In the atlas of fiction, the "Great Plains" typically consists of roughly everywhere in the continental United States between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are all part of this, but Texas isn't. It’s rare for Minnesota or Louisiana to get associated with this, with the former being more culturally associated with the Twin Cities and the latter having Ragin' Cajun as distinct identities. Missouri has St. Louis as a cultural touchstone that lets it largely avoid this treatment, as well.
In short, when it comes to interpretations of these states in fiction, the Great Plains are largely thought to be underpopulated and… insignificant, for lack of a better term. It may have given us phrases like "We're Not in Kansas Anymore", and Mt. Rushmore is a significant landmark in South Dakota, but beyond that, there are a few stereotypes that pop up when these states appear in fiction. They're referred to as the "flyover states" for a reason after all; that is, you always fly over them, never fly to them.
These states will often be portrayed as dusty, rural, and what areas are inhabited are either one-horse towns or the only homestead you will see for the next eighty miles. Expect vistas of desolate prairies that stretch as far as the eye can see, so choked with dust that you'd think you were transported back to the 1900s, with stark wastelands where you can go for hours without seeing anyone else. In Real Life, the Great Plains region has always been arid — not to the degree of the Sonoran or the Mojave, but still dry.
A lot of this portrayal of this region as desolate and dusty was, at one point, Truth in Television. Contemporaneously with The Great Depression, the Great Plains were wracked by an unprecedented drought, and combined with erosion of the topsoil and poor farming practices, led to dust storms that ravaged the region, known today as the Dust Bowl. One of the factors leading to the Dust Bowl was a now-discredited👁 Image
theory of climatology that claimed agriculture would lead to increased precipitation in the region, prompting the government to encourage homesteading on land that had no chance of sustaining conventional farming. Another was that the first major attempts at record-keeping regarding the rainfall of the plains occurred during abnormally wet years, which led to overestimation of how much rain the region usually got. Efforts to plant trees to try and stop the flow of wind have left the states far less desolate than they once were. That said, the cultural idea of the Great Plains as desolate predates this period, likely having to do with propaganda claiming everything west of the Mississippi was unspoiled and ready to be conquered by Manifest Destiny, but thanks to evocative photographs of the Dust Bowl, this idea has never really left.
A subtrope of Flyover Country and Artistic License – Geography. Some examples for Nebraska specifically go under Corny Nebraska. Sister trope to the more characterful, if stereotypically boorish, Deep South. Large cities sometimes get framed as Everytown, America with this trope in effect. The Mountains of Illinois are often involved, due to California Doubling for these locales.
Examples:
- Interstellar: Cooper's farm is in eastern Colorado, at the very edge of what's considered the 'Great Plains', and a lot of the imagery in the first act is meant to recall scenes from the Dust Bowl. Justified, given the fact that the world is suffering through crop blights that have wrecked agriculture in the film’s setting.
- The Plow That Broke the Plains portrays the Midwest this way. Justified as it was filmed during the Dust Bowl and was about the devastating effects it had on the region. As the name suggests, the film pinned the blame squarely on the farmers who'd plowed up the native grasses to plant wheat and in doing so had broken apart the topsoil.
- Star Trek (2009): The film portrays Iowa in the so-called "Kelvin Timeline" as a largely rural flat and dusty landscape... but in the Establishing Character Moment where a young Kirk steals a car, it also shows that Iowa, inexplicably, has a sheer canyon that Kirk drives said vehicle into.
- The Wizard Of Oz portrays Kansas as this, as seen in the example photo above, the black and white photography contrasting sharply with the Technicolor land of Oz.
- The Camp Half-Blood Series:
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians directly compares the Fields of Asphodel, unflatteringly, to having to stand in the wheat fields of Kansas, forever.
- The Heroes of Olympus: At one point in The Mark of Athena, the heroes have to seek out Bacchus at a wheat field in Topeka, Kansas… the state's capital.
- Dorothy Must Die: Amy's hometown of Flat Hill, Kansas, is a depressing, broken-down, poor rural town in the middle of nowhere. In The Wicked Will Rise, the Wizard reveals that Flat Hill and the rest of Kansas is so sad and grey because the fairies who made Oz sucked out its magic to create their new land and all its wonders.
Otherwise, Flat Hill was exactly as I preferred not to remember it. Balding, patchy lawns surrounded by picket fences whose white paint had peeled away years ago. Bedraggled flower beds overgrown with weeds. Televisions flickering behind closed windows, even though it was the middle of the day. The late-morning sun already baking down into the carless streets while a dirty-faced girl on a tricycle wheeled around in bored circles. Flat Hill was a place people took their dreams to die, if they’d had any in the first place.
- The Grapes of Wrath: The Trope Codifier. It takes place during the Dust Bowl, and the early part of the novel is pervaded by the misery that it brought by the conditions in Oklahoma and the rest of the Great Plains on as the cast tries to make it to California, where they will hopefully find work… only to find that they're not the only one to have that idea, and as a result, wages are low and the work is back-breaking when they reach their 'salvation'.
