Creator Provincialism

"Once again a UFO has landed in America, the only country UFOs ever seem to land in."

— News Reporter, Monsters vs. Aliens

Because most authors write about what they know, creators of fictional works tend to set stories in their home city/province/country, making for well-developed, colorful settings. Even when the actual place names are disguised, they can still be identified as the author's home territory.

However, sometimes this happens even in contexts where such settings seem unlikely. In this case, lack of imagination or assuming one's audience is unreceptive to anything remotely foreign may play a role. Of course, this is often a case of global realism being sacrificed for local realism. It might seem unlikely for one place to be the focus of so much activity, but setting it in a place the author is familiar with can help to make the setting appear more full-bodied and believable. It can mean the difference between a realistic environment and The Theme Park Version.

Sometimes, one country actually is more significant than most other countries in certain contexts, but highly provincial writers and viewers may simply assume their country has contributed more than any other in every way, for example, believing that the West-European front was more important than the East-European front in World War II despite only involving 10–25% of the latter's troops and 10% of its deaths, etc., etc. The Throw-Away Country trope is what happens when such writers absolutely have to mention another country.

Please note that Tropes Are Not Bad if the alternative is everything happening in New York City, Tokyo or London. It can also bring wide attention to parts of a country or the world that were previously little known by most people.

When applied to romantic plots, it tends to result in Heart Is Where the Home Is (turning down a foreign Love Interest in favor of a local lover).

See also Campbell Country, Cultural Posturing, Eagleland Osmosis, Creator's Culture Carryover, Small Reference Pools, and Hemisphere Bias. Compare and contrast Aliens in Cardiff.

Supertrope of Hollywood Provincialism. Compare Local Reference. See also Eiffel Tower Effect, where every other country is symbolized by a single building.

---

Examples:

• Comic Books
  • The DCU
  • Marvel Universe
• Literature
  • What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History

---

Advertising

• Averted with Hello Kitty and her friends. Despite her Japanese origins, she's from England according to Sanrio.

Anime and Manga

• In action series, it is seldom explained why the heroes all live in such a small area that they will all encounter each other, and why supernatural villains that attack civilians only do so in areas where the heroes will learn about it. In the most extreme examples, people from the Tokyo area proper are not treated as having a Regional Accent unless the story intentionally takes place elsewhere in the country.
  • Also, the Tokyo Dialect is used as a nationwide standard for things like formal, "accentless" speaking, and teaching. You could view it as the accents of people in other regions being illustrated as diverging from the Tokyo Standard norm.
• Fist of the North Star is about conflicts surrounding ancient Chinese martial arts in a wasteland caused by nuclear missiles launched from China, yet everyone has Japanese names and makes mention of Japanese regions when real-world locations come up, even when the comic flashes far enough into the past that the Chinese origins of these styles are shown. The sequel comic Fist of the Blue Sky is more explicitly set in China, but it also stars a more explicitly Japanese man.
• Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow: The original novel was written by Phyllis Piddington, an Australian woman who lived in Britain for some time, and is about a British family that immigrates to Australia. While Piddington wasn't involved in the production of the anime, many references to her Real Life can be seen in it.
• Sailor Moon is especially guilty of this, with the only time it was justified being the second half of season 2, as the villains were from the future and were trying to alter Tokyo. It gets pretty ridiculous in later seasons when the villains are looking for a particular object inside of humans and somehow never decide to target people outside of Tokyo. Then again, it's kind of hard to think any other town could have so many supernatural shenanigans going on when the 30th-century Moon Kingdom is Tokyo. The most ridiculous part is that whoever IS carrying what they're looking for will, without fail, be in Tokyo. (At least we can kinda fanwank that the villains had it on good authority somehow that Tokyo was the place to look for Whatever.) And 99.9% of the time, it's likely to be carried by one or more of the senshi.
• Bleach: The afterlife is Edo Japan with ghosts. Although there are indications that the shinigami and quincies cover the whole world in their fight against hollows, everything centers around Japan. Even characters that seem to be from other countries all behave like Japanese characters and are based in either Japan or the Japanese afterlife. In fact, despite the hints that Hollows affect the entire world, there are no hints at all that the afterlife is anything but Japanese.
  • That said, Quincies' equipment has a European style and the names of their powers are all German. Similarly, Hollows are Spanish flavored.
  • In addition, the entirety of the human world, except for a few scenes in Mexico and a flashback somewhere vaguely in Europe, is Karakura Town. Not even Japan, just this one city. Hollows seem to only attack Karakura, and Soul Reapers only seem to visit Karakura.
  • Surprisingly subverted when a Western branch of Soul Society was shown: since the action took place primarily in England, any and all things soul-related take on more of a sorcery motif rather than Eastern tradition. This is part of the reason its reveal as the setting for Burn the Witch was so effective.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the setting is strictly limited to Japan, despite the leader and progenitor of all demons, Muzan Kibutsuji, having lived for nearly 1000 years with plenty of room to spread his demonic blood all over the world when Japan began to open its borders to foreigners under American instigation; accordingly, the Demon Slayer Corps never had the chance to spread internationally. The author keeps the conflict fairly small by introducing a long-lasting paranoia that makes Muzan not willing to make too many demons and his own demon army often disliking each other as it is; that keeps the plot and its characters tightly focused in Japan, rooted heavily in its beliefs and culture, making easier for Gotouge Koyoharu to formulate something they know about.
• Particularly ethnocentric publishers will publish foreign-made works for profit but attempt to erase most if not all of the obviously alien elements. This has happened quite a bit with North American adaptations of anime, especially in the U.S. and Canada. In modern times, however, the only series that get truly affected are translations of Kodomomuke shows.
• Japanese manga or animated adaptations of many Western tales or novels normally avoid this for obvious reasons, but there are even some original Japanese stories when the whole plot takes place in a foreign country, and sometimes, without Japanese characters that could help to empathize with the audience. This could be justified by the recent change in Japanese attitude towards foreign culture; rather than shunning it, many Japanese people openly embrace Western culture.
  • Candy♡Candy takes place in the U.S. and England. No single Japanese character appears here. The closest to Japanese symbolism happens during the Nursing School arc: it involves Cherry Blossoms and a Cool Old Guy who dies peacefully underneath them.
  • A Dog of Flanders (1975): Averted, and that's why the setting seems so unusual. The story is set in Belgium, but since the showrunners are Japanese and have no idea how Belgium is supposed to look like. The end results come out looking like the Netherlands, with Alois wearing traditional Dutch clothing and a white sling, and Nello wearing clogs.
  • Hellsing takes place in England and some parts of Europe, and the only named Japanese character that appears is a villain.
  • Usavich takes place in Russia.
  • The 1975 anime La Seine No Hoshi is a re-telling of the French Revolution with some fictional elements here and there. The main characters are mostly French, with a Spanish side character.
  • Monster takes place in Germany and the Czech Republic. The only Japanese character is the protagonist, and even then, he's a German citizen.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure begins in Victorian England, with only two parts out of eight that take place wholly in Japan, and not a single protagonist is fully Japanese. The closest would be Jotaro Kujo and Josuke Higashikata of respectively parts 3 and 4, both being one-half Japanese. However, part 5 has several characters in Italy who hold more Japanese attitudes, such as Mista being highly superstitious about the number 4, and the main cast's initial motivation being spurred by an attitude towards drugs which is more typical of yakuza than Mafiosi.
  • Gunsmith Cats takes place in the U.S., although there are some Japanese characters out there, like Ken Takizawa.
  • Gunslinger Girl takes place in Italy with a near-exclusively European cast, with one girl from Tunisia/Northern Africa.
  • Hello! Sandybell takes place all over Europe, mainly Scotland, England, France and Greece. There's no mention of Japan, and the series is styled like a Western Animation as well.
  • Laura, the Prairie Girl is a Japanese anime adapting an American novel about American Midwestern life. That being said, the original novel is quite popular there.
  • Blassreiter takes place in Germany, with a Japanese character appearing on it.
  • Heroman takes place in the U.S. and just like Hellsing, the only Japanese character is a villain and a very stupid one for that matter.
  • Honey Honey takes place in Europe, and the only recurrent Asian character is an Arab Oil Sheikh who is chasing Honey.
  • Averted in Honoo no Alpen Rose. Michiyo Akaishi is Japanese, but the anime takes place in Switzerland, then Austria, then Lichtenstein, and there are no Japanese characters. The only person of colour in the series is Louise, the Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis in Switzerland, but she doesn't make an appearance in the anime.
  • The Rose of Versailles is a manga about the French Revolution written by a Japanese woman, Riyoko Ikeda, and there are no Japanese characters. When the anime aired in France, the French loved it, and she even received a Legion d'Honneur award!
  • Attack on Titan: The characters are mostly Caucasian, with only Mikasa being of (half)-Asian descent, and she is implied to be the last of her ethnicity within the Walls. The most widely accepted interpretation of the published maps, interestingly, places the action in Madagascar, assuming that it's actually on Earth at all.
  • Cyborg 009 takes place at locations all over the world, and only one of the nine cyborgs is Japanese. The rest of the team is Russian, American (2), French, German, Chinese, British, and African.
  • Power Dolls (at least in the anime OVAs) has a sci-fi version of this trope: Despite the plot of the whole franchise taking place on a different planet from Earth, all the characters have a stated Earth ethnicity, as the characters are descendants from Earth colonists. Oddly enough, the main heroines, Fan and Yao, have Chinese ancestry and while there's a character with Japanese ancestry (Nami Takasu), she is a minor character.
  • An aversion: Yona of the Dawn takes place in the fantasy version of Korea, which is an achievement by itself taking into account the author is Japanese.
  • Little Witch Academia: The main heroine Akko Kagari is the only thing linking this series with Japan, as the whole plot takes place in England. Curiously though, the titular academy seems to follow the Japanese school year, with first-term picking up in April. Another example: 'Pohjola's Ordeal' of the TV series is set in Finland, Lotte's home country, however, her parents say itadakimasu before a meal, which is customary in Japan but unheard of in Finland (unless it's Translation Convention).
  • The plot of The Promised Neverland takes place in an English-speaking country and almost all of the characters are westerners, with the sole exception of a couple of characters with Japanese names.
  • Nobara no Julie is a Shoujo anime that takes place in post-World War One Austria. Despite none of the staff being Austrian, they really Show Their Work with several details regarding Vienna.
  • Isabelle of Paris takes place in 1870s France and England and focuses on the Franco-Prussian war. Despite the work being from Japan, there aren't any Japanese characters and the only person of colour in the cast is Irma (who's a Romani woman).
  • World Masterpiece Theater runs on this, since it's a Japanese studio that adapts Western literature into anime.
  • The Secret Garden takes place in India, and then England. The staff behind it is fully Japanese; however, it takes clues from the novel it's based on, which was written by an English woman.
• A particularly bizarre one in the Free Fight manga: at one point the fight commentator goes off on a tangent about morality, mentioning businessmen paying high school girls for sex. Except the fight is taking place in the US, where the practice of paid dating doesn't exist.
• Kill la Kill is set for the most part in Japan, and when the Big Bad's global plan is finally enacted, other world countries only get a passing mention at best. The final battle is set in low Earth orbit, but even then, Japan is the only country that can be seen, with the rest of the planet being covered by Life Fibers.
• Zig-zagged by the old anime Tondemo Senshi Muteking, which is set in the US, more specifically in San Francisco, and takes a good deal of inspiration from the American culture of the time (roller skating, cop shows, and so on). However, halfway through the series the main characters move to Japan and stay there for the remainder of the episodes.
• Black Lagoon: The manga is set in a fictional Thai city, with an extremely multicultural cast (one Japanese guy, one Chinese-American girl, two American guys, Russian, Chinese, Italian and South American mobsters...). The trope still shines through in an early arc where the heroes face a band of white neo-Nazis who display the kind of comedy behavior associated with Japanese Delinquents (exaggerated Manly Tears, etc.), and later, when the cast has to deal with the Yakuza in the "Fujiyama Gangsta's Paradise" arc.
• Gundam:
  • The colonies from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, despite having residents with Western names and architecture, have the vehicles' steering wheel be found on the right, rather than on the left.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has the terraformed planet of Mars which features vehicles being of RHD variety.
• Lucky Star and K-On!'s animated adaptations have the characters go to Kyoto for a Class Trip, with nice Kyoto Real Place Backgrounds to give it that extra sense of flair, thanks to the locale of Kyoto Animation, the studio who did the adaptations. Gets particularly weird with K-On! specifically because some of the settings in the girls' hometown are also taken from Kyoto, despite the fact they have to travel to visit Kyoto, implying they don't live there.
• P. A. Works are very fond of setting their works in their native Toyama prefecture, even those with aliens and fantasy monsters. Some of them get bonus points for being set in their hometown, Johana/Nanto.
  • True Tears is set in the town of Johana, where the studio was based until it was amalgamated with other nearby places into Nanto in 2004.
  • Kuromukuro is mainly set in Kurobe and Takayama, but the prefecture seat and Nanto also get a chance to shine, and the aliens even destroy the newly-built studio building in Nanto.
  • Manoyama in Sakura Quest is quite openly based on Nanto, with its station being Johana station, and the woodcarving district is based on the same in Inami, another of Nanto constituents.
• Both invoked and played straight in Re:CREATORS. The fictional characters (or "Creations") that came to life in the real world are all based on in-universe Japanese properties, because the one who brought them was herself a Creation drawn by a young Japanese doujin artist, so she brought the ones her author was most familiar with. Played straight because, when in the end the entire world is in danger, nobody outside our heroes and the Japanese government is ever shown to care (or know) about it.
• In Space Battleship Yamato 2199, the known crew of the Yamato is entirely Japanese, even though the Yamato belongs to the United Nations Cosmo Navy (and thus makes one think that there would be at least one non-Japanese crew member)
• Exaggerated in Space Patrol Luluco, where Ogikubo (where Studio TRIGGER makes base) becomes an interstellar immigration hub. Then taken further when Ogikubo and only Ogikubo gets packaged up for sale, and even further when it's revealed every planet in the show's star system has one of its own. The clincher has to be when Luluco goes to Hell, and the background is just a color-filtered version of outside the Studio Trigger office.
• Black Clover is set in a Western-style medieval fantasy world, and as such most characters are Caucasian, with a few having dark skin. However, Captain Yami is stated to come "from the East", has a distinctly Japanese name, grew up as a fisherman, goes to festivals in a happi and sells fried squid at them, wields a katana, and teaches Asta about the concept of Ki.
• RobiHachi takes this and runs with it. Despite the galaxy being made up of many races besides humans, Japanese appears to be the only human language that has official status across it. Hostess bars, an exclusively East Asian phenomenon in real life, are widespread. There's a planet of aliens who are obsessed with anime, and the resort planet of Isekandar resembles a Japanese tourist town, with shops selling exclusively Japanese foods and souvenirs and its chief attraction, a giant glowing alien crystal, being housed in a building with all the trappings of a Shinto shrine. In fact, most of the planets the main trio visit along the way are Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of various Japanese towns and cities.
• Boarding School Juliet has a rather odd case. The nations of Touwa and Westia, Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of Japan and Italy, respectively, hate each other, and the inhabitants of each country are stated to be equally as racist toward the other. However, while most of the Westians, barring some of the main characters, are shown in practice to be racist assholes, the Touwans are only shown to be delinquents or stern traditionalists whose prejudice hardly comes close to the Westians. This is best exemplified in a scene where a diplomat from each country visits Dahlia Academy—the Westian is openly rude and nasty toward the Touwan students while the Touwan diplomat is portrayed as contemplative and wise.
• The movie Promare takes place in a metropolitan American city implied to be a stand-in for Los Angeles, and is localized entirely in America and stars American characters. However, Galo's fire-fighting Mini-Mecha is based on ancient Japanese firefighting gear and he even spends some time gushing about how those ancient firefighters are so cool and how they exhibit the ideal firefighting spirit.
• Kengan Ashura's Kengan organization, despite drawing from a pool of fighters around the world, seems to be overwhelmingly Japanese in terms of where those fighters are coming from: the Annihilation tournament has a total of eight non-Japanese fighters out of a pool of 32. This is somewhat justified by the fact that the Kengan tournaments are an originally Japanese institution, but even then, it stands out when it's specifically acknowledged in Okubo's backstory that Japanese fighters are considered something of a dark horse in the series's equivalent to MMA.
• Record of Ragnarok: Approximately half of the Einherjar are Japanese or Chinese, and would likely be obscure to any non-Asian without an interest in history. Averted with the gods, whose fighters tend to favor the Greek and Norse mythologies with a few outliers.
• Undead Unluck is a mixed example - Deuteragonist Fuuko is Japanese, but the other main character, Andy's nationality is unknown, and the rest of the Union is a Multi National Team who go on missions all over the world.
• Lady!! is about a half-Japanese girl named Lynn who lives in England. Yōko Hanabusa is a fully Japanese woman, but she did travel to England once to get an idea for the story^note She confirms it in the author's notes of the final manga chapter. Word of God is that Lynn was made half-Japanese so Japanese readers could understand her predicament.

