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Compare [[Aliens in Cardiff]] and [[Everytown, America]]. Contrast [[Quirky Town]]. See [[Ordinary High School Student]] for when this happens to a person.
Everyone's going to assume that wherever you live, nothing exciting has ever happened, and if you live in a city that no one has ever heard of, it's because '''Nothing Exciting Ever Happened There''', so all [[Real Life]] examples should be an aversion. (Unless, of course, a location is only a ''former'' example of this trope.)
{{examples}}
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== Real Life ==
* The [[Muggles|non-escapist people]] of real life examples often dread this ever becoming the case, even temporarily. When such events range from school shootings and town-destroying train derailments, to nuclear power plant accidents and illegal toxic waste dumping, to (allegedly) the fate of the town's children after the mayor didn't pay [[The Pied Piper of Hamelin|the exterminator]] the agreed amount, its often hard to blame them.
=== USA ===
* Granby, Colorado was this until [[wikipedia:Marvin Heemeyer|Marvin Heemeyer]] destroyed it in the Killdozer, his homemade armored bulldozer.
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* Alamogordo, New Mexico: a sleepy suburb-without-a-city in the middle of nowhere, but with such events as the Trinity Nuclear Test Site forty miles north, [[The Great Video Game Crash of 1983|the burial of ET: The Game just outside city limits]], and (more recently) the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' Book Burning by local [[Principles Zealot|zealots]].
* Ohio. All of it.
** [[Memetic Mutation|Always has been.]]
* Vermont, definitely. There are three questions that get asked when you say you're from Vermont. ''Where's that?'', ''What state's that in?'' and ''Isn't that part of Canada?'' Not kidding.
** Popular bumper sticker/t-shirt saying: ''What happens in Vermont stays in Vermont... but nothing ever really happens here.''
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* Inverted with St. Louis, Missouri. Stuff [[I Used To Be Cool|used]] to happen here (the World's Fair, the Olympics), and now we're probably best known for a [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17361995 recent BBC documentary] about how racially and economically disparate the north and south sides of Delmar Boulevard are.
** And on the other side of the state, Joplin was more or less unknown until the May 22nd, 2011 tornado hit and took out much of the city.
* Roswell, New Mexico was this prior to one of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul Project Mogul] [[Zig Zagged|top secret Air Force nuke-detecting balloons]] that crashed nearby sparking the modern [[Conspiracy Theorist|crazy UFO seeker culture]] we now associate with the city and with [[Area 51]]. To be fair, if you're trying to avoid discovery of something the size of a vehicle, [[Aliens In Cardiff|a good place to hide it is in a desert in a sparsely-populated area with no nearby famous landmarks]].
** Ironically this means that it was only that most people ''thought'' nothing exciting ever happened in Roswell, until something happened that threatened [[The Masquerade|the masquerade]] in [[Clarke's Third Law|a certain sense]]<ref>The caveat being that the "Masquerade" was the reverse psychology cover-up of a false report to the local newspaper from the Air Force that "we found aliens and a flying saucer" followed by gaslighting everyone for decades into thinking the cover-up was to hide the aliens rather than the lie about aliens being just one layer of the cover-up. Project Mogul was a Cold War-era project and an early real life example of the [[Sensor Suspense]] that permeated the world's theater of global thermonuclear war in the mid-20th Century. As such, it was declassified shortly after the Russian Federation came into existence, so [[This Is Reality|sorry sci-fi fans]], but the [[Flawed Prototype|truth]] that [[History Marches On|was]] out there has been [[Enemy-Detecting Radar|public knowledge]] since [[The Nineties]] and obsolete to the military themselves since at least [[The Sixties|the invention of ICBMs]].</ref>.
* Anaheim, California was at best known as a fertile place to grow oranges. Then a well-known industrialist opened a little place called [[Disneyland]] and, [[Mega Corp|well]]...
=== Canada ===
* Often the case to any American who lives farther than 200 miles from the Canada/Continental US border. "Which state is Alberta again?" "Toronto, Canada? Do you know my old friend John Doe? He moved to the Yukon a few years ago..."
* Part of a concern in Canadian politics is due to this being too commonplace (minus becoming interesting enough to matter when bad things start happening); British Columbia is a distant third to the economies of Southern Ontario (Toronto and Ottawa) and Quebec (Montreal and Quebec City) and most cities and towns in BC feel they pay taxes only so Vancouver can build another SkyTrain line for all the rich teenage kids of foreign investors and BC politicians to go to Metrotown, Victoria can put on more gentrification makeup, and Kelowna can expand their wine tourism businesses. Further, every province that isn't [[Bad Boss|Ontario]] or [[Parental Favoritism|Quebec]] has basically [[The Unfavorite|no influence]] over federal politics at all, especially if located west of Ontario<ref>Yukon Territory, Northwest Territory, Nunavut Territory, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all have to vote later in the day due to the time zone difference, and the system is "First Past The Post", so combined with the sheer population of Ontario and Quebec the entirety of Western Canada literally means nothing in federal elections. That's like if American politicians only had to win New York and Florida to win a Presidency, and the vast majority of the population of New York State and Florida were made up solely of the world's wealthiest people.</ref>. In short, when this trope is [[Evil Debt Collector|purposefully averted for financial gain]] for [[The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized|too long]] it can become [[You Can't Fight Fate|inevitable]].
* Happens with a Canadian town every so often [[Status Quo Is God|before slowly fading back into obscurity]]. One sufficiently notable example was Grand Forks, British Columbia where [[Small Town Boredom]] is practically the local pastime for anyone under 18. Its irrelevance before the latter half of [[The New Tens]] and after COVID-19 hit was and is so thorough, the town's name didn't and won't even give good search results because Grand Forks, ''North Dakota'' is still more notable than Grand Forks, BC in every way. However, from 2015 to the end of 2019, events in the city of <5000 included a firebombing of City Hall, several local bars being burnt down (tragically destroying homes in the apartments of the former Grand Forks Hotel, and the historic Winnipeg Pub), two floods of much of the town, and a shooting at the local hospital. The second flood was the first time the city had been worthy of Global News (a major TV news station across Canada) or any other news outlet not based in British Columbia, and ~30% of the town's housing was bulldozed to return to wetlands permanently as a result.
=== Not USA ===
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