, a man tells a taxi driver to "Take the Kennedy to Sheridan Road." Those roads/highways are not connected in real life.
* ''[[Happy Days]]'' seems to take place in a Milwaukee where mountains and palm trees populate the landscape (especially in the opening credits), along with California housing styles which never went near Wisconsin.
* [[Fox News Channel]] broadcast a map of the Middle East with [https://web.archive.org/web/20120329224149/http://mediamatters.org/blog/200907270040 Iraq labelled as Egypt].
** They also placed Sydney, Australia on the north coast of Australia during their recent{{when}} Tsunami coverage.
*** CNN also had a blunder covering the same story (which ''[[The Daily Show]]'' called them out on) where they called the Galapagos Islands "Hawaii".
* In Season 1 of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', Sylar visited a man in Virginia Beach, VA. A quick peek outside the door revealed rocky hills, scrub, and lots of dust. Viewers in coastal Virginia rolled their eyes.
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* ''[[QI]]''. One example being a question about the smallest English county - expected "wrong" answer being Rutland, with the "correct" answer being the Isle of Wight, which apparently has a smaller area at the relevant tidemark. Unfortunately, in traditional terms the Isle of Wight isn't a county (it's part of Hampshire, and Rutland ''was'' the smallest traditional county), and in modern terms, both the reinstated Rutland and the IoW are unitary authorities - the smallest of which is Blackpool.
** The traditional counties are counties which used to exist but don't necessarily still exist or have their original boundaries. A unitary authority, while being for most purposes a county in all but name, is still considered for ceremonial purposes to be part of a county. Hence the entities known as Ceremonial Counties, which are the current officially existing counties, which have the ceremonial institutions of a county such as a Lord Lieutenant & which may govern all their own territory, or alternatively some or even all of their territory may be under the control of unitary authorities. In any case, QI was wrong because the City of London is a seperate Ceremonial County in its own right, not part of Greater London
* The [[Soap Opera]] ''[[The Young and The Restless]]'' recently{{when}} featured a storyline where a character faked his own death and escaped Wisconsin. Then he went to Ottawa. Then he went to Brazil. So his father followed him to Ottawa on a vengeance mission. Apparently, Ottawa is some harbour-front dive-down, inhabited by rednecks in cowboy shirts. In order to enter Ottawa, you have to parachute out of a clunker aeroplane. [[It Got Worse|And then]], another character follows the father to Ottawa. By chartering a boat. ''From Wisconsin''. While geographically possible, it still requires a detour through four
* In ''[[Friends]]'', Phoebe had a scientist boyfriend called David, who went to Minsk on a research trip. Minsk is stated to be in Russia several times, while it actually is the capital of Belarus. Belarus was the part of the Soviet Union to which Americans often referred as "Russia", but the Soviet Union was dissolved years before ''Friends'' even started.
** Still, the characters would have been adolescents to adults at the time the Soviet Union fell apart, with already formed speech habits when it came to the geography they'd learned in school.
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* In Lefty Frizzell's "Saginaw, Michigan", the narrator claims that he lived in a house on Saginaw Bay. Saginaw, Michigan is about 20 miles inland from the bay, so it would be physically impossible to be in both Saginaw and on Saginaw Bay.
* And then there's Lead Belly's "Cotton Fields" song which mentions a place "in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana". Texarkana is sitting on top of the Arkansas/Texas border, but it's nowhere within one mile from Louisiana's borders.
* [[Journey (band)|Journey]]'s "Don't Stop Believin'" has one of the
** Similarly, The Feeling's "Without You" (its lyrics referring to the Virginia Tech spree shooting) mentions "North Virginia", a term that is not used by locals and in no way describes the location of Virginia Tech within the state of Virginia.
* Averted/parodied by [[The Beatles (band)|The Beatles]]' "Back in the USSR"; the lyric "and Georgia's always on my mind" refers both to the song ''Georgia on my Mind'' (about the US Georgia and/or a woman named Georgia) and the Georgia in the Caucasus.
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** Very, Very strong diving suit?
** Actually at low tide there are areas you can wade on (or if you're trying to actually fish, avoid like crazy.) That's justification after the fact though: it was probably originally just put in to sound good.
* British artist Kim Wilde's "Kids in America" includes a perplexing line about "East California". California is long and narrow and is usually divided into north and south regions. The northeast part is dominated by mountains, the southeast is dominated by desert, and both are sparsely populated. "East California" is likely to land in the Mojave Desert, home of [[Peanuts|Snoopy's brother Spike]] in the Peanuts comic. A real place, but an odd choice of location.
* Sade's "Smooth Operator": "Coast to coast, LA to Chicago", though you can argue that they're supposed to be two unconnected phrases.
* "Sausalito Summernight" by Diesel (from The Netherlands) is about a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but the actual verse about Sausalito implies that it's south of San Francisco, when it's actually north. Also, the notion of a "hot summer night in Sausalito" is pretty laughable, because Sausalito is right on the SF Bay and is very breezy. The average overnight low temperature during summer is about 55(F)/13(C).