Fan Works

• Everything she deserved: The fic seems to take place in LA, but everyone uses Commonwealth English like "maths" and "jumper" (in reference to a sweater).
• Among its other alterations to canon, Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami immediately establishes the story as being in the US rather than in Japan when Light notices that a car cannot be American because it does not have the wheel on the same side.
• This fic looks at the reasons for this trope's use in the Michael Bay-related films within the Transformers Film Series, by asking why there are differences at all. "White American male" is seen as the dominant subculture, but in this case, it's still a conscious choice—and, sadly, probably the right one, because it's the one that most people are subconsciously more likely to accept.
• Most Neighbours fanfics are set in the fictional suburb of Melbourne that the show itself is set in. Jack Rudd's fic When Winter Shows Her Hand is set in the mostly obscure English town of Yeovil. Guess which town Jack Rudd grew up in.
• My Immortal does this constantly. For starters, Hot Topic doesn't even have a branch in the UK. Every band mentioned is very American, and it is considered notable that Harry/Vampire has an English accent (not even bothering to tell us what kind of English accent). The entire "prep" subculture is American, the closest UK equivalent to "preps" being "sloanes", more or less. There's also the fact that the timescale is messed up.
• Hoyle's Rules of Dragon Poker: The game, purportedly from another dimension, has an awful lot of references to US/British media.
• Almost no modern-day Frozen AUs take place in Norway. America is the default by far. Occasionally you will get a reference that they are of Norwegian descent or were born in Norway but it's rare. Even their fanon surnames are very un-Norwegian.
• The Albedo: Erma Felna EDF / Katmandu / Ace Combat Crossover fic Liberi Fatalis: The Theriantrope Chronicles is an interesting case. While the author is Mexican, the entire fic is written in English, in at least the Earth parts of the story, most of the story takes place in many countries, and only a very few parts of the story take in Mexico, mainly a very brief part in Act XXIII that take place in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a town near the American border, and a Mexican bartender appears in Act XXV. Other than that, besides most of the story happens outside Earth, most of all the human-based narrative takes place in either the U.S.^note Mainly in Texas, Arizona, New York, New Mexico, Delaware, Massachusetts, Indiana and Kentucky. Japan^note Tokyo, Osaka, Naha, a fictitious town in Okinawa, Hiroshima, Kanagawa, Nagoya, and Okayama. Germany^note Berlin, Frankfurt and Offenbach., China^note Northern China, also known as Manchuria/Manchukuo during World War II, Taiwan^note Kaohsiung, Greenland^note Narsarsuaq., Israel^note Haifa., Russia^note Moscow. and an unified Korean peninsula ^note Pyongyang. so far. Also, all the characters from Strangereal are treated as Earth citizens, with their nationalities matching the ethnic origin of their names.
• Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction takes place in Dallas, as opposed to Black Mesa or City 17 because Peter Chimaera's friend lives there.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: subverted and lampshaded. Although the action takes place mostly in Britain, many heroes have non-British ancestry, or have immigrated. British wizards think of themselves as of "the greatest magic nation in the world", but it is implied on multiple occasions that other regions of the world, from Asia to North America, have their own well-developed wizard communities and rich history, which is only tangentially related to the history of Magic Britain. When on the Hermione's trial Harry scares a dementor, this makes news all over the English-speaking wizarding world, except for the United States. The American Wizard is more concerned with wirewolves supposedly being the first historical population of Wyoming.

Films — Animation

• The overwhelming majority of films in the Disney Animated Canon take place in either North America or Europe. Also, 101 Dalmatians is the only European-set film to take place in The Present Day. When it comes to specific identifiable countries, the ones most frequently depicted are, by a huge margin, The United States and Great Britain. France, where five films take place, is in a distant third spot.
• Lampshaded in The Book of Life, with light-hearted jokes and references to Mexico as the center of the universe. Even the country itself has a mustache.
• All the dogs in Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs have English names written in Western characters on their collars, despite the film being set in Japan and often using untranslated Japanese for the human characters.
• Luca: Director Enrico Casarosa was born in Genova and moved to the USA in his twenties. The film is set in a fictional town in the Italian region of Liguria, where Genova is situated.
• Despite Turning Red being made in the United States, the film takes place in Toronto, Canada, since it's where writer/director Domee Shi is from.
• Anime film Pompo: The Cinéphile does a good job of depicting the United States, however, the characters are seen bowing to one another several times, and Gene's behavior at the end is a fairly standard depiction of Japanese Spirit.
• The Polar Express begins and ends in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the hometown of its original writer Chris Van Allsburg.

Films — Live-Action

• Most Japanese Godzilla (and Godzilla-related) movies take place in Japan. This is generally explained as Godzilla making his home in Japan, so many kaiju end up going there to defeat Godzilla and have free reign over the rest of the world. As a result, kaiju often seems to be a specifically Japanese problem. Exceptions include Godzilla: Final Wars and Destroy All Monsters. Some films include other nations joining together to create anti-Godzilla kaiju.
• The American Godzilla films Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla (2014) take place primarily in the United States.
• Played straight and lampshaded in District 9. One of the talking-heads in the Mockumentary section specifically says when aliens landed on Earth, they 'did not land in New York' as they do in most Hollywood blockbusters. Instead, they land in South Africa, the country of origin for most of the cast and crew.
• Every movie by John Waters is set in Baltimore.
• There were very strong ties between M. Night Shyamalan and Pennsylvania (Philadelphia in particular) in his earlier films. In fact, only The Last Airbender, After Earth and Old are not explicitly set there.
• Actor Vince Vaughn tends to use his weight as a box office draw to get his films set in his hometown of Chicago. There have been a few exceptions, but he usually gets his way.
• The Man Who Saves the World: "Two Turkish pilots and some other people went off to battle."
• Masked Luchador films (e.g., El Santo's Santo contra la invasión de los marcianos) generally treat Mexico as the most important city in the world. Whenever aliens invade the Earth, they invariably land near Mexico City.
• Todd Solondz's movies are almost always in New Jersey, but he doesn't seem to LIKE New Jersey, judging from the movies.
• All of the TV shows and films in Kevin Smith's The View Askewniverse are set in his hometown of Monmouth County, New Jersey.
• The majority of George A. Romero's films have been either set or filmed in Western Pennsylvania.
• A lot of Richard Linklater's films take place in or have been shot in Texas.
• Almost all of Woody Allen's films take place in New York City or feature New Yorkers. When the city became too expensive to film in, however, he later dropped the favoritism and started making films set all around the world.
• Writer/director Shane Meadows sets almost all of his films in The Midlands of England, where he is from.
• The Farrelly brothers frequently set their films in Rhode Island (where they grew up) or elsewhere in New England.
• Practically all of John Hughes's movies are set in Illinois, typically either in Chicago, or in a fictional city or suburb damn close to Chicago.
• The Coen Brothers are from St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. While they have set their films throughout the United States, Fargo is a love letter to rural Minnesota and A Serious Man takes place in suburban Minneapolis around the time the Coens were kids.
• The November Man: By the end of the movie, Mira breaks the big story about Hanley and Federov's schemes to the world news — which apparently means the New York Times, and none of the other major world news networks. And she's not even a US national.
• Almost all of Alexander Payne's films are set and filmed in Omaha.
• Director Peter Jackson is famous for filming all his movies in New Zealand, even stories set in the US (and especially Middle Earth). While Jackson traveled to New York City before filming King Kong (2005) and visited the Empire State Building, the entire movie itself was filmed in New Zealand. The only times he's ever left New Zealand and filmed elsewhere has been some filming in Pennsylvania he did for The Lovely Bones and filming Christopher Lee and Ian Holm's scenes at Pinewood in London in The Hobbit, as the health of both actors was too frail for them to travel to Wellington.
• Shane Black usually sets his movies in Los Angeles (both written, such as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, and directed, including Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys), where he's lived since high school. One of the few aversions, The Long Kiss Goodnight, still fits for opening in Black's home state of Pennsylvania.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • While Iron Man is based on New York in the comics, the movies place him in California instead - from the headquarters of Marvel Comics to one of Marvel Studios.
  • In the comics, Peter Quill is from Colorado. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) makes him a native of the same Missouri as writer-director James Gunn.
  • Killmonger grew up in Harlem in the comics, but Black Panther (2018) had Ryan Coogler make him hail from his hometown of Oakland.
• Into the Forest: The original novel is set in a redwood forest in Northern California, but the Canadian film adaptation takes place in a rainy Canadian forest, not that you're likely to notice.
• U-571 infamously told the heroic story of the American capture of a working enigma machine from the titular Nazi U-boat. The real event the film was based on was the British capture of U-110, which occurred before America had even entered the war.
• Tyler Perry always sets his films in Atlanta.
• Multiple films of Francis Lee's are set and filmed in rural Yorkshire, where he grew up.
• The Third Saturday In October Part V and The Third Saturday In October Part I were made by indie filmmakers from Alabama. They both take place in small Alabama towns around where the filmmakers lived.

