I’m really coming around to the suggestion that Galar is Great Britain upside down. Observe:
Which wouldn’t even be unprecedented; after all, they rotated Maui ninety degrees counterclockwise to create Akala Island in Alola.
The real question is, if Galar is upside down, where the hell is Kalos?
Pokémaniacal 
Let’s not forget how Hoenn was also 90°rotated Kyshu. 🙂 the region looks very promising, I must say.
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*Kyushu, typo
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Also this!
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Either that or it looks like they’ve drawn a line through the country somewhere in the midlands and have left the bottom half out. Not *un*reasonable since the only used a quarter of france (The UK doesn’t have a tonne going on in the south outside of London) but it’d be really odd.
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They’ve definitely cut off at least the northern part of Scotland, if we accept my reading of the map, so either way there’s some chopping going on…
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What’s to say they’re not where the UK and France are in real life? We’re just seeing the region upside down. Much like Hoenn is presumably in the same place is Kyushu and we just see it rotated.
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I kind of meant that comment flippantly but it is actually something I wonder about. Like, all the regions we see in the Pokémon core series are based on regions of the real world, but when the anime zooms out to show us the whole world, it looks nothing like earth. All we really know for certain is that Johto is west of Kanto. So maybe Galar is nowhere near Kalos, and the fact that they resemble countries that happen to be adjacent in the real world means nothing?
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Ah, the anime’s shown us a world map several times and it’s always different. The original series had a world map that was virtually identical, but then the BW series showed us one with five countries that looked like Scandinavia and Unova slap-bang in the middle. I’ve never put too much stock in it; given that it’s fairly clear from the original RGBY games that the Pokemon world is Earth, I remain unconvinced otherwise.
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Sure, but the original games were made long before anyone ever thought Pokémon would leave Japan. If it seems like they’re set on Earth, that’s because the designers had never, at that point, had any reason to consider what the rest of the world looked like. I don’t believe that, if you really pressed them on it today, Game Freak’s designers would hold to a conviction that there is a country called Guyana on a continent called South America in the Pokémon world, or that there is a continent called Africa inhabited by creatures, which are not Pokémon, called “elephants.” “Canon” for the original games those things may be, but I seriously doubt subsequent generations have been informed by a conception of the Pokémon world that includes them, because frankly they’re not important; they’re throwaway lines meant to provide accessible points of reference (essentially, they’re moss-trolls https://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/the-moss-troll-problem/).
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I think it’s not only upside down, but rotated as well, so the Isle of Armor is in the direction of Kalos (fwiw, I think the relative positions of Galar and Kalos are the same as those of Britain and France in the real world). I seem to remember seeing an image when the Isle of Armor expansion was announced that showed it was to the east, not to the west, of the main landmass.
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