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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 town. Small towns have their advantages for 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 particularly 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.
Places whose location are never given are particularly prone to this. Compare Chaos Architecture, Traveling At The Speed Of Plot.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Konoha in Naruto has walls that appear to be less than a quarter-mile across from the outside; most of the businesses patronized by the main characters are on one street, but wide shots of the city seen from inside show it to be just that — a city.
Comics
- Riverdale from Archie comics sometimes spawns a beach or a mountain, and occasionally gives a hint of where it could be located, just to be able to contradict it later.
- Its size also seems to fluctuate. Depending on the story, Riverdale's a hick town in the middle of nowhere, or is big enough to support an airport and an international stock exchange.
Films
- Back To The Future can't seem to decide whether Hill Valley is a decent-sized city or a small town. It's small enough to have a tiny downtown area with no buildings higher than three stories, but it apparently has a large enough population to support at least one very large mall. And that's just in the first film. Part III adds an entire desert within walking distance of the city while stating that there's a lake which freezes over in winter. Still the series didn't really last long enough to produce anything too contradictory, though it likely would have if it'd been allowed to continue.
Literature
- Nancy Drew's small hometown of River Heights seems to have whatever experts, businesses, universities, or other resources that are needed for any particular book.
- In the first Harry Potter book, it's stated that the geography of Hogwarts magically changes around from time to time. JK Rowling has explained that she established this early on as a ready-to-fire justification in case this problem ever manifested itself, which, of course, it did.
- This is especially true in the movies. Throughout the films, Hogwarts has changed in the following ways:
- Second film: The sand pit around the Quidditch pitch is replaced with a trench. The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom is changed.
- Third film: The location of the Fat Lady's portrait is changed (as is the Fat Lady). Hagrid's hut is moved next to a newly-added giant sundial, which is accessed across a newly-added bridge attached to a newly-added courtyard at the foot of a newly-added Clock Tower. The hospital wing is moved to the top of this tower.
- Fourth film: The entrance hall is replaced with an entrance courtyard.
- Fifth film: The Potions classroom (unseen since the first film) uses the set built in the second film as Snape's office.
- Dragonriders of Pern does this with an entire planet: The time to walk/ride-a-horse/fly-a-dragon/sail between locations varies as the plot demands — sometimes by what would be hundreds of miles. Amongst fans, it's called the "rubber ruler".
Live Action TV
- Sunnydale in Buffy The Vampire Slayer started off as a "one Starbucks town" and gradually acquired more buildings, an entire waterfront district, international airport, train station, zoo, a community college and a campus of the University of California. It also lost the 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.
- One possible explanation is that the "one Starbuck's town" line (delivered in the first episode) may just be typical teenage exaggeration. At that age, no matter where you live, the next town over always seems so much bigger and cooler...especially when the next town over seems to be Los Angeles. Of course, that doesn't explain the vanishing waterfront...
- As to the waterfront, this is one of the few shows where "A wizard did it" might actually be a valid explanation...
- This is mostly due to Sunnydale being a stand in for Santa Barbara, which has all the locations mentioned (although the airport is mostly regional). Santa Maria may account for the inland POV.
- 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.
- Craggy Island, in 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. (For reference, the island of Inishbofin
 , which is in roughly the same place has about 200 inhabitants).
- 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 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.
- Residents of Dog River, Saskatchewan on "Corner Gas" often refer to (and drive to) "the city" but it's unclear whether it's Saskatoon or Regina they're going to. In some cases Regina is implied, but in one case Saskatoon is mentioned explicitly, i.e., "You went to Saskatoon for a morning swim?" The show also subverts the trope, often having a character declare emphatically that Dog River doesn't have an item that many sitcom towns tend to have for story convenience. For example, the above-mentioned "morning swim" comment was the result of Brent pretending that his case of pink eye was the result of taking a dip in an over-chlorinated pool, but Hank and Wanda point out that there's not a swimming pool anywhere in Dog River. Strangely, the town of 500 has no pool, but does have an ice rink large enough to hold a regional curling tournament. Of course, that may be a Canadian thing.