Literature

• In K. A. Applegate's Animorphs, it's not really made clear what's going on outside the States during the entirety of the war. We know that at least one major head of state outside the U.S. is a Controller (the President of the U.S. isn't, though), but except for, like, four missions outside the country, the kids mostly ignore everything beyond U.S. borders. Or more than a day's journey from their hometown, for that matter. In this case, the trope is justified, since a group of kids too young to drive would have no way to leave their town, much less their country, without alerting adults to their secret mission. It's also justified in that their general area was one of the first places the Yeerks landed.
• One of the oldest ones in the book - H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Martian invasion nearly succeeds, with the world only being saved when germs cause the invaders' demise. With a whole planet to invade, the Martians pick north London. Mostly justified, as it was the capital of the world's biggest superpower of the time. However, the invasion only actually covers a small part of the Home Counties, culminating in a chase into and partial evacuation of London. Most of Britain remains untouched (and resistance has actually been quite successful so far) while the rest of the world is unlikely to even be aware anything has happened, but Wells' home region being conquered is treated as if the entire world has fallen. However, he freely enjoys letting the Martians destroy specific places where he spent an unhappy childhood.
• Brian Jacques, the author of the Redwall series, is a born-and-bred Liverpudlian. His multitude of jobs has led him through a multitude of Western English countrysides, and he (self-admittedly) shows off these anglicisms throughout the setting of his books and their characters (complete with Highlanders, Somerset natives and West-coast seafarers). In all but name, actually.
• The Anita Blake books place St Louis at their center.
• Apart from three scenes, Shaman of the Undead takes place solely in Wrocław, and it sometimes looks as if there are no wizards outside Poland.
• Stephen King sets the majority of his stories in his native Maine, and more specifically the town of Derry, with seven books set in the town and an additional seventeen referencing the town by name. And when he started spending part of the year in Florida, he started setting some of his stories there. Several books were set in or around Boulder, Colorado when he lived in Colorado for a while. All of them are set in the U.S. (except the ones set in fantasy worlds that are often implied to be parallel versions of America) and his entire body of work has only three notable non-American characters, the British-born Richard Straker in 'Salem's Lot, the English Nick Hopewell in The Langoliers and the German Kurt Dussander in Apt Pupil.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Narnia proper has a lot of English culture (possibly due to the first King and Queen of Narnia being a London cabbie and his wife), even among the Talking Animals, and English food — even animals that should be vegetarian will cook and eat fish or bacon. C. S. Lewis also depicts Middle Eastern food in Calormen. He makes it clear that the homesick Narnians think it's distasteful foreign muck — or at least gives the impression of being nothing but dessert courses — but points out that "You might not have liked it, but Shasta did." Shasta grew up in Calormen. The books were written before Middle Eastern food became popular in the UK.
• The Divine Comedy gives the impression that the entire universe is structured with respect to Medieval Italy and The Roman Empire. Notably, the lowest level of hell is shared by Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, because Dante saw the fall of Rome as a sin near the depravity of the betrayal of Christ.
• In the Dragaera books, the Eastern Kingdoms are heavily based on Hungary. Author Steven Brust is very proud of his Hungarian ancestry.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Deathly Hallows, Voldemort conquers all of wizarding Britain, which is essentially treated as though it were the same thing as conquering the whole world. Throughout the series, he fights a war to Take Over the World in which practically everyone on both sides is British (a few foreign wizards on Voldemort's side notwithstanding). Australia is assumed to be safe since Hermione sent her parents there. We can only guess whether Britain is the wizarding world's superpower and/or still rules over the Wizarding British Empire, or Voldemort taking over Britain is a prelude to a bid for world domination, or that the only reason it's bad is that the heroes live in Britain.
  • The vast majority of creatures in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are native to the British Isles, and some are specifically described as unique to a particular county, isle, or forest. Meanwhile, beasts native to other continents are seldom given a more specific home range than "China", "Peru", or even "Africa". The foreword explains that the list in the book is not comprehensive, and Scamander is writing for British wizards, so in-universe it would be reasonable for him to show provincialism.
  • Quidditch Through the Ages notes that there are dozens of teams from other places such as the US and South America but these wizards are never referenced in the books ever. Apparently, during the whole series, they decided it wasn't really that important to butt in. And Goblet of Fire introduces two other wizarding schools in France and Norway with equal prestige to Hogwarts, which only receive minor references in the rest of the series.
  • The Expanded Universe map of the wizarding schools betrays a very English and pop-cultural view of world geography:
    • Europe has a disproportionate amount of the major eleven wizarding schools, with three serving a population of under three-quarters of a billion. There's one the Northeastern US that serves North America, one in Brazil for South America, another in Japan, and one in Uganda, and three unknown.^note  Although one has been implied to be in Australia This means the British Isles (around seventy million inhabitants) and the entirety of Africa (1.3 billion) both need just one school, and there are, at most, three schools for the 4.4 billion of continental Asia.
    • The map also throws countries together without much regard to culture or history (though in all fairness, the wizards in the books don't typically pay Muggle politics much attention): there are such howlers as the Koreans being lumped together with the Japanese,^note Korea is a traditional enemy of Japan and was under Japanese military occupation from 1910 to 1945. One supposes one should be thankful Pottermore's writers didn't try to add China in there, too. and India being lumped with China.^note One school for two very different countries with over a billion people each, plus all the surrounding countries like Pakistan, Thailand, and Mongolia, none of which has much in common with the two big ones. Mexico has far more in common with the rest of Latin America than with the United States, and Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have more in common with each other than with the US (Potterverse Canada) or Malaysia and Indonesia (Potterverse Oz and NZ).
  • Also somewhat lampshaded in Goblet, when Harry realizes how stupid he was for not realizing there must be wizards in other countries too.
  • Before Voldemort, the dark wizard Grindelwald was incredibly feared. His influence didn't seem to have reached England though, and the most impact his reign seemed to have was his defeat being a bit of trivia on the back of Dumbledore's Chocolate Frog card. It's inverted in the seventh book, where Krum's reaction to Grindelwald's sign (actually the symbol of the Deathly Hallows) indicates that wizards in his home country Bulgaria still remember all too well the damage done by Grindelwald (he says Grindelwald murdered his grandfather), to the point where students who draw the symbol on walls as a joke tend to get beaten up by the descendants of Grindelwald's victims.
  • Although with Grindelwald, it could be due to Voldemort's greater extremism (and Rowling herself said that his downfall in 1945 was intentionally done, drawing parallels between him and the Nazis).
  • Even within a British context, Harry Potter is very provincial. Aside from the undisclosed location in Scotland where Hogwarts is located, virtually all the important places in the story are in the extreme south of England. Harry lives in Surrey, Ron lives in Devon, and Malfoy lives in Wiltshire. The first third of Deathly Hallows takes Harry from Surrey to Devon, then to London for a couple of chapters, a few chapters in nondescript woodland, and then to a fictional West Country village, then to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, then back to Devon, then to Wiltshire, and finally to Shell Cottage, in Cornwall, before finally going to Gringotts in London, and then Hogwarts. For those keeping track, 95% of their England-spanning journey takes place in the West Country. J.K. Rowling grew up in the area.
  • There are two scenes in the last book that take place in Central Europe. Voldemort murders a German-speaking family (although it’s not said if it’s in Germany itself or another German-speaking country) in his search for the Elder Wand towards the beginning of the book and then he goes to Grindelwald’s prison which is in Austria at about the 2/3 mark of the book.
  • There's finally an attempt at expanding the wizarding world with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie, set in 1920s New York City... even if it was filmed in England and starring predominantly British actors. The sequel did the same, set in Paris but even the characters are mostly Brits.
  • Pointed out by Harry when he discovers that Voldemort has created six Horcruxes and hidden them to ensure his immortality. Harry immediately remarks the Horcruxes could be hidden anywhere in the world for all they know and would be impossible to ever find. As it turns out, none of them were outside the United Kingdom. Only one of them was even outside of England. Though somewhat justified in that Voldemort is English, and due to his massive ego hid his Horcruxes in locations that had personal importance to him rather than pragmatically hiding them in random places far away.
• It's implied in The Hunger Games series that the people of Panem represent the entire human race since no other country other than Panem is mentioned in the narration. Panem itself is located in a severely reduced North American continent.
• The Discworld is vast and large, but Terry Pratchett's British outlook comes through very clearly. Fantasy Counterpart Cultures are depicted based on British attitudes to their real-world inspirations, and the most significant locations, Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, and the Chalk, are based on locations in England. (The Chalk in particular is Terry's home county of Wiltshire, while Lancre is a cross between Oop North and his childhood memories of Buckinghamshire. Ankh-Morpork is mostly London, although it has elements of every big city).
  • An in-universe example in Mrs. Bradshaw's Guidebook to the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygenic Railway, which assumes that its readers will be starting their journeys at New Ankh Station, rather than travelling from, say, Sto Helit to the Great Wahoonie.
• Historically, a disproportionate number of gay-themed romances written in the US took place in California or New England. This started to change in 2015 with the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.
• Robert A. Heinlein was so terrified of doing this that he only set his novels in places that he had personally visited, or were completely made up. He did write a bit about Mars, but his depictions thereof probably fall into the last category.
• In the illustrated children's book series Barbapapa, when the titular character returns from a space trip looking for a partner, we are shown Europe with only one point of reference: the Eiffel Tower. Three guesses where the author lived...
  Harry: All my stuff is there.
• In The Dark is Rising everything important in the grand struggle for world dominion between good and evil apparently occurs in Great Britain (Ireland doesn't even come into it), specifically in three tiny villages in Cornwall, Buckinghamshire and Wales; even Scotland is only mentioned in two sentences over a five-book series. The U.S. is irrelevant except that (1) one of the main characters has an uncle who emigrated there and (2) the U.S. sends back its share of magically clueless tourists to the U.K. (represented by the aforementioned uncle's American wife). Lastly, while there are Old Ones (the race of magical servants of the Light/good wizards) all over the world, the ones in countries other than the U.K. don't do anything except show up as part of a crowd in visions that our British Old One hero occasionally has, and one Jamaican Old One posts a magical MacGuffin back to our hero in England. Rome is mentioned, but only in relation to the Roman invasion of Britain, and India is only relevant because there's one scene in the last novel where one of the heroes defends a British Indian child (the son of immigrant parents) from some bullies.
• The most commonly used flume on the Earth territories in The Pendragon Adventure is in The Bronx, a quick drive away from the main character's hometown of Stony Brook, New York. The other was created during the series, and it is in Stony Brook, itself. The author, D.J. MacHale, was born there. This is later justified in the tenth book. Saint Dane created the flumes, and the Travelers were created in order to combat him. It made sense to put them in places where they had easy access to a flume.
• The works of Robert Rankin see myriad supernatural disasters threaten the world, most of which are centered on the London borough of Brentford, also notable as the area in which one Robert Rankin spent his childhood.
• Night Watch (Series) is a lot like the Harry Potter series. While magical persons are not restricted to the author's homeland (in this case Russia), everything important happens there, and while Geser and Zabulon are only the heads of the Light and Dark Others of Moscow, in practice, they function as the leaders of Light and Darkness in general.
• According to Jodi Picoult, New England is full of sick or neglected children, Knight Templar Parents and various lonely lawyers with dysfunctional backgrounds. Picoult was born on Long Island, NY and later moved to New Hampshire.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Despite revolving around Greek gods, the first book in the series is set in the modern US. The farthest place away from the US that the series shows is when Percy dreams of seeing Rachel spelling messages on a nondescript Caribbean beach (her family is vacationing there). Justified in the first book, where Percy is told that the Greek gods relocate to whoever happens to be the current Western powerhouse at the moment.
  • Sister series The Kane Chronicles seems to follow in THO's footsteps, as it breaks the provincialism from day one: the first book opens in London, the second has the heroes visit Saint Petersburg and Egypt, while the final book, with the exception of the prologue and epilogue, takes place entirely in Egypt, which to the present day still acts as the capital of the Egyptian gods, unlike the Greeks. Oh, and Sadie is British too, and this fact is even reflected in her narration, which uses British English.
  • However, the other sister series, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard seems to have fallen back to this trope, as it's said that Boston, due to a peculiar history with the Vikings, is the word-to-word Hub of the universe, or rather, the Nine Worlds. The human main characters also fall into this, as both Magnus and Sam are (Bostonian) Americans. Although, this is not as obvious as the PJTO series by virtue of not playing Boston highly at all; most of the events happen in other worlds parallel to Boston, probably because Magnus is dead.
• The Dresden Files may seem to suffer from this; for the first six books of the series or so, it seems like Chicago is the site of all the supernatural threats and disasters in the country, and every major supernatural power in the world has a vacation home or bunker there. Then the seventh book reveals that Harry and the reader were almost completely oblivious to a major Secret War (that started in Chicago, but anyway...) and some very important action has been happening on other continents. Additionally, the strongest of factions are noted for having a presence everywhere, Chicago simply being the place that Harry Dresden has "jurisdiction" over; and Harry ends up leaving the area for important, climactic battles at least a couple of times in later books. Also, it's explicitly noted in the books that Chicago (and the Lake Michigan area generally) are supernaturally unusual, the area is thick with ley-lines and strange things that were present from time immemorial, and furthermore, the role of Chicago as a global 'cross-roads' as amplified the effect. Ironically, series creator Jim Butcher never visited Chicago until he finished the first book. He lived in a suburb of Kansas City at the time and is now located outside of Denver, Colorado.
• Another Chicago example would be the Divergent series. Forget the world, forget the U.S., forget even the freaking Midwest. The series never ever steps outside of Chicago City as defined today (i.e. most of Cook County and a sliver of DuPage County to house the O'Hare airport), even though the series is set in a distant future. If we go by characters, however, there are a handful who are explicitly stated not to be Chicagoan: Nita, who came from Indy and Natalie Prior, and thus her children Tris and Caleb, who are Milwaukeeans.
• A subtle example: The Marîd Audran novels by George Alec Effinger are cyberpunk books with an unusual Arabic setting; most of the action takes place in the Levant. However, the books' main metropolis, the Budayeen, and its inhabitants are patterned after the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Effinger lived. It's particularly clear in the characters' dialect, which will be familiar to New Orleanians or fans of A Confederacy of Dunces.
• Skulduggery Pleasant takes place in Ireland. Mostly around Dublin. It is apparently the "birthplace" of magic, and impliedly has more magical artifacts, happenings, and general weird stuff happening than anyplace else on Earth. Many nations would like to gain control of it, with the US usually mentioned.
• The Nuala Anne McGrail novels start in Ireland (Nuala is a somewhat psychic woman from there, by ancestry) and move to Chicago. They were written by an Irish-American priest who lives in Chicago.
• In Xanth, the Fantasy World Map is in the shape of Florida, where Piers Anthony lives.
  • Began to be averted later in the series when the connection to "Mundania" has shifted variously to Korea and Italy (notably during the Punic Wars), and it's shown that Mundanes who enter Xanth will perceive it as being the same shape as whichever peninsula they entered from. It's still usually Florida, though. Anyone from the modern era who enters Xanth will by definition do so from Florida.
• All of the central characters of the Mediochre Q Seth Series live in Edinburgh, Scotland (although, interestingly, none of them have lived there all their life). The author is Scottish and grew up in Edinburgh. Lampshaded in the About the Author section of the first book.
• 1066 and All That is simultaneously a history of England and a spoof of “history” as taught in English schools. As such, the book says that (East) Indian History began in the 18th century and that The American Revolution (led by Dick Whittington) "prevented America from having any more History."
• Most of Meg Cabot's books either take place in New York, where she lives, or Indiana, where she grew up.
• Most of The House of Night series takes place in Tulsa, which is where the authors live. This becomes a bit silly when it's implied in one book that of all the House of Nights all around the world, including various famous historic sites in Europe, Aphrodite's socially-conscious ladder-climbing parents consider it far more prestigious for her to attend the House of Night in Tulsa.
• Myth Adventures: The series takes place on several dimensions, none of which are Earth, but all the pop-culture references are from 20th century America. The same is true for the game based on the books. See Fan Works.
• The Genesis of Jenny Everywhere manages to combine both this and Where the Hell Is Springfield? with the heroine's hometown of Levendale City- clearly as English as it possibly can be, with a few minor dialect hints suggesting it's the north-east bit. Based loosely on the River Leven (a tributary of the Tees) near where the author lives (there's even a real Levendale, but it's just a small suburb) and a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire he visited as a kid.
• Kerstin Pflieger does this with her fantasy novels - apparently, the most important vampire village is somewhere in the Black Forest, and the device that prevents humans from being overrun by supernatural creatures is located in Heidelberg. The organisation that researches paranormal activity operates in different German cities, but no mention is made of other countries in Europe. However, as Germans read lots of translated American novels, this doesn't lead to the question of why the supernatural never happens elsewhere, but rather to a kind of satisfaction that, after all, supernatural things can happen in Germany, too.
• Extreme example in The Chemical Garden Trilogy; everywhere except America has been destroyed offstage. Sever suggests this might not be entirely true, though.
• Horrible Histories: Many volumes discuss historical periods from a British perspective, like the Saxons, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Georgians. When pupils are depicted they always wear the mandatory school uniforms as is a custom in the British Educational System.
• A good portion of Colleen McCullough's books are set in her native Australia.
• Every Nicholas Sparks book (and the vast majority of the subsequent movies) is set in North Carolina, where he's from.
• Author Erich Segal set many of his books in Brooklyn (specifically, the neighborhood of Midwood), where he grew up, and/or Harvard University, where he went to college.
• Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw takes place in Brisbane, which was the city the author lived in prior to August 2016.
• Maeve Binchy set all but one of her books in her native Ireland. And the one that wasn't — Nights Of Rain And Stars — still featured a cast of Irish people.
• Up until the third book, The Mortal Instruments series takes place exclusively in New York City, and all of the main characters, with the exception of Magnus, are New Yorkers too. The third book, City of Glass, finally averts this as it introduces Idris, a fictional European country sandwiched between France, Germany, and Switzerland, and the homeworld of the Shadowhunters. However, most of the (main) series alternate only between these two locations, up until Los Angeles is seen, if only briefly, in City of Heavenly Fire.
  • Its prequel series, The Infernal Devices, completely averts this. Even though the main protagonist is an American, the entire series is set in the United Kingdom, and her new friends (and villains) are therefore British. It also doesn't go through Small Reference Pools by only showing London either, as it actually shows a bit more pieces of land, including, believe it or not, Wales!
  • Downplayed in The Bane Chronicles which still has a preference for New York, but also shows some other places (six of the short stories take place in New York, two take place in London, one takes place in Paris and one takes place in Peru).
• The Bookworld as depicted in the Thursday Next series is not only the English language part (areas in other languages are only briefly mentioned), but practically all of the characters, books, and tropes depicted are limited to England specifically, with very few references to American authors and books, let alone works not originally in English (only War and Peace and The Trial are shown explicitly).
• With the exception of the novella The Devil Delivered, all of Steven Erikson's non-fantasy fiction is set in Canada, where he is from.
• Whenever the action takes place on Earth in Honorverse, it's invariably in Chicago, where one of the series' coauthors, Eric Flint, lives.
• Mordecai Richler sets at least parts of nearly all his books in his hometown of Montreal.
• Joe R. Lansdale, of Bubba Ho Tep and Hap and Leonard fame, has almost everything he writes, no matter what time period, take place in Texas.
• In Dutch author Tais Teng's novel Voorbij de Zerken (Beyond the Grave), an ancient conspiracy has been guarding three MacGuffins belonging to the cult of the Sumerian goddess Tiamat (a flute that hypnotizes everyone but its user, an eyeball that can see anywhere in the universe at the cost of the user's lifespan, and a book that can turn anything that is written in it into reality). All three divine objects and the secret groups that protect them are conveniently located in the Netherlands.
• Thomas Harris's 2019 novel Cari Mora is set in Miami, where he had lived for over 3 decades (ironically, he moved there after making Florida the primary setting of Red Dragon).
• Three of Robert B. Parker's four main series (Spenser, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall) are set in Boston, where he lived. The one exception is the Cole and Hitch westerns, which for obvious reasons are not.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The lack of frostbite in Fantasyland is explained by the fact that much of the Management lives in California.
• Ludwig Thoma showed a lot of this. While his Lausbubengeschichten are indeed semi-autobiographical, Der Münchner im Himmel partly takes place in Munich where he lived for a while, with what he considered a typical Munich citizen as the protagonist.
• Remembrance of Earth's Past: With the author being Chinese, it shouldn't come as a surprise that much of the action on Earth is set in China, almost all major characters are Chinese, and most of contemporary and future human civilization has a strong Chinese tint.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero:
  • One of the main characters, Raphtalia, is a half-human, half-Tanuki girl, which wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary for the genre if wasn't for the small detail those animals are native to East Asia^note Tanuki, known as raccoon dogs in English, were introduced in Europe via Russia, but traditionally those animals are considered as a part of Japanese folklore. In some countries like Sweden, they are even considered an invasive species. and the setting of the light novels and the anime adaptation is a Medieval European Fantasy world. The only reason this trope applies is that both the author of the story and Raphtalia's master, Naofumi Iwatani, are from Japan.
  • The three other heroes that came with Naofumi were called from alternate Earths... and just so happened to be from their equivalent of Tokyo, Japan.
• Haruhi Suzumiya is set in the author's hometown, Nishinomiya. Both the light novels and the anime depict the town in sufficient detail to make it obvious where it's set, but the animators model every location in the anime after a real-life location in the town.
• KonoSuba has a spinoff chapter where Kazuma chews Aqua out on the importance of saying "itadakimasu" before meals. This phrase is a distinctly Japanese/Shinto-only ritual in real life, and the world of the light novels is a standard Medieval European fantasy world. As such, it has several fantasy religions with gods you'd expect Aqua to explicitly pray to before meals if she was going to pray to anyone at all (the perplexingness of lecturing an actual goddess on the importance of prayer notwithstanding).
• The ads featured in Jim Heimann and Alison Nieder's compilation 20th Century Fashion for Taschen, were all American, ignoring the fashion trends from other countries, specifically Western Europe.
• Robert J. Sawyer has set many of his books in or around Toronto where he's spent most of his life (Sawyer's from Ottawa). Others are nearby and still in Ontario.

Live-Action TV

In General:

• Regarding telenovelas, most Brazilian soap operas take place in Rio de Janeiro (HQ of the biggest TV network, TV Globo) or São Paulo (where the other major networks are located).
• In Denmark, between 1/5 and 2/5 of the population lives in the capital Copenhagen and its suburbs. If you only know Denmark from television, however, you would think the number was much higher. Almost all Danish TV series take place primarily in Greater Copenhagen. Copenhagen is located on the island of Zealand, and it's noteworthy how many Copenhageners (especially in fiction, but also quite a few in Real Life) think that everything important happens only in Copenhagen, and that the geographically largest region of Denmark, Jutland (with a population number that is actually the same as Zealand), is just a big peninsula filled with nothing but fields, farms, cow, pigs and mentally backwards country bumpkins with weird dialects. Essentially the Danish equivalent of the Deep South. While some of the most rural areas of Jutland may have shades of this, the inhabitants of Aarhus (Denmark's second-largest city) have a city lifestyle more similar to Copenhageners than to farmers, and most inhabitants in other larger towns aren't country bumpkins either.
  • However, a very large percentage of Danish media is centered in Copenhagen. If you are something big in terms of media, you more or less have to live there if you don't want to commute every day. And when all of the screenwriters live in Copenhagen, it may be easier for them to write a city they know.
  • The same thing happens in Sweden too. Almost every TV show or movie will take place in Stockholm, Gothenburg, or maybe Malmö (mostly due to the proximity to Copenhagen).
• Many Russian TV shows are set in one of the following settings: a) Moscow, St. Petersburg, or suburbs thereof, b) an unnamed and imaginary rural community utterly lacking geographical coordinates of any sort, c) Abroad, with a capital A, characterized by either rampant espionage, crime, international terrorism, and other miscellaneous Wackiness Ensues, and/or exaggerated national stereotypes (hijabs and/or pickups and shotguns for everyone, no exceptions whatsoever).
• The Earth Alliance from Babylon 5, the Twelve Colonies of Kobol from Battlestar Galactica (2003), the Federation from Star Trek, the future Earth of Futurama, and probably many other examples all have the same political system that the US has. A presidential regime with a president and a vice-president elected for 4 years, a line of succession in case of death of the president and members of government called "secretaries", while this kind of system is not the most common among democracies. Futurama's Earth has even the same flag! This led to the sub-trope: United Space of America.

By Creator:

• Except for Firefly (which is set in another solar system in the future) and The Nevers (which is set in an alternate Victorian London), every Joss Whedon show has been set in southern California: Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the fictional SoCal town of Sunnydale and both Angel and Dollhouse in Los Angeles. This does avoid California Doubling.

By Series:

