Krel giving the death stare to Aja

Arcadia does not have a canal. Arcadia has three-quarters of a moat   I saw this frankly bizarre city planning (why would you need SEVEN bridges. It only takes five bridges to connect Queens and Brooklyn (and if you were to consider each of NYC’s boroughs its own city, Brooklyn and Queens on their own would be the 3rd and 4th most populous US cities, respectively) and immediately thought of FMA and Amestris - the city developers must have been up to something nefarious! But then I thought, hey, what if it’s actually meant to be defensive. What if the founders of the city had some inkling that there were unseen predators about - ones that could not be caught by bear traps or poisoned meat. So they built a canal around most of the city, and then built plenty of bridges so they would not be boxed in - strategically, they can bottleneck any enemies at any one of the seven known paths into the city. A canal of water is, incidentally, a pretty good troll deterrent, since they aren’t great swimmers.

A couple of questions remain. Notably, where does the water come from to fill the canal? One side of the town is bordered by a steep drop-off, and since this isn’t an Escher drawing it can’t flow uphill. However, opposite the cliffs, the two canals just. End in forest. There’s even a strip of land connecting Arcadia to its surroundings. The only way I think they could manage to would be if there are underground channels that feed into the canals, and the flow is controlled by a dam on a reservoir several miles upstream. But I don’t know if they had the technology to do that sort of civil engineering in the mid-1800′s (when I headcanon the town was founded).

Sings Steve... in Keith Kogane's voice,