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Informed Location

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So Alice and Bob are running a bakery in...where are they? Let's just say Boston.

If your story takes place in a specific, extant location, some local color is to be expected: the natives of the place should act like people who live there do; the ones who are visiting should react to the unfamiliarity. Food, dialect, and weather all shape a town. But all that is complicated, particularly if it's a place with which you're not familiar. Just start off with "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night in New York" and just like that, your tale is set in New York. However, for the most part, the location is added in later.

TV series will usually go to some effort to shoot footage in the actual location (which may or may not feature the actors) for the Title Sequence, or they may just license Stock Footage. This will usually be the only time it is ever featured in the show.

Note: this isn't necessarily when a work fails to depict a location properly, merely when it isn't relevant. Often it appears to be done to avoid either Everytown, America or Where the Hell Is Springfield?. Contrast the Eiffel Tower Effect and Hollywood Atlas. See also California Doubling and Thinly-Veiled Dub Country Change, both of which involve informed locations not matched by what the audience actually sees.


Examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • W.I.T.C.H. has the main characters live in the city of Heatherfield, USA, but the setting often comes across as being somewhere in Western Europe more than anything else. The American animated adaptation naturally addressed this issue by making the location feel more like a New England suburb.
  • Jon Arbuckle and his pets Garfield and Odie are stated on a few occasions to live in Muncie, Indiana (author Jim Davis' hometown), but their home could be Anytown, USA and the theme would not change.

    Literature 
  • All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is set (at least half of it) in the French seaside city of St. Malo, during the Second World War. Doerr certainly did his geographic research of the city (or what the city was like before it was bombed to rubble), but culturally the city is lacking compared to its real life counterpart. St. Malo has a distinct Breton culture — a culture with Celtic roots — complete with its own folklore, language, cuisine, crafts, and holidays. But the way that Doerr wrote about it, it could be just about any French town that happens to be on the sea.
  • Much of the Left Behind series by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins is set in some of the world's largest cities, including Chicago, Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Jerusalem. Many readers have written commentary on how inaccurately their respective cities are depicted, pointing out the jumbling of landmarks and the lack of any of the city's real life defining traits.
  • Captain Underpants is set in Piqua, Ohio, which at the time the series began had an annual Underwear Festival. Dav Pilkey is from Ohio, but it functions as Everytown, America.
  • An important plot point in Andrew Holleran's Dancer From The Dance takes place in Washington, D.C., which Holleran had not yet visited. Holleran provides no insights about the city that could not be gained from glancing at a map. His descriptions range from Everytown, America to hilariously wrong.
  • Only once does Invitation to The Game mention it's set in England, when Lisse imagines being able to freely travel the world like people did in the past rather than being confined to the Designated Area she has been assigned as an Unemployed (outside of thier group participating in The Game). Beyond that, the location has no bearing on the story. Especially after the lot of them are shipped off-planet.
  • The Misfits series by Nick Christie is set in a Chicago that is completely devoid of local texture and that could be anywhere except the United States. For one thing, Christie appears to have no understanding of local dialects.
  • Sailor Nothing nominally takes place in Tokyo, but other than the character's names appears to be entirely American, with American school systems, American pop-culture references and American laws.
    Live-Action TV 
  • Being Human (US) is set in Boston, despite being filmed in Toronto.
  • Community is set in Colorado but filmed in California, which is why you can often see palm trees. There is virtually no snow in winter-set episodes, and only a handful of references to winter sports; there are also very few Hispanics considering they make up 22% of the population of Colorado (Asian- and African-Americans being much more numerous on the show, despite each group making up less than 4% of Colorado's population). Apparently Colorado was chosen because it's one of a few states where you can get a 4-year degree at a community college.
  • Fringe is set in Boston, but it doesn't make much use of that fact. Oddly, when they go somewhere else, it doesn't really make a difference.
  • Full House is set in San Francisco. You can tell from the opening theme, and nothing else. Ditto Fuller House.
  • Quick, where's Three's Company set? Santa Monica.
  • Parks and Recreation is set in south central Indiana, but all of its exterior shots are filmed in California. This means that the weather is peculiarly sunny and dry, with about two days of snow per year — you know, like Indiana has.
  • One Day at a Time (1975) showed Indianapolis locations in the opening credits only (sometimes extensively, as in the first round of season 5 titles, which consisted mostly of helicopter shots over city landmarks). Some attempts at averting this trope were made periodically, but in a way that would only come across to Indianapolitans: for example, in one episode one of the daughters mentioned going shopping at Block's, a big local department store that no one out of the area would have recognized.
  • A study in contrasts: two iconic NBC shows from The '80s, both set in Miami, Florida. One is Miami Vice, which shot on location and made full and ample use of the sights and sounds of the city. The other is The Golden Girls, which was almost entirely studio-bound and relied entirely on establishing shots to convey the location. Even the famous exterior of the home they lived in was actually of a house in California!
  • Low-budget soap operas made in Singapore or Malaysia are a particularly notorious offender of this trope, where an episode allegedly set overseas will take place entirely indoors, with the dialogue being the sole indicator that the characters aren't in their home country anymore. For example, Portrait of Home (a cheesy love drama made in Singapore) have two characters going on a business trip to Paris... and having all the Paris scenes being filmed in a hotel room that appears to be in Le Méridien Singapore, with one of the characters saying how much she missed home despite clearly having never left the country at all. For some baffling reason, they didn't even include visual indicators to imply the scene takes place overseas, like hiring Caucasian extras as porters, chambermaids, and hotel staff, or throw in a brief stock recording of the Eiffel Tower.

    Video Game 
  • 77p egg: Eggwife is allegedly set in Sheffield, England, but you sure as hell can't tell from the surreal graphics, abstract humor, and over-the-top design nature.

    Web Animation 
  • Madness Combat is said to take place in Nevada, but early episodes showed it through a nondescript desert town and its Sheriff's office. The bulk of the series is set inside buildings with Alien Geometries and demonic hellscapes.

    Webcomics 
  • Erma: Tales of Outcast #1 reveals that Blairwood is in central Illinois. Previously, the town had no identifying features whatsoever, aside from "The Water's Fine" implying that there was a beach nearby.

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