Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30644093-20170527094016/@comment-25926288-20170527231751

Yep, as said, Storybrooke is a county (given that Storybrooke has a county sheriff and labels on maps). There are small weird things that usually brings up questions like the ones posed.

Being generous, the Dark Curse hit at best 10,000 square miles (100 miles by 100 miles), with some part excluded. Given a lot of (by humans) sparsely/uninhabited forests, and mountains, giving a 30 person per square mile average is fine, which means SB county has at best 300,000 citizens. (Plus, there were a few ogre wars. Plus some could have fled the curse.)

Now the conflicting parts are the small trivial ones of "A region full of people are in a small town with one hospital and one elementary school with like no police force". So, yeah, the show treats Storybrooke a little too small for its sake. TV does have a slight "1 means 5x to 10x more than it appears thingy. So, we may see five police officers in some cop procedural but there would actually be 50 or a hundred or so cops. (Like when we see like ten people from Camelot, we should assume a few hundred. Like my highschool assembly in the past was at least 500 people (in my grade alone), so I'd hope we aren't suppose to assume that Camelot was inhabited by a hundred people.)

Now the only slight issue with royals running is that Regina was feared in the EF and could easily kill them with magic. But one would have thought they'd at least faction themselves off.