• Barneyand Friends once had a video about Barney, Baby Bop and BJ visiting the Fort Worth Zoo.
• The Blacklist: Despite the task force being set up to catch the most dangerous criminals in the world, nearly all of the action takes place in the United States, and while many Blacklisters are non-American, Americans are disproportionately represented on the list (to date, at least). There are allusions to Blacklisters operating all over the world, and the task force is willing to operate abroad to pursue either criminals or its investigations, but the bulk of any episode will take place in America. Sometimes this is justified as some Blacklisters are based out of America, and occasionally it will turn out that Red actually helped lure them to the US to make the apprehension easier but in most cases it's just a Contrived Coincidence that a Blacklister happens to be doing a job in the US which therefore gives the task force an excuse and opportunity to go after them.
• Every episode of the latter two seasons of French Canadian sci-fi comedy series Dans Une Galaxie Près De Chez Vous opens with a Star Trek-like speech which includes the line: "The planetary federation turned to the first world power... Canada. It's Canadian know-how that allows the launch, on October 28th, 2034, of the spaceship Romano-Fafard which left Earth towards the confines of the universe." This line appears in the latter two seasons because the Canadian government refused to renew the show's grant due to a lack of "Canadian content". The show itself has plenty of Creator Provincialism, but it's not usually that blatant and usually Played for Laughs as a parody of Star Trek and its Aliens Speaking English.
• In Doctor Who, Britain and parts thereof are generally the centre of the universe — particularly London and The Midlands. For a show about Time Travel, there's also a suspicious amount of preference for the Doctor going to Next Sunday A.D., particularly to recruit his companions.
  • Lampshaded in "Fury from the Deep", a Patrick Troughton story, which opened with a funny sequence of Victoria griping that the TARDIS always seems to end up on Earth, and Jamie (a Scot) griping that it always ends up in England.
  • Lampshaded via the acting in "Robot", which hinges on the ridiculous premise that America, Russia, and China have all given their nuclear missile codes to British politicians as part of a disarmament treaty.
  • "Pyramids of Mars", an Egyptian-themed story, still takes place in the UK.
  • "Voyage of the Damned" features the Doctor wincing when he discovers where the ship may end up crashing: Buckingham Palace. And at the climax of "Journey's End", his reaction to Earth being the last planet left — and the one that didn't get sent back with the other easier alien planet-theft device — is "Oh... guess which one?"
  • Space travel is overwhelmingly British in Doctor Who. One of the few exceptions is "The Waters of Mars": the base is a realistic mix of nationalities, with the majority being American, but also including a Pakistani, a German, and an Australian... and one of the few British residents is the commander.
  • The resident Badass Crew UNIT is, despite supposedly being an international coalition, seemingly 95% British. This might be a case of episodes being set in Britain, in the US 95% of UNIT might be American. In the Third Doctor era, it was described as a UN agency with cover as a counter-terrorism force, the Brigadier's superior was not British, and one of the novels referred to a UNIT SAC (Supreme Allied Commander), but the national contingents could be freely withdrawn from UNIT command.
  • The Torchwood Institute is British, having been founded by Queen Victoria. The spin-off show Torchwood is set in Wales, resulting in lots of Aliens in Cardiff.
  • Lampshaded and justified in the Doctor Who Magazine short story "Useless Things", which explains that the standard operating procedure for alien invasions is to start out in a rural area on a small island, move to the capital once you've established a beachhead, and then move on to countries that take up a sizable proportion of the globe from there.
• Highlander: The Series is a joint French and American production. The series constantly switches between two main settings: an unnamed North American city and Paris. (The former is actually based on two cities, Vancouver, British Columbia and Seattle, Washington. Thus the nickname "Seacouver".) While Immortals and their Watchers are supposedly active around the world, there is little mention of any events outside these two locations. A handful of episodes take place in Scotland or feature brief scenes in the Ukraine, Iraq, etc., but that is it for present-day content. Flashbacks were better at having characters and events placed around the world. Even if the main character can just wait around for other Immortals to come to him as There Can Be Only One, the lack of movement still qualifies as playing this trope straight.
• Kamen Rider, like its sister franchise Super Sentai, has everything important happen in Japan. Some series have excuses: Hibiki focuses on Oni and various Japanese spirits, Kabuto's monsters are aliens who came to Earth on a meteor that landed in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, and Fourze focuses on a single school because the Big Bad is its owner, the teachers are his minions, and they hand out Monster of the Week trinkets to students. Some series aren't quite so justified, though; mostly the Showa series, where the supposedly international terrorist organizations would only attack Japan instead of going after a country that didn't have a costumed superhero protecting it.
  • In the manga Kamen Rider Spirits, the evil space empire Badan attacks the whole world, with the Kamen Riders and their allies splitting up to take them on wherever they appear. The attack is still mostly concentrated on Tokyo, though this is because it was the seat of Badan's power in the past and they see it as "reclaiming what's ours". Even earlier, the first chapter is set in New York City, where Rider ally Kazuya Taki has been telling local kids about the Kamen Riders, causing at least one to muse about how much it sucks that the US doesn't have one.
  • The Showa Era shows did sorta-kinda explain this. In the first show when the original hero had to be written out due to the actor being injured, he was replaced by another Rider with the handwave that the original was fighting Shocker plots in other countries. It was implied this was the reason the heroes of previous shows only showed up once in a while in their successors' shows: they were also fighting the current villain group, but conveniently offscreen most of the time.
• The Animal Planet documentary series North America was supposedly going to showcase the wildlife of the entire continent. In actuality, aside from some obligatory scenes of polar bears hunting seals in the Canadian Arctic, the entirety of the series was about animals found in the United States and ignored all the parts of the continent found south of the US/Mexico border.
• One way the quiz show Only Connect plays up its difference to other shows is by making sure everyone knows it's filmed not in one of the UK's media powerhouses like London, Glasgow or Salford but in the Welsh capital, Cardiff. The host often asks teams what they've got up to in Cardiff and makes frequent references to the city and to Wales in general, including the Running Gag of insisting that dragons are real.
• The Mexican soap opera El Pecado de Oyuki (Oyuki's Sin) was one of the first Mexican TV series that doesn't take place in Mexico since almost all the characters are Japanese. There are a few foreigners, but all of them are Europeans (mostly British) but we don't see a single Mexican character in the TV series (Besides the fact that the forests of Cuernavaca were used to simulate Edo-era Japan.)
• In every season of Power Rangers, all alien attacks take place in one town. In the first five seasons, it was the same town every year—Angel Grove. Since season seven, Lost Galaxy, it has at least been a new town each year. Most of these cities (including Angel Grove) are located in California - as near as we can tell, anyway. Fanon and/or Word of God does place some of them outside of CA, but still in the Western US (in states such as Washington, Colorado, and Oregon). Power Rangers RPM's city of Corinth has some Easter Eggs pointing to Boston, the hometown of that season's first Executive Producer. Only Lost Galaxy's city of Terra Venture definitively escapes this, being a space colony.
• Quantum Leap made a rod for its own back by establishing that Sam Beckett could speak several foreign languages. He should have been fine with leaping outside the US, but he hardly ever did—not even to Canada. The last season did have some episodes set in more exotic locales, but there was usually an American connection. (In one show, Sam is adrift in the Aegean Sea—with Brooke Shields. Lucky man.)
• The opening of Rhoda (The Mary Tyler Moore Show Spin-Off) has Rhoda telling us "I was born in the Bronx, New York in December 1941. I've always felt responsible for World War II." It was meant as a joke about how Rhoda wasn't that smart.
• Sesamstraße (the German co-production of Sesame Street) takes place in Hamburg (where the show is made) according to Word of God as well as the Eine Möhre für Zwei spinoff's TV movie Alarm im Zirkus. Thus, all sorts of bizarre events typical of Sesame Street occur in Hamburg.
• Lampshaded in Stargate SG-1. When the US finally decides to let the governments of the wider world in on what's been going on (i.e. seven years of exploring other planets through the Stargate and waging a secret war against the Goa'uld, an empire of alien galactic overlords), many of the other world leaders are incredulous at America's arrogance in taking unilateral action that affects the entire Earth. And when the Air Force suggests that a multi-national Stargate effort should be headed by America, most of them balk outright until Stargate Command's alien allies, the Asgard, back the American representatives up as a deus ex machina. Ultimately, while America tries to get international cooperation, it's still the one primarily saving the day.
• Star Trek:
  • In franchise lore, the warp drive, the semi-sentient computer, and the transporter were all invented by Americans. At least one Enterprise executive was influenced by a series of essays by Sal Lagonia that suggested The Federation was likely formed from the victorious powers from World War III, so the Anglo-Amercancentrism may have been intentional. (This would also explain the overall United Space of America motif of the Federation, with most of the other galactic powers having parallels to various non-AngloAmerican nations.)
  • While all of the shows in the franchise have made an effort to include characters from around the world, the majority of them are still American. Out of the seven main captains, five have been American, the only exceptions being Picard (French) and Philippa Georgiou (Malaysian).
  • For a franchise set three or four centuries in the future, characters tend to be awfully familiar with and interested in 20th-century American pop culture.
  • Starfleet Academy and Starfleet HQ are all set in San Francisco. Thus, when a crew goes to Earth, it usually goes to San Francisco. Even when Time Travel is involved, and the crews go to Earth before Star Fleet existed, they still often wind up in San Francisco.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise
    • The title sequence is biased towards American space and aviation achievements. The Russians (or even the German V2 rocket and the British jet engine for that matter) seem to have been ignored.
    • In the Enterprise episode "Zero Hour", the villains (a group of alien Nazis) are revealed to have invaded the majority of America and are currently making a final push across the country. A map in their headquarters shows that their "invasion" inexplicably stops at the borders of both Canada and Mexico and that the invasion is solely focused on conquering America.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: American captain Kathryn Janeway informs American officer Tom Paris that he's the latest in a line of pioneers including Orville Wright, Neil Armstrong, and Zefram Cochrane. As Armstrong was a pioneer of exploration rather than a new form of transportation, he should have been replaced with the Russian Yuri Gagarin.
• Supernatural is made of this trope, especially in seasons 4 and 5. While the previous seasons can kind of be excused as none of the events that are happening are particularly cataclysmic in-universe and could be happening elsewhere as well, ALL of the events related to the Apocalypse and the final battle between good and evil take place in the US. Even with a limited TV budget, you'd think they could've at least spent a day in Canada or something. Considering Supernatural is mainly filmed in Canada...
  • Actually, kind of averted: we hear about seals being broken all over the world, and as for the rest, well, the Apocalypse is kind of centered around the Winchesters, with Dean and Sam being Michael and Lucifer's true vessels and all.
  • Season 6 onwards still sets most of the action in America, even though the Winchesters are nothing but hateful annoyances to most factions at this point. Despite both Heaven and Hell going through civil wars and various apocalyptic monsters breaking into the world to cause havoc, all of the villains still feel the need to set off their Evil Plan in the American Mid-West. One gets the impression that they could avoid those meddling Winchesters entirely just by picking Tokyo or Nairobi instead. Crowley, notably, isn't even American - he is Scottish, and his "meat-suit" (i.e. his actor) is British. He's the exception, though - if you see an angel, monster, or demon, expect them to be or be possessing an American. May have a retrospective justification in that later seasons reveal Chuck was manipulating events the whole time to tell an epic story centered around the Winchester brothers for his own entertainment; therefore he would keep the key action reasonably close to them, especially given Dean's fear of planes.
  • Justified with the Leviathans: their plans to turn humanity into a food supply are focused on the United States because that country has the fattest population on Earth.
• Super Sentai places every alien/monster/etc attack in Japan without fail.
• V (1983): Although the story is said to have a global scale, most of the pivotal events occur in Los Angeles. The weekly series, where Los Angeles itself becomes a Truce Zone, tries to avoid this by constantly mentioning the Great Offscreen War taking place in other parts of the world, but almost all the show's plots still happen in the same area.

Music

• "Losing My Religion" by R.E.M. The title is a common expression for loss of temper in Georgia (where the band hails from) and other Southern states, but elsewhere ... not so much. The band didn't realise that the majority of the English-speaking world would have to guess what they were on about (and therefore make the wrong assumptions).
• Elton John's "Social Disease," a country-western tribute in which the tequila-swilling cowboy "gets bombed for breakfast... dinnertime and tea," and his landlady lives "in a caravan" (trailer). Given that Bernie Taupin had been able to write largely convincing (if dramatized) Americans on the Western-themed album Tumbleweed Connection this is probably intentional.
• Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a Concept Album about a Puerto Rican street punk living in the streets of New York City, yet Britisher Peter Gabriel's lyrics refer to "notes and coins" (dollars and cents) and "progressive hypocrites" (liberal hypocrites), as "progressive" as a synonym for left-wing views wasn't in wide use in America at the time.
• Ludacris' song "Move Bitch" says that he is "doing 100 on the highway, so if you do the speed limit, get the fuck outta my way..." which is funny when heard by people in countries using the metric system, considering 100 km/h (62 mph) is usually lower than most highway speed limits in those places when they have them at all.
• One of Swedish Power Metal band Sabaton's albums, Carolus Rex, is about the rise and fall of the Swedish Empire.
• In general, this can be found on Christmas compilation albums that bundle Christmas carols together with secular winter songs like "Sleigh Ride", "Winter Wonderland", and "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow". Winter and Christmas are associated in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, but not so much elsewhere.
• The Tragically Hip were very Canadian, frequently mentioning the country's topics, cities, and events in their lyrics. Thus they were music legends in their home country, but hardly got attention in the U.S., aside from border cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Buffalo, New York.
• Midnight Oil also had a preference for writing Protest Songs about Australian politics that made them more popular down under, albeit unlike The Hip they managed to score worldwide hits relying on local matters (while usually reduced to One-Hit Wonder status for "Beds Are Burning", about the mistreatment of Aboriginals, they also charted with a few others like "Blue Sky Mine", about an asbestos mine in Western Australia).
• Squeeze's insistence on singing in British working-class slang kept them from becoming more popular in the U.S.
• Played for Laughs by Gloryhammer, whose songs portray Scotland as a grandiose fantasy world.
• One remarkable trait of BTS is how often their songs reference elements unique to Korea, such as 독서실s (mostly private study facilities for high school students with no non-Korean equivalent) in "No More Dream".
  • "Spine Breaker" talks about consumerism among teenagers, based on the teenage fad of padded jackets in Korea.
  • Several songs (most notably "Baepsae" or Silver Spoon) reference the crow tit - used in a popular Korean saying in contrast to a stork as a metaphor for "try-hards" or people who lack opportunities - and the golden spoon/silver spoon/etc. descriptors of Korean class status.
• Bruce Springsteen is well known for his strong New Jersey identity and references to New Jersey in his songs. Whether it be the state of working-class towns across New Jersey or the imagery of the Jersey Shore and Asbury Park amusement parks.
• Big Red Machine: A lot of their music references their Midwestern upbringing (Dessner and Vernon are natives of Ohio and Wisconsin, respectively), such as the song "The Ghosts of Cincinnati" and the lines in "New Auburn" referencing highways that run through Wisconsin.
• SiIvaGunner makes a lot of references to the Netherlands, with a major location in the channel's story videos, Grandiose City, being located there. This is because the character of SiIva is Dutch, as a parody of the real-life GilvaSunner the channel based their persona on.

Pinball

• The opening narration in Attack from Mars indicates the entire world is under siege from the Martians, and the Martians themselves say they want to conquer Earth. However, all of the motherships are located in the United States and the European Union.

Podcasts

• Plumbing the Death Star:
  • To tie in with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, an episode was made about what other wizarding schools besides Hogwarts would be like. What country did the Melbourne-based cast choose to focus on? Australia.
  • If you can't tell from the title what "Would It Really Be Nice if the World Was Cadbury?" is about, don't worry. The guys immediately admit that making an episode about an obscure ad for Cadbury chocolate might alienate their listeners who aren't Australians born in the mid-eighties.

Print Media

• Pro Wrestling Illustrated:
  • Beyond the two held by George Hackenschmidt, the only title belts PWI consider worthy of world championship status were owned by the National Wrestling Alliance, American Wrestling Association, WWE, WCW, ECW and Impact Wrestling. This disqualifies everything not based in the same country as the monthly, including every non-NWA belt used by CMLL and Pro Wrestling ZERO1, every title belt sanctioned by The Universal Wrestling Association for Lucha Libre Internacional or otherwise, everything sanctioned by the GHC and IWGP, the Mega Championship belt, even the Unified Triple Crown, at their peaks. CMLL's exclusion makes pragmatic sense, as there isn't one championship belt indisputably greater than all others(it has at least four). One could argue that the despite International Wrestling Grand Prix allowing defenses in multiple countries it had presided only over two explicitly Japanese rather than "world" feds(which itself is an example on their part, as detailed in the pro wrestling folder), but it's harder to explain away everything else as anything but this trope. And it's strange since the Mexican and Japanese wrestlers are still considered in the monthly rankings and end-year awards, frequently cracking the top ten. Canadians too.
  • Wrestler rankings, while more inclusive than those of belts, are not free from signs of provincialism. The PWI 500 stands out in this regard because a lot of people scurry to the stands every year to see who made it but very few people seem to understand just what it is measuring (it's supposed to take wins and losses into account first and foremost with quality of competition, skill of the wrestler and such being lesser factors). Everyone can tell working for a company with a big USA TV deal is the most significant factor though.
    I like Tyler Breeze a lot too, guys, but two developmental squashes does not make you better than Daisuke Sekimoto.
  • After the success of the of the Gail Kim-Awesome Kong feud in Impact Wrestling, PWI released a top fifty for women's wrestlers to compliment the 500, which had previously only included women on rare occasions. But while their work in the budding Knockouts division was nice and worthy of attention, Amazing Kong had been a bigger star in promotions like Zenjo and Zero 1 for years beforehand. CMLL had also seen resurgences in its women's divisions years before TNA's Knockouts hit their stride but the wrestlers responsible wouldn't be ranked by PWI unless they already had a presence in the fifty states or came there.
  • An Australian, Madison Eagles, did take the number one spot of the 50 in 2011, roughly four years after it was established. It was almost certainly because of her work in the USA-based SHIMMER, however, as the Australian women not working in the US didn't even rate. In 2017, Kazuchika Okada, a Japanese man who had only won title belts in Japan, got his overdue spot atop the 500(between then and 2013 one could count wrestlers who could conceivably be called more dominant champions on one hand, and none of them were on top either).
• TIME Magazine: Despite trying to maintain a cosmopolitan image and being read across the entire world the magazine sometimes focuses too much on topics that only Americans would consider to be interesting.
  • Since 1996 most people elected to be "Person of the Year" have been Americans. The magazine even went so far as to name "The American Soldier" "Person of 2003", despite the fact that the Americans weren't the only troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. So far, the only exceptions have been Irishman Bono (2005, albeit alongside Bill and Melinda Gates), Russian Vladimir Putin (2007), and Pope Francis (2013), not counting general winners like "You" (2006) and "The Protester" (2011).
  • When Time tried to elect the "Person of the Century" in 1999 there was criticism that too many names were Americans, and not only that, some of them were solely important to the U.S.A. itself, not the world in general.
  • Averted with the 2015 selection: Angela Merkel.
• Model Railroader magazine, founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and published in nearby Waukesha, has often been accused of being a cover-to-cover advertisement for local model company William K Walthers. An overstatement, but the sheer amount of Walthers structures and rolling stock used in project layouts (and the generous advertising space purchased by the company) makes it hard to argue.
• Lampshaded in a 1976 cover illustration for The New Yorker drawn by Saul Steinberg, titled "View of the World from 9th Avenue" (and used as the page image for Big Applesauce on this wiki).

