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Geographic Flexibility: Difference between revisions
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The geography of a fictional location becomes extremely flexible as more and more is added to it.
The most common way this occurs is when the story is set in an ostensibly [[Small Towns|small town]]. Small towns [[Quirky Town|have]] [[Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here|their]] [[Small Town Boredom|advantages]] [[Everytown, America|for]] [[Where the Hell Is Springfield?|fiction]], but they may not have every location the plot requires. The plot calls for a dock, so the town has one. The plot calls for a university, and it's there. The plot calls for an industrial district, and it's there. None of this is inherently unreasonable, since many small towns do have those, or are even built around them. But having ''all of them''? Suddenly the town's not looking so small anymore.
In [[Egregious]] cases, the [[City of Adventure]] may gain or lose major geographic features like mountains, or may move to a different climate zone when no one's looking.
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** It started off being described as a "one Starbucks town" and gradually acquired more buildings, an entire waterfront district, airport, train station, zoo, dam, a community [[College]] and a [[California University|campus of the University of California]].
** It also ''lost'' the entire beach/waterfront portions when the finale needed it to be landlocked.
** Lampshaded in the episode "Buffy vs Dracula" when Riley wondered how he'd never noticed Sunnydale had its own gothic castle. In that case it's presumed that either Dracula teleported his own castle to Sunnydale, assuming residents wouldn't [[Extra
** Common theory is that the fact that Sunnydale is directly on top of a Hellmouth does all sorts of screwy things with the geography.
* Pine Valley, PA, setting of ''[[All My Children]]'', ostensibly a small town, has a university with every graduate program you may need, a television station where national network shows are shot, an international airport, a casino (which were ''illegal'' in Pennsylvania until very recently), and the headquarters of several major corporations. It also has a beach. In Pennsylvania. An ad for the show on Soapnet parodied all this.
** Let's not forget that there are several ''uncharted islands'' off this beach. In Pennsylvania.
*** Does Lake Erie not exist in this particular TV universe?
* Craggy Island, in ''[[Father Ted (TV)|Father Ted]]'' parodies this trope. Usually it seems there are only a handful of people living on the island, but in one episode there's an entire Chinatown district Ted never knew about. Even weirder, a hugely disproportionate number of those inhabitants are priests. (For reference, the island of [
** There is one constant: it has no west side. "It just broke loose during some bad weather and floated off."
* The size of Rutherford in ''[[3rd Rock From the Sun|3rd Rock from the Sun]]'' seemed to change between episodes. Sometimes it was implied to be a tiny [[College]] town and other times it seemed to be a decent-sized city.
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*** That one is plausibly justified by Bowser tending to wreck the place in every game, so it's not improbable that they simply change the architecture as they rebuild.
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda (Franchise)|The Legend of Zelda]]'' series has a significantly different Hyrule every game (going so far as to submerge it for ''[[The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker]]'' and build a new one by the time of ''[[The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks]]''), but it's justified as significant period of time and/or space separate most of the games.
** Hyrule is a less extreme version of this trope, as while Hyrule's topography is unmistakably different in each game, the major landmarks and their positions relative to each other remain fairly consistent from ''[[The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past]]'' on (although Kakariko Village appears to have picked itself up and moved to the far end of the kingdom at some point, and in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time]]'', Hyrule Castle is to the north, when in all the others it's nearer to the centre).
** Oddly enough, the Wii version of ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess]]'', which made Link right-handed and flipped the map over, has Lake Hylia (southeast of the castle) and Kakariko (southwest) roughly where it is in comparison to ''A Link to the Past'', while the GameCube version has the Lake and Gerudo Desert (southwest) and the Lost Woods [by a different name] (south-southeast) analogous to ''Ocarina of Time''.
* Partially averted in ''Super [[Metroid]]'', where the parts of the game that were featured in the NES prequel remain pretty much the same, but much of the geography had considerably changed.
** The changes can be handily explained by the original base having ''blown up''.
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* ''[[Resident Evil]]'''s Raccoon City is supposed to be a relatively small mountain town in the middle of "The Arklay Mountains", but over the course of the games gains a subway system, a university, all the way up to Outbreak: File #2's sudden addition of the Raccoon City Zoo. Complete with only that which could become extremely dangerous when zombified or pissed off. If the ending of ''Resident Evil 2'' is any indication, characters in the series travel far enough to reach an arid desert-like valley, among other places. At least with ''Code: Veronica'', the game tells you that you're traveling to Antarctica. In ''[[Resident Evil 5]]'', it seems to be indicated that Chris and Sheva travel from South Africa to Kenya, though they do travel by boat, jeep, and plane along the way.
* ''[[Backyard Sports]]'' has different stadiums every game, but is always assumed to be a small town (confirmed in Skateboarding), so it is an example of this trope.
* Gensoukyou, the setting of ''[[Touhou]]'', has had many things added to it over the years that were apparently only discovered in the game in which they debut, including Misty Lake, the Garden of the Sun, Mayohiga, part of the Sanzu River, and both Koumakan and Eientei. More recent games have managed to avoid this though, with locations either mentioned before (Youkai Mountain) or explicitly stated to have recently arrived in Gensoukyou (a second lake, the Moriya Shrine, and even a [[Schizo
* This is a gameplay mechanic in ''[[Legend of Mana]]'': you get to place... ''places'' on the World Map. Each place emanates Mana of certain colors, which affects immediate previously placed places.
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== Western Animation ==
* ''[[The Simpsons (Animation)|The Simpsons]]'' openly embraces this problem. See [[Separate Simpsons Geography Thing]].
* The animated show ''[[Code Lyoko (Animation)|Code Lyoko]]'' suffers from this slightly. Most clues to the location of the show put it in France (satellite photos), despite a few episodes contradicting this (such as the visit of a French foreign exchange student). This however, is an artifact of [[Dub Induced Plot Hole|the dubbing and localization process]]. [[Fanon|The town would be]] specifically [
* ''[[Kim Possible (Animation)|Kim Possible]]'': Middleton, apparently a fairly small midwestern town, grew and grew and grew.
** Lampshaded in the season 4 episode "Clothes Minded", when Kim chases Drakken and Shego through a series of increasingly obscure local technical labs that she didn't know Middleton had.
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* ''[[Family Guy (Animation)|Family Guy]]'': Quahog, Rhode Island is seemingly a suburb of Providence (with its skyline in the background), which has a modest metropolitan population of 1.6 million in real life, and a city proper of less than 200,000. Despite this, Quahog has an international airport, a subway system, and other "big city" features that even Providence lacks. Sometimes the small skyline resembles Providence well, other times it looks like a huge sprawling metropolis. Some could argue that some of the scenes take place in Boston, about 40-50 miles away, but most of these big-city scenes do not resemble Boston either. Earlier episodes resembled the real-life area more (Peter Griffin even jumps off a skyscraper resembling one in Providence), whereas later episodes drifted apart from the real-life counterpart, where Quahog has a split personality between small town and bustling metropolis depending on the nature of the plot.
* Ponyville in ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Animation)|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' seems to acquire a system of gem-loaded caves, a really big mountain, a large cliff, and who knows how much other stuff when the episode calls for it.
** The most egregrious example would have to be the sudden [[Schizo
* Bikini Bottom from ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants (Animation)|SpongeBob SquarePants]]'' is shown to be this, as well. In most episodes it's a typical small town (small towns are '''usually''' underwater, right?), but other episodes have shown that it contains a mall, a racetrack, and an Olympic stadium, among other things.
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[[Category:Settings]]
[[Category:Universal Tropes]]
[[Category:Geographic Flexibility]][[Category:Pages with comment tags]]
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