Not only is it called Happyville, the owner of the house is a cat named Maple Claws and the place is permanently frozen over. And that's not even MENTIONING the Gingerbread House!
"While the twee small town naming trope is way tired..."
A Quirky Town with Eccentric Townsfolk, only there's an adorable name attached to the town as well. Usually some kind of joke/pun is attached to the name. A town with crazy people has some kind of crazy-themed name, a place dedicated to romance will have some romantic name, etc. Frequently seen in a Romance Novel.
Beware; sometimes the cutesy name hides a Town with a Dark Secret. Contrast I Don't Like the Sound of That Place.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Among the districts in ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. are "Suitsu" (Sweets), "Rokkusu" (Rocks), "Furawau" (Flowers) and others like that. The residents of these districts have relevant names - eg. Lilium of Furawau.
- At the end of the second season of Hell Girl, there is a town called Lovely Hills. It's not.
- Kibougahana from Heart Catch Pretty Cure. The name translates to "Flower of Hope".
- Go! Princess Pretty Cure: Yumegahama, the city that the girls travel to outside of Noble Academy. The name translates to "Beach of Dreams".
Comic Books
- During the Amalgam Universe event, the comic Generation Hex (a combination of Generation X and Jonah Hex) was set in a town called Humanity. The story was an homage to the film Pale Rider.
Fan Works
- In Son of the Desert has the town of Eshkolit which is Hebrew for grapefruit.
- If Them's the Rules has the town of Eden Valley.
- Story of the Blanks has Sunny Town, though it's not as nice a place as it appears.
- In Wishing Well, Ponyville's name has a terrible reputation. Even the ruler of Ponyville hates its name. But it was named by her deceased mother, so she doesn't want to change it.
- In Zero Context: Take Out the Trash
, the city where most of the action takes place is called "Muffinville". As with Sunny Town above, it has some serious negativity going for it.
Film
- Mystery, Alaska
- Purgatory's town is called Refuge.
- The Quick and the Dead is set in a town called Redemption.
- The first and third Tremors films take place in Perfection, Nevada. The fourth film, a prequel to the others, reveals that the original name of the town was Rejection.
- Suddenly takes place in Suddenly, California. In-Universe, it's explained as a holdover from its days as a gold rush town.
Literature
- "Ether, OR" (1995) by Ursula K. Le Guin, about a town that moves from place to place.
- Wishful, California in the novel Instant Attraction by Jill Shavis, to which the Smart Bitches are referring in the page quote.
- Lunacy, Alaska in Nora Roberts's Northern Lights. Naturally, the inhabitants are quirky.
- “This Private Plot” by Alan Beechey is set in and around the village of Synne in the Cotswold. No less than five recent arrivals have penned volumes of reminiscences titled “Living in Synne”.
Live-Action TV
- Brisco County, Jr. finds himself in a town called "No Man's Land," which turns out to be populated entirely by women.
- Banshee, Pennsylvania. It's more of a Meaningful Name than you'd think, given that the banshee is an omen of death.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer has Sunnydale, probably the most evil and horrible place in the setting, next to Cleveland.
- The comics reveal that this name was given by Mayor Richard Wilkins himself.
- Bunheads is set in Paradise, California.
- Doctor Who:
- "A Town Called Mercy".
- "The Time of the Doctor" has the town of Christmas.
- Ed's Stuckeyville.
- Eerie, Indiana. = weirdness abounds.
- Eureka, anyone?
- Everwood
- Gilmore Girls' Stars Hollow.
- Carnivàle has Babylon, a town of all male ghosts with murderous intent.
- Hawkeye Pierce of M*A*S*H hails from one Crabapple Cove, Maine. While we never actually see the place, some of the items he shares from the local newspaper in one of the "Mail Call" episodes hint at its possible quirkiness.
- You know with the monster attacks and all, the name of Angel Grove seems ironic.
- Once Upon a Time is set in Storybrooke, Maine...and most the townsfolk don't know they're all fairy tale characters.
- Pushing Daisies has two of its leads hail from a town called Coeur des Coeurs (Heart of Hearts). Aw.
- Sons of Anarchy is set in Charming, California.
Pinball
- The playfield freeway signs in Truck Stop refer to various Real Life towns with funny names, such as "Santa Claus, IN", "Smackover, AR", and "Metropolis, IL".
Radio Drama
- Fibber McGee and Molly hail from Wistful Vista.
Video Games
- Fallout 3: Very, very inverted with Tranquility Lane.
