#but then where does huntokar come in

[kerink]

i do want to spend a little more time with the proverb

PROVERB: Love is a many-legged thing with human skin and no eyes.

so first, the human skin and no eyes thing. while it's an easy reach to go kevin with this (and thankfully we have those posts), i'd really like to talk about the snake god

from 171 we learn that the flickering creature haunting cecil is a snake with human skin and a human face and, at the very least, talons. cecil said its face was small, small enough he thought it was far away, and that it cried like a child. its eyes are expressionless. when cecil's mother told him she was an oracle, she gave him a book written in an unknown language and told him to study it. this book features drawings of this creature.

in 214 john peters, you know the farmer, says there were a couple hundred children gathered in his corn field speaking in an unknown language who worshiped a serpent god. their eyes were entirely white (<- adding this detail for my kevin warriors out there). john was taken by this snake god up to heaven where he was given an effigy of himself.

in 213 there's a mural depicting children standing in a field of corn while a winged snake god lifts all the adults into heaven. cecil said: "This action symbolizes our city being delivered into the future by a huge snake god."

in 79 we get: The symbolic dead lead the procession, each of them wearing the mask of one of those who went into the distance of time and can never return. Behind them is a float depicting the enormous serpent whose mouth contains the universe. A playful reminder to us all that even the stars must someday be swallowed.

and let's not forget cecil's iconic line from e1: Along those lines, to get personal for a moment, I think the best way to die would be swallowed by a giant snake. Going feet first and whole into a slimy maw would give your life perfect symmetry.

so let's break down this snake god.

cecil's mother was an oracle and aware of the creature, which cecil can see when he looks in the mirror, which cecil's mother covers. see my last post about cecil and his mother about what i think about this dynamic cause this post is long enough.

this snake god represents death and, more specifically, the death of the universe.

i don't think it's a coincidence that this snake god has appeared in night vale right when huntokar returned and her cult its picking up speed. huntokar is the destroyer after all, she ripped a hole in reality which has caused an immense amount of pain and suffering and which she is trying desperately to fix.

i also don't think it's a coincidence that this snake god has appeared when the uowii is trying to un-weird night vale, when we know from e110 that the belief night vale is weird is part of what keeps it in-tact

between the uowii and huntokar's meddling, is night vale going to un-weird enough to fix the damage huntokar did? and the snake god has appeared because to do so would be to destroy it? we know that huntokar acts only out of love, and yet, love is, possibly, this serpent

especially because cecil alludes to being swallowed by a serpent as being an inverse of birth, which is what he'd prefer

which brings us to the love part of the proverb. i'd like to circle back around to e102:

“Love is a shambling thing. It climbs through a window into an infant’s bedroom. When one of the mothers comes in to check on her baby son, there is love too in the crib, curled up beside him. Love murmurs, and the baby spits restlessly. The baby does not burn. The baby will eventually burn, but by then he will not be a baby. The woman looks down at the ghastly form of love, curled beside her son, and she thinks ‘what have I done?’ She cries, not because she is happy or sad, but because that is what her body needs to do next. Love rises from the crib, and passes her without a glance. Love is a shambling thing. It shambles out of her home."

and here i'd really like to redirect you to my post about cecil and his mother.

love has curled around cecil, almost like the thing in the mirror curled around his shoulders and digging in to draw blood. love has followed him since birth and doomed him. love is birth and death. love of his mother and love of his god.

if the smiling god is the unraveling of all things, and huntokar is the destruction of all things, is the serpent god the repair of all things? the bringing pieces back together? the future night vale will be delivered to?

and why children? why is the creature in the mirror a child and children were in the corn field and only children survived on earth in the mural?

children saved night vale from strexcorp because children could not be financially controlled. will children save night vale because they contain whimsy, imagination and belief? will their view of reality and the world keep them immune from the uowii? will the adults fall because of their unwavering faith in science? but the children will remain because just look at the state of the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner

a child saved desert bluffs too. it was in the play and imagination of a child the town was saved from kevin's hubris. will a child be what saves night vale from carlos' inaction and cecil's loyalty to his husband? will this child be esteban?

love curls around a son, after all

#wtnv #wtnv spoilers / #does literally any of this make sense i feel like its fucking pepe silva over here #wtnv meta

[desert-bluffs-and-me]

WTNV quick rundown - 107 - The Missing Sky

Featuring Desiree Burch as Pamela Winchell.

Read the rest here!

The best strategy for a labyrinth is to put one hand on a wall and follow that hand around until you reach the exit. The second best strategy is screaming. Welcome to Night Vale.

There is a faint popping as well as the sound of singing coming from underground (as well as breaks in reality continuing). Carlos, Luisa and Nilanjana are investigating and figure out that the popping is fireworks and the singing is the voice of a parade coming from the tiny city under Lane 5. They are celebrating the Great Weeks of Memorial to commemorate the 'attack' on their city and years of fruitless war which followed.

It turns out that the tiny city under Lane 5, which has given up it's attempt at war, is actually a miniture version of Night Vale. It has it's own Cecil and several familiar residents but does not appear to experience any of the supernatural or strange elements the larger NV has. It is however, completely isolated from the rest of the world due to being trapped under Lane 5 which is not their natural state of being.

Tiny Cecil recounts the day Carlos stepped into the hole as a terrible and dark day.

Noted differences between NV and Tiny NV include: Josie died several years ago and she and Cecil were not close, Erika is a woman with an angel tattoo who was living with Josie, John Peters was a war hero and lived/worked with Jim Peters, Leann Hart was an intelligence officer, Steve and Cecil were best friends (before Steve died in the war) and the lines and grids that Steve could see where the floorboards of lane 5, city council is made up of actual people including Harriet Ramon and Benjamin Gold, there is constant rolling thunder (the bowling balls), this Cecil has never met a scientist, the weather is reported as actual weather, they worship Huntokarr and believe she is punishing them by cutting them off.

Although he talks of Carlos as some kind of God which caused everyone great pain and terror, the Tiny Cecil also finds Carlos beautiful, talking about his rich brown eyes and perfect hair and teeth.

Weather: "The Ends and the Means" by Robby Hecht

Regular Cecil is worried about Carlos being near Lane 5 again and leaves his show to go and offer moral support.

Stay tuned next for one of our most popular shows, Janelle Duarte’s advice show, Hey Janelle, What Did I Personally Do To Contribute to Huntokar’s Anger Against Us? And under whatever starless, moonless sky it is we have lived under since the day of the change, good night, Night Vale. Good night. 

Proverb: "Top of the morning to you. The rest of the day to me. I never said this was fair."

