[OOC][PLOT][ARC 1] Planning for Season 1 - The Retcon

[Bob Schroeck]

Checking the Prairie Home Companion wiki reveals that there is only one canonical motel in the town and given that it apparently is also a bait shop is probably someplace we don't want to convert into a residence, if only because of the smell.  There don't appear to be any boarding houses, at least that got advertising time on the show. 

So, thinking about it, I'm going to suggest we turn a former farm just out of town -- someplace with a big farmhouse and a lot of outbuildings -- into the residence.  We can just call it "The Old <insert name here> Place" and pick something that's either German or Scandinavian to match the names on the other businesses in town.  Backstory can be something like, "Old man <name> passed away last spring, and his son, who's a <pick a profession> in Minneapolis, has no interest in coming back home and running the farm, so he's been trying to sell it for a few months now but he's been asking more than anyone local wants to spend.  Then that nice Mr. Phantomhive came to town..."  (And maybe some of the townsfolk are now calling it "The Phantomhive Place"...)  The farmhouse is huge -- it was built in the 1930s when the family had 12 kids and a couple of them were old enough that they had families of their own staying there -- and there's a good-sized bunkhouse for the hired hands the farm needed back when it had been a very profitable going concern.  The barn can be turned into a dojo/training hall for the RWBY folks; other outbuildings can be whatever we need, and we put something cool in the silo.

Okay, I've been doing a bit more research on Lake Wobegon and discovered that there is something that's as close to a canonical location as you can get -- the programs distributed at live performances of A Prairie Home Companion in 2005 had a map showing Lake Wobegon about two miles north of Holdingford MN and northwest of St. Cloud MN. The intersection of County Road 9 and 440th St out in that direction is 2.08 miles from the heart of Holdingford, and might make for a good location for the center of Lake Wobegon, especially as it doesn't appear that we need to have the literal lake right there. The town has only 800 people so it also doesn't need to be terribly big. And there are lots of farms in the area, any of which could be the residence

Speaking of the lake, Rob, you're not alone in identifying Kranz Lake as Lake Wobegon -- Mapcarta.com does it, too. One problem, though -- Google Maps' satellite view reveals that the lake is an ugly, algae-covered mess surrounded by bare earth -- probably not appealing enough to be the right lake.

Anyway, back to landmarks: Keillor references St. Cloud as the closest "good-sized town". He's called Holdingford "the most Wobegonic", so I guess we can crib pics of Holdingford when we want to show nonspecific parts of LW.

As for the residence, info on LW says its people are mostly German in background, so for the moment I'm calling it "The Old Dietmeier Place". As a tentative replacement for Greer Wakefield, I've come up with Kris Wikstrom, who's from the Scandinavian segment of the population and like Garnett is a recent college grad. He/she/them/other remains unspecified in birth and presenting gender, appearance, and pretty much all characterizing information.