Professional Wrestling

• Despite having member promotions ranging from Canada to Chile to Nigeria to Japan and promoting several world title belts it was for some reason named the National Wrestling Alliance rather than, say, the International Wrestling Alliance. The American Wrestling Association was worse, as it not only had a world title belt but when the company closed its doors some of is former employees started World Superstars Of Wrestling, which licensed out the AWA name for other promotions, including those based in regions not in the Americas, such as Australia and Japan (this did lead to some memorable angles at least, such as when Amazing Kong vowed to take one of the AWA belts Pro Wrestling ZERO1 owned back to its "rightful" home after defeating Nanae Takahashi).
• Downplayed with All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, All Japan Pro Wrestling, and New Japan Pro-Wrestling. All of them present(ed) themselves as global companies despite their names but none of them were conceived as global companies. The two All Japans had already relied very heavily on the Foreign Wrestling Heel trope and then acquired various assets from US and Canadian companies, particularly when Vince Jr started destroying the territorial system, so they decided to roll with it. New Japan adopted a similar image to compete with the male All Japan. Japanese enterprises that have global aspirations from the start tend to reflect it in their names (Universal Wrestling Federation, Super World Of Sports, GAEA, etc)
• This was later officially stated to be the reason for stripping Jack Veneno of the NWA World Heavyweight Title after he defeated Ric Flair. Apparently, Veneno decided that he didn't need to continue the regional touring tradition of the world champion, declaring anyone who wanted a shot at the belt should have come to the Dominican Republic.
• Jay Briscoe's "real" Ring of Honor World Title belt was adorned with Union and Confederate flags.
• The acquired assets bit was used for an angle when Meiko Satomura won World Wonder Ring STARDOM's invitational title belt and used it to justify calling Sendai Girls a "world" promotion. This brazen act caused Kairi Hojo and Thunder Rock to put aside their rivalry until Satomura was defeated but even after Io Shirai regained the World Of STARDOM belt Sendai Girls continued to bill its singles and tag team champions as world champions.

Radio

• The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show makes little effort to hide that the Reduced Shakespeare Company is an American troupe. The show includes an extended sketch about William Shakespeare's little-known trip to America, a place mentioned only once in Shakespeare's entire unabridged works.
• BBC sitcom Stockport! So Good They Named it Once! played on this trope, trying to find some New York-style glamour in a quiet Oop North town famed only for making hats and having a very long railway viaduct.

Religion and Mythology

• Countless portrayals of Jesus and other biblical figures tend to have them depicted as more Western or Caucasian-looking than the typical Palestinian person of the era. This was due in part to cathedrals and other places of worship in medieval times, as well as illuminated manuscripts of the era, opting to contemporise and/or Westernise said figures for them to better relate to Christians of the era, especially those who are less literate. The same goes with portrayals of biblical figures made elsewhere, such as this painting of the Virgin Mary in a kimono carrying the Holy Child Jesus, also with the express purpose of making them better relate to a particular culture.
• Events that are depicted in the Abrahamic holy books such as The Qur'an or The Bible usually, if not always, take place in or around the Middle East.

Sports

• The alleged issue of "East Coast bias" in North American sports, which claims that, since most sportswriters are based in New York City, they give undue focus to teams in the eastern half of the country (and particularly franchises in the Northeast) and short shrift to teams out west.
• The naming of the "World Series" in baseball is a classic example. Partially justified, at least until recent decades, in that baseball was played in very few countries outside the US, but still... (This is to some degree the Grandfather Clause at work: the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries was famous for its bombast, and styling the national baseball championship the "World Series" was wholly unremarkable even for those who realized it was silly. If baseball were a new thing, the "World Series" would most certainly not be MLB's championship.) For what it's worth, one of the teams to win the World Series, the Toronto Blue Jays, are based in Canada... as of 2004 are the only MLB franchise to operate outside the US.
  • Actually there is kind of a reason (though a twisted one) to calling the champions of Major League Baseball (and the NFL for that matter) "world champion" - there simply is no other team in that sport that could claim to be better. That's also the reason why the predecessor to the current Super Bowl was called the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game". The American and National Football Leagues were the only professional Football Leagues at that time, and the one who won a duel between both champions would be the best in the world.^note The Canadian Football League plays a separate sport. It can be argued that the "world champion" crowned by the International Federation of American Football (currently the US) is not a world champion at all, because no NFL talent is allowed to compete and hence the best players are excluded.
  • In addition, any professional team in the major U.S. sports (baseball, hockey, basketball, and football) attracts the best athletes worldwide, due to it paying the most and having the largest audience. While the US national team may struggle in a given sport against another country, even the worst professional team in the top U.S. leagues would trounce the best in any other country.
  • Things might be changing with the World Series, however, as of baseball's inclusion into the Olympics for the 2020 games.
• Any sport mostly focused on one country/region for that matter. Up until the 1960s, there was no Ice Hockey outside the NHL according to US newspapers. And it took quite some time (and Dirk Nowitzki) to realize that Basketball is played outside the NBA.^note The NBA at least has the excuse that, ever since pros were allowed in international competitions, the USA has been obscenely dominant in basketball. They win most competitions with ease and occasionally without the absolute best American players due to either injury or indifference. Almost any non-American player who is on the level of top American players will be found playing in the NBA as well. Baseball is a different story, but American Football is still called "NFL Football" even in other places where it is played - all that despite there being a European Championship of American Football since the 1980s.
• The Australian Football League (the premier competition of Australian Rules Football) has 18 teams, of which 10 are based in Victoria (and all but one of those are based in Melbourne). Somewhat justified in that the League is an expansion of the Victorian Football League, and Victoria is the birthplace and home of the game.
• The Argentinian Primera Division consists of 20 teams of which 12 are concentrated in the Greater Buenos Aires province (from which the tournament came into fruition and its oldest teams were founded); these clubs have amassed more than 70% of all national league titles from an area that represents less than 13% from the rest of the country. Though this is understandable and logical given that the Greater Buenos Aires area contains one-third of the total population of Argentina, there was actually a considerable bias towards the Bonaerense clubs during the 35-plus year tenure of late AFA president Julio Grondona (a huge name not only in AFA but also on CONMEBOL and FIFA), who blocked funding and development of the clubs outside the Argentinian capital.

Tabletop Games

• In Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the older background, it was hinted that the Golden Throne was not only in Britain but also in Nottingham, where Games Workshops' headquarters are situated. Newer material makes it more likely to be somewhere in Eastern Europe, where the Emperor is supposed to have arisen. At least, if the Throne is anywhere near the center of his palace, which covers much of Eurasia.
  • The Horus Heresy novels avert this, fixing the original part of the Imperial Palace atop the Himalayas in Tibet and/or Nepal. This may just be the Emperor's sense of spectacle or may be a Gundam Shout-Out.
  • Older fluff (since retconned) indicated that the Emperor was Jesus, but a still-canon one is that he was Saint George (the Patron Saint of England).
  • The short story "The Last Church", in which the Emperor destroys the last remaining church on Earth, is set in Lindisfarne, a church in northern Britain. However, this has a more symbolic meaning, as Lindisfarne was the site of the first major Viking raid on Western Europe, and the start of their long history of attacks on Christian holy sites.
• Warhammer Fantasy: The world is essentially a combination of real-life cultures and countries at very different time periods, but most of the lore focuses on the European equivalents such as the Empire, Brettonia, and Norsca (and even then, Tilea and Estalia are more or less forgotten). While East Asian countries are known to exist (Cathay, Nippon, Ind...), the only ones that really get any spotlight are the vaguely-Mongolian Ogre Kingdoms (the Hung are the human Horse Archer Hordes from the East, but they're part of the Chaos forces along with the Norsca). However, this trope is ultimately Downplayed if not outright Averted, as none of the Fantasy Counterpart Cultures are straight-up based on Britain.
  • The closest example is Bretonnia. While much of its lore is lifted straight from Arthurian Legend, it is geographically the equivalent of France with its characters being based on examples from both cultures (there are versions of Richard the Lionheart, Robin Hood, and Jeanne d'Arc) though all of the nomenclatures are French rather than English. It is alternatively a pastiche of the repressive and corrupt pre-revolutionary era France or a romantic land based on Arthurian myth, implicitly making all its good aspects English and its bad ones French. Newer editions make the former apply to the peasantry and the latter to the nobility, with some of the more outlandish aspects retconned so the place could actually function (e.g. lords still take the lion's share of their peasants' harvests, but now it's to redistribute them rather than For the Evulz). As such, it can be seen as a version of Norman England, with a French-inspired aristocracy ruling over an English-inspired lower class. Not helping their case is that for much of the original game's lifespan, Bretonnia was effectively The Unfavorite. Not only did they not get updated past the 6th Edition and suffered a severe case of Power Creep, but they were one of two armies that suffered a Bus Crash on the transition to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. Fortunately, thanks to their playable appearance in the Total War: Warhammer Trilogy, they became one of the first factions announced for the Warhammer: The Old World revival.
  • Following this up, the High Elves of Ulthuan are the noble, better-than-you former thalassocratic world power on an island by themselves whose people are trained with bows as a matter of course, and are responsible for teaching and shepherding the resentful continental peoples of man who could never be as great as them. Whose empire was broken starting by the secession of the Dark Elves, who immediately become cruel, despotic, self-serving slavers that set up shop on Naggaroth, the northern continent of the New World that's shaped like an inverted triangle? However, in much of the marketing for Total War: Warhammer II, the High Elves were the resident punching bag of the trailers (in spite of the fact that both Games Workshop and Creative Assembly are British companies).
  • And then they added a third Hufflepuff House called Albion. In spite of being geographically where the British Isles should be, in practice, it ends up being the equivalent of Ireland instead. Its culture goes back and forth between portrayals ranging from being as sophisticated as the Celts of antiquity at best to cave-dwelling savages who can barely understand each other at worst. Not helping matters is that it frequently gets occupied by the other major powers. Case in point, in the Immortal Empires campaign of Total War: Warhammer III, the only faction that starts there is the Shadow Legion of Be'lakor the Dark Master. Less Creator Provincialism and more Creator Self-Deprecation much?
• Battletech located the original court of the Star League, the court from which all of human-inhabited space was briefly ruled, in Seattle, where FASA just incidentally had some of their offices. Also, up until the source books published post-FASA's Demise, most of the Successor States didn't really adhere to their alleged adopted cultures to any great degree beyond a few token words and all tended to be written as Ersatz Americas.
• Shadowrun:
  • The game has its default setting in Seattle, where FASA has some of its offices. Part of the reason for putting the location there was that, in the 1980s, Seattle was something of an "every town" that didn't have a reputation for anything specific.
  • FASA's official headquarters are in Chicago, which became a big part of the setting fiction when an invasion of magical insect spirits decimated the city. The nuclear bomb blast that created "Bug City" in Chicago was detonated at the FASA offices.
• The original GURPS Time Travel postulated one alternate world called "Campbell", where the science fiction editor John W. Campbell died, therefore not encouraging science fiction writers, which in turn meant that students were not inspired to go into the sciences and science hasn't developed since the end of World War II. The version in the revamped GURPS Infinite Worlds lampshaded the provincialism in this concept by pointing out that since science stopped all over the world, not just in the United States, some suspect a different cause.
• The majority of the action in Rifts takes place in the (post-apocalyptic) central United States and southern Canada—not coincidentally, areas near the location of its publishing company.
  • However, there are sourcebooks for almost every other part of the world (South America, Africa, Germany, Russia, etc.) including other regions of the U.S. (New England, the Southwest, etc.).
• In The Dresden Files RPG, it is assumed that you know a large city to base your game on. This can be hard if you live in a country that doesn't have the population to have such a large city.
• Gary Gygax's original Greyhawk campaign setting (the one he ran in his basement in the early-mid Seventies) was based on a parallel Earth, with the players' home stomping grounds being the Great Lakes region of the US. The City of Greyhawk itself was an Expy of Chicago. When the setting was published in a box set in 1980, however, although specific adventure locations remained, the geography had been completely altered.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse While there are supplemental books for other places in the world, the majority of the source material for centers around the United States. And while the 13 Garou tribes hail from regions where wolves are indigenous around the world, a majority of tribes trace their origins to Europe and America, with the U.S. having two tribes all its own.

Theatre

• Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes and Albert Herring are both set in his native East Suffolk.
• Henrik Ibsen. Most of his plays take place in Norway and have a Norwegian subtext, although some plays are more subtle than others. Averted prominently in Emperor and Galilean, and in his first play Catilina, both with ancient Rome as a premise. The League of Youth is a satire on the Norwegian political system, and with the action taking place in a certain small town in the east of Norway. Exaggerated even more in Comedy Of Love, which is set in a small suburban area outside the capital - and nowhere else!

Toys

• A lot of Thomas & Friends merchandise lines that aren't designed in the UK often fall victim to this. For example, the Wooden Railway and Take 'n' Play lines have American-style cabooses as opposed to British brake vans (although Toad is included in both ranges) and some of the earlier TOMY rolling stock are thinly disguised Japanese vehicles.
• The file card bios for an inordinate amount of G.I. Joe characters indicate they're from Rhode Island (the website yojoe.com has a list of all the Joes by state...RI wins by quite a margin). Seems strange that such a small state could produce so many badasses...until you realize Rhode Island is where the corporate headquarters of Hasbro is (and given that Hasbro is the only major toy company headquartered in New England, it's probably an ode to the region the company hails from).

