#inb4 but you’re taking the silly vampire show 2seriously!!! shut UP this is fun to me

[serendipitouscontaminant]

NANDOR: Please, I am speaking here! And when I was the leader of my country, I would kill anyone who disrespected me when I’m talking about candles.

COLIN ROBINSON: You were the leader of a country?

NANDOR: Yes. I was the leader of Al Quolanudar.

LASZLO: That sounds like you just made it up.

COLIN: Sounds fake.

NANDOR: No, I have not just made it up, it’s a real country, it’s not a fake country, it’s a real country, Al Quolanudar.

NADJA: Bless you.

NANDOR: Guillermo, go on your intelligent telephone machine and look it up.

GUILLERMO: Spell that? A…

- S1e8, Citizenship

So, like everyone else in the WWDITS tag, I am Normal About This Show, and thus I have spent way too long thinking about how that exchange makes no sense and how to make it make sense. YES, the real explanation is that it was early in the show and it was the funniest way to do the reveal that Al Quolanudar dissolved and set off the A plot of the episode, but I have still decided to dedicate an extended amount of time to hammering out a Watsonian explanation and now you have to suffer with me as I explain how I handwave many of the inconsistencies/what I as a vaguely obsessive person perceive as inconsistencies in this show.

Anyway, first—why does it not make sense? Well, Nandor’s 750+. There’s no point in time in between that and 2019 where he found out that his country, which he used to rule, dissolved? He’s also the one who, later in the episode, pinpoints it as part of Southern Iran, and it doesn’t seem to be something he just discovered. We also find out that he already started the citizenship process, and I feel like some basic research about his place of birth would’ve AT LEAST come up then.

Then, when it comes to the other vampires asking about it…well, in season 3, we find out that the Staten Island house has been celebrating Nandor’s Accession Day for years. And even if we ignore that because it’s clear that the writers did not have that planned when writing s1e8, Nandor never shuts up about how he was ruler of Al Quolanudar! The possibility that anyone in that house wasn’t aware of that aspect of his past is zero.

But!!! There’s totally an explanation!!! And by explanation I mean my headcanon, which is that Al Quolanudar existing as the place Nandor ruled and Al Quolanudar being dissolved isn’t new information to the vampires + human of the Staten Island house. Nandor himself became aware of it—and probably had a crisis about it—in the 1400s. It’s just that by the time the episode rolled around, he’d forgotten. And if you forget something completely enough, it’s still a revelation when you find out about it again.

Colin Robinson, for his part, is just goading Nandor, potentially even being kind of sarcastic. “Oh, really? You were the leader of a country? No kidding.” Naturally, Nadja and Laszlo can’t help but join in on the teasing. Then when it comes to Al Quolanudar having been dissolved, I think that Colin totally already knew and it’s a question mark whether Nadja and Laszlo did.

Guillermo, however, absolutely knew Al Quolanudar had dissolved. But he also knew Nandor DIDN’T know. (And probably never really spent too much time thinking that he ever might have known because that’s, like, kinda sad when you dwell on it too long.) He never broke the news to Nandor because he didn’t want to upset him. He was fumbling with his phone and asking about spelling because he was trying to act like he had no idea what was up with Al Quolanudar, a place he had DEFINITELY googled because he’s known Nandor ten years at that point. He and Laszlo just went to the same “ignorance is bliss” school of friendship in this case.

Anyway, a lot of “wait, how does that make sense?” moments in the show or moments where characters seem to know less about each other or themselves than one might expect are easily explained, imo, by the ravages of time and inconsistencies of memory, especially with Nandor. (For example, I personally think that a non-zero amount of the interactions we see Nandor and Guillermo have are interactions they’ve had before, probably multiple times, that Nandor just kind of forgot. But that’s a meta for another time.)

#wwdits #nandor the relentless #guillermo de la cruz #my 30000 memory loss headcanons for this show #idk if this is actually anything or makes sense #inb4 but you’re taking the silly vampire show 2seriously!!! shut UP this is fun to me #what we do in the shadows #wwdits meta