This is possibly a reference to penal colony of the British empire. And whenever you think of the British empire... you guessed it, we're going to be talking about the Victorian era.
Even that dev Shaoji mentioned the Victorian era when discussing ideas and designs for Penacony. The Jazz Age is a part of American history, but alas, the USA is a child of Britain. As long as the world breathes and speaks in English, we are still living in the aftermath of the Victorian era.
How is it that literally everybody knows about the Mongols, even Alexander the Great of Greece, but fewer people know about Alexandrina Victoria, when the British empire literally conquered a ton of territory comparable to the Mongols (even surpassing the Mongols according to western media)?
At least in the USA, whoever is in charge of the education system must think that if all USA children were educated about Queen Victoria, that would enable so many people... Perhaps only the educated, mature people could be trusted to handle the truth of history. So this is how the USA elites (aristocrats) 'condition' and 'contain' its young children. Also, there could be some geopolitics between the modern Britain and USA...
It is also funny to see some USA media try to lecture China on how to teach the history of the Mongol empire. After all, how does the USA handle teaching about Queen Victoria to young American children? In most USA cirriculum, Queen Victoria is hardly mentioned at all, compared to other Anglo-Saxon figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, TR, FDR, even King George and the Boston tea party, etc. So USA has its own kind of censorship when it comes to educating its citizens about history.
The USA is like: ok, you know what, we are not going to teach our children about possibly the most powerful Alex in history. But we can write chapters, books, and plays about other Alex's such as Alex Hamilton (btw there is nothing wrong with writing more about Hamilton, given his foundational role in USA history).
Meanwhile, certain people creating certain video games in China are like: hmm, we do not really know how to make Alex sound more Chinese (do you translate Alex as A, Ya, Ai, Li? Sun?? Yang? Jin? And then Ar is somehow translated as Huang), but Victoria on the other hand can be easily translated into something that sounds Chinese (vi > wei). So let's release and talk more about vi first and delay all other characters for as long as possible.
The same people probably looked at Alexandrina Victoria's name and decided: hey let's just focus on the 'rin' and 'vi' parts of the name for now and delay the rest of her name for later. That will for sure (dis)please our stakeholders. What do you call this kind of behavior? There is even a space separating the 'rina' and 'vi' parts of her name. How should all the good people named Alex in the world feel about this?
As they say, why have a 2-some when you can have a 3-some (somebody censor this sentence).
The IPC used to send its prisoners to Penacony. So hey Penacony is basically like Australia (during the British Empire) and Meropide. Now it has transformed into a giant hotel and luxury vacation destination (so like Las Vegas?).
There was a cartoon featuring Clockie, Hamster Ball Knight, and Hanu. This seems to be very much in the style of post WW2 USA around the time TV was invented. Some of the architecture displayed seems reminiscent of Bioshock (Rapture). They even explicitly say when you arrive in Golden Hour (Dreamscape) you will get Jazz Age aesthetics/vibes.
So Penacony is the child of the British empire, namely the USA.
There is a soda drink called Soulglad (Suleda). Suleda... Sorush... Surtalogi... Speaking of which, weren't there rumors about a Fontaine character named Soutine? What happened?
Apparently the fountains, cars, even fireworks all use suleda, making it a way of life. We can hear Earnshaw saying 'sugary drinks will make your teeth rot' to Lanoire.
As for the 2.x main storyline, our expectations are very low based on what happened in Fontaine 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 (and the later parts of HSR 1.x). It is very easy to destroy trust but very hard to build it up.
It seems there is a new tonberry-like monster in Penacony.