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #wtnv quick rundown #wtnv ep 107

[rindomness]

Ok ( sends you an ask) I guess why nightvelle? What are you thoughts on the place it’s self? (jackdaw)

(send me night vale topics to write an improvised essay about)

NIGHT VALE THE PLACE ITSELF. oh boy. this got long i added a readmore

The fun thing about Night Vale the place is that, at least for the first... five to seven or so years, it's sort of Schrödinger's Town. It exists! Obviously, it exists. But it also really, really doesn't exist. And that's kinda the key to understanding why Night Vale is like that.

I'm not fully sure what the details are on where Night Vale came from, but Night Vale - our Night Vale that we follow in the podcast, which I'm going to be calling the True Night Vale (TNV), kind of... doesn't have a full universe to fit back into? And like obviously spoilers ahead on this one under the cut

But TNV's universe is, uh, gone. Dead. Destroyed truly and utterly. You see, TNV comes from a universe in which the Cold War blew open into a Not-So-Cold Nuclear Armageddon. The world literally ended. And TNV should have ended with it!

Except, well, there was Huntokar.

In Night Vale's universe, there are beings which are referred to as gods that are treated as such but also, like, kinda just exist. They're around. The Glow Cloud (all hail), for example. And Huntokar. And oh boy Huntokar. How many feelings I have about Huntokar.

TNV is a version of Night Vale that was on the brink of ending due to nuclear armageddon. It was also the domain of a goddess who loved it dearly. (or deerly. get it, because huntokar is a deer- i'll leave) And what she did is she, basically at the last possible second, tore TNV out of existence.

So now this specific version of Night Vale is stuck floating in a space of simultaneous existence and nonexistence and when Huntokar did what she did, she pulled every other version of Night Vale along for the ride, so now there's like. a million Night Vales just kinda floating in the same place in time and space?

And it's fine! for a while. for a while that holds up. and it holds up kind of... entirely on the back of cecil's reporting. because every version of night vale has a cecil. and he's the Voice, you see, and this is a title. Like, names have power, etc etc etc, and Cecil's reports and Cecil's steadiness and Cecil's unchangingness is what keeps Night Vale, every Night Vale, from crumbling in on itself.

So, Night Vale is this fucked up little town that both exists and does not exist, and its tenuous grip on reality is held together entirely by the unchanging nature of its Voice. And it all happened this way because a god loved a place and a person so much she ripped reality apart to save it.

IT'S MESSY! and very very fragile!

so it's hard to get in and out of night vale, because technically, night vale exists outside of reality, and time doesn't work there because of all the time travel and the complete disconnect from the rest of the world. In this little town that simultaneously does and does not exist, perception is reality takes on a whole other meaning, and Cecil's reports of events take up a whole new weight. Night Vale needs Cecil to report on events.

And then Carlos comes to Night Vale, and Cecil starts to change directly in response to him, and this weird little tightrope Night Vale has been balancing on to keep realities separate and persisting begins to strain.

The fun thing is that in the current day of the podcast, Night Vale (TNV specifically) does actually exist in some version of the real world? Like. Obviously it is still a fictional reflection, because it is a fictional podcast, but Night Vale is presented as a real place with real world consequences for its existence, rather than a sort of floating point of a town in the space between existence and non-existence. (fucking Listener Questions and Listeners, dude. I screamed IRL when I heard fucking Ross and Carey start talking!) I'm very excited to see how that gets handled going forward, because despite being real, it is still a deeply weird and out-of-step place. It might not be balancing on a tightrope of existence on a technicality anymore but it's still, like... it's still real and not-real simultaneously. It's fun!

Also i am not entirely convinced Night Vale isn't sentient in some weird fucked up real-but-not-real town way as a result of the attention and focus Huntokar sent its way, nor am I convinced entirely that Cecil can't subtly alter events as they are happening simply by discussing them, rather than just through (a frankly enormous amount of) soft social power. I am, at the end of the day, also a fucked up living places enjoyer, so im obviously going to be biased.

Also i could talk so much about how night vale attached itself to carlos, too, but this is already REALLY LONG? oops. maybe another post I could probably write a whole essay just about that. There'd be overlap obviously because of how intertwined Cecil and Night Vale are, but. Yeah. Yeah!

but yeah. night vale as a place is Fucking Weird in some Really Tragic Ways if you think too hard about it!

#thank you jack for enabling me :) #ask #friend stuff #wtnv #i really was not joking about my essay length thoughts #this. this got very long. because i needed to talk about huntokar #you cannot talk about nightvale as a place without talking about huntokar #and you cannot talk about huntokar without it getting long

[bulkhummus]

huntokar / lee marvin theory

everything im about to say is made up, from my own brain. any accidental supporting evidence is just that, accidental. that being said, have fun!

so, I think Huntokar and Lee Marvin are Cecil’s parents, and Cecil doesn’t remember.

One of the things we know about the people of Night Vale is that everyone seems to be in their own personal time bubble, and experiencing time differently (ie. FOW book, also steve growing up listening to Cecil on the radio, however the fuck Abby is Cecil’s older sister, lee marvin, etc.) That being said—

Huntokar fell in love with our Night Vale, but namely I think she fell in love with Lee Marvin. I think their love was a passionate, dramatic, movie style love, that burned very hot in both directions. She assumed the body of a woman, who had a small child, and courted Lee Marvin. When she saw him beginning to age, I think she in part panicked.

I think, adding to this panic, she eventually grew to care for the child, Cecil. Thus begins the reality/body hopping. We just learned that Huntokar can switch bodies, aka her wearing Susan Willmans meat suit. THIS is interesting, because it makes me think of Cassettes, and how young Cecil died, with the later implication that another version of Cecil had killed him. This feels very body hopping/ assuming identity to me as well!

I think Huntokar was able to transfer her son, and Lee Marvin, into different versions of themselves. Like a loop hole. Like rewinding a movie and watching it again. If she can displace her lover and her son enough times, into enough realities, she can prevent them from getting any older, or at least slowing down their age. She loves all Night Vales, but there was only one that she fell in love in, and had a son in. I do think, this is in part why Cecil is tangled up in so many timelines and realities. I think he has lived in many, just as Lee Marvin has lived and worked in many. He can’t remember them all, not fully, but they blur and overlap, sometimes he has a brother, sometimes a sister, sometimes its only him. All the while Huntokar is present, but busy, frequently leaving for long periods of time, etc (like Cecils mom).

And then, the war comes. And they’ve been at it for so long. And to her it all feels like a blip, shes always been immortal, but Lee Marvin is tired of it. He’s lived several life times, somtimes weeks in one reality, sometimes decades in another. He wants to settle down with his family, and age, properly. He wants his son to have one last childhood, one be remembers, and isn’t wiped clean when they transfer once more. A resentment festers, coated in love and desperation. She knows whats coming, long before it does, including the war. She settles them back into the original night vale, one where Cecil has an older sibling, a sister. This is purposeful. He was youngest when they left there, and the woman Huntokar assumed had another child, a girl. She’s aged while they’ve been reality hopping, but only a few years older than Cecil, who is now just a toddler once more.