Radio
- Simply because the sheer length of the Adventure in Odyssey (20 years), the town of Odyssey has gone from a small quaint Midwestern town to a place complete with a full scale downtown (with skyscrapers), an international airport, multiple malls, a college, and a zoo. And everything still seem to be within walking distance.
Video Games
- The American localization of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney apparently takes place in Los Angeles, California (Pacific time zone, near a movie studio). The sequel introduces the extremely Japanese Kurain Village, which is two hours away by train. The reason, of course, is that it was an extremely Japanese game series before being localized.
- The Mushroom Kingdom in the Super Mario Bros series. Yeah, totally different in layout, features and just about everything in literally every single game and adaption, has possibly a more flexible geography situation than even Springfield in The Simpsons, and more... stuff than many series have in the entire universe. Heck, even the interiors totally change per game.
- The Legend Of Zelda series has a significantly different Hyrule every game (going so far as to submerge it for Windwaker), but it's justified as significant period of time and/or space separate most of the games.
- Averted in Super Metroid, where the parts of the game that were featured in the NES prequel remain pretty much the same, though in a state of ruin.
- Only partially averted, as much of the geography had considerably changed.
- Castlevania. This was eventually lampshaded and explained in Aria of Sorrow. Chaos, the true master of the castle (Bestiary be damned!), rebuilds the entirety of... whatever the castle is called at that particular time from scratch if for no other reason than aesthetics, like some otherworldly interior decorator run amok.
- In Symphony Of The Night, Alucard says the castle is a creature of chaos itself, changing its shape every time it is rebuilt.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons openly embraces this problem. See Separate Simpsons Geography Thing.
- The animated show 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 the dubbing and localization process. The town would be specifically Boulogne-Billancourt, in the suburbs of Paris. However, the French version does obfuscate a bit the exact location too, never mentioning any place name (or that the river is the Seine).
- Kim Possible: Middleton, apparently a fairly small midwestern town, grew and grew and grew. Lampshaded in season 4 when Kim learns about increasingly obscure technical labs and is continually surprised that she never knew Middleton had all these places.
- Lampshaded repeatedly in episode "Clothes Minded".
- Parodied in the first episode of Clerks The Animated Series; when Leonardo Leonardo is opening his new convenience store-slash-shopping mall only a few doors down from the Quick Stop AND his new skyscraper, both Dante and Randall point out how unlikely it is that they wouldn't have noticed such large buildings constructed around them; especially as Leonardo's skyscraper is the only skyscraper in the entire town.
- Daria fans (including This Troper) are STILL arguing about the location of Lawndale.
- Dimmsdale of Fairly Odd Parents could be its own country for all that happens there, even without Timmy's interference.
- Noticeable in Avatar The Last Airbender when the world took them several months (with some screwing around) to cross in the first season, but half that distance was traveled in one day in the Grand Finale.
- Well, to be fair, in the first season or two they got distracted a lot and Aang did lallygag quite a bit.
- Free Country USA in Homestar Runner is whatever size and sophistication level it needs to be for the current cartoon.
- This is even parodied in Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, where Strong Bad can put other Free Country USA landmarks anywhere he wants on the map, and even rearrange them as he sees fit. His own house starts in the middle, but it's just as mobile. In the second game, he makes a new map by drawing on a Risk-like game map.
- South Park is in Colorado. We hear it's a small redneck town, and it did show it more than The Simpsons that it seemed to be so, but, nowadays, it has malls, supermarkets, baseball parks, TV studios,a "little future" time-travellers' district and several fast food chains, both fictional and real. Strangely enough, some locations, such as Stark's pond and Doctor Mephesto's lab, still exist. Fanon states that the South Park docks were built hastily over Stark's pond for the Halloween party.
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