Middle of Nowhere Street

"Jennifer: What's outside of Pleasantville? Miss Peters: I don't understand. Jennifer: Outside of Pleasantville? Like, what's at the end of Main Street? Miss Peters: Mary Sue. You should know the answer to that! The end of Main Street is just the beginning again."

- Pleasantville

A location that for all intents and purposed has its plot- and character-related oddness self-contained to a specific area.

Even if this is in or near a big city, no one outside of a seemingly arbitrary area ever seems to notice or mind. This lets characters essentially self-govern their own location and allow any collateral damage or odd phenomenon to occur without major incident.

In most such locations, anyone not taking part in the plot itself is subject to the Weirdness Censor.

See also the Building of Adventure, which is often found in the Middle of Nowhere Street.


 * Powerpuff Girls: Townsville where the protagonists hang out, has all the giant monsters, supervillains, and other major troubles. The town of Citysville, right next door, is monster-free. There are occasional exceptions: the town of Farmsville was the site of an Alien Invasion.
 * The farm in Courage the Cowardly Dog is literally in the middle of Nowhere, a town in Kansas. This jump-starts some of the plots. The villain theorizes that nobody would easily notice if they kidnap some yokels in the middle of nowhere.
 * Tenchi Muyo!: Tenchi's house. (Although, to be fair, the first weirdness to hit it transplanted the house from the city to a rural area near the shrine maintained by Tenchi's grandfather.)
 * Urusei Yatsura: Tomobiki.
 * Ranma ½: Furinkan. One fanfic suggests that the weirdness of Furinkan is, in fact, well known. However, the bizarre creatures and rampant property damage have long since become routine. The rest of the world is merely happy to not live there. This theory does well to explain most of the more severe cases of Nowhere Street.
 * Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy: The cul-de-sac, despite being in the middle of a city, seems to be both cut off from the rest of the city and fully adult-free. This can be explained (along with many other things) by how the fourth season finale "Take This Ed and Shove It" revealed the entire show was the main characters as old men telling stories of their childhood.

The fifth season went on to shift from summer vacation to fall, and the school was seen. However, only the kids from the cul-de-sac were ever seen; never any other students or any of the teachers. (The sixth season goes forward again into winter, but that's irrelevant.)
 * Ninja High School: Subversion: in US-made print comic, the odd events in and around Quagmire are well known nationally, but are so frequent that they are no longer considered news.
 * El Goonish Shive: Moperville. The strange goings-on in Moperville are being actively covered up by Mr. Verres, who works for a secret government agency and is a master of the Paper-Thin Disguise. Although more recently it seems the Weirdness Censor may be breaking down and breaking the Masquerade but Moperville may just end up like Roswell.
 * The Wotch: Tandy Gardens. The weirdness in Tandy Gardens has actually made the national news; but a lot of the goings-on happen in out-of-the-way places or at the high school, and, well, kids just have the darndest imaginations...
 * Fuka Academy in My-HiME, despite being fairly close to a town, otherwise seems to be surrounded by nothing but Ghibli Hills. Apart from the need to come up with rational explanations for the collateral damage from HiME fights (which are themselves Invisible to Normals), most of the events in and around the academy are apparently treated by outsiders as Somebody Else's Problem ? to the point that nobody cares when.
 * Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou takes place principally in a town so desolated and isolated its population consists of a mere handful of people and even traveling a limited distance towards or away from town is considered a major endeavor. Furthermore, most lines of communication are cut requiring either air drops or a personal courier for mail delivery, and for the latter option humanoid robots are preferred as they're better able to cope with the conditions.
 * The sit com Corner Gas takes place entirely in the fictional town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, Canada.
 * Stormalong Harbor in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. It doesn't even seem to be anywhere near land.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer has Sunnydale. It was specifically designed and run for monsters to hide out in and eat people. It all fell apart when the immortal mayor exploded, though.
 * Scary Go Round features the town of Tackleford, a place outsiders seem to be dimly aware of as 'very weird' while not believing any of the (entirely true) stories they hear about it. A couple of references to "Tackleford Madness" indicate this is definitely a local phenomenon.
 * Fabletown in Fables, through use of a magical Weirdness Censor and other spells to keep people out and hidden, is a neighborhood in the middle of New York City. In one issue they had to remove the Weirdness Censor to cast a powerful spell to make it rain, relying temporarily on the rain itself to keep people out of their business. They recently had to leave because all of their spells failed at once: both causing their magically-enhanced buildings to fall down, and causing the citizens and officials of New York City to notice that said buildings fell down.
 * Subverted in Eureka, where the town is the home of a government sanctioned top-secret research facility, and so the town is kept low-key to avoid unwanted scrutiny.
 * The Protomen: "The City", which gradually becomes Dr. Wily's totalitarian robocracy seems to be completely isolated from anything going on in the world outside it.
 * Pleasantville features a literal version of this: the village's main street wraps right back to itself at each end.
 * The Prisoner: The Village. Be seeing you.
 * Paradigm City in The Big O.
 * In Once Upon a Time Storybrooke is a town under a black curse. None of the inhabitants can leave and outsiders rarely pass through and almost never stay. If the town gains a new inhabitant it is because the person is tied into the curse.