It was Lee Marvin’s birthday the day Huntokar decided to split the town from reality. She picks this day in part out of spite, and anger. This is how he got stuck turning 30 every year, and I think, why him turning 31 was such a big deal, signaling the town beginning time once more. (Shit got weird after he turned 31, and it was sort of the moment that Cecil began to outwardly state how old he is.) (i do think lee marvins power of resentment for celebrating a new year every day while not actually aging but experiencing time nonetheless is SUPER symbolic Of his and Huntokar’s relationship, and why The power of that resentment unsticks time itself when he turns 31.)

There was some discussion, as Cecil began to age, that Lee Marvin couldn’t be a part of his life, because that would be too telling, too dangerous, for what has been a carefully constructed and selfish love story. So he watches from afar. Huntokar gathers movie tapes from every reality Lee Marvin has been in, and there are a lot, and stocks her home with them, so his presence is there if not in actuality. Cecil grows attatched to Cat Ballou, and the story of a young woman trying to save her town with the help of a handsome man, immortal actor, Lee Marvin. Abby never knew her father, only a mother that never felt like the one she remembered, and never loved her like she loved Cecil. She wasn’t warm, or comforting, and her love for Cecil was shown in her distress and fear of him, of him aging into a young man. She only ever received cool indifference from the woman.

When Huntokar finally leaves, she doesn’t think she’s gone long, but shes immortal and she isn’t used to time passing at all, let alone normally. It’s been years, and her loving adoring son and the daughter she didn’t mean to have, age. She comes back and they take care of her hosts dying body. She dies, her body does anyway. And shes transient again, recuperating in death, waiting to become someone else. this takes time, which she has plenty of, and now so does night vale.

so i think abby and cecil do grow up as siblings together, and bc time is broken in night vale, it takes a very, very long time for them to grow up. Abby is technically immortal now, and cecil has several life times under his belt that he can only vaguely remember.

i think it doesn’t take long before huntokar begins to take an interest in her children's lives again. Shes lonely, and she feels entitled in her love. She wants to explain, to see and be with them, but she doesn’t know how. but she does see the way time has ravaged cecils memory, and the way her flippant inexperienced parenting effected abby. she even destines cecil to a career that will allow him the ease of telling her legacy and story to the town. So the people of night vale will remember their origin and why they worship, and maybe she wont feel so alone. But he doesn’t remember. her plan backfires.

so, in comes— Steve Carlsberg! she figures if she can direct him toward abby, maybe he could be the key to explaining the truths of night vale to her children. steve came from a family that never forgot abt why they worshipped huntokar, or what the lines meant in the sky (sorta canon, steves grandpa believed what steve did, i assume he taught him) so she makes sure all arrows point toward Abby. Its the most she can do, but she doesn‘t expect them to fall in love. She thinks his propensity for the truth is endearing, and silly, and Huntokar is frustrated that devotion is just another word for love. even moreso when cecil begins to openly resent Steve For humanistic reasons she can‘t understand. She sees how time has warped her sons view of the world and town and its her doing. Shes the reason all of night vale forgot.

she tries to communicate in other ways, a train,’a cock roach, but her town and children don‘t understand, they can’t. Cecil can’t even look at himself in the mirror because he doesn‘t know who he sees when he looks, but doesn’t know why.

she watches in intrigue and sorrow as her children grow and age, how their children grow and age. She thinks Esteban is terrifying, for what he represents. she hates carlos, because of how safe and loved and ready to grow old he makes cecil feel. She feels prideful, however, that cecil is beginning to recognize that passage of time is frightening but exhilarating every time he looks at his son. in It Doesn’t Hold Up, it’s The first time Lee Marvin is mentioned in a while, and its also the first episode where Cecil directly mentions his father, or lack thereof, while also talking about being a father himself. I just think this is an interesting coincidental BUT, i do think lee marvin is like ‘yo i wanna be a grandpa, remember me!!!’ At cecil. im v excited for when the reintroduce lee marvin.

(i also think theres some interesting things with the episode where cecil talks about dumping memories at the waste center. i still think that episode was about him.)

and now, huntokar is susan willman! Its taken her a while, and STILL her son hates her, passionately in fact. Shes frustrated and annoyed!!! it took her So long to become another person, and the person she chose is someone her son hates!!!! This is also, to me, SUPER SYMBOLIC. and heart breaking. shes trying so hard to be a mother, and offer guidance, but she doesn’t know how to communicate.

anyways, those are my theories and thoughts! Feel free to chat with me about them — i love the concept of a love story that becomes tragic in its desperation. even if that love is platonic! theres like other bits, but this is already v long, and i have to get back to work now haha

thanks for reading 💖

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #cecil palmer #abby carlsberg #Lee marvin #huntokar #wtnv thoughts #sorry for typos and if this doesnt make sense — its all for fun!!

[somehow-progressing]

WTNV 182 / 132 Connection

So this isn't the first time Cecil's mother and trees have been connected.

In 132, exactly fifty episodes previously, her bedtime story was about a boy who turned into a tree.

I reviewed this episode to look for connections and..

Oh, boy.

So, first off, the boy's interest in science obviously reminded me of Carlos, right? But then the similarities stop there.

And start leading towards Cecil.

(The rest under the cut)

We now know that there was a time where Cecil's father was in the picture, although it may have been when Cecil was very, very young. The family dynamic in 132's story matches his exactly: a mother, a father, a sister, the youngest son.

My first thought was, "Well, this can't be a parallel to Cecil's family. They're far too loving, which doesn't match up with what we know of Cecil's mother at all." But then I looked closer.

The boy's parents are verbally insistent that they love him, to the point where it comes off as "I'm your parent so I have to love you, it's my job to do everything for you." Putting pressure, and a sense of guilt, on the child while never actually living up to their word.

"He knew he would never need his father to give his life for him. He just wanted his father to show concern for his health. He knew he would never need his mother to give away all of her belongings for him. He just wanted his mother to show interest in his curiosity." - 132, Bedtime Story

His parent's love is very idealistic, while not being one that they actually show or.. Possibly, feel. They don't show concern for his health, or value his interests. He's their son, but he's not anything more.

"My mom seems really proud of me too! She hid from me for three days! Like, the longest ever! And she’s covered all the mirrors in my house. I’m not sure why, but I think it must be because of pride. Being proud does all sorts of things… to a… um… to a person." - 33, Cassettes

Cecil's own experiences parallel this. He interprets her love through ideals, to fill the void of it in actuality. When you're a child, you think that a parent is supposed to be loving. They're supposed to care. When they don't, or they leave you alone in your house, or they ignore you, or they tell you not to cry after you've been injured because "you don't even exist," your brain doesn't know how to process it. Like he did with his memory loss in 182, Cecil tries to rationalize it. Mother abandoned me because she's proud, because she cares about me- because she's my mother and she has to.

