Americans need to know that most non-Americans suspect at least 87% of the time that most of your country doesn’t actually exist, and you’ve all just been engaging in a fascinating if admittedly somewhat overwrought work of performance art for the last two centuries. What gives the game away is all those places on the map that have names but no meaningful identity. We can tell you made the map first and still haven’t gotten around to making the labels mean something - like Forlindon in Middle Earth. What is Forlindon? It’s nothing, it’s just a name - but Tolkien didn’t like blank spaces so he wrote ‘Forlindon’ and never went back to flesh it out. Most of America is like that. There is no such place as Delaware so you can all stop the charade; Delaware is entirely fictional. Maryland? You needed to try harder. Colorado? Yeah, sure, there’s totally a perfectly rectangular state slap-dab in the middle of America. Arkansas and Alabama are the same place and just because one of your artistic ancestors screwed-up and used two different names doesn’t mean you had to keep the fiction going this long. It’s okay, America. We get it: you’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and it has been fairly entertaining and all, but some of this stuff is just silly, or bland, or just flat-out undeveloped. You don’t have to try to keep it all canon just because the guy who played Abe Lincoln flubbed a line and created a city called ‘Cincinnati’ so y’all had to come up with Ohio in about twenty minutes. It was a rush job and it shows. Maybe it’s time to pull a comics-industry thing and just reboot the whole franchise - cut-out the dead wood, streamline the lore, and merge Illinois and Indiana so writers stop getting them confused. It would be a lot easier, and the die-hard fans who complain would likely get drowned-out by the legion of new fans who would be free to discover a far more accessible and modernized America. (You can just call it ‘America’ from now on too. Nobody ever uses the ‘United States’ part and I think the brand would be stronger with the shorter name.)
