Where the Hell Is Springfield?
Wicks checked: 18/50.
Deliberately Obscured Location of Setting
- Back Blocking: In "Much Apu About Nothing", Apu is about to point to Springfield on a wall map, when Bart enters and blocks the whole scene with the back of his head.
- The Kids Are American: Both film adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory go with a Where the Hell Is Springfield? approach to the location of Charlie Bucket's home and Wonka's Factory, and this trope winds up being invoked in one version and inverted in another. In the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which was shot in Munich, Charlie and his family are amongst the only people in town with American accents — while in the 2005 version Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they're amongst the only ones with British accents.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the actor playing Mike Teavee is supposed to be from New Mexico but speaks in a stereotypically New York fashion when he's trying to sound like a tough guy (probably Rule of Funny). And in Charlie's hometown, there's a mix of American and British accents in an intentional evocation of Where the Hell Is Springfield? .
- Doki Doki Literature Club!: The game is completely American-developed, but it would be easy to mistake it for a real Japanese visual novel. This is lampshaded by Monika during her endless talk with the player in Act 3:Monika: By the way, there's something that's been bothering me... You know how this takes place in Japan? Well...I assume you knew that, right? Or at least decided it probably does? I don't think you're actually told at any point where this takes place... Is this even really Japan? I mean, aren't the classrooms and stuff kind of weird for a Japanese school? Not to mention everything is in English... It feels like everything is just there because it needs to be, and the actual setting is an afterthought. It's kind of giving me an identity crisis.
Location of Setting is Never Stated
- Altar Diplomacy: Legend has it that one of King Nebuchadnezzar's wives was given to him under these circumstances (as princesses and noblewomen of that time and place usually were), and she was homesick. She came from an unspecified kingdom in an unspecified mountainous region, and apparently quite loved the nature scenery there. Because King Nebuchadnezzar actually loved and cared about his wife, he commissioned The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
to cheer her up. - Fantasy Gun Control: In The Tribe, a 90s and early 2000s New Zealand teen post-apocalyptic soap opera, The City (which is located in an unnamed country that is generically Anglophone to the point of Where the Hell Is Springfield?) is a Teenage Wasteland or warring "tribes," including one, the Locos, who terrorize the streets with an appropriated police car. But there are no guns anywhere to be found. The Locos have a police car, but not police firearms (suggesting possibly that the show's very generic setting, police pre-apocalypse didn't regularly guns, like in some European and Asian countries). When Lex gets mad enough to assassinate the local fundamentalist cult leader, he arms himself with a crossbow, and the characters treat it like an instantly lethal, game-breaking weapon. And finally, in Season 4 the city is invaded by a technologically advanced tribe with stun guns... and yet no one thinks to dust off their parent's old revolver. Clearly, the pre-apocalyptic version of whatever country the hell this is had some serious gun control.
- Lying to Protect Your Feelings: In Blood Stain, Elliot rushes to take a flight to God-knows-where for a professor's lab assistant position, ditching her boyfriend's date and causing her older sister to become alarmed that she's missing. She can't exactly say that she's living in the same house as her boss. All of them thought there would be student dorms, so Elliot fabricates that as a lie to make the explanation easier. She can't state that the sudden rush was due to Dr. Stein's carelessness, so she claims that the position has tight deadlines. The gist of what actually happened is there, but the details have been smoothed out.
- Princess Tutu: Kinkan/Gold Crown/Goldekrone isn't given a specific location, although the fandom tends to assume it's set in Germany (since nearly all of the text shown in-series is German, including a map of the town where the "Goldekrone" name is taken from, and the town itself is heavily based on Nordlingen, Bavaria).
- Devil May Cry Five: DMC5 brings in Red Grave City with its mixture of British and American architecture and urban design. However, it's not established in which country the city is located. It's also revealed Red Grave City is Dante and Vergil's birth place as their childhood mansion is located in it, although it isn't mentioned if Dante's Devil May Cry shop is set there as well. No one also says if it's the same city in DMC3 where the Temen-ni-gru was summoned, which all traces back to Dante's supposed nationality in DMC1; if he is American, then Red Grave City should be located in the United States, but again, nothing is ever said or made clear. Not helping the matter is that Mission 2 of DMC5 (set in Red Grave City) starts in a shopping mall based on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a real-life famous mall in Milan, Italy.
- OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: A minor Running Gag is that, despite the non-specific American setting, everyone uses an exaggerated Canadian pronunciation for the word "sorry".
- Quirky Work: PB&J Otter is a WHAT animated series from the same people as Doug about a trio of river otters who live on a houseboat on a lake of undetermined location who do a "Noodle Dance" to solve problems, and live alongside a variety of neighbors including millionaire poodles, a toilet seat-collecting "mayor", and "watchbird" cranes.
- Arrow S 4 E 9 Dark Waters: Damien's dialogue explicitly places Star City on the West Coast, ignoring hints in prior episodes that it was in the Midwest. This tends to indicate Central City is also situated more toward the West, otherwise the characters (including Barry) wouldn't be jaunting between them so nonchalantly.
State/Province where Setting is Located is Given, but Precise Location isn't given
- Stranger Things: Hawkins is located in the fictional Roane County somewhere in Indiana, but where in Indiana precisely is never specified. The tie-in novel Suspicious Minds indicates that it's close to Bloomington, where the protagonists live and go to school, as they take regular day trips to Hawkins National Laboratory to participate in MKUltra experiments. Various comments made on the show also indicate that it's close to the Illinois border. The mobile game lampshades it if you choose to look at a map, with the player character stating that they can't find Hawkins on it.
- The Many Deaths of Jason Todd: Gotham City is located somewhere in New Jersey, and the Kane Memorial Bridges connects directly to the New York state.
ZCE and Unclear use
- Dreaming of a White Christmas: Peanuts usually features plenty of snow in its Christmas and wintertime strips, but as with Calvin and Hobbes this is pretty well justified by the setting (generally accepted to be in or around the Twin Cities of Minnesota, in this case). Fan speculation about where a fictional location is located.
- The Simpsons:
- Bart hears the tale of an old west fort (In Springfield?) where the soldiers, surrounded by hostile natives, are told they'll be left alone if they hand over the base's commander. This being The Simpsons of course, they give him up to a horrible death, and the base is renamed "Fort Sensible". Seems like a troper making a joke.
- Tropes J to Z: The game's setting is a mishmash of various European locales and eras, with Romania, Victorian England and pre-industrial Prague being particularly prominent sources of inspiration for Yharnam's architechture and technology. It cannot truly be pinned down to a single real world location, and more extremely, the Alien Sky and Weird Moon makes it hard to say with certainty that it takes places on our Earth at all. This seems more like Culture Chop Suey.
- D.N.Angel: The setting is architecturally a mix of Japanese, Italian, French, and German, and the town is possibly based on the town of Manarola, but the characters have Japanese names and Japanese educational and social customs. Ruins around the town include Romanticism-era German castles, Roman-like temples, and old Gothic medieval churches. To make matters worse, Dark can occasionally be heard to chant Gratuitous German when sealing artwork in the anime. It doesn't help that the name of the town itself is "Azumano", which can literally translate to "Eastern Japan." One of the audio commentaries on the English DVDs has Vic Mignogna and Kevin Corn expressing confusion on where the series is actually set.
- Even the time period is ambiguous. While they appear to have some modern technologies (touch-activated security systems, trip beams, computers, cameras, and security passcodes), much of the clothing and lifestyle is extremely dated. Flashbacks from only thirty or forty years ago look as though they were from the Victorian era at the very latest (with Gorgeous Period Dress, lavish garden parties, large German castles, small and poorly insulated rooms and windows, candle lighting, carriages, the works). While the main characters wear modern clothing, background adult characters often dress in old-fashioned styles (Inspector Saehara even wears a Victorian tiered cloak while on the job). Even the flashbacks aren't consistent with time and place themselves; some have people wearing Japanese kimonos and robes, others wearing European ball gowns and tuxedos from varying eras—usually in the same scene and shot. This seems more like Culture Chop Suey.
Non-tropes
Unsorted