The boy's relationship with his sister parallels Cecil's as well.

"His sister would tell him, “I hate you, brother.” But their parents would instruct her to be nice and so she would say sarcastically, “I love you, brother. I would climb the tallest mountain for you." - 132, Bedtime Story

"He knew his sister really loved him. He knew he would never need his sister to climb a mountain for him. He just wanted his sister to believe him that mountains were real." - 132, Bedtime Story

As mentioned in Ghost Stories, Cecil has had a very difficult relationship with his sister.

"See, my mother disappeared when I was only 14. Abby had just started school, but she had to drop out to return home and raise me, and I thought that Mom would be back at any moment, like maybe she was away on business. Our out for a walk. Or just hiding.

But Mom did not come back, not for my entire childhood. And I was petulant and subversive, and Abby was reserved and controlling and she blamed me for having dropped out of school and I blamed her for just… not being Mom.

But in our adulthood, my mother did return home, sick and sorry to two children who barely spoke to each other in the morning." - Ghost Stories

Which would match up with the sister's animosity with him.

The difference here is that, out of the entire family, the boy knows that his sister actually loves him. And in Cecil's life, his sister is the only one he has made amends with. No matter how she treated him in the past, they are part of the same family once again. (As of 182, at least.)

Here, a direct parallel to Cecil is established. This boy's life mirrors his own.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

Just as Cecil enters the tree, the boy is transformed into one

"He spent a lot of time in those next several months watching his family, their grief at his loss. His parents’ happiness at his sister’s education." - 132, Bedtime Story

There has been a lot of theorizing that Cecil's mother may have been covering the mirrors and leaving flowers because she was mourning Cecil, and not just his father.

"What was it your mother said before she left home when you were a teenager? Did she tell you she was an oracle?" - 171, Go to The Mirror?

It's entirely possible that Cecil's mother knew what would happen after she left, or had enough of an idea to subconsciously work it into a bedtime story.

It's possible that this is a glimpse of a timeline where Cecil really didn't survive entering the tree. His parents mourn, and his sister is allowed to pursue the education she wanted.  (Which, in all honesty, a pretty cruel burden to place on Cecil's shoulders. It's not his fault that their mother disappeared, leaving Abby to take care of him.)

Next, we watch the boy slowly lose his humanity as his awareness widens outside of himself.

"Time slowed for him, and his knowledge grew so vast and so expansive, human triumphs and pains became only a small sliver of his interest. There were much larger systems to comprehend than humanity." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil is canonically one of the people in Night Vale that time slowed down for. Like Earl, he has been stuck at a certain age for a long, long time.

"He had forgotten what he used to be." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has canonically lost large parts of his past. He no longer remembers them.

"Later that spring, the woman and the man and the child brought a picnic and some games, and the tree was happy, but could not comprehend why. Nor did the tree intend to. The tree was simply happy, and this was a feeling that existed. Years later, the family wore black again and cried. And the tree felt sad, but it did not connect this feeling to any kind of narrative. It was simply sad, and this was a feeling that existed." - 132, Bedtime Story

The boy tree is becoming incredibly distanced from his family. (A woman, man, and child, just like Abby, Steve, and Janice.)

"You know, Cecil and I first met at one of these things. Seems like we should have met earlier than that. I had dated his sister for a while. But Cecil’s busy, he- he serves his community. He really gives himself to his community. Who do you live for, you know? Who do you give yourself to? Those are questions we should all be asking ourselves." - Steve in 100, Toast

Steve confirmed that Cecil was distant from his family and the people around him before Carlos came along, burying himself in his job.

And then an angel cuts down the tree.

"Over a few days, the tree and the fruits and the separated stump died. But the tree retained everything. As its body was planted into boards, as its twigs were ground into mulch, the tree felt the knowledge of each seed it had planted across the valley, each creature it had nourished with its fruits, and each piece of lumber built into a home for generations of humans to come.

The tree felt its branches burned in a fireplace, and it rose up as smoke and dissipated into carbon across the sky, coming down in trillions of molecules to build more soil, more trees, more creatures. The boy could truly learn everything now, cell by cell." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has given himself to his community. This boy, this tree, has been divided and used up as a resource, to serve the community in which he lived. Not to mention the fact that Cassettes Cecil died before becoming the Voice, like this boy/tree was cut down before he could serve/understand his community.

"Cecil, sweet Cecil. Whose life lies directly on the fault lines of this broken reality." - Huntokar in 109, Huntokar

Patching together:

- this quote from Huntokar that gives off the impression of Cecil as the glue keeping the fractures together, and

- the way that Leonard Burton, a deceased Voice, is brought back the moment that Cecil left town, filling the vacant spot, and

- the way that Night Vale fell apart when its citizens rejected their reality, and began to be patched back together along with the narration of their Voice

It all leads to:

The Voice of Night Vale is a significant, needed position.

 It’s possible that he holds the fractured town together, in a way, his words reminding the citizens to keep their will and hold onto what is in front of them. (In the case that the cold light is the Smiling God, this gives it a motive. If it takes out Cecil, the town is left vulnerable for it to devour.)

Just like the tree, Cecil is used by his town.

His mother knew that he would become the Voice one day- it was prophesized. That’s the reason he was given the tape recorder, that’s the reason she told this story.

We still don’t know what was in the book in the table.

Then, this very interesting quote from 182:

“I’ve been in this job for a long time. Probably longer than I’ve been alive. I mean: you’ve been alive.”

He says the truth for a moment, then backs up because that doesn’t make sense to him. Coupled the way his mother’s story parallels Cecil’s, with boy becoming the tree, becoming a resource that serves the town and seeing all of it (similar to how Cecil knows what’s happening in the town and what its citizens are thinking without leaving his studio. See: every traffic report and episodes likes A Story About Them.) and Cecil mentioning the odd nature of his job in 182..

I think we’re about to learn exactly what it means to be the Voice.

#long post #AAAAAAAAAAAA #wtnv theory #wtnv #welcome to night vale #cecil palmer #cecil gershwin palmer #huntokar #god there are so many more episodes mentioned here #welcome to night vale theory #steve carlsberg #abby palmer #wtnv spoilers #cecil's mother #mom palmer #rambles from the void #character discussion #character study #theorizing #so much red string out here #if you have any questions or add-ons please feel free to reply!! #cw bad parents #cw spoilers #wtnv 132 #bedtime story #wtnv 182 #it sticks with you #void posts

[morporkian-cryptid]

What we know about mirrors

Aka, the new WTNV episode fucked me up and I need to put my thoughts somewhere to put them back in order.

