It’s true, Grantville, WV, isn’t Mannington, WV. Except it kind of is.
Keeping the details straight with hundreds of writers and millions of words is more than a challenge. It would be pretty much impossible without some solid structure in place. Mannington in 2000 provides that structure.
This section includes some of the research we have done on what Mannington was like and what resources it had in April 2000. There are some known differences. The biggest one is the contents of the Bowers Mansion. Those just didn’t come through the Ring of Fire. The early writers didn’t realize what the resources in the house (no one outside of the family really did at the time), so they weren’t written into canon.
A rural (Appalachian) small town in 2000 will also have some specific regional characteristics. Writers outside of the USA, in particular, can’t be expected to be aware of those so something will be written up and included in this section. For example, everyone would be familiar with popular country music of not just 2000 but several prior decades, because their family would have been playing the older music often enough for them to know it. Country music was hard to miss, and rock music would have been equally hard to miss. (Urban trends in music might have had their fans, but they wouldn’t have been common.) That includes the teenagers.
Another example is “bless your heart.” Yes, it can be a nice phrase meaning “bless your heart” but it’s close enough to the south to mean things like “you are a complete idiot I cannot believe the words that just came out of your mouth”.