You know what I’ve never really seen realistically depicted in fiction? The way that people in places that get a huge amount of snow deal with said snow. Specifically in the cities. I get that it’s probably not exactly an intuitive thing to think about if you’ve never lived in a place that gets a lot of snow, and even if you do, you probably figure that they must have some really sophisticated infrastructure systems specifically for this purpose. It’s not like they’ll just scoop the snow off the streets and gather it into huge piles, and then just climb over the progressively larger and larger snow piles every single year for months while waiting for the piles to melt in the spring.
We do. There’s no point in planning more sophisticated systems to get rid of something that’ll eventually just go away on its own. So they just pile the snow into randomly designated spaces that cars or people aren’t supposed to go through, and let it pile up. There’s significantly less street parking available in the winter because some spots where you could otherwise park a car are currently the parking spot of a snow pile three times taller than a car.
You get used to it. And if you grow up around here, it never even occurs to you to think of it as something strange in the first place.
Now thinking about how badly british-style colonialism would’ve fared here. Local natives telling them “you can’t build things that closely together, you’ve got to leave enough space for the huge snow piles in the winter”, being told that that’s nonsense, you people are just too lazy to be efficient with space. And then having the colonial town of New Shitterton or something get fucked over the first year because there’s no efficient way to clear out the waist-deep layer of snow on the streets.
Except rather than admitting they were wrong, they would build a huge, space-wasting, coal-burning Snow Furnace that all the snow gets dumped into (at the newly minted taxpayers’ expense, obviously) and melted in a tremendously inefficient and polluting way. Years later, the ash-blackened area surrounding the Snow Furnace would become the poorest neighborhood of the city and people living there would be the subject of much invasive scrutiny from colonial government officials trying to figure out why their district has such low standardized test scores. The conclusion would be something racist.