Video Games

• Cossacks: European Wars: The amount of special attention Ukraine has in terms of gameplay and campaigns really stands out, due to the studio being based in Kyiv. However, the game was originally planned as something for the internal Ukrainian market rather than wide-release export, and Ukraine actually lacks a lot of units most other nations get, having only a single infantry unit outside of mercenaries, no officers, no ranged cavalry outside of mercenaries, only a single type of combat ship and no access to the 18th-century units and upgrades (which doesn't prevent the faction from being an excellent choice in multiplayer).
• Ghostlore is developed by a Singaporean studio, so no prizes for guessing the country it's set in. The game's assorted supernatural enemies are also lifted entirely from South-East Asian myths, most prominently from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, while the environment, despite being a fictional setting, references the game's country of origin - a large Merlion statue can be seen in a public square, and the Ghosthunter's headquarters has an indoor waterfall based on the famous one in Singapore's Changi Airport.
• The Grand Theft Auto series of games is, in theory, set in America, but is made by Scottish developer DMA Design/Rockstar North.
  • A lot of place names in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are thinly-disguised ones from Scottish cities. There's also an exact replica of Scotland's Forth Road Bridge in San Fierro, which is placed as the game's equivalent of San Francisco's Oakland Bay Bridge, as well as an adjacent replica of Forth Rail Bridge (whereas the real-life San Francisco has no such thing). Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh and Dundee and evidently like their in-jokes.
  • The HD games, for the most part, try to downplay this as much as possible, especially Grand Theft Auto V. The developers still put in a couple of British in-jokes here and there, however.
  • There's a car with weak performance stats that's all over the first game, the Mundano. It's clearly modeled after the Ford Mondeo that could be seen all over the place in Great Britain back then. It was also available in North America, but under the names Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique, so the pun in the name only works for those who know its British and European name.
• Civilization IV shows signs of this in its soundtrack. Although the opening theme is in Swahili and the Ancient and Classical eras' soundtracks include Asian and African music, beginning in the Medieval era, the soundtrack consists entirely of European and North American music, with the Modern era's soundtrack consisting entirely of the works of US composer John Adams.
• After production of Sonic the Hedgehog shifted over Stateside, the story primarily centred on the apparently world-dominating United Federation, complete with a president and a San Francisco analogue. Shadow the Hedgehog expands on it: while other cities are said to be under attack, only the UF is shown, and the Big Bad seems to think the UF President controls the entire planet.
• SimCity can allow a player to build any kind of city or those that resemble one from the world, but all cities wind up suffering from looking like a place from Southern California. SimCity 4 is probably the most noticeable, as everything, from the Empire State Building having palm trees to the BART-style transportation systems to the drab adobe/earth tone colors of the standard buildings and even the terrain all drive the fact that the creators based everything on their California home.
• Both Command & Conquer settings play with this a bit: every game in the series bar the original has had at least one or two missions set in the United States:
  • In Red Alert 2 you will visit the Hollywood studios and can see various signs with the Westwood Logo (before EA bought them out and dissolved them). You can even recruit three heroes, all of whom have hilariously overpowered abilities.
  • Done hilariously in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 where the Empire of the Rising Sun invades the US at Los Angeles, where Electronic Arts's offices are. The Empire, controlled by the player, can then target and demolish those offices.
• Averted in X-COM where you establish a truly international force, encounter aliens all over the world, and have countries cut their contribution to your funding if you ignore them. Though in Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown even soldiers from Japan or Ukraine speak perfect American English. Fixed in the expansion pack.
  • The Third Person Tactics game, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, on the other hand, is set within Cuban Missile Crisis-era America, where the titular Bureau's job is to hide how devastated the US is so that the Soviet Union can't exploit it in the Cold War. Some have pointed out that this is (somewhat) more realistic than people from around the world all knowing the same language and getting along.
• Mostly averted in the Resistance series; developer Insomniac is based in the USA, but the first game was set entirely in Great Britain (despite having an American lead character who saves the day) and the sequel, while mostly taking place in America, also features Iceland and Mexico, and it's made very clear that the alien invasion has decimated the whole world. Only the third game is solely set in America. PSP game Retribution also shows western Europe.
• A common fan complaint is that Florida-based Tiburon, developers of the NCAA Football series, overrate players from Florida schools and the SEC and correspondingly underrate players from other parts of the country. This complaint sometimes extends to the Florida teams in the NFL (and the Dallas Cowboys) getting higher ratings in Madden NFL as well, as Tiburon makes both games.
• Resident Evil 3: Nemesis's Raccoon City is supposed to be a modern, Midwestern, American city, but the size of the streets and presence of extensive back-alleys and shopping arcades are clear evidence that Raccoon was based on a contemporary Japanese city. For reference, many of the streets are blocked by a single, longitudinal car across the road. There are very, very few cities in America with streets that narrow, especially ones with a population of over 100,000 residents. Further games in the series that revisit Raccoon, however, seem to retcon them to the proper width.
  • In the 1998 version of Resident Evil 2, Sherry Birkin wears a Japanese-style student uniform, despite living in the midwestern US.
  • The use of green herbs as healing items across the series. In Japan and other Eastern countries, this is a staple of traditional medicine. In America, the most common medicine associated with this was illegal in all 50 states at the time of the first few games' release. Cue weed jokes.
  • For the most part, though, the entire Resident Evil series averts this. Not a single character among the main cast is Japanese or of Japanese descent.
• Fallout:
  • The first two games in the series take place on the West Coast, particularly in California, home of Interplay Entertainment. When Maryland-based Bethesda Softworks acquired the franchise, they set Fallout 3 in Washington DC. You can even visit the company's ruined headquarters in the game. This may have been done deliberately to avoid having to follow the previous games' canon. Fallout 4 remains on the East Coast, being set in Boston.
  • Averted with Fallout: New Vegas. The developers just thought it would be cool to see a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.
• Gran Turismo 5, developed in Japan, has a car list of over 1000, and about 150 of those are Nissans ^note And 42 of those were Skylines!. Most of the cars in the game hail from Japan.
  • Gran Turismo 2 features used car dealerships where you can buy dozens of old cars that are otherwise unavailable in the game - but only for Japanese brands. The rest of the world only sells brand-new cars from current (as of 1999) offerings, except for a few timeless classics.
• The Forza Motorsport series, developed in the United States, has a fairly even distribution between modern cars across the continents, but in classic cars, it's almost entirely classic muscle and high-end supercars from the 60s to the 80s. Downloadable content packages after the release of Forza Motorsport 4 have helped to balance out classic car distribution by adding in more classic Japanese and British cars.
  • Forza Horizon is set in Colorado, but the game's licensed soundtrack is utterly dominated by European artists (with many of them being relatively unheard of in the US) since the game was developed in the UK. Horizon 2 is set in Southern Europe, so at least the European dominance is justified.
• Something of a Justified Trope for the Massachusetts-based developers of the iRacing sim because of the cost and logistics of shipping their laser scanning equipment around the world limited the opportunities to add non-American tracks until the sim became established and they could afford it.
• While not a Sim per se, Driveclub was developed in the UK, and most of the cars featured are European: out of the ~100 cars, the only non-European cars were the Marussia B2 and Venom GT, and the oldest car from the list was the Ferrari 430 Scuderia, from 2007. Thankfully the Season Pass balanced it giving 4 Chevrolets, 2 Dodges/SRTs, the Lykan Hypersport, and some others. Also, cars from the previous century, such as the Lambo Diablo SV, Mclaren F1, and Ferrari F40/F50 were introduced. However, the 2 only Japanese things the game has are tracks and the console where it's played, but no cars.
• EA Canada, developers of EA's NHL, FIFA and early Need for Speed games, has been showing some of this by overrating Vancouver's local teams and underrating their rivals, or the east coast teams in general. FIFA 12 contained the first non-generic Major League Soccer stadium in the form of BC Place, home to the newly-joined Vancouver Whitecaps, which was still under renovation at the time of the game's release. As far back as Need for Speed II, the Canada level was very obviously based on Vancouver and the Coast Mountains and included the Sky Train and Expo Centre as prominent parts of the scenery.
• Mass Effect 3 starts with the Reaper invasion of Earth, in which Shepard was fighting them in Vancouver (a day's drive away from BioWare's headquarters). However, this would later be averted as when the game returns to Earth, the battlefield is instead in London.
  • Emily Wong's liveblog of the Reaper invasion took place mostly in the greater Los Angeles area, which includes Electronic Arts' headquarters.
  • Other places get a throwaway line in the background information - the first cities to fall to the Reaper invasion were stated as Adelaide, Hamburg, Al Jubail, and Fort Worth. But that's about it.
  • Lampshaded if Shepard romances Traynor. Shepard promises to take them to drinks in Vancouver after everything gets sorted out, but Traynor complains that it's not a more famous, romantic city like Paris or Venice. "You never take me anywhere nice."
• Sweden-based Paradox Interactive has often given extra attention to Sweden and Scandinavia in their strategy games. Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Victoria all provide the player with the option to unify Scandinavia into a single nation. Paradox is particularly unrepentant with regard to this trope.
  • Their release trailer for Europa Universalis IV featured a mighty Swedish Empire.
  • Of all the pagan faiths that existed in the timeframe of Crusader Kings 2 but were effectively gone by that of Europa Universalis IV, one exists as a functional religion in the files of EUIV without having the Crusader Kings 2 Converter: Norse. It even gets a special feature in one of the expansions and can show up randomly if a fantastical random New World is activated.
• The Pokémon games made after the 4th generation will always have Japanese elements slip through, even if they're set in fantasy versions of the United States (Black and White, Sun and Moon) and France (X and Y). The abundant Shrine in the Unova region is obviously a Japanese shrine, for example, while the Lass trainer class usually wears an outfit based on Japanese school uniforms. Even Pokémon Sword and Shield, set in a UK analogue, gets a bit of this; despite the game's art director being British native James Turner, characters still do things like eat Japanese-style curry, instead of the Indian-style curry you're more likely to find in the United Kingdom.
• Hideo Kojima's games always had a very odd relationship with this trope, despite Kojima being Japanese himself:
  • The setting of Snatcher is in the city of Neo-Kobe in Japan, except all the important characters are Westerners (plus a Chinese one), and the only Japanese guys you're going to find there are nameless extras.
  • Played a bit in Policenauts: While almost all the main characters are also Westerners, there are a few named Japanese ones, or with Japanese ancestry, and the main employer in the space colony when the game takes place is Japanese-owned.
  • The Metal Gear series plays with this trope to ridiculous levels. Just like the aforementioned games, almost all the characters are technically Western too, but many of the characters, including the protagonist Solid Snake, have some relation with Japan, even if that relation barely matters for the plot, other than helping the Japanese players to empathize with the already too Western cast of the series. The only characters with closer ties with Japan are Kazuhira Miller (even if he looks too American, being half-American himself)^note aside from him are easter egg characters modeled after the voice actors, Teliko Friedman, Michiko Takiyama, Johnny Sasaki and Allen Ishiba, a Japanese-American soldier from a radio drama.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes plays with this trope to hilarious levels: The only Japanese character you're going to find here is Hideo Kojima himself.
    • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance plays this trope somewhat straight: The main character is an American-Liberian Ninja cyborg, one of the stages of the game takes place in a Japanese garden, one of the bad guys is a Japanese-Brazilian ninja as well and in the oddest case of this, Senator Armstrong use a Sumo wrestling pose before fighting against Raiden. The odd part came with the fact it heavily implied he somewhat dislikes Japanese culture.
    • Plenty of Japanese elements sneak themselves into the games when they wouldn't make sense in a Western setting. One of the most obvious is Volgin, a Marxist-Leninist, who is obsessed with Judo and repeats "kuwabara kuwabara", the latter has as much sense as a KKK member talking about Anansi the spider. In case that isn't enough to indicate what market this game is actually for, "kuwabara kuwabara" gets zero explanation, but there's a looooong explanation about the significance of the names ADAM and EVA.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Raiden's appearance is very culturally Japanese, with a Japanese name, samurai-influenced armour, ninja weaponry, and martial arts, a stylised Bishōnen appearance, and a kabuki-themed breather on his water mask, but he was born in Liberia, there's no evidence he's ever been to Japan, and he lives in New York. The Arc Words "la-li-lu-le-lo" are themed around a Japanese Ranguage pun that no one other than weeaboos knows about in the West. Japanese text is used in the game's UI with zero explanation.
    • Numerous parts of the games' philosophy come off as very culturally Japanese, as well. The most obvious one is the obsession with nuclear weapons, which has a certain doom-laden tone that is generally inaccessible to any country that has not experienced a direct nuclear strike on a major civilian population centre. Various characters appear who appear to be American action heroes, but instead of extolling American movie virtues like individualism and being the best, instead state the Zen-ish virtue of simply doing whatever is required of you by the times, and tend to incorporate samurai-ish Warrior Poet elements. These elements also tend to crop up in throwaway details, like how any mention of drugs is condemnatory apart from Snake's hilariously casual reliance on Benzedrine (something that only makes sense in Japan's drug culture), and Laughing Octopus's backstory being based off an untrue but commonly believed Japanese factoid about why Northern Europeans don't eat octopus.
  • Subverted in the Zone of the Enders series, as there's a single Japanese character, but just like the rest of the cast, nobody cares about from which country they came from; what planet they currently hail from is more important.
  • Averted in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, since the entire game takes place in Medieval Europe.
  • Death Stranding has many instances of this, even if they are not very notable at first sight:
    • The setting takes place in an apocalyptic version of the U.S., through there's many characters of Japanese origin, mainly The Engineer, which is based on the likeness of the mangaka Junji Ito, the Musician, based in musician Daichi Miura, the Chiral Artist, who is also of Japanese origin and the Collector, based on on Hirokazu Hamamura, the editor-in-chief of the Japanese magazine Famitsu. Oddly enough, outside those characters and Charles Khan, a member of BRIDGES of Indian origin, there's no other non-Japanese Asian characters in the game.
    • The whole premise of the game, about delivering goods on foot while walking through dangerous and rough terrain seems to be heavily inspired in the whole concept of the bokka, a kind of Japanese porter transporting goods on places inaccessible to other kind of vehicles, just like the main protagonist does in the game. In fact, the same backpack Sam use in the game is basically a futuristic version of the same backpack Japanese bokka use in real life.
    • If you know about ancient Japanese story, the whole plot of the game seems to be based in the myth of Queen Himiko, the ruler of the kingdom of Yamatai.
  • And again in Boktai which is modeled after movie portrayals of the American Old West and almost entirely stars Caucasian and Native American characters.
• Both Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus avoid this since, despite almost all the main characters being Korean, the author is a white Canadian girl, Christine Love. In fact, in Analogue, there's a section that shows the various works she used for research in order to avert this trope.
• The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, despite being set in Japan, and all the named characters are Japanese, was developed in Russia, though all the characters behave and act like Russians at times. This is somewhat justified, as the game was partly based on the creator's own childhood experiences in Moscow.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! was developed by an American developer, despite being set in Japan, and all the characters are Japanese, with no American or even other kind of foreign characters in sight.
• A partial example: though StarTropics and its sequel were made by a Japanese team, it was only released in the United States, with the games heavily playing up that aspect. For example, the main character lives in Washington State, where Nintendo of America is located, and is a huge baseball fan.
• Wargaming gets the accusation that it intentionally makes vehicles from the Soviet Union overpowered in its games like World of Tanks, who have been developed in former Soviet Republics (Russia, Belarus, and so on). Who can say if it's true or not, but the attention the Soviet military gets can be a little excessive.
  • For example in World of Warships The Russian/Soviet Navy ^note Its earliest ships were laid down by imperial Russia is a major player and got tech tree lines before Britain, France, Italy. All three nations were considered major naval powers (the British having the world's largest navy at the war's outset) while the Soviet Union's navy was a joke during the Second World War and really didn't do anything particularly interesting. Part of this was because the Russian company had much easier access to the blueprints of Russian ships (the British and especially Italian national archives are notoriously stingy about allowing access to military blueprints, even for ships that have been obsolete for over 60 years), but the appeal of having their own nation's ships in the game was also clearly a factor.
    • This gets muddled in regards to certain overpowered ships, which gave rise to the "Russian Bias" memes. The joke goes that if a ship is overpowered that belongs to another nation, it's because that ship abuses the game mechanics. If it's overpowered and Russian, then it's Russian Bias. "Balans, Comrade" and "The Almighty Spreadsheet" came about because Wargaming will use over/underperformance as reasons/excuses for buffs and nerfs (the most infamous being Kremlin getting its AA nerfed... and nothing else, while the German lines have been power crept into oblivion with nothing but a minor buff to even attempt to bring them back up to par).
  • And likewise for World of Tanks (developed in neighboring Belarus), there are far more Soviet tanks in the game than from any other nation. While it's certainly true that the Soviet Union designed and built a huge variety of tanks during the roughly 1930 to 1960 time period that WoT (mostly) covers, so did the United States and Britain, neither of which have anywhere near as many tanks represented in-game. This disparity is even more obvious when it comes to premium and reward tanks (26 American, 19 British, 45 Russian, not counting clone premiums), not helped by the fact that several of the Russian premiums are actually British-made tanks that are currently exclusive to Russia rather than being available under the British flag.
• War Thunder is kinda infamous for perceived Russian bias, with many of the Reds with Rockets and Russians with Rusting Rockets vehicles charged by the player base of being overpowered. Outside of these accusations, there is a kernel of truth to the infamous meme. For one, it is notable that missions and events are written almost exclusively from the perspective of a Russian player: "Mozdok-Malgobek Defensive Operation"? Sure, it's defensive if you're Soviet. "German aviation unleashed several groups of 25 bombers on the Soviet troops, repel the raids of the enemy bombers"? For a German player, wouldn't this be encouraging them to shoot down friendly bombers?
  • Back when Ground Forces combat was a new addition to the game and Germany, Russia and the United States were the only three factions, Russia was the only nation that had access to post-World War II tanks. Germany and the US had to make do with during-war designs.
  • There have been some scandals during the game's run when investigative players delved into the game's code and found some very curious quirks in the engine. The chances of a shell bouncing off a tank's armour are greatly exaggerated compared to real world physics, which implies artificial difficulty to prevent players being destroyed so easily; however, it was found this feature heavily favoured sloped armour, and guess which country happened to have sloped armour as a design feature on most of their tanks? There was also an inquisitive player who discovered that many Russian shell types were operating with much more explosive filling than could be physically stuffed inside the projectile.
  • Back when Gaijin was based in Russia, the developer received a funding grant from the Russian government — many countries do this to attempt to build native arts, media and entertainment industries. However, this grant comes with a caveat that any media created cannot reflect negatively on Russia itself, nor past or present events in Russian history. Whilst they aren't specifically under pressure to make Russian material look comparatively good, portraying cultural icons like the T-34 battle tank and IL-2 attack plane dying in droves like their real-world counterparts did would have likely kicked up a stink with the Russian government and caused them to withdraw the funding.
• A very odd version of this trope happens in The Ninja Warriors games. The game takes place in a Western country, but both rebels and Balgar's army use ninjas, albeit, in the rebels' case, they're robotic ones. It's never explained in the games why both sides use ninjas, along with regular troop soldiers, other than the games were programmed in Japan.
• Eternal Darkness concerns four primary parts of the world — the Middle East, a cathedral in France, a temple mound in Cambodia, and a mansion in Rhode Island. That said, its characters come from all walks of life, but the last playable one, Michael Edwards, is from Canada, the homeland of Silicon Knights.
• Operation Flashpoint and the ARMA series do this, in particular ARMA II, where the main setting of Chernarus includes Czech names for towns and characters who speak faux-Czech, and the third DLC for its expansion is "Army of the Czech Republic".
• Two Ace Combat games did this for the box art. Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere's original Japanese cover, as well as the cover for the PAL version, had the game's futuristic equivalent of the Russian Su-37, while the American release instead featured the American F-22. Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War had the F-14 on all versions of the box art with two exceptions - the Spanish release replaced it with the Eurofighter Typhoon, and the French release with the Dassault Rafale.
  • A very odd version of this trope happens with two characters wielding Japanese names: Kei Nagase and Rena Hirose. With the sole exception of the light novel Ace Combat: Ikaros in the Sky, when she is properly Japanese, Nagase hails from the Strangereal version of the Western world, in this case from the "far eastern side of the Usean continent", according with her profile; the same goes for Rena as well. The odd part of both girls came with the fact there's no equivalent of Japan or even Asia.^note By Asia, we mean the the entire continent, both the West and East parts of it. AC3 was originally self-contained and unrelated to the Strangereal universe and the Usea Rena hails from was originally an acronym for "United States of Euro-Asia", from which Japan, Rena's country, is a member until the mega-corporations make the concept of the nation completely obsolete. Later games retconned this. Even more egregious, at least in Rena's case, her name is normally written in kanji, while Nagase's one is written in both katakana (the alphabet used for writing foreign names and words) and in the Western order, and both girls, especially Rena, are treated in-universe as something special or weird. Also, there's another Asian girl, named Húxiān, in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, who is a citizen of the Osean Federation, itself based in the United States. This also brings the question, as Húxiān is a Chinese name, she could be the Strangereal equivalent of a Chinese-American pilot, but since there's no equivalent of Asia in Strangereal, there's also no local counterpart for China in this universe, leaving that lingering question about her origins.
  • The plane roster is an aversion to this trope. Despite the series being made by a Japanese company, most planes aren't Japanese, though this is in part because the series focuses primarily on single- and dual-seater jet fighter craft from after WWII, of which Japan currently has very few distinct types of, and it's rare for any one game to have more than two. Throughout the entire franchise, there have been only five Japanese aircraft featured: two built wholly in Japan (the F-1 from Zero and the A6M5 Zero added in Joint Assault), a third which has only seen one prototype so far (the X-2 Shinshin from Infinity), and the rest being licensed copies or derivatives of American aircraft (the F-2A first flyable in Shattered Skies and the F-15J added to Infinity) or completely fictional (the ASF-X Shinden II from Assault Horizon).
• In Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Bear Hugger is portrayed as originally being from Salmon Arm, British Columbia (where Next Level Games is headquartered). He's actually from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
• EarthBound (1994) and its predecessor EarthBound Beginnings are set in parallels to the United States (explicitly in the latter's case) and use dollars as currency, but since the games were made in Japan, items seem to be priced as if they were in yen. This results in things like a "Cheap" Bracelet costing $98. Although a lot of items would be too cheap if this was the case since the yen's value has been less than one US cent for most of history, and peaked at about 1¼ cents the year EarthBound came out.
• Undertale doesn't explicitly state what part of the world the Underground is in, but the game's roots as an American-developed project are made clear when you use the "Check" command on a Vegetoid, who is described as "Not monitored by the USDA." For you non-Americans reading this, that's the United States Department of Agriculture.
• Nioh is interesting about this; it's a Japanese-made game that takes place in Edo-Period Japan, but it stars a blond, blue-eyed samurai as the protagonist, who is based on a real British sailor who became an honorary samurai.
• Aztec Wars, made by a Russian development studio, is set in an alternate timeline where the Aztecs have conquered all of Europe; save for China, there's only one nation that can stand against them... Russia. They're also the only nation to get a campaign of their own.
• Being a Japanese game, A-Train mostly has Japanese trains. Even the worldwide version of A-Train III with European character faces, only labeled A-Train, has two fantasy trains, two American trains, and 17 Japanese trains plus the computer-controlled Shinkansen.
• Transport Tycoon looks very British. The buildings aren't exclusively British, but the overall style goes in that direction. Also, all rail vehicles except for the TGV are modeled after locomotives and railcars operating in Great Britain.
• Likewise, the first two RollerCoaster Tycoon games featured a few tip-offs as to their UK origin: One of the base game parks is heavily based on the UK theme park Lightwater Valley, and two of the three "real parks" offered in the expansion packs were in England (Alton Towers and Blackpool Pleasure Beach), and the third (Heide Park) is in Germany. There is also a helter skelter included among the available rides (referred to as a "spiral slide"), something rarely seen in US parks. Then Infogrames neglected to localize the sequel for US audiences, leading to litter bins suddenly becoming rubbish bins, for example. Eventually, a patch was released to remedy this.
• Mini Metro has any number of real-world subways you can try to replicate, one of which is Auckland's. Except Auckland doesn't have a metro system, so why is it there, you may ask? Dinosaur Polo Club, the publisher and developer, is based there.
• While Team Fortress 2 is mainly set in what appears to be the US, Australia—or more accurately, a comical parody of it—would go on to get a lot of attention in the backstory: It's where the wonder element australium was discovered, and as a result has become a center of insanely advanced technology despite being, as Elizabeth put it, "a nation of idiots". Then there was the Australian Christmas Update, which centered around the legend of Old Nick, an evil Australian Santa Claus. Why the obsession with Australia? Most likely because Team Fortress's creator Robin Walker lived there before he got a job at Valve.
• The Chilean-based ACE Team made more than a few games involving Chile. The eponymous Abyss in Abyss Odyssey is right underneath the city Ace Team is based on, and in Zeno Clash it's revealed in the second game that the entire land of Zenozoik that the games take place is in is actually a quarantined Chile far, far into the future.
• Angels of Death (both the game and the animated adaptation) was made in Japan by a Japanese creator, but the story takes place in an English-speaking country and none of the characters are Japanese.
• The whole Silent Hill series takes place in the U.S., with no Japanese characters whatsoever.
• Marvel's Avengers sees the team relocated to San Francisco, which serves as the primary setting of the game, as opposed to the usual New York City. It just so happens to be where Crystal Dynamics is based.
• While Dungeon Munchies has an English title, and the option for English texts and subtitles, the Taiwanese devs mostly communicate in Traditional Chinese on the forums, using the same language for the untranslated signs all over the game's world. Additionally, the architecture is similar to that of most urban East Asian cities.
• Deadly Premonition is openly inspired by Twin Peaks, and as such is set in a tiny town in northwest America and stars American characters. Some instances of Japanese culture come through in the way characters interact with each other, but the game is so surreal, it's hard to notice. One example does shine through though - early on, the characters have to solve a puzzle involving Chess pieces, one that would be simple for an average American adult, but each character is stumped and need someone else to explain Chess to them. On top of that, the room the puzzle is in is adorned with posters labeling each Chess piece and you can interact with them to get a better look. These caveats are more for Japanese players who would be completely unfamiliar with the game.
• Food Fantasy is supposed to showcase different foods from around the world, but it should come as no surprise that about half of its various Food Souls are Chinese or Japanese because the game originates from China.
• House Flipper is ostensibly set in different countries based on the user's selected language, according to the addresses listed for the potential buyers. However, there are certain bits of the game that suggest a European viewpoint. The default unit of money in the game is euro (though it can be set to any of a couple dozen different units, including US dollars, through the options menu) and all measurements are listed in metric rather than imperial units. Towel rack radiators, which are common in Europe but less so in the States, are all over the place here. There are also quite a few options for building saunas, which are quite popular in Poland, where the developers are from.
• Both >OBSERVER_ and The Medium don't hide they're set in Poland, but the former is less obvious about its specific location. The creators of both games, Bloober Team, are based in Kraków, and the decrepit pre-war tenement block you explore throughout the game is characteristically Cracovian.
• World Software, the developers behind the Polish Beat 'em Up Franko: The Crazy Revenge were based on Szczecin, and Franko's stages are pretty recognizable to anybody that was ever around said city's areas the stages were based on, which is quite a feat considering what passes for that game's graphical fidelity.
• The seventh-generation console and PC versions of Splinter Cell: Double Agent have an exclusive level set in Ubisoft Shanghai's hometown of, well, Shanghai.
• The Guilty Gear saga has a bizarre relationship with this trope, despite the whole franchise being developed in Japan. While there's no shortage of Japanese characters, almost none of them are relevant to the narrative. In fact, according to the backstory of the game, Japan was wiped off the face of the Earth and all the remaining Japanese people live in colonies in other countries. The whole plot of the saga is carried out by an American (Sol Badguy), a Frenchman (Ky Kiske), and their children and relatives. The only important characters with some kind of tie to Japan, however minimal, would be That Man, aka Asuka R. Kreutz, and likely I-No, and therefore Megumi, Axl Low's girlfriend. More egregiously, the whole plot of Strive, the last game in the chronological order of the story, takes place mostly in the U.S. with a few scattered parts taking place abroad, mostly the parts focusing on characters that don't live or stay in the States to help the heroes; a small part near the end of the game takes place at the southern border with Mexico.
• Pump It Up, as a result of being made by a Korean company, has a lot of songs that are licensed Korean songs (including chart-topping K-Pop songs) or are in-house songs with Korean lyrics.
• In the Trails Series, Japanese cultural elements frequently appear in the fictional nations on the western half of the Zemurian continent, which is mostly inspired by real-life Western nations. While this is usually justified by cultural imports from the in-universe Eastern nations, this isn't always the case. Despite Erebonia being heavily based on Prussia, Thors Military Academy is effectively a Japanese high school, books are read from right-to-left (despite the script itself being left-to-right), and orbal cars and bikes are designed to drive on the left side on the road.
• Killer7, a Japanese-developed game, is interesting: A large majority of the gameplay takes place within the United States, but the overarching plot involves an international conspiracy largely involving relations between the United States and Japan, and over the course of the story, Japan is largely (or, depending on how you act, entirely) destroyed by a large-scale missile barrage.
• The Japanese murder mystery adventure game series J.B. Harold Murder Club, and its sequels, despite being developed in Japan, are also an inversion of this trope: The whole franchise takes place in the U.S., with each game being set in a distinctly American city and there are no Japanese characters whatsoever. This is justified in this case, as the franchise was modeled after the American Film Noir genre, and more specifically, the Hard Boiled Detective genre.
• Crossing Souls has posters of Dash Kappei and The Fruitties in a treehouse in an American town. These shows were popular in the 1980s, where the game is set... but only in developer Fourattic's native Spain. Most Americans back then, let alone kids from a small rural town, would've never heard of them. Most Americans now may not have heard of them.
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is set in a futuristic version of the New York, under the name of New Amsterdam and Team Reptile is based on the Netherlands. Some of the musical artists chosen for the soundtrack were featured on local records, and the first major location after leaving the Hideout, Versum Hill, is based on the studio's hometown of Hilversum.

