#predominantly populated by nomadic peoples so the sedentary kingdoms act like it doesn’t count)

[bestworstcase]

So, I was gathering reference for a map making project and when looking at the Vale World of Remnant video got reminded of this map and was curious if you had any thoughts on things:

This was its follow up:

i think about those red settlements all the time. (i have another post about this somewhere but it’s lost in the tumblr abyss. rip.) now, first thing, the placement of these settlements is clearly vibes-based—we know there are no settlements in the menagerian interior and there’s no green markers where the city of vale should be, etc—so their distribution is probably meant to give more of a general sense of where people tend to be in a world populated mainly by grimm, rather than the exact location of specific settlements. in any case, what’s up with quadling country those settlements on the “uninhabited” continent where salem lives?

third data point, from the great war spot:

which implies that battles were fought across the southern peninsula of the “uninhabited” continent during the great war; this does not make sense to me unless there were people there, so my thinking is that these red settlements must have existed at the time and their obliteration occurred during the course of the great war, which tracks with qrow noting many settlements were permanently lost due to the fighting and the grimm.

but that leaves the questions of 1. who were these people, and 2. why hasn’t anyone ever mentioned them?—because if this was an entire kingdom that got annihilated during the great war, you’d think that would merit at least a footnote in the great war episode. the two explanations that i can think of are:

#1, the red settlements represent a now-defunct faunus kingdom that is receiving the same treatment in history books that menagerie receives politically in the present—namely, the “four kingdoms… (and menagerie)” thing where the faunus kingdom is not only completely marginalized on the international stage but humans barely even acknowledge that it exists.

this would also make menagerie a much harder kick in the face, if the faunus already had a kingdom—a much larger one, even!—that was razed to the ground, ended up impossible to reclaim from the grimm, and got unceremoniously erased by human historians while the human kingdoms were like “stop complaining, we gave you an island!” about it.

however, i’d think this would be a bit of history blake knew, and there’s an obvious place in V4 for her to have brought it up because she talks about the history of the great war in relation to menagerie!

or,

#2, the red settlements were founded by vacuans displaced by the conquest and occupation of vacuo. this conveniently explains why they’ve never really been explained, if they were separate from vacuo by virtue of not being under mistrali occupation but also still, in a way, considered ‘part’ of vacuo because the people living their were vacuan—the settlements were destroyed or abandoned after the war, sure, but in the end the vacuans who lived there got to go home and have their own kingdom back. i think this is also more in keeping with the decolonial project of the vytal accords, with imperial territories being liberated and so forth. and you still get the whitewashing-history vibe of well, sure these vacuans lost their homes but they got a kingdom in the end so…

<- this would make the vacuo arc the natural place for it to come up in the story proper, because the vacuans would remember even if the rest of the world didn’t.

either way, the fact that the settlements are 1. located on the continent where salem presumably lives, and 2. color-coded red definitely implies some connection between her and them—whether that’s a legitimate connection or just ozma making an assumption that people living in her proximity must secretly be under her thumb remains to be seen, but it’s interesting. i do think it’s quite unlikely that salem herself is the one solely responsible for their obliteration, because the great war episode does show that there was fighting in that region; if she did attack them she did so under the cover of a level of destructive warfare that would have wiped them off the map anyway.

i’m also very interested in the menagerian-lime settlements on anima—it’s always been my assumption that that’s where the WF is headquartered and the idea of faunus-majority settlements in southern anima, protected by menagerie, compels me.