- Sarah Plain And Tall's sequel Skylark picks up the story during a severe drought in 1912 Kansas. It's so bad that, after many of their neighbors have moved eastward, farmer Jacob Witting sends his wife, Sarah, and the children to her native Maine, while he stays behind to try to save their farm, which is a considerable distance from the small town of Hayes. Before the drought is over, they have suffered through loss of income due to the extremely dry ground not yielding any crops, their well drying up, the barn burning down due to a dry lightning storm, and having to sell all their farm animals except for Jacob's horse and one just-weaned calf.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: While we're not entirely sure if the series is even set in the USA, the Hinterlands still evoke this image. It's the location of books seven through nine, and is home to the Village of Fowl Devotees, Heimlich Hospital, and the Caligari Carnival. It's a desolate area described in terms of someone drawing the horizon, and forgetting to draw anything else.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The first two paragraphs of the novel describe Dorothy's family as living in a 'great gray prairie' miles from any other sign of civilization, and the location isn't given any further definition beyond "Kansas".
- The Boys (2019): Starlight is introduced working in Des Moines, Iowa. While tiny compared to New York City, Des Moines is still Iowa's capital, and Starlight acts like it's a sleepy small town where Nothing Exciting Ever Happens due to inactivity on the police scanner. That's not even getting into the fact that Des Moines has a violent crime rate that's about 1.5x the state average (though given what we learn about how Vought handles crimes it assigns to its supes, this might be intentional).
- Good Omens (2019): The diner in Iowa where Famine/Dr. Raven Sable tries to sell CHOW is in the middle of a desert-like environment, next to a hotel that seems to be the only landmark for miles. In the book, the restaurant was in Des Moines (population 210,000).
- Leverage: In "The Tap Out Job", Lincoln, Nebraska, is portrayed as a one-horse town. Lincoln is the state capital.
- Smallville: Clark Kent's adopted hometown of Smallville, Kansas is portrayed as a bucolic farming community that's interrupted by Clark's own latent superpowers, as well as the emergence of "Meteor Freaks" caused by Kryptonite debris in the area conferring superpowers to random citizens. An establishing shot of the show in Season 1 shows it surrounded by farmlands out to the horizon.
- Supernatural: Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is where Bobby acts as Mission Control for hunter operations throughout the U.S. in the first few seasons. It's treated like a small town where Bobby can casually commit burglary on the local library and still be on good terms with the local sheriff, on top of having a small enough population that people coming Back from the Dead is treated like an event that doesn't have too much reach, but Sioux Falls is the most populous city in South Dakota.
- Tulsa King: The series focuses on Dwight Manfredi, a New York Mafia Capo who, upon being released from a long stint in prison, is sent by his family to set up a new territory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Whilst the series does acknowledge Tulsa is a city and makes it clear there are richer and more metropolitan parts, it's still largely presented as a sleepy backwater area surrounded mostly by farms, ranches, large stretches of open countryside, and nearby indigenous land. Likewise, a large number of the natives carry a strong small-town country aesthetic. In reality, Tulsa is a thriving economic centre and one of the fifty largest cities in America.
- Arknights: Much of land to the west of the Columbia Union is an unsettled arid prairie. Though Catastrophes are common in those regions, the Columbian government has made initiatives for westward settlement and expansion even at the cost of encroaching on neighboring Bolívar's territory.
- Red Dead Redemption: Inverted; Blackwater, the largest city in the game, is in a region of the state of West Elizabeth known as the Great Plains. It also serves as a hub for the first half of the game's third act.
- Shadows Over Loathing: Gray County is inspired by plains-focused Folk Horror and the likes of "It's A Good Life" from The Twilight Zone (1959). It's largely corn and desolation as far as the eye can see, with an oil company having taken over what parts of the County haven't fallen to some form of supernatural corruption.
- Whilst it is set in the fantasy realm of Azeroth, World of Warcraft features certain zones reminiscent of the Great Plains, notably Westfall.
- 17776: The establishing shot we get of how Football works in this world, and just how much culture has changed in the last 15,000 years, is a football game being played across the entirety of Nebraska, where players have to avoid twisters, and the end zones are in Iowa and Wyoming. This game has been going on for well over a year at this point, and the most action that takes place is the fact that the camera crew is told off for being too close to a twister.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-1929👁 Image
is a series of anomalous dust storms that happened during the Dust Bowl that would disintegrate anything that it touched. - SCP-5352👁 Image
was a Supernatural Hotspot Town in New Mexico, at the very edge of the Great Plains, notable for a large number of disappearances in the area, which was abandoned during the Dust Bowl, and not re-discovered by the Foundation until a camera crew went missing in the area.
- SCP-1929👁 Image
- Courage the Cowardly Dog: The setting of the series is the Bagges' little farm home in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. It has a little town with a park that Courage goes to, but the Bagges' home is surrounded by arid, dry land, which is sometimes shown to be so dry that the ground is cracked.
- Steven Universe: Inverted. Due to the extreme Alternate History of the show, Kansas is apparently home to this setting's equivalent of Hollywood.