Warning, long post is long.

The most recent episode, 171 - Go to the mirror? brought some answers regarding Cecil’s long-time weird relation with mirrors. But mostly it brought more questions. 

Three episodes describe events that have happened to Cecil involving mirrors: 33 – Cassette, 106 – Filings, and 171 – Go to the mirror? .

Several “versions” of Cecil appear in these episodes, sometimes at the same time. For more clarity I’ll refer to them as: -MC: main Cecil (the one we follow since 01-Pilot) -YC: young 15 years old Cecil in 33 - Cassette -IC: intern Cecil in Filings -NC: Cecil as the narrator in 171 - Go to the mirror? (presumably the same person as MC but that’s not sure)

 33-Cassette

-YC was 15 when he started recording the cassettes. -MC has no memory of doing so (suggesting that MC and YC are two different persons). -YC has a brother (presumably Cal), who MC does not remember (MC has a sister, Abby). -YC could see a flickering movement in the corner of his eye, at first only when he was recording, including within his home. He describes it as the movements of a person trying to attract his attention. He observes that the flickering seems to be encouraged by him recording. At some point, he feels something touch him. -After some time interning at the radio under Leonard Burton, YC can see the flickering everywhere, even when he’s not recorded. He sees it more clearly in mirrors. -At some point YC states that he “knows” the flickering movement. -YC says that “the radio station feels like home”. -Later, YC says that he thinks “the radio station is fun. The radio station is hidden. The radio station is like a dark planet lit by no sun. I think, therefore I soon won’t be.” -At some point, YC’s mother and brother disappeared from his home, and the mirrors that his mother had previously covered were now uncovered. While looking into a mirror in his home and recording, Cecil described the flickering movement, then made a strangled, gargling sound. It is presumed that he died. -MC can find no record of him ever interning at the radio station under Leonard Burton, nor does he remember doing so.

 106 – Filings

-MC is unable to physically recognize IC as his younger self (presumably because he hasn’t looked at himself in a mirror for ages, although it is mentioned in The Sandstorm that he has a photo of himself on his desk). -No one hired IC and there is no written trace of him anywhere. -IC does not acknowledge MC’s presence (that may be a supernatural phenomenon, OR simply IC’s way of being polite towards his boss, since that’s how MC interprets it, and MC and IC are more or less the same person) -When MC requested lunch, IC didn’t acknowledge him, but he appeared frightened and ran away crying. -IC has a brother (presumably Cal). -IC says he works for Leonard Burton (whether he confused MC for Leonard or simply thought MC was a random employee is unclear). -When his accident with the mirror happened, IC was recording his cassettes in the station bathroom, in front of an uncovered mirror (despite MC being sure he had covered the mirror before), and saying the exact same words YC from Cassettes had been saying before his death. -When IC described the flickering movement getting stronger, he looked directly into MC’s eyes. MC was waving his arms trying to get IC’s attention. -IC choked and screamed, and died. MC did not describe anything that might have killed IC. -After IC died, the bathroom mirror was shattered, although no one had broken it. -A glowing crack in the wall was visible in the mirror, one of the fissures caused by Huntokar and the universes collapsing. The whole incident could be attributed to that arc. -For a second after IC’s death, MC remembered something which was presumably what IC experienced, and included a dark planet lit by no sun. -All evidence of IC’s presence (including his body, and the wallet MC had left in his studio) disappeared quickly.

 171 – Go to the mirror?

Note: most of the episode is narrated in the form of questions to the listener (referred to as “you”), some of them comparing the questions to something Cecil had experience, and some describing things that we know belong to Cecil’s past. It is unclear how much of the events narrated have actually happened to Cecil, but I’m going to assume that everything that’s described as happening to you have also happened to Cecil.

-The events are happening in your house. -NC asks “What did I see in the mirror today?” implying that the events narrated are recent. -NC describes the creature seen in the mirror as a serpent or snake with a human head one third of the size of a normal head, with long fingers, talons and silver rings, and that cries like a human baby. It seems to flicker like an animated picture book. -NC asks whether the tiny face is familiar, and where you might have seen it. -NC suggests that the creature you see behind you in the mirror may very well still be behind you when you’re not looking. -The flickering is originally described to be behind the creature, then later to be the creature itself. -The reflection of the room on the other side of the mirror is slightly different, there is a table that doesn’t exist in your house. -It’s possible the person in the reflection is also different from you, in tiny unnoticeable ways. -The creature attacked you before you could break the mirror, because you turned your eyes away from the creature. -The creature disappeared after you smashed the mirror. -“All around you are shards of the mirror you just shattered, yet in front of you the mirror is still intact.” -Your reflection is on the floor on the other side of the mirror, dead. -The table in now in the same world as you. -There is a room in your house which you never open, in which is a book containing images of the creature as well as handwriting matching no know language, which your mother made you promise to learn how to read. - Cecil concludes by asking whether you might have traveled to the mirror world, or maybe you had always been in the mirror world.

----------

The events of Cassette and Filings appear to be identical; except for one single element: YC of Cassette was in his home at the moment of his (presumed) death, while IC of Filings was at the radio station. That being said, YC describes the radio station as “feeling like home”, which (knowing Night Vale) may very well be literal: YC could have started confusing the radio station for his own home. There is no other example of this phenomenon, but on the other hand, YC says his mother and brother have disappeared, and all the mirrors are uncovered (which would be the case if he was confusing the station for his own home).

Also, there is no description of the state of the mirror in Cassette after YC died. And the events of Filings can be attributed to the cracks, while the events of Cassette can not.

171 - GTTM, on the other hand, describes different events. Nowhere does it say that the person looking into the mirror was recording. The flickering is explicitly caused by a non-human creature and not by someone waving their arms. The mirror is both broken and intact. There is also a lot more details than in the previous events, as well as references to your or Cecil’s past (especially your or his mother).

Cecil suggests that you may have always been in the mirror world.

It is clear that you haven’t, since you are now in a world where the table exist, and you previously weren’t. OR… During the broadcast, a muffled version of Cecil’s voice could be heard repeating the same words as Cecil with a few seconds of delay. Maybe, up until the mirror was broken, we were hearing the broadcast from the Cecil on one side of the mirror, and after by the Cecil on the other side.

I am almost sure that a switch happened, that before and after the incident we were hearing the same version of Cecil. Which means the reflection Cecil (RC) went to NC’s world and died there, while NC went to RC’s world, is still alive, but stuck there. Now we have no way of knowing who, between NC and RC, is the main Cecil, the one we’ve been following since 01-Pilot – or if they’re all three different versions of Cecil. I sincerely hope NC and MC aren’t the same person, otherwise that means Carlos is going to find the corpse of his husband’s doppelganger (RC), and that’s… not good.

