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"I've lived in Sunnydale a couple of years now. You know what I've never noticed before? This big honkin' castle."
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 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.
- Actually, most of what's shown in the manga and anime is downtown Konoha (i.e. the area surrounding the Hokage tower). Zoomed out shots in some of the manga and data books show that Konoha is a lot bigger, maybe close to the same size as New York. Case in point: Naruto himself says, when leaving for the Land of Waves, that that's his first time outside the village, meaning that both the training ground where Team Seven was tested and the forest where Naruto learned to make Shadow Clones and beat down Mizuki are INSIDE KONOHA.
- Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they are within the walls. They may well be training outside of them. What Naruto is saying is that he has never traveled to another town, not that he never left Konoha proper.
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.
- Bloom County, from the comic strip of the same name, was first presented in 1980 as a small backwater with a general store and a few farms. Later on it gained a small urban setting that appeared whenever the plot required it; and by the strip's end, Milo's Meadow was drawn quite bizarrely, and the county had a full-fledged Wrong Side Of The Tracks.
- The same thing happened in its spinoff strip, Outland, except in reverse. The Outland was originally supposed to be Another Dimension that featured wacky, Krazy Kat-inspired landscapes. It quietly shifted to feature more normal surroundings, and even became a segment of Bloom County itself in the final strip.
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.
- Of course, the fact that you see the movies in four very separate time periods might have something to do with it.
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 and the hospital wing are 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.
- Sixth film: The Potions Master's office is a new set, although this one was Hand Waved — Slughorn specifically asked for a bigger office. Also, the Astronomy Tower is a new set after being represented in the third film as a redress of the Dumbledore's Office set.
- 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".
- Stephen King does this often. A good many of his books are prefaced with the statement that parts of the city, state, or country that is featured are straight made up.
- The Discworld. Ankh-Morpork is concisely plotted, but everywhere else can be pretty vague. Fortunately, any possible continuity errors were explained away in Thief Of Time as alternate pasts from the badly-repaired fabric of history.
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...
- In one episode Giles referred to Buffy and Faith coming back from the docks as "coming back to town", so they (and the beach) could just be nearby, rather than part of the town itself.
- 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.
- To be fair, either the community college or the university, or both, were alluded to in the first season, when Buffy says that Angel is a college student tutoring her.
- 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.
- No one has heard of Erie, PA? With beaches? On Lake Erie? Which the town is named after?
- Though Pine Valley is a suburb of Philadelphia, the opposite side of the state from Lake Erie, not to mention that it is clearly referred to as on the Atlantic Coast
- 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.
- I always thought it was Oberlin or Kent, and that the decent sized city was nearby Akron.
- 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.
- It is a Canadian thing. Some towns with fewer than fifty residents have ice rinks large enough to hold a regional curling tournament, but very, very few smaller places have pools, public or private.
- The island on Lost, while admittedly a Genius Loci with many mysterious and magical properties, features many locations that you'd think the survivors would have encountered during their first month or so, like an entire village surrounded by a big sonic fence, the various Dharma stations, the ruins of a giant statue, and a whole 'nother island right next to it! This could also be attributed to the fact that the losties were somewhat fearful of exploring the jungle because of the monster, the Others, and the various strange whispers and apparations, but still, it seemed the writers kept adding stuff on to this supposedly Deserted Island because the plot demanded it.
- The Losties not finding these things is at least moderately plausible, but Rousseau had been on the Island for 16 years and claimed never to see a lot of the stuff she came across when with the Losties. Granted, she was mad, but hadn't she supposedly been obsessed with finding her daughter? And she never came across the death pylons set in the incredible obvious grassy plain area near the centre?
- Angel Grove for the first six seasons of Power Rangers, largely due to the mix of varying Stock Footage from Super Sentai and on-location footage from LA. There's the city proper, the beach, the adjacent vast desert, a large forested nature preserve, the park (which got bigger as time went on, eventually developing a massive lake that wasn't there before), snow-capped mountains not too far away, and, of course, innumerable suspiciously similar quarries scattered throughout all of the above for convenient fight-sceneing.
- It also has historical flexibility, with matching secenery. It was settled by the British in the early 1700s (despite being in California), and was mostly grassy fields. In the late 1800s, it was full of prospectors, cowboys, and other Wild West stereotypes, and was mostly barren desert.
- Greatly subverted with Star's Hollow in Gilmore Girls, which is a very realistic small town in Connecticut. Most of the action takes place in the same locations throughout town and with the same characters, due to having a population of just over 1000. Many shots are done in the same town square, with everything in the same location in every episode.
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 The Wind Waker and build a new one by the time of 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 A Link To The 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 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 Twilight Princess, which controversially 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) analagous 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.
- 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.
- Resident Evil's Raccoon City is supposed to be a relatively small mountain town in the middle of nowhere, 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.
- 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.
Web Animation
- 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.
- Free Country USA usually appears to be about half a dozen buildings (three houses, the King of Town's castle, the Concession Stand, Coach Z's locker room) in the middle of nowhere, explicitly told not to have roads (or functioning cars), and yet the houses are decently sized, there's utilities, a postal service (and presumably a zip code), Internet access, a few in-story television appearances and so forth. Best not to think too hard about it.
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 are STILL arguing about the location of Lawndale.
- Given that it was a spinoff of Beavis and Butthead, it probably takes place in a suburb of Dallas.
- Dimmsdale of The Fairly Oddparents 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.
- 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, not to mention a plastic surgeon (Tom's Rhinoplasty appears in a lot of background shots.) 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.
- It was also usually portrayed as having only one police officer, Barbrady, early in the show. Later, when the plot required, they started using a police department of slightly less-inept cops in a nearby, apparently larger, city.
- The Tri-State Area of Phinneas and Ferb could be anywhere, but is shown as having mountains, an unpainted desert, at least three different museums, two malls, a lake, two separate rivers, and docks on the ocean.
- TeamoSupremo was constantly summoned by The Governor to save the state, but exactly which state the series takes place in is never revealed/stated.
Real Life
- Burlington, Vermont. University? Check. Two smaller colleges? Check. Community college? Check. Beaches? Check. Mountains? Check. Docks? Check. International airport? Check. Castle? Sort of (two 18th century forts are in driving distance, plus Wilson Castle, In Proctor, about an hour and a half away). Number of Starbucks: One. Population? Less than 40,000, which makes it smaller than the usual definition of a "small town" in MA or NY.
- This Troper is amazed that a medium-sized city of 40,000 people could be considered a "small town" by anyone.
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