- Fallout 4 plays it straighter, with Sanctuary Hills (later called just Sanctuary) being the player's home base if they so choose and the refuge for the people travelling with the Minutemen. Goodneighbor, however, is an inversion.
- EarthBound (1994) has Onett, Twoson, Threed, and Fourside, in that numerical order.
- All of the town names in the Japanese version of EarthBound Beginnings are named after holidays, including a town named Mother's Day.
- Magical Starsign parodies this trope with the Sickeningly Sweet town of "Honey Mint White Caramel Fudgeflake with Melty Butter and Syrup and Whipped Cream on Top", is populated by a race of alien bunny people.
- Toontown Online. Toontown has Daisy's Gardens, Minnie's Melodyland, Donald's Dock, The Brrrrrgh, Donald's Dreamland, Goofy's Raceway and Chip n' Dale's Acres.
- Silent Hill: Subverted by the eponymous town.
- What could possibly be threatening about a place called Raccoon City?
- What could possibly be threatening about a place called Possum Springs?
- The levels in Dungeon Keeper all have cutesy nams like Eversmile, Cozytown and Nevergrim, until you beat them.
- The Engineer in Team Fortress 2 hails from (the real life town of) Bee Cave, Texas.
- The Sims 2 has Pleasantview, the "beginner" packaged neighborhood. Given that some of its storylines include adultery, missing persons and an impoverished young widow with a delinquent child, the name is a bit ironic.
- In Glittermitten Grove the default name for the town you have to build is Tickleborough.
Web Comics
- Possibly the most literal example: Girly is set in the town of Cutetown.
- And is right down the road from Cheap Gag.
- A little village up the coast, Pretty Pretty Unicorn. Currently on the way to Kethenecia. The mayor is an undead warlock named Richard. They missionaries didn't know that. Neither did they know the whole village wasn't exactly alive.
- Life Sketch is set in a town named Hannah, in the state of Montana. A place where vampires are socially accepted as members of society. note
Western Animation
- Ponyville, which was introduced in My Little Pony Tales and became a series staple with My Little Pony (G3). In fact, in Friendship is Magic it's the only town in Equestria that doesn't have some sort of Punny Name. This was due to Hasbro insisting on using it as the town name; it was originally going to be called Fillydelphia.
- Gravity Falls has a cutesy name, but is also a Town with a Dark Secret.
Real Life
- Accident, Maryland. The story goes that the place was given that name after the surveyor who was supposed to chart out 778 acres of land to build a town on somehow came up about 100 acres short.
- Bill Clinton, from a town called Hope. (..., Arkansas)
- There's a city in Canada called "Happy Valley Goose Bay". This is located in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which collects such names. Other candidates include: Heart's Content, Heart's Delight, Little Heart's Ease, Little Paradise, Cupids, Harbour Grace, Blow-Me-Down, Tickle Cove and Comfort Cove. There's even an advertising campaign for the island centered on cute children standing in front of brightly painted houses (another feature of the island), lines full of drying Guernsey sweaters, and aged fishing boats in towns with these kinds of names.
- That province also carries the antidotes to such cutesy names: Killbride, Hate Bay, Grosswater Beach, and the infamous Dildo.
- And in Canada there's also "Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!".
- Also, Legal, Alberta, and Emo, Ontario.
- Naming towns odd things is practically a national pastime. It started when we ran out of British cities to name towns after. There are townships such as Elbow, Eyebrow, Pokemouche, Snafu Creek, Blubber Bay, Pickle Lake, Bummers Roost and Jerry's Nose. The world's second longest place name belongs to the township of Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde.
- There are HUNDREDS of these in Canada. We love them. Due to the Anglicization of many Native names for landmarks, you end up with towns like Lac Aachikamakuskasich, which everyone is expected to pronounce in full. Many towns have been renamed so they don't sound absurd. When Pile O'Bones, Saskatchewan was made the capital of the province, it was wisely renamed Regina.
- That province also carries the antidotes to such cutesy names: Killbride, Hate Bay, Grosswater Beach, and the infamous Dildo
- Morgongåva, meaning "morning gift" in Swedish. In old Germanic tradition, on the morning after the wedding, the groom presented the bride with something valuable, so that she wouldn't be left penniless if he should die. This is the morning gift, or dower. The Swedish town "Morgongåva" is named for a small farm that was once given away in such a fashion.
- Schoenchen, Kansas. In German, "schoen" means beautiful and "-chen" is a diminutive, similar to "-ette". To a German, it sounds like a whole basket of puppies and kittens looking up. And the basket is made of something fluffy. And sugar-coated.