* Music video for "Pipppero" by Elio e le Storie Tese takes place on the italian-bulgarian border. Needless to say that the italian-bulgarian border ''doesn't exists''.
* [[Lemon Demon]]'s ''[[Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (song)|Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny]]'' has [[Abraham Lincoln]] [[Our Zombies Are Different|came out of his grave]], in [[Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe|Tokyo]]...
* "The Night Chicago Died" says that the police shootout took place on the east side of [[The Windy City|Chicago]]. As [[Dave Barry]] pointed out in his "Bad Song Survey" column, Chicago has no east side. East of Downtown Chicago is Lake Michigan. Anything calling itself "east Chicago" is likely southeast.
* Parodied in [["Weird Al" Yankovic]]'s "Canadian Idiot", where the singer mentions "driving a Zamboni all over [[Accent On the Wrong Syllable|Saskatchewan]]". In real life, Saskatchewan is considered a prairie province, and definitely isn't covered in ice. This however, is making fun of people who think that all of Canada is a frozen wasteland, as if the Great Plains stopped at the US-Canadian border or something...
== New Media ==
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== Tabletop Games ==
* An [[Old World of Darkness
** In the World Of Darkness, Auckland is located in Australia - and Australia's capital is Sydney.
** Also in the World Of Darkness, New Orleans apparently has a subway system. On the gulf coast. Below sea level.
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== Webcomics ==
* In the Mafia themed ''[[La Cosa Nostra]]'' set in the Mid 1800s where the Irish main character emigrating to America meets a Japanese boy on a ''ship going across the Atlantic''. The sad part is, that isn't [https://web.archive.org/web/20130421003012/http://badwebcomics.wikidot.com/la-cosa-nostra the only instance].
** That's only a real Wall Banger if you assume that the Japanese boy was coming over from Japan. In Real Life, the Japanese diaspora has been sizable if not that large pretty much since the Shogunate was kicked out, and many came first to Europe via the Suez Canal and from there to New England. And they weren't the only confusing case of this as well, such as in the "Great Railroad race", where the company on the Pacific coast primarily used Irish labor while the company on the Atlantic used Chinese. Hence why [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]
* In [[Scandinavia and The World]], America literally cannot see Denmark and cannot tell the difference between Sweden and Norway. On the flipside, he seems to be the only main character that acknowledges South America.
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* In the ''[[Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures|Real Adventures of Jonny Quest]]'' episode "The Mummies of Malenque," the Quest team goes on a trip to Columbia. Luckily they specified it was the Col'''''u'''''mbia that is ''in South America'', else the kiddies might've gotten confused.
* In [[Total Drama Island]]'s "Celebrity Manhunt Special" the gang travels from Ontario to New York, and somehow get lost in a desert with a nuclear testing site (Trinity Site is in New Mexico if you are wondering.)
* In the "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" skit from ''[[Tiny Toon Adventures]]'', Istanbul looks more like Saudi Arabia, with deserts and Arabic architecture.
* In the ''[[Inspector Gadget]]'' episode "Wambini Predicts", Gadget goes to "[[Qurac|Alpakistan]]", where there are diamond-spitting llamas. Llamas and alpacas are from South America, only camels are found in the Middle East.
* The song [[List Song|"Yakko's World"]] from ''[[Animaniacs]]'', ostensibly listing all of the countries in the world, left out several countries, such as South Africa and Burkina Faso.
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** In "Simpson Safari" they travel to Africa where a lot of local fauna are intentionally inaccurately depicted: giraffes live under ground, rhinoceroses lay eggs, hippo's are afraid of water and giant spiders live in jungles.
*** The Masai tribes are depicted as if they practice lip plates and neck rings, while in reality they don't.
** After the Simpsons travelled to Brazil in "Blame It On Lisa" the Brazilian government complained about the way their country was depicted in the episode: rampant street crime, kidnappings, slums and a rat infestation. A spokesman for the Tourist Board of Rio De Janeiro [[I Take Offense to That Last One|added that "what really hurt was the idea of the monkeys - the image that Rio de Janeiro was a jungle."]] They even threatened with legal actions.
** In "30 Minutes Over Tokyo" several Japanese landmarks are depicted being within short distance of one another.
** Krusty visits The Hague in "Elementary School Musical" and arrives at the local airport. Despite the fact that The Hague has no airport in real life!
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* Whenever the Earth is shown in ''[[Homestar Runner]]'', the United States is actually drawn as a single landmass surrounded by oceans, with Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America nowhere to be seen!
* [[Dino Squad]] tends to set itself in location that actually exist, but at the same time tends to ignore the actual travel times. The episode "Easy Riders and Raging Dinos" has the kids driving to places in excess of 400 miles away from their hometown (Kittery Point, Maine to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Niagra Falls) like they're going to the next town over.
