Middle-of-Nowhere Street

So middle of nowhere, it became its actual name!

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 purposes 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.

If weird stuff keeps happening here anyway, see Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here. 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.

Sub-Trope of Small, Secluded World.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Paradigm City in The Big O. Justified by the end... probably.
• 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 ignored by outsiders to the point that nobody cares when it is taken over and the students are held hostage by an army brought in by a secret American organization.
• Deconstructed in Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, as Homura begins to realize that the Mitakihara the cast are living in cannot be the real Mitakihara because attempting to leave for the supposedly neighboring city of Kazamino where Kyoko is from results in them looping right back around to the other side of Mitakihara. This is her first hint that they might be in a Witch's Labyrinth. She's right. Oh, boy, is she right.
• 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.
• Shimeji Simulation: The Danchis (Japanese name for public housing) that Shimeji and Sis live in. They are located in the middle of nowhere right next to a wheat farm, and eerily enough, only four residents settle in there, including Shimeji, Sis, and the Chito and Yuuri Expies. It was later vacated starting in Chapter 31, when Shijima left and with Sis nowhere to be found.
• 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.
• 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.

Comic Books

• 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.
• 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.
• The story of Circles takes place in real city Boston, but the fictional street 6 Kinsey Circle.

Film

• The entire premise of Interstate 60.
• Pleasantville features a literal version of this: the village's main street wraps right back to itself at each end.

Literature

• 12 Grimmauld Place in Harry Potter. It is a big estate belonging to a very old wizard family, and it is later used as headquarters by the Order of the Phoenix. And it is just a random place in London. Justified because it is hidden by powerful magic, but still, all those wizards and witches (some of them far from discreet) going around...
• Middlefield, Indiana enforces this trope in Mark Clements' novel The Land of Nod. It's apple-pie idyllic, why would you ever want to leave? Besides, good luck finding a way out.

Live Action TV

• The sit com Corner Gas takes place entirely in the fictional town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, Canada.
• 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.
• 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 Prisoner (1967): The Village. Be seeing you.
• 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.
• Recycled IN SPACE!! on Firefly when Mal tells Simon they're all alone in the black. Corner of No and Where.

Music

• 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.

Webcomics

• 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 darnedest imaginations...
• 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.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Generictown is made of this — although it all tends to gravitate around Bob's house, or rather, Bob himself.

Western Animation

• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): 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 in the middle of Nowhere, a town in Kansas. This jump-starts some of the plots. The villain of the week often theorizes that nobody would easily notice if they kidnap some yokels in the middle of nowhere. However it is such a Crapsack World that whenever they travel, it turns out that there are plenty of villains and monsters everywhere. So it ends up being questionable how safer the yokels would be if they lived somewhere rather than Nowhere.
• 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 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 (though their actions could occasionally be heard off-screen). One major exception is the football team from nearby Lemonbrook, who appear as shadowed silhouettes during "Tight End Ed".
  • In Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show the settings move from the cul-de-sac and the suburb of Peach Creek to an area of badlands, farms, nearby Lemonbrook, a forest, and an unnamed oceanside city where the Eds and the kids really learn about Eddy's brother.
• Stormalong Harbor in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. It doesn't even seem to be anywhere near land, not counting the various islands that are within travel distance, and "How The West Was Fun" shows that travelling west just leads to an endless, empty ocean infested with seamonsters. The harbor doesn't even grow "out" it grows "up", with the richer you are the higher you live. The richest family in Stormalong have a massive manor with a lawn and Stromalong Harbor is supposed to be a rickety island made of wood planks and piles. Hell, Stormalong even have Suspiciously Spacious Sewer, despite having no foundation!

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