Web Animation

• Much of Homestar Runner's Atlanta origins appear on the website. One example is an easter egg for the first Teen Girl Squad episode where Strong Bad appears and asks Cheerleader to go to Rally's with him (or Checker's or Sonic or whatever is in the show's universe). Rally's, Checker's, and Sonic are restaurant chains best known in the South.
• Ducktalez: Duckberg is in Canada, as Vegeta!Scrooge destroyed Winnipeg by accident in 3 and Ogopogo showed up in 7.

Webcomics

• Parodied in the first strip of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Later lampshaded and defied here. The Doctor is convinced the aliens will attack London, Kamen Rider is positive Tokyo is the target, and Wonderella is pushing New York. They attack Antarctica.
• All of the Kids in Homestuck are American (Jade lives on a fictional island in the Pacific, but her family comes from America), and the fate of the rest of the world gets shown all of once when Becsprite blows Jade's meteor up and is briefly shown eradicating a nameless city in either Australia or Southeast Asia and vaporizing the entire Pacific Ocean.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent, written by someone with both a Finnish and a Swedish background, focuses on the Nordic countries After the End. The author has also lived in Mora, the town that has become Sweden's capital via Suddenly Significant City in the comic.

Web Original

• Google Translate:
  • It used to translate 华裔女孩 as "Chinese-American girl", when it simply means a girl of Chinese descent who is not a Chinese citizen, without any reference to the US. This happened because Google Translate uses automated algorithms that compare different translations of websites instead of the translations being defined by hand, which can result in errors like this. In this case, it's the Google bots picking up on a Chinese bias; the Chinese word for "American" is frequently used to mean all foreigners in general (including South and south-east Asians), and "America" is essentially synonymous with "waiguo".
  • Google Translate appears to sporadically convert things like place names, names of bands or artists, and other terms that are rarely used outside of the language from their area from the original text into ones local to the language it's translating to, rather than maintaining the one that makes more sense in the original context. Phrases like "Raggende manne komt naar de Efteling" are translated to "Sabaton is coming to the Big Ben." (Although sometimes the words remain untranslated when used in a slightly different sentence.)
• At times, TV Tropes itself. Uses of phrases like "our part of the world" and so on, especially when used to contrast with other cultures and nations, reveal the assumptions of the troper responsible. Usually involves everyone living in the US or sharing the troper's political views.
  • Go count how many times 9/11 is mentioned under Harsher in Hindsight.
  • Or how many American films, actors, and TV shows have their own articles as opposed to other countries? The overabundance of pages and entire character sheets for major American superhero comics like Marvel or DC also says a lot. Even European works still get a fair share. Anime, manga, and other Japanese works also count, because works that get heavy coverage tend to be ones with Occidental Otaku appeal. Works that are released in neither region, if they get their own pages, will probably just receive maintenance from one or two editors.
  • Whenever a troper mentions "our troops" in an article and talks about how people should respect them rest assured he means American troops.
  • Some works and products are released in multiple territories with different names for each territory, or have terms and character names changed for localized versions. You can sometimes guess what region the author of a particular edit hailed from based on the titles they use; for example, someone who uses "Sega Genesis" is probably from North America. (It's known as the Sega Mega Drive in the rest of the world, including its native country of Japan)
  • If a page describes the values of a culture different from the modern United States, expect the page to pothole to Values Dissonance.
  • Entries sometimes follow a mention of the defeat of Nazi Germany stating that World War II is over, forgetting about the still defiant Japanese and their invasion of East and Southeast Asia.
• The titular Earth-Chan◊ meme has her wear a NASA shirt despite her representing the whole planet, not just the USA. Parodied in the Planetary Moe webcomic that references it, where Moon sticks the logos of all of Earth's space programs on them in revenge for all the times they stuck flags on her.
• Any film that underperforms in the United States is considered a failure on US websites, even when the international gross is high (as shown in this article, where The Prestige — which grossed over $100 million internationally - and Terminator Salvation — which grossed almost $400 million worldwide — are counted as flops).
• Parodied in this article by The Onion in which the Bush administration officially declares itself "confused and saddened" that alien diplomats chose to land in Italy.

Web Videos

• Epic Rap Battles of History: Most episodes have at least one American participating in the battle, sometimes not even people very well known outside of the USA, such as Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Randy Savage...
• Channel Awesome: Most reviewers on the site are American and thus frequently reference American pop culture and customs. On the same token, they will often (sometimes tongue in cheek) talk about a film scene or commercial or something else that gave us a patriotic feeling. Similarly, they will judge/review many things from a uniquely American viewpoint.
  • The Nostalgia Critic:
    • Often talks about comic book movie adaptations of superhero comics in his editorials, which aren't as popular outside the USA. Yet Doug Walker (and his fellow reviewers) will gladly geek out about Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and others.
    • In his Top 11 countdown of "Best South Park episodes" Doug put "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" on the number one spot because by poking fun at the events of 9/11 the episode helped America get through the trauma of the events.
  • A state-centric view can occur at times: Doug has filmed some episodes cheering for Chicago teams, The Cinema Snob will often mention Illinois, and the NYC-based The Nostalgia Chick and friends love Broadway musicals.
  • Radiodrome devotes an episode to comic book movies, but mostly discusses superhero comics of American origin. The only foreign ones mentioned are Judge Dredd (British, yes, but again a superhero comic) and — for a millisecond — Tintin. Nobody is familiar with Tintin and thus they continue their discussion about American superhero comics.
  • On the other hand, there's Film Brain, who will sometimes make episodes more British than other contributors would (specially when dealing with works that hardly went out of the UK such as Fat Slags).
  • Todd in the Shadows' "One Hit Wonderland" series largely tends towards reviewing bands and artists that have only had one hit within the US charts. Many of the acts covered (such as A Ha, The Proclaimers, and Midnight Oil) had much more success in their respective home countries or in other locations outside of the US itself, something which Todd himself does acknowledge.
• Noob was created by a guy living in southeast France. Guess where all characters whose place of residence has been mentioned live.
• Gnoggin comes from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Guess which part of the world The Kaskade Region (his fan-made Pokémon region) and all its regional critters are based on.
• YidLife Crisis is set and filmed in Montreal, which makes sense since there's already a large Jewish population there, and they don't have to pretend to be living somewhere like New York.

Western Animation

• An episode of Freakazoid! had Freakazoid being... Freakazoid by traveling back in time to prevent World War II by preventing the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In Real Life, World War II started in 1939 or earlier - the US simply didn't fight in it until 1941. Freakazoid! quietly assumed that World War II did not exist until the United States was attacked, completely ignoring earlier events that did not directly involve the United States such as Japan's invasion of China in 1937 and Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. (Then again, it's also since the show runs on Rule of Funny.)
• In Transformers: Animated, a number of the Transformers seem to have accents which, by Earth standards, would come from different countries (Blitzwing is German, Jetfire and Jetstorm are Russian, Master Yoketron appears to be some form of Japanese, and so on). But there's rarely more than one of any non-American accented Transformer, and the majority of accents are American.
  • Averted in Transformers: Cybertron, where everyone's accents are all over the map for no particular reason, however, this is most likely justified, as much of the setting is in international hubs.
• Creator Butch Hartman grew up in Michigan, and so while the ghosts of Danny Phantom can turn invisible and fly incredibly long distances, they never try making their debut somewhere other than Amity Park, located in the American Midwest. The in-universe justification is that ghosts can only travel between Earth and the Ghost Zone through portals specifically designed for that purpose, and there are only two in existence, both in the midwestern United States: one being unguarded in the protagonist's basement and the other having a built-in defense system and being closed most of the time anyway.
• Il Était Une Fois...: The French series Once Upon a Time... Man (French: Il était une fois... l'Homme) has its own problems on occasion. In 26 episodes, aired between 1979 and 1981, the show covers world history from the birth of planet Earth and the evolution of life up to the 1970s. While fairly accurate and attempting to be objective, the show covers important events and eras as seen from a Western perspective. Most of the action takes place in Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. Figures like Pericles, Julius Caesar, The Prophet Muhammad, Charlemagne and Peter I of Russia get entire episodes devoted to them. But the cultures of the rest of Asia, Africa, and pre-Colombian America are hardly represented. For example, out of the entire history of China, only Kublai Khan gets the spotlight treatment and then only through his interactions with Marco Polo. The creators tried to make up for this by making a sequel entitled Once Upon a Time... in America, which focused on the history of the Americas, including pre-Colombian times.
• American edutainment shows with a world history theme tend to focus primarily on American history: Histeria! did two episodes each on the American Revolution and The American Civil War (in addition to dealing with these events in other episodes), while in Time Squad, every other location and period the squad visited was in the U.S. after 1776.
• The Battletoads cartoon pilot. Of all the places on the Insignificant Little Blue Planet where T. Bird could find three dudes to turn into Battletoads, he had to pick Oxnard, California.
• Futurama:
  • The government isn't just like the U.S. government, it is the U.S. government. The flag of the World resembles the American one, the Earth's president lives in the White House and the people are called "Earthicans." Also, there are only two significant political parties to vote into office, both of them American.
  • When Richard Nixon first runs for President of Earth, someone objects that the Earthican Constitution states that nobody can be President more than twice. Apparently being President of the US counts as being President of the Earth.
• The Simpsons:
  • The show has been known to be guilty of treating Springfield as if it is in California, since that is where the writers live, and according to the DVD commentaries they are aware that this trope has been in effect. Most notable is the weather - Springfield is often shown as bright and sunny year-round (the exception being Christmas when it is usually portrayed as permanently snow-covered for thematic reasons). This being The Simpsons, it has been lampshaded.
    Lisa: It was an unseasonably warm February 14th, so the children walked home without jackets.
  • The couch gag of "Them, Robot" shows The Simpsons hanging up a poster in 1989 with the text: "America, the most powerful country in the world". Then the years pass by and in 2012 (the year of broadcast) they pull the old text down to replace it with a new one: "America, too big to fail (we hope)". This is clearly aimed as a spark of hope to the American viewers in light of people suffering under the economic crisis, which nevertheless is a universal problem, not just of America alone. Furthermore, even though the creators try to put in a little My Country Tis of Thee That I Sting humor it still comes across as if the rest of the world should solely pity the poor Americans, while other countries like Greece or Iceland were hit far more seriously by the economic crisis than the USA.
  • In 2014 Scottish people were allowed to vote whether they wanted Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom or become independent. The makers of The Simpsons made a short promo starring their Scottish character Groundskeeper Willie vocally explaining why Scotland should become independent. Many people in Scotland weren't amused, because the Americans who made it seemed to think that every country ruled by the British wants to become independent, just like the USA did in 1776. This would be like a Scot making a video advocating the independence of the People's Republic of New Jersey, The Holy State of Utah, or New England.
• South Park:
  • The show is set in (and named after a region of) Colorado, as creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were raised there and met at the University of Colorado. Cartman has also been borrowed by the Denver Nuggets (and in a case of headquarters instead of hometown provincialism, the Los Angeles Kings).
  • Additionally, Parker was raised Catholic, and thus every non-Jewish person in town practices that particular branch of Christianity, despite the fact that in Colorado Protestants outnumber Catholics 2:1.
  • Although neither Trey Parker nor Matt Stone was raised Mormon, they include a lot of stuff about Mormons in their works, as Colorado's right next to Utah. Thus, they knew a lot of them growing up.
  • In the Imaginationland trilogy and compilation movie, more than half of the High Council of the most important good imaginary characters in history is composed by American popular culture and literature characters: Popeye, Luke Skywalker, The Matrix's Morpheus, Glinda the Good Witch, and Wonder Woman. The exceptions are Zeus (classical mythology), Gandalf the Grey, Aslan the Lion (both invented by Brits), and Jesus (who is somehow both an in-show real character and a fictional character. Celebrity Paradox?). Kind of justified by USA's popular culture being hugely influential around the Earth for decades, but still, it's pretty funny to see Popeye being compared to millennia-old deities and mythology characters.
• In a bit of a twist, the Earthworm Jim cartoon takes place in "Terlawk", a spin on creator Doug TenNapel's hometown of Turlock, California. One episode even has a joke attempting to explain why there are so many alien attacks (an old guy put graffiti on a deep space probe daring aliens to destroy the town). (The fictional Terlawk is said to be in New Jersey, however.)
• While Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers loves to throw in some obvious Big Applesauce for good measure (Chrysler Building, Twin Towers, mentioning the Statue of Liberty without mentioning its hometown), it also slips in a lot from Los Angeles in general and Hollywood and Burbank in particular where it was made. The police wear LAPD uniforms and drive LAPD-colored cars, the pilot "To the Rescue" features the L.A. city hall as well as Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, Seymour's Travel Agency in "It's a Bird, It's Insane, It's Dale!" is located near Lankershim Boulevard and Cahuenga Boulevard which meet in Studio City, and "The Luck Stops Here" mentions Flower Street (they're mentioned again in "A Wolf in Cheap Clothing"), one of which stretches from Hollywood to Burbank. Perhaps this is what Tad Stones meant with the "West Coast city with an East Coast flair".
• A minor case from Super Friends— the design of the Hall of Justice was based off Union Terminal, an art-deco train station inc Cincinnati, Ohio. At the time, Hanna-Barbera was owned by the Cincy-based Taft Broadcasting. (Bringing it full-circle, footage of the real Union Terminal was used in the Arrowverse adaptation of the Invasion! crossover event, as a disused STAR Labs facility intentionally invoking the Hall of Justice.)
• Ready Jet Go!: The series takes place in Washington State, where the creator, Craig Bartlett, grew up.
• While Infinity Train takes place on the titular supernatural train, some of the show's protagonists are examples of this:
  • Tulip is from creator Owen Dennis's home state of Minnesota, hailing from the real-life city of North Branch. Both the first episode and her flashbacks have direct references to things such as a regional bike commercial.
  • Ryan and Min-Gi are from the fictional town of Lake Powell, based on the real-life town of Powell River, British Columbia, where storyboard artist Ryan Pequin grew up, with extra research being done to make sure that Lake Powell's appearance mirrored that of Powell River's during the 1980s.
• Downplayed in The Owl House. While the series mostly takes place in the Demon Realm, it's eventually revealed that Luz's hometown of Gravesfield is located in Dana Terrace's home state of Connecticut.
• In the VeggieTales video "The Wonderful World of Auto-tainment!", during the segment where the French Peas are singing "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea", while providing a slideshow showing images related to the song's lyrics, some of the images are real photographs taken within Chicago and some nearby cities like Joliet.