== Real Life ==
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* There is a US state called Georgia [[Name's the Same|and]] [[Why We're Bummed Communism Fell|ex-"republic" in USSR]], now the nation called Georgia. Naturally, a few citizens from the former expressed confusion when they heard about the Russian invasion of the latter. Google didn't help any, when their automatic Google Maps integration on Google News was helpfully showing a map of the former. [[Troll]]s even supplied a few "panicked logs of the invasion". At least, by [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100907134922AACWd2q the next time] enough people learned that it wasn't repeated even despite early [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/14/russia-georgia-fake-invasion-report overblown rumors].
** This is the reason that at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the country that got the most applause other than the United States, was Georgia.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20150905163248/http://img.wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/hundredsstates.jpg This headline.]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws "I've now been in fifty.... seven states?"] - President Barack Obama.
** To be fair, that incident sounds more like he started to claim that he'd been in every state, realized that he hadn't, and fumbled the correction.
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* Two countries, one whose name is part of the other's. Congo and The Democratic Republic Of The Congo (formerly Zaire). It's the latter that's always in the news, yet the former's name is used a vast majority of the time to refer to it. Worse, they're neighboring countries...
** The former's official name is ''Republic of the Congo'', and the demonym for both nationalities is the same: Congolese.
* Two countries with (confusingly) almost the same name: Dominica, and the Dominican Republic.
* US Representative Michele Bachmann (Tea Party - Minnesota District 6) proudly told people in New Hampshire that the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord happened right there. [[Internet Backlash]] naturally followed from irate Massachusetts (and other knowledgeable) citizens.
** She pulled off another one kicking off her presidential nominee campaign when she said that John Wayne, born in the city she was currently visiting, was an American hero. Marion Michael Morrison, later known as John Wayne, was born in another city 140 miles away. The John Wayne born where she was at the time was [[Serial Killer|John]] [[Monster Clown|Wayne]] [[Complete Monster|Gacy]].
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** Zig-zagged by the Cleveland Cavaliers. They originally played in the Cleveland Arena until it was torn down in 1974, then they played in Richfield, almost an hour south, for over twenty years. However, Gund Arena (now Quicken Loans Arena or "The Q") was built in downtown Cleveland in 1994, and the Cavs have been playing in Cleveland proper ever since.
* Many people seem to forget that Canada is part of America. The (possibly ex-)top comment of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xeonqv_c4o0&feature=relmfu this] [[YouTube]] video, for example, is/was "what I've learned from JFL is that Canadians are much kinder than Americans".
** 'American' is normally used as a referent for 'resident of the United States of America', not 'resident of a country part of the North American continent'. The term used to refer to the entire group of continents is not "America" but "the Americas", to avert confusion with one peculiarly generically-named country (indeed there are lots of countries in the Americas which use or have used generic terms like "United" or "State" in their name, the United Mexican States being the most obvious example). By the original trope entry's reasoning, a
* There's also the common misconception that [[Canada|Canadians]] all reside north of the 49th parallel. That line actually refers to just one piece of the international boundary, extending west from Lake of the Woods to the BC Lower Mainland.
** The International Boundary itself is an error-ridden travesty of geography. Article 2 of the ''Treaty of Paris (1783)'', by which the Great Britannic Empire rid itself of a certain traitorous Thirteen Colonies, states "And that all disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented, it is hereby agreed and declared, that the following are and shall be their boundaries..." and proceeds to draw a line through Lake Superior and the middle of Long Lake "...to the said Lake of the Woods; thence through the said lake to the most northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi; thence by a line to be drawn along the middle of the said river Mississippi until it shall intersect the northernmost part of the thirty-first degree of north latitude." At that point, the whole effort goes haywire due to a topographical error: the Mississippi River does not reach north to the Lake of the Woods. The head of the Mississippi, Lake Itasca, is in Minnesota – where it lies to the south of Lake of the Woods, rather than northwest of it.
** To add insult to injury, an 1818 attempt to fix the mess lops off a peninsula, the [[wikipedia:Northwest Angle|Northwest Angle]], from mainland Manitoba and places it geopolitically as the northernmost point in Minnesota (where it remains today). It's north of 49°N and the only way in by land is through [[Canada, Eh?]]
** And then there's [[wikipedia:Fort_Montgomery_(Lake_Champlain)#"Fort_Blunder"|Fort Blunder]], the 1817 "works", "fortification" or "battery" at Rouse's Point – mistakenly built on the Québec side of the 45th parallel.
* One of the most notorious examples is the co-opting of the word ''Aryan'' by [[Those Wacky Nazis]]. Uh, Adolf, there's some [[Kipling's Finest|Rajputs, Punjabis, and Parsis]] that might wish to discuss the point.
** And then there's "Hun"gary, named in the mistaken belief that the people there were Huns. Nope... the Huns were a Germanic people, the inhabitants of what is named "Hungary" in English and some other Western languages are actually Magyar.
** Or Turkey, but in that case the bird was named for the country in a mistaken belief that it originated there. Much like the "guinea pig" is neither from Guinea nor a pig...
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