From this, we could theorize that Cecil (or maybe everyone, but so far we’ve only seen it with Cecil) can break mirrors in order to go to the world on the other side of them. Every time a switch happens, one of the two Cecils die. There is a creature attempting to kill him, the existence of the creature is probably not linked to the mirrors, Cecil’s fear of mirrors comes from the fact that he can see the creature in them.

Of course this is mostly conjecture, we don’t have enough elements to really make a generalized assumption to explain every mirror incident in the same way.

TL;DR the events of Cassette and Filings are almost identical save possibly for the location where they happen. GTTM’s event is different. There are a few possible explanations: 1) Cecil can somehow travel through mirrors but his reflection dies in the process; 2) the narrator changed during the episode (from Cecil to his reflection), and the Cecil narrating at the beginning is now dead. Also there’s clearly a creature that is out to kill Cecil but it’s unclear whether it’s related to the mirrors.

#welcome to night vale #wtnv #go to the mirror #cecil palmer #the hobbit rambles

[mallowbees]

A Story About A Radio Host

This is a fairly true story about a radio host, wrote a dedicated teenager, and you were intrigued, because you had heard, seen and written many stories about this particular radio host, but none quite like this.

Cecil Palmer. Night Vale Voice and radio host, loving husband, dedicated father,  occasional scientist, time anomaly.

Time traveler? Technically. The same person he has always been? No.

Let’s start at the beginning. Sometime in February, around 1900. A woman gives birth to her second son and names him Cecil Gershwin Palmer.

As Cecil grows, he develops a love for radio. Shortly before that same time in February in around 1915, this woman time-travels to the 1960s to get her son some cassette tapes so he can record himself and perhaps her older son will stop teasing him. She warns young Cecil, who is only 15, that he will be killed, and that his death will involve a mirror, for she has seen his death. Her mental state declines, and she dies.

A few months after that February day of 1915, Cecil gets the job of his dreams: an internship at Night Vale Community Radio. He reports, in his tapes, that there is a flickering presence behind him when he records, but this is not a priority to him. He does field reports for his job now, and although he does not know it, he is very much like his mother, in that he can time travel.

He time-travels to the year 1745, when Night Vale was just a waste of desert, claimed by a clan of travelers in meat crowns. They started a town, and said they would call it Night Vale.

He time-travels to the year 1849, where he falls in love with a man named Guglielmo Marconi. Guglielmo is inventing a beautiful little thing he calls a radio. He is still just a young intern, but this is when Cecil falls a little in love with science as well.

He time-travels into his future as well, to the year 2017. He has spent a couple years as an intern now, and the aforementioned flickering presence is following him to the station now. He looks in the mirror for the first time since his mother and brother disappeared, and he does not recognize his reflection. He does not recognize himself. The flickering presence is there too, and Cecil is afraid.

So very afraid.

Where no one can see her, a goddess named Huntokar writes time as it happens. She is fond of Cecil, but he has never known her. She can tell that Cecil is distressed. Huntokar has stated that Cecil will fill the shoes of the current radio host and Voice, Leonard Burton, and has written this in one of the prophetic tablets in Night Vale City Hall. She is bound to duty, and her duty is to ensure that the tablets are true, so she takes precautions.

Cecil’s mother is unstable after seeing her son’s death, so Huntokar rewrites her death. Cecil’s brother, Cal, does not approve of him going into radio, so Huntokar erases him from the narrative and replaces him with Abby, a loving, caring, if stern, older sister. Younger than Cal, but older than Cecil.

Huntokar realizes that she has done too much for this Cecil, the young, impressionable intern. She has changed time too drastically for him to continue. She continues writing his story, of course, she allows him to age and live and continue life as normal. But the intern who stared in the mirror and did not recognize himself, he died. He no longer exists. Huntokar erased him from the narrative as well.

Cecil becomes an older, more tired intern. In 1934, he is now in his 30s. His voice is deep, and smooth, and perfect for radio. There is a young girl, a magician, by the name of Josie Ortiz. She will grow old and die, and she will be a dear friend of our dear radio host.

In the 1940s, he becomes the Voice. Amidst the war raging in the country, Leonard has retired, and Cecil steps up to take his place. 

But Huntokar’s effects are not lost on him. He knows it is much harder to leave than it was when he was a child.

He continues to speak, to tell stories as Leonard did, until one fateful day.

1983. Cecil knows he hasn’t aged; this is just how it works. The Russian sister city to Night Vale is dead, and he soon believes, as all do at this time, that the rest of the world is soon to follow.

He does not know that Huntokar is still bound to her duty. He does not know that she has rewritten time for him again in 1984 so that he can continue being the Voice.

On June 15, 2012, a stranger comes to town. A stranger comes to town and Cecil falls in love. Cecil falls in love for all of Night Vale to hear. The following years are full of love, and danger, and beauty despite a lack of understanding.

On December 15,  2016, Cecil and the stranger - Carlos, dear, sweet, perfectly imperfect Carlos - get married. It is beautiful.

Everything is, even if it scares you at first.

On April 15, 2017, a strange intern appears. He does not speak, does not even acknowledge Cecil. And Cecil is afraid.

So very afraid.

The intern dies in front of him. The intern dropped his wallet.

Cecil is afraid for the rest of the show that day.

That was Intern Cecil Palmer.

Other things happen in the gaps, of course. Things are always happening. Cecil falls in and out of love and does not remember it, people are born, people die.

This was a story about a radio host, and I hope you were intrigued, because I don’t think you’ve ever heard a story quite like this.

-

K: DUDE OH MY GOD THIS IS SO COOL WHAT THE H E C K?????? HFGHDHF!!! THIS IS PERFECT AND IM SCREAMING THIS IS CANON NOW I DONT MAKE THE RULES

#submission #local carlos stanon #wtnv #cecil palmer #welcome to night vale #cecil gershwin palmer

[this-is-a-podcast-fanblog]

ok here’s my really long night vale meta

(I want to just start by saying that I love Welcome to Night Vale more than any other show that I’ve ever listened to or watched. I’m not sure if I would even still be here without the positive change it brought to my life and the art form it introduced me to. So although this post is critical of recent story develops, please understand that I critique with love, and that I have nothing but the highest respect for the writers and cast.)

So let’s get into it. 

This turned out way longer than I meant for it to be. 

Since the beginning, each season of Welcome to Night Vale is basically self-contained. The things brought up in them can stretch across seasons, but for the most part any conflict or Big Bad brought up will be resolved when that season ends, which typically is on June 15th. 

Let’s look at the first five seasons and their overarching in-season arcs. 

Season One: The introduction season. This season laid the groundwork for all the seasons to come and established Cecilos. The arc of the Apache Tracker was resolved within this season. 

