(This page is a work-in-progress. Please feel free to contribute your own findings!)
La France Éternelle: Analyzing Gasco's Geography (ABUNDANT SPOILERS!)
The Free Lands of Gasco are a Fantasy Counterpart Culture and post-apocalyptic version of France, meaning that there's bound to be some things we can directly connect between the two. Yoann himself has also alluded to a secret hidden in the names for each town and/or their sub-locations
.As a main reference to use, I've put together a simplified map of Gasco through compiling in-game screenshots and information taken from the game's Little Tail Bronx Archives book. The map shows the placement of both major story locations and individual towns, and roughly distinguishes between environments of grassland/forest, wastelands, and mountainous regions. I don't view it as totally 100% accurate, but we want to focus on the general vicinities of each location rather than tedious to-the-kilometer assessments.
Please also feel free to check out the Departemental Issues page for further reference on the many regions of France, along with other sites to take your research from— Wikipedia, digital maps, atlases or tourist sites, whatever you feel works.
Without further ado, let's begin.
First and foremost, the overall shape of Gasco matches that of France (and even cuts off at the international borders with Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Andorra), which is rather obvious from a first glance, in spite of any liberties taken.
However, the biggest area of France missing from Gasco is the southwestern portion, which has historically been known as the Gascony region. In the real world, this region includes the western Pyrenees mountains and the major cities of Bordeaux and Tarbes. That being said, it's not a straightforward cut— there's a curved portion in the southwest of Gasco shaped like a bay, with some headland just south of it that curves down to the southernmost point of the continent. The area around the city of Toulouse survives upon this headland.
With this in mind, Gasco's name can be viewed as possibly being ironic due to how it lacks the Gascony area, and this lack of Gascony gives Gasco an irregular pentagon-like appearance compared to France's famous hexagonal shape.
The other parts of France that definitely didn't survive the transition to Gasco are as follows:
- The Contentin Peninsula in northwestern Normandy, where the city of Cherbourg is notably located.
- The entirety of what was once Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the northernmost tip of France bordering Belgium, which includes the settlements of Calais, Dunkirk and Lille.
- The Vosges mountainous area bordering Germany in the east, which includes the cities of Strasbourg and Mulhouse.
- The east-southeastern half of Provence in southeastern-most France, including the cities of Nice, Toulon, Monte Carlo, and possibly Marseille.
- And lastly, the northeastern city of Charleville-Mézières.
As for the parts of old France that did survive, let's see how they line up with each of the places in Gasco:
- Petit Mona itself is situated within the department of Finistère in northwestern Brittany, a peninsula where the westernmost tip of France is located. The most specific location that can be determined is that it's a short distance west or northwest of the real-life commune of Morlaix. "Finistere" also gets its name from the Latin phrase finis terræ, which translates to "end of the earth". The forest surrounding Petit Mona is known in-game as the Terre-Neuve Forest, which has the literal translation of "new earth". ("Terre-Neuve" is also the French word for "Newfoundland", and pulls double duty as a Stealth Pun referencing the Newfoundland dog breed).
- Around the border between the provinces of Dale and Viszla is a river— it's likely that this river is a future version of the Loire river.
- The mountainous province of Mastiff Central in Chapter 9 is on the northeastern edge of the real-world Massif Central region, just west or so of the real-world city of Lyon and the Rhône river. The strange path shown on the map east of Mastiff Central and Lhassa Apso may also be the dried-up remains of the Rhône.
- The capital of Paresia has been outright confirmed by Word of God to have been built over the ruins of Paris (or more specifically, the Vanargand's corpse), and its position within north-central Gasco lines up near-perfectly with Paris' position within north-central France. Its name is also an obvious portmanteau of Paris and the Gaul capital of Alesia.