Real Life

• A lot of songs that have become "classics" in a certain language are often just translated covers. "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, for instance, is not American in origin, but a cover of "Comme d'Habitude" by French singer Claude François. Several traditional children's songs also exist in French, German, English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian versions and it's often difficult to trace which one was the original.
• A London newspaper made a ranking of "most appropriate cities to be the world's capital" (without explaining why). Guess which was number one.
• Wondering why so many Chinese restaurants in the US claim to cook Hunan-style? When Richard Nixon went to China, he was greeted with a lavish banquet. Whenever he found a dish he particularly enjoyed, he'd ask Chairman Mao where it came from (seeking to avert this trope and demonstrate his knowledge of and respect for the diversity of Chinese culture — "I know you're a big country with lots of different cuisines, just like us!"). Mao, having grown up in Hunan Province, would always say it was from the Hunan area. Nixon came back singing the praises of Hunan-style cuisine.
• One of New TV Lebanon's old news intros had a globe that depicted Africa, Eurasia, and the Pacific, but not the Americas.
• Computer programs like Microsoft Word often have the default language setting as American English, which is frustrating for any other English speakers, who want spell check to stop telling them they spelled "colour" wrong. Even applies to some online British/Australian etc job application forms that will highlight non-American spelling (obvious typos like 'color' being one of the first ways hiring managers will thin the pile of applications.)
• Some tech or web companies from California's Bay Area or Silicon Valley show preference in their home region.
  • Guess what is Yelp's default city.
  • For a while, the Apple Macintosh's spell check did not recognize the word "cooperation" (recognizing it only in its hyphenated state, "co-operation") and replace it with the word "Cupertino." Cupertino is a small town in California near Silicon Valley where Apple is located that, were it not for this quirk of that spell check, would be mostly unknown to anyone else and would otherwise be unlikely to be part of a spell check's word list. They've since run with it. Check the time settings on an iPhone, most modern Apple devices have Cupertino as the city listed for PST. Not San Francisco, not Los Angeles, not Seattle or Portland, or even San Jose (the nearest big city to Cupertino) —Cupertino.
• Likewise, many Japanese websites list the 47 prefectures of Japan first when asking for members' locations. "Overseas" is almost always listed last, and hardly ever allows you to specify where. However, Japanese websites that have gained more international members (and have been translated into other languages), such as Pixiv and Nico Nico Douga, have started to avert this, allowing members to specify which country they're from.
• Many webshops demand you enter a ZIP Code, even when you select a country other than the USA. This is despite the fact that the ZIP Code is meaningless outside the US. (Admittedly, most countries^note 160, out of 192 members of the Universal Postal Union do have postal codes, of which the U.S. style of five-digit numeric code^note Technically, the US has 9-digit codes, but ZIP+4 is strictly optional. is most common, though weirdly not in the English-speaking world.^note Among countries where English is the dominant language, the UK, Canada, and Ireland use six-to-seven-digit alphanumeric codes, while Australia and New Zealand use 4-digit numeric codes. Meanwhile, the Anglophone Caribbean countries don't use postcodes at all (Jamaica tried a British-inspired alphanumeric system for 2 two years in the mid-2000s but it wasn't worth the cost.) This is justified in that the United States has a greater population than all other English-dominant countries combined. (For what it's worth, the country with the largest L2 English-speaking population—India—uses 6-digit postal codes.))
• The Film at 11 trope doesn't account for the fact that in the Central and Mountain Time Zones the late local newscast has always been at 10:00 pm. Plus, in all time zones FOX affiliates have their late local news one hour earlier than the other networks (though the trope pre-dated the creation of FOX by several decades).
• In a sense, this happens repeatedly in humanity's understanding of the universe. At first, people thought Earth was the largest thing in the universe and everything else had to be the little specks seen in the sky (or the big specks known as the Sun and the Moon). Then, people accepted that the Earth is not of any special importance to the Solar System but still thought the Solar System encompassed the known universe with the stars being a speckled backdrop beyond the furthest planets. Then, the Milky Way was discovered to be a vast collection of stars comparable to our Sun, half of whom have planetary systems like ours, but the Milky Way was then thought to be the extent of the universe. Then, the Andromeda Galaxy was discovered to be a galaxy similar to the Milky Way and we expanded our scope of the universe to an unimaginably large collection of such galaxies. In fact, there's reason to believe that the universe we live in might not be the only one to exist.
• The standard barcode with 13 digits used worldwide is the EAN: European Article Number. The 12-digit number only used in North America is the UPC: Universal Product Code. Go figure.
• Thanks to "Canadian content" laws, listening to an oldies radio station in Canada is a surreal experience, especially for non-Canadians. Because 35-40% of the songs have to be by Canadian artists, you'll hear a couple of familiar hits, then a song you've never heard before by a Canadian, and then back to the familiar hits. And Canadian artists who managed to become successful internationally are overrepresented. If you knew nothing about 1970s pop music and listened to a Canadian oldies station, you'd end up with the impression that Anne Murray, The Guess Who, and Gordon Lightfoot were major superstars. The same rules occasionally have spillover effects: for instance, in The '90s, at least one of the major alternative-rock stations in the Detroit radio market was actually based in Windsor, across the Canadian border; the effect was (1) there was a lot of Barenaked Ladies played on that station, to the point that people got sick of it, and (2) a not insubstantial number of Michiganders have not only heard of The Tragically Hip, but actually like them (unlike most of the US). (On the other hand, as to (1), BnL really are pretty popular in Metro Detroit, partly because of that station; there's a reason that one of their live albums is a recording of a concert at DTE Theatre in Clarkston, MI.) The same is true of other genres — just listen to a Canadian country station, and you'll hear mainstream country music blended in with names like Tim Hicks, Dean Brody, Lindsay Ell, and Dallas Smith, none of whom have made much noise in the States if at all.
  • The same laws forced game shows taped in Canada for American TV (such as Super Pay Cards!) to have Canadian personalities on-camera in additional segments and the like. This posed a problem for the USA Network's revival of Chain Reaction, which was taped in Montreal. When original Canadian-born host Blake Emmons left after the first few weeks, Geoff Edwards was brought in to replace him. But this meant they were breaking CanCon laws in the process, as Edwards was an American. The solution was to have announcer Rod Charlebois appear on-screen every episode, playing a minigame of sorts with Geoff.
  • CanCon also bedeviled MuchMusic when that network launched an American feed in 1994. People complained about the network's Canadian origins and focusing on Canadian artists nobody south of the border really cared about. This led to the network splitting off as MMUSA in 2001 and a full rebrand as Fuse in 2003.
• Another Canadian media issue regarding this came by way of the country's biggest commercial TV network, CTV. The network's larger affiliates, including CHAN-8 of Vancouver (better known as BCTV) and CFCF-12 of Montreal were often at odds with CFTO-9, the Toronto flagship of the network and their owners, Baton Broadcasting. They felt Baton and CFTO held far too much sway over the CTV board and what the network did — CFTO/Baton produced CTV's national news and much of their Canadian-originated entertainment programming, and only got onboard with the idea of a morning show (Canada AM) when they got to produce it (CHAN had come up with the idea). As time wore on, Baton bought more and more CTV stations, but thanks to the cooperative bylaws in place at the time, they didn't get any more power than they already had. Cut to 1993, when CTV (in response to falling revenue and more competition) restructured into a corporation owned by the station owners. The bylaws were eliminated, meaning Baton amassed more and more control with each stakeholder they bought — this despite them also running a separate system, BBS, on their stations which saw them competing against CTV for the rights to US imports and creating their own exclusive programming (as a backup in case their CTV takeover plan didn't work out). By 1997, Baton had gotten enough power that the remaining stakeholders gave up and Baton became CTV, Inc. by 1998. However, there was still one minor issue — BCTV, whose owner WIC had also begun buying their own programming and was currently caught in a tug of war between Shaw Communications and CanWest (owners of rival Global TV), was still an affiliate. Baton instead set up an independent station, VTV, on channel 32 and aired the BBS programming over there; it was obvious the station was a backdoor into the market for Baton (being a clone of Citytv didn't exactly help matters). Ultimately, a Disaster Dominoes situation ensued that saw every private station in Vancouver switching affiliations.
• A great deal of reporting on "Canadian culture" tends to operate on the assumption that readers are primarily interested in how Canada is different than the United States. This might be true for Americans and Canadians, but often less than helpful for the rest of the world. For example, a list of "Canadian foods" will inevitably feature a lot of relatively obscure snack foods that can't be bought in the United States, such as ketchup-flavored potato chips, but never mention common Canadian things like smores or root beer that are also popular in the US, but people outside North America might find curious or distinctive.
• The phrase "God's own country" has been used by Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Scots, Irish people, and Indian people, but always for their own nation. U2 intentionally used this idea to write their song "In God's Country", which is officially about America, but has lyrics vague enough that fans from every country in the world see it as referring to their country.
• The Academy Award event has always vastly favored English-language films, to the point that it typically relegates all other films to compete against each other for the Best Foreign Language Film award. Most other categories are largely filled out by English-language films, particularly the acting categories. There have obviously been exceptions, with some foreign directors receiving Lifetime Achievement honors and some foreign films receiving multiple awards, though it wasn't until 2019 that a foreign language film won Best Picture: Parasite (2019). The In Memorium section is also more global with its honors.
• Local television news programs tend to concentrate their coverage on the city where the station is situated, primarily because it is often the central area of their market. The areas on the outskirts are often neglected unless there is significant news.
• "But enough about you, here's New Jersey" is a running joke among the residents of New York City as city news outlet (particularly traffic and weather) often dedicate as much time to discussing the neighboring state of New Jersey as they do discussing things locally. Partially this has to do with the fact many commuters live in New Jersey but also the fact that space for large operations like news broadcasters is more available there (only a few, very successful and established outlets can afford to operate out of NYC). This is mirrored somewhat with New Jersey's southern counties and Philadelphia; South Jersey does get decent coverage by Philadelphia media, although because Philly is smaller and less expensive than NYC, the outlets are more likely based in the city itself. Where New Jersey gets the shaft media-wise is Central Jersey, which unfortunately for all involved is where the state's capital of Trenton sits. Neither Philadelphia nor New York outlets seem to have much interest in reporting the goings-on in the N.J. government, as it is on the border between their two respective spheres of influence: it sits on the other side of the river from Pennsylvania, and Mercer County (where Trenton is) is part of the New York metropolitan area for statistical purposes (based on economic connections) but is part of the Philadelphia media market. Because Trenton is so peripheral, it doesn't get much media coverage, which feeds into the ability of New Jersey politicians to engage in the shady dealings for which they are so famous.
• A prime cause of The Longitude Problem was that, for centuries, national politics prevented people of different countries from agreeing on a global Prime Meridian, with several nations using a point in their own capital cities as zero degrees longitude. The pressures of international commerce finally forced most nations to agree on a Prime Meridian through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which was later tweaked a few arcseconds east of the observatory by the IERS.
• A much nastier version of this happened with computer technology: Since computers and computing are Western inventions, and were originally intended for Western use exclusively, it was natural that the first computers were able to display Latin text exclusively. This became a royal pain for different writing systems, such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and especially languages in countries that write from right to left, like Arabic, Hebrew, etc., as well as scripts with numerous diacritics such as Thai and Vietnamese. Special mention goes to East Asian users, especially Japan, which were forced to create their own computers or develop specialised hardware for existing PCs that could handle their writing systems correctly, something that neither MS-DOS nor Windows could do natively until the mid-'90s.^note MSX was an offshoot of MS-DOS and was primarily designed for Japanese users It wasn't until the Windows 7 era, however, that most OSs could handle those writing systems natively, regardless of the region the user is in and without needing a special OS or add-on cards for those regions.
• The same goes for typewriters, which weren't much of an issue when adapted to most non-Roman scripts like Cyrillic as they more or less have as many characters as the Roman alphabet, but logographic systems such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are a royal pain to implement and equally cumbersome to operate. This would later be mitigated by input method editors (IMEs) for computers and other devices which allow users to key in certain scripts on a keyboard that would otherwise not be able to have all the characters from a particular writing system.
• American dates (Month, Day, Year) can cause double takes on ticketing apps and the like to non-American users left worrying if they've just forked out large sums of money for the wrong date. This can be cut both ways - Americans seeing non-American dates (Day, Month, Year) will occasionally also be thrown for a loop (say, when buying train tickets).
• Many English-language websites developed in the US will ask users to input their country using a drop-down menu. A lot of these menus have "United States of America" as the first entry and every other country listed alphabetically after.
• The consonant sounds used in Esperanto line up perfectly with the consonants in Polish (and with almost no other widely spoken language). The creator of Esperanto, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, was Polish (though his first languages were Yiddish and Russian; his children grew up speaking Polish).
• The Dewey Decimal System has a heavy bias towards North America and the USA in particular. In the 970s, History of North America, 971 is Canada, 972 is Mexico, Central America, West Indies, and Bermuda, and 973 - 979 are various regions in the USA (Northeastern, Southeastern, South Central, Midwest, Western, and Great Basin and West Coast, with another entire number for a history of the USA more generally). The creator of the system, Melvil Dewey, grew up in New York.

In Universe

• Done in the Professional Wrestling series The JWL. The A-List (Johnny Nitro and Melina Perez) were presented as snobs who thought they were better than everyone else because they were from Los Angeles. During Episode 63, which was held there, Johnny cut a promo about how he wished they could have debuted in their hometown rather than in whatever "Flyover Country" they were in when they debuted.^note Seattle, on Episode 56.
• Used in the Ciaphas Cain novels. The editor of Cain's memoirs has to insert text from other works to give the readers the big picture, often lamenting how Cain always focuses only on events affecting himself.
• In John Brunner's "Galactic Consumer Report No. 1: Inexpensive Time Machines", the titular devices have a setting for religious people who want to avoid Broken Pedestal by accidentally seeing, for example, what actually happened during the Exodus. The reviewers complain that even the best of the models is only adequate for the Western European religions in that regard. Another comes from Greece and works for Hellenists best.

---