#im only half way thru the fow book which is a great place to get lore on the Weird european towns
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kerink · 2 years ago
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(i have only heard the main podcast and im still reading the books so idk if this gets addressed elsewhere sorry) not counting the legal merging, do you think original Desert Bluffs was a Night Vale, or do you think EVERY Night Vale has a Desert Bluffs? And what about the other towns in the desert, like Red Mesa?
this is one of those things i've grappled with a lot while trying to understand wtnv's world building.
what we know is that huntokar ripped nv out of time to save it from nuclear war. this created a collapsing or black hole effect where all nvs in all timelines are either mixed, overlapped, or connected
what we also know is that nv is connected to some earth in some way that allows for 1. carlos (and the uowii) to come to town, 2. the man in the tan jacket, jackie fierro, and the craytons to move between nv and king city, 3. cecil to travel to europe, a tropical island, and the big city, 4. allow silas and mino to travel between it and the real world
night vale is simultaneously in its own pocket dimension sucking in all the other fractured night vales into a singularity AND a town with a location in the united states where people can travel (even before the events of 190)
that being said
in book 1 we learn that night vale is infectious. my assumption is that the surrounding towns were infected just like king city was and became Weird due to proximity to and inter-mingling with night vale.
(there's also much to be said about the history of nv and how it was weird even before huntokar hurt it, and how there ARE so many Weird towns all over the world. i personally love the idea that pre-1983 nv and other weird towns were all locked down by the world government to keep the rest of the world safe, but in order to keep the citizens from know they're trapped they're kept stupid about the outside world and are only permitted to interact with the other Weird towns. and then huntokars meddling just made things worse, but i digress.)
i don't think the other Weird towns are alt-timeline night vales because of how kevin and cecil function as doubles.
the a matter of blood arc gives us a clear understanding of how doubles are meant to work in terms of timeline shenanigans, and kevin and cecil don't fit that understanding. the danas were all clearly from different timelines and had to travel to the primary timeline. desert bluffs and night vale are within drive time, they're rival high school sports teams. kevin and cecil have different names! the events of the sandstorm do not perfectly parallel - vanessa and dana did not have the same experience.
whatever kevin and cecil are they aren't doubles like the danas and the kareems and the joseph finks. bulk has a lot of really good musing on them as mirrors instead of doubles, but i'll let them speak to that.
so no, i don't think db and pine cliff and red mesa and stone meadow and cactus park and the big city and king city and svitz and luftnarp and franchia and nulogorsk are alternate night vales. i think they're their own cities with their own rich lore and back stories and are interconnected with night vale by virtue of being Weird and therefore isolated and i don't think we've been told how yet
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