"We belong in Night Vale, all of us. It is our home."
Is actually such a fascinating sentiment, especially in light of... The series as a whole, but also particularly just the novel because of the insight the novel gives into daily life in Night Vale.
Like, how that plays out and the acceptance of Night Vale as home vs the awareness Night Vale citizens have of the fact that their home is a strange and uniquely terrifying place (or maybe not unique, exactly... who knows what's up w/ Pine Cliff, Red Mesa, etc)
Like... Jackie notes that "many things in Night Vale aren't what they are in other places." And this is to emphasize that she is strange even by Night Valian standards... Or, you could say, to emphasize that the strangeness has touched her life in a particular way.
Lucinda tells Jackie to be kind to the mothers of Night Vale because the town sends them "faint, distorted echoes" of their children.
So A) Lucinda seems to blame Night Vale itself for this, on some level, and B) Jackie is uh. At that point. A faint, distorted echo of herself, apparently.
And yet Jackie later notes how frustrating and confusing she finds King City relative to the comforting weirdness of home. She notes that it feels like the people of King City were once normal "whatever that meant outside of the only context she had ever known." Like shopkeepers didn't used to bleed there - but that's normal in Night Vale. So how is she distinguishing this, or even the above point re: things in Night Vale aren't what they are elsewhere?
Night Vale has always had a tenuous connection to reality, but that's still a connection. Their isolation is more complex than complete, but that's its own post.
And yet what this loops back around to that I find interesting is... this place, this uniquely strange and even terrible place, this place which can warp people into their own echoes is their home. And it is a message of the series as a whole, I think: homes can be terrible, you have to make them somewhere worth living.
And like in Jackie's case in particular... She does. She goes home, and things change for her. She's able to move toward where she wants to be - and that is Night Vale, but with her life in a different shape.
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