- No Name, Colorado. Apparently, when the area was surveyed the townsfolk didn't have a name yet. The surveyor marked it as well... No Name. And there it stuck.
- Loveland, Colorado looks cutesy at first glance, but it's actually named after railroad executive William Loveland.
- Inversion: Fucking, Austria. It's about 1500 years old, with a population of 104. Named after a guy named Focko. It's apparently pronounced "foo-king" with a short "oo" sound. Also, all the signs with the town's name on it are bolted down because tourists kept stealing them.
- The townspeople have petitioned the Austrian government to change the name of the town to stop the literal thousands of people who come by every year to laugh at the town name. The local council ultimately did change the name to "Fugging" in 2021.
- Fucking was also most likely the inspiration behind the crime novel "Bad Fucking", set in a town of the same name ("Bad" being a typical part of many a town name where there was some sort of bath, much like, um "Bath," Somerset). There is also the Urban Legend of Fucking planning to brew its own beer, the name of which would have been Fucking Hell (Fucking Pale Ale). In fact, the beer does exist, except that it's brewed in neighbouring Germany.
- Another inversion: there is a town in Norway called Hell; there is also one in Michigan. (And as far north as they are, the two Hells do freeze over from time to time.) Oddly enough, both Michigan and Norway also play host to cities named Paradis(e), and one of the ones in Norway isn't terribly far from/is on the same train line as Hell.
- Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico. Originally called Hot Springs, it was renamed after the game show of the same name offered to broadcast from any town that would change its name to it. A movie made with that title in the '90s gave it a whole new meaning.
- New Mexico also has a Pep, Pie Town, Candy Kitchen, Sunshine, and Loving, among others (though the latter is named after early cattle baron Oliver Loving).
- Santa Claus, Indiana. It was originally named Santa Fe, but there was already a Santa Fe, Indiana so in 1856 the postal service told them to change the name. The (probably apocryphal) story is that at a Christmas Eve church service a child heard bells and shouted "it's Santa Claus!", and the town leaders liked the sound of it.
- Another version has it that on being told they could not have Santa Fe, one of the town fathers snarked “Maybe you’d rather we called it Santa CLAUS.”
- There's also a North Pole, New York, home of Santa's Workshop but long regionally famous as town of license for the Lake Champlain region's NBC station.
- There was a popular 19th century poem (which later became a song) called "Ben Bolt", which opened with the line "Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?" In 1904 a town was founded in south Texas, a few miles away from the established town of Alice (named for a daughter of a prominent rancher)...yeah, they decided to call the new town Ben Bolt.
- Carefree, Arizona.
- Don't forget Surprise. (There's also a town of Surprise in Indiana.)
- Joe, Montana.
- Sweet Home and Happy Valley, Oregon. Oregon also amusingly inverts this trope with the towns of Drain and Boring.
- Westward Ho! [sic] is an English seaside resort that got its name from a Charles Kingsley novel that was popular enough to have a town named after it.
- Port Sunlight, in northwest England, was built in the 19th century to accommodate soap factory workers. It was named after a brand of soap.
- Glen Campbell, Pennsylvania, was named after Cornelius Campbell of the Glenwood Coal Company. But the country singer’s agent staged a publicity visit, as did a professor named Glenn Campbell.
- Kauniainen, Finland. The name is a mangling of Finnish word kaunis, beautiful. The Swedish name of the town, Grankulla, is more prosaically "spruce hill".
- There is a bucolic town called Bunnythorpe on the North Island of New Zealand, about 8 kilometers northwest of Palmerston North (itself about 130 kilometers northeast of Wellington). The town is famous for being the original home of a company that got started as a factory turning milk from local dairies into baby formula (using the ludicrously cute tagline that the formula "builds bonny babies"). The name of this company, intended to recall the Greek word for milk, was called Glaxo. Yes, that Glaxo.
- C. S. Lewis in one of his letters mentions passing through Shapely Bottom and Cuckold’s Green in Kent. “…if one had lived in the 17th century, what a horrible fate it would have been to live at Cuckold’s Green.”
- Intercourse, Pennsylvania. The fellows from Top Gear were rather baffled (it's basically a Have a Gay Old Time situation where "intercourse" used to be a more innocent term and in this case it was either used as a synonym for "junction" or "fellowship").
- Hopeulikit, Georgia. It's pronounced "Hope You Like It".