Season Two: The Strexcorp season. This season taught us a lot about the characters, and about Desert Bluffs.

Season Three: The auction season. This is also the long-distance relationship season for Cecil and Carlos. Both plotlines are resolved beautifully by the end and relate well to each other. 

Season Four: The beagle season. Also known as “Who’s a good boy?”. The evil beagle puppy was defeated by the end of the season. I felt like this season’s arc felt very natural and was enjoyable to listen to. 

Season Five: The Huntokar season. A lot of things that have been building slowly come together. We finally meet Huntokar after hearing a lot about her throughout the show. The small arc of converging timelines is resolved, but as we will see, it later comes back.

So that’s the first five seasons. 

Now, as far as writing styles go, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are pretty formulaic. (This is also evident in their other shows, Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires). I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Quite the opposite - I think one of the reasons why Night Vale is so endearing to so many people is because you always know what to expect: the complete unexpected. The world is weird and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s consistent in its inconsistency. You’ll get a community calendar or sponsor, you’ll get deep thoughts about life, and you’ll get a weather. Similarly, with the seasons, you’ll get a problem introduced over the course of the season, and then it will be resolved. 

But as you can probably see from the list I’ve written out, the seasons don’t exist in a bubble from each other. The things that happen affect each other. The arrival of Strexcorp in town was what eventually drove Carlos through into the desert otherworld, which set up the conflict for season 3. The tiny city under the bowling alley in season 1 was revisited to teach us more about Huntokar in season 5. Each season has a different flavor, but they’re all ultimately the same dish, if that metaphor makes any sense. 

And this is where we get into the issues I’ve been having with the most recent three seasons. My biggest problem is simple. They just don’t have a distinct flavor like the other seasons do. They don’t have anything that stands out to me. 

Let’s take a look at seasons six and seven, and then the first episode that dropped today of season eight. 

Season Six: The guest writer season. This season was mostly written with guest writers that would do a mini-arc of two to three episodes. 

Season Seven: The Carlos’s Double/Blood Space/Lee Marvin/Thanos-Snap season. Not sure what else to call it. 

The basic premise of season six was that it would be a bunch of character-driven stories set in the world of Night Vale, most of which were written by guest writers. To me, worldbuilding and characters are more important than plot every time, so I didn’t hate this as a concept. It was just... the execution honestly wasn’t all that interesting to me. I feel like the way the characters were discussed moved their placement within the world, but it didn’t actually change anything we knew about them. Tamika’s episodes, for example, didn’t really show us anything new about her, they just showed us how she acted as a city council leader instead of a militia leader (spoiler alert: pretty much exactly the same). 

My biggest problem with season six is that it set up a lot without actually doing anything. All of the best moments from season six were things I thought we would revisit later: who will be the mayor now that Dana stepped down? What is it Carlos is still keeping from Cecil? What’s up with the shipwreck? But then all of these things were totally forgotten in season seven. It was like the writers didn’t care. That may be because they were established by different writers, but it still feels... I don’t know, *Cecil voice* Incomplete? 

Now let’s talk season seven. I think season six was definitely the weakest of all Night Vale seasons, but this was a close second (and that shows you how much I love this show, because even the weakest seasons had moments that blew me away, and I’ve relistened to most of the episodes at least once, if not more.) Season seven, like season six, just had way too much going on. For the first few months there was no plot whatsoever, just a bunch of disjointed episodes with seemingly no relation to each other. 

And don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of these episodes were amazing. Are You Sure? was thrilling, totally game-changing for podcasts. Save Dark Owl Records was a really great look at Maureen and Michelle. I’ve relistened to UFO Sightings a bunch. But there’s a difference between enjoying episodes alone and thinking they fit in a larger story. And so while I really like a lot of the episodes of season seven... they’re kind of pointless story-wise. What disappointed me the most was the Kevin mini-series near the start of the season - Kevin is one of my favorite characters, and so while I liked to see him happy, I was annoyed that they forgot about him again after the arc ended and they moved on.

That’s because season seven didn’t really have a story - it had a bunch of stories. The problem is that they weren’t introduced until near the very end. We had the Lee Marvin arc that started somewhere in the middle, and I did like that. I thought it was cool to take what seemed like a throwaway gag and turn it into a story, especially one that seemed relatable. But running this arc concurrently with the Blood Space War arc didn’t make any sense to me. There were a bunch of times that I thought the two could relate - linking time travel to being trapped in time would be pretty easy, I thought. But that never happened. 

Then the Blood Space War arc nosedived into a pit of emotion after both Cecil and Carlos were erased from history, and I was ecstatic. Not that Cecil and Carlos had been erased - but that the show was taking such a drastic emotional change. It felt like a shift in tone, but also consistent to the show’s format, hitting that perfect sweet spot. I was even more excited when I found out that the resolution to this was that Leonard Burton would have to die again. That seemed like the perfect end to his (albeit brief) character arc, and a great emotional high for the season. 

And then the next episode was just... Cecil saying everything had been fixed. 

That really disappointed me. It felt so anticlimactic, especially considering the heights some of the other season finales had reached (I’m especially thinking of the dog’s ominous barking right before the finale of Who’s A Good Boy, and the town almost being destroyed). The ending to the Blood Space War arc felt rushed to me. I liked the close of the Lee Marvin arc, but everything else seemed a little off-beat. 

I think a big problem with season six and seven is they try to take us to new things within the world of Night Vale, but they do that in a way that doesn’t actually show us anything we need to learn. Eunomia hadn’t been in any other seasons and her backstory was minimal, so her death in season seven had no real impact on me. 

So why are they doing that? I don’t know. But it seems like the writing team has made the decision to utilize Cecil more as a voice for the town than an independent character, and are trying to let other people take the spotlight. However, because Cecil is by far one of the strongest and most beloved character, and because he drove most of the story for the first few seasons, this doesn’t work as well as you might hope. 

I hoped that season eight might go back to the old format. However, the first episode was another self-contained episode (although I do love Josh Crayton), so that has me worried. 

I guess I can say, there’s a difference between a story podcast and a storytelling podcast, does that make sense? Those might overlap, but they aren’t really the same thing. While a story podcast exists to have an overarching plot, a storytelling podcast just wants to put you in a world and let you look around. What I love so much about Night Vale is that it has always been able to be both. It has a plot, but it isn’t just a plot like many other shows are - it can let you walk around, run from government satellites, and NOT enter the dog park. 

However, it seems to me that Night Vale is forgetting it does have a story, too. There are still SO many things from past arcs that haven’t been resolved yet. What’s more, the show doesn’t seem all that interested in resolving them. You can have floating cats and five-headed dragons, but you can’t give up an essential part of your show. That doesn’t mean the show can’t still be fun to listen to, if they decide the plot no longer matters. But I think it will be a little less rewarding. 

