This has been bugging my friends and me for a while. In the world of Slugterra, there are only 99 caverns. But it has been established that the western Cavern encompasses Canada and the U.S., so shouldn't there be more caverns to count? Also, who do you think came up with 99 caverns in the first place?
Please let me know what you think.
HI!!!! Have kept this on the back burner because its a great question and deserves alot of thought. Also, its why basically all the show/game maps *takes a deep breathe* DONT FREAKING WORK FOR US.
Here’s why - and its gonna sound unrelated at first but work with me -
Lets say you want to go to quebec. You wanna know where things are! Cool. heres a random map of quebec:
How useful! How is it useful? Because our surface world is operating on this scale:
So that map of quebec is from a birds eye view is useful, cause using our imagination, we understand that everything is on that x axis. If you start in Radisson and walk south, i can tell you with full certainty that, even if theres a mountain or a lake or a hill or buildings in the way, its all on relatively the same plane of earth, and you will reach Wemindji. and you will probably see Wemindji from a distance! its not like theres walls surrounding it!
Now, we take the drop, we enter slugterra. Caverns are basically big civilized caves!
….are they all on this same plane?
PROBABLY NOT! This ground-to-sky chart, how far deep it is in the earth, could be different for any cavern. not to mention, we’re not even sure which pathways are part of a cavern and which parts are just considered roads/caves that connect different caverns. Like imagine a world where you walk south to Wemindji, but you have to both walk sound AND walk upwards like 40 miles, because a bend of the flumes, actually, is on that level with Radisson instead. Imagine if basically everywhere on the surface had mountains, and then underground towns, so for every coordinate you had to specify whether to go north, south, east, west, UP, OR DOWN…and then on top of all of that, all these places have ceilings, so you cant visibly SEE all these places from each other. Maps become REALLY important when you cant follow stars, or your adding two new directions to keep track of. You need a birdseye view of a cavern, but for large-scale travel from cavern to cavern, you need a general sense of what levels of caverns lead to each other, whats on top of another and which caverns have exits to which other caverns. just imagine if we had to be like "oh im going to boston for the weekend! oh no, lower boston. yeah, i know it adds 5 hours to the trip. i just really wanted to see the green sox's new stadium."
My favorite example is in ROTE. that fire elemental cavern had to be FLOWN TO, far above the previous cavern in the movie. And THEN, when riding the jetpacks/the deep cavern creatures, they exit into the jungle cavern, where they basically shoot out at least a few dozen feet into the air of the Jungle Cavern. So that chart seems something like this:
Soooo…how do you make this map? Imagine if quebec worked like that, and below Raddison was another two cities. Map makers would have to use slashes or something in the same spot. Which is doable! but, what about a map thats supposed to help us with the geography only?
And on this map, if I wrote down "?Cavern", and then to the right of that, "fire elemental cavern", and then to the right of that, "jungle cavern", i would be in quite a shock if i was a new traveler, because holy heck, the map didnt tell me they're on different heights!!!
you can kinda see where the underriver is! We get a general understanding of the important levels in this rocky terrain. But in my info doc, theres a reason why, sometimes, i say whether a cavern is right next to another, or above/below one. This gives us a birds eye view, but NOT the earth view as to how deep a cavern is in relation to those around it, and whether theres stuff above or below it. What if two caverns are super close to each other north south east and west, but one of them is thirty miles above the other! What if some cavern looks really close to the flumes but theres some huge slabs of rock debilitating travel from there to that water source? A birds eye view is helpful. But unless u leave alot of sidenotes/get creative with the map key, your not gonna get a good sense of how away these places are to each other from birdseye alone.
SO! Why aren’t there more caverns? Theres probably much of slugterra that are just trailways to the different levels of earth, and therefore arent considered caverns. We dont what caverns are natural, or manmade; newly populated, or buried as of some cavern cave-in tragedy thirty years ago or something. Caverns can also be HUGE! Think about it, even in your question - all of slugterra in the US and Canada! JUST in the us and canada! Hot damn, the US and canada must be huge, then! 99 caverns in just TWO COUNTRIES?!? What if every cavern was at least as big as a latin american country! There isn’t even 99 countries in the entire western hemisphere! We cant really guess on how big these caverns are, thats why tracking travel time is so important to the slugterra map lore. it really could've been any number, cause they could be any size!
So long winded answer - theres alot of history that comes with marking territory, and 99 is a cool sounding number. I support the show for going with it.
As far as who came up with the caverns, here’s a non-exhaustive list of all the powers/communities of slugterra that could have had various control over specific areas, depending on where they settled:
Mother nature. Caves are pretty natural things, over millions of years. I’m sure many caverns are naturally-occuring, and life evolved in them. The cave trolls and molls and shadow clan, for example, are alluded to be the oldest beings of slugterra.
dark bane's time in the midland, in slugterra, and whether or not they were ever on the surface. get creative!
The shanes meddling around. Get creative!
The shadow clan staking territory/not allowing other species to claim certain territory
Moles claiming territory…or building it from scratch! And connecting caverns to each other.
Trolls building/staking territory, and connecting certain caverns to each other.
Humans from the surface trying to create societies similar to the ones the left behind - countries are caverns but they keep locations like towns and cities and markets
Elves existed. Im sure they did something.
temperatures and weathers of the caverns. no one lived in the magma cavern, i wonder why!
crime! how bad was piracy on the trails, throughout slugterran history?
enviorments for certain species. i wonder why the fish lived in undertow cavern...
All of these species’s colliding with the eastern caverns, back when the portal was open. Perhaps true slugterran worldwide mapping, similar to the history of map-making up here on the surface, only came to be when explorers and tourists wanted to navigate huge swaths of land with new tech like mechs, and therefore, solid boundaries had to be properly settled legally to finally create a guide for the eastern slingers to navigate the west, and vice versa, only a few hundred years ago.
So yeah, not that far off from how small groups of humans created the societies on the surface. All of these groups probably only really cared about their super local areas, moving when they needed food, the environment was dying, another place was advantageous, there was a war and they’re being kicked off their now foreign-invaded territory…aloooooot of things can happen in thousands of years. I do think, tho, that since slugterra’s map isn’t one single plane, these different societies were harder to integrate with each other, hence why the caverns of mostly humans, mostly trolls, mostly molls, etc., still persist to the modern day, even with mechs and trains and the flumes.
This was really fun to write, thanks for asking!!! Im posting less rn, im on a greek mythology run and its pride month so it makes sense to write queer greeks rn, but i’ll be back for more!