And to finish I’ll just share my biggest fear: I really really really hope Night Vale isn’t going to become normal. At the end of season seven, time started working again. I’m so scared that they’re going to slowly convert the whole town to being normal before the show ends. And I think that would really suck, because it would change what Night Vale means to a lot of people, and what the town really is. 

TL;DR: although it is one of the greatest shows ever, Welcome to Night Vale has recently started to stray from its established formulas, tropes and characters, especially in seasons six and seven. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, I feel like the way it’s been executed has weakened the recent episodes. Seasons six and seven also tried to fit too much in without actually doing anything to advance certain arcs or plot points. Nonetheless, it is a great show, and I’m optimistic about the future. 

I’d love to have a dialogue about this so if you are the one person alive who’s going to read this, please don’t hesitate to comment or send an ask! Again, I absolutely love this show, these are all just my opinions, and my ability to critique the show exists outside of my adoration for it. 

Now I should sleep. 

#It's one am #this is not beta'd #and my formatting is all over the place #but here you go #please someone read this #welcome to night vale #night vale presents #podcasts #meta #my meta #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #cecilos #all hail the glow cloud

[kevinvoiceofdesertbluffs]

150 - The Birthday of Lee Marvin

I like to call this episode “The Death of the Recurring Gag”.

It is much, of course, as these things often are.

We begin with... a lot of voices. Firstly, Deb (delightful as always) is the one to greet us. Together with Dana (lovely line she has), Computer (the creepy one), and Steven Carlsberg (who has much more anxiety than one would expect).

Cecil comes back once again. It is Carlos’ and his 6th anniversary! Beautiful stuff.

Back to the voices - this does give us a notion that something is going on. They are clearly radio hosts, voices of Night Vale, that much we know from the beginning.

Next, it is, of course, the 30th birthday of Lee Marvin. He has a special message. In this one, he sounds very... happy. He says he has a plan. A plan to die. To stop existing. To reach out, alter.

Ominous enough. The switching of the various voices is very entertaining, especially as we go into the financial news. Steve is still my favourite. The faceless old woman is featured, even!

Lee returns. He talks about Huntokar. about what she did - which, of course, we know all about. He talks about the general, who messed with time. He talks about himself, about how he could just reach out...

We go to the weather - delightfully, we are directed here by the girl who says numbers. She also sings a little for us, rather cute. The weather is Mal Blum’s new song. I fucking love Mal Blum.

When we return, Lee tells us about all the Night Vales. About the voices. About the universes bleeding together. There is a Night Vale where time does not work right. This is, of course, the one we know.

Point of Interest - the Facelss Old Woman is in every Night Vale. Point of Interest - this gives us a rather good confirmation that the Night Vale we’re in most of the time is the same one each time.

So, Lee, a victim of time, reached out. He stopped it for a while. Just for a little. He reached out to every, single, Night Vale. All is frozen.

When the time moves again...

It is his 31st birthday.

Carlos calls Cecil. Time works correctly in Night Vale. It is no longer confusing. The implications are terrifying.

Happy 31st, Mr. Marvin.

#night vale #welcome to night vale #wtnv #night vale presents #kevin #OOC

[weaverlings]

@transcecilpalmer

because it’s not letting me use a proper cut in the reblog and this is... long

also kind of all over the place oops sorry

Anyway, yeah, totally! I mean, I don't think that they don't literally depend on each other to exist, in that sense.

Some of my perspective on this is just wrong, because I've had a lot of fun in the past with "Night Vale is somehow sentient" as a concept, and it's difficult for me to let it go. I feel like it's pretty definitively been disproven, but… it runs with the idea that Cecil's role as the "voice of Night Vale" is a pretty literal descriptor of what he does, and the biggest factor in like. How he gets away with so much. Why reeducation doesn't seem to affect him. Why he always knows what he needs to report on.

It's interesting that you brought up Josie in this context, because she's actually someone I'd kind of use as a counterexample! There's an episode early-ish in year 2 where she tells Cecil that if she falls, so does Night Vale (paraphrased). Now, obviously, that's not true. I think a lot of that came from the specific danger that Strex posed - if she had fallen to Strex, it might have been very, literally bad for them. And indeed, she died.

But also like, what happened soon after she died? Night Vale almost fell apart into (near?) infinite versions of itself. While this was almost certainly a coincidence, and 100% certainly is more closely related to Huntokar's actions, what if it isn't a coincidence, at least in the timing of it? The broken realities had probably been unstable for a long time, so why did things fall apart then?

Maybe Josie's death - the removal of a "pillar of the community" so to speak - was something of a catalyst for events. So these things aren't immutable. Lose an old woman, out by the car lot. Lose a mayor. Gain dragons and scientists. A man in a tan jacket comes and goes. Or change the nature of these positions - Sheriff Sam reveals their name and face. People feel these changes, and maybe, sometimes, they feel them more acutely in other places. They can go on without Josie, but it takes some time and effort for them to stabilize.

So I can't say I wasn't being literal; I totally was, just not in the same way? It is absolutely true that Cecil doesn't rely on Carlos to keep existing, nor does Carlos need Cecil in that sense. But we know that Cecil is healthy with Carlos around, and vice versa. A really interesting part in It Devours!: Carlos actually outright says that Cecil taught him that science is not more important than himself. That he needs and deserves to take care of himself, as opposed to, say, overworking himself no matter how much he's enjoying science.

If Cecil does have a little something extra that keeps him "safe" as the Voice of Night Vale, in a town so full of dangers that he sometimes ends up in the thick of, it miiiight extend to Carlos? I don't think anyone is deliberately warping reality, but… okay, I'm not there in re-listening yet, but if I remember how the year 5 finale works out, Cecil basically encourages people to remember who they are, to hold onto the idea of themselves so they can maintain the reality. I don't think he, like, spoke them back into existence. But I do think he was instrumental in guiding them in the right direction, and because of that, they were able to pull together as a town to keep existing. (And hopefully, to move closer to being the community that they want to be.)

So this is super circular, but like - to an extent, I think the world does need them? Or their community does, at least. They make and maintain spaces for each other their, because they are part of their community, and what is a community but made up of the people who live it? It's that idea, but maybe with some supernatural enhancement. A stronger hold, a more tangible impact.

It’s not that they need each other to exist - like they’d end up pining away or suffering or anything like that. They are separate people still capable of leading separate lives, and yeah, it would probably lead into some unhealthy relationship things if that weren’t the case. It’s more like, there is a specific need that exists because of their relationship, while they have it.

(Which is going to be for their lives, just, as it happens. They are happy and healthy and in love and I love them... so much... anyway)

It doesn't apply to like, danger or mortality one way or the other, exactly. It just means that while Cecil is existing in Night Vale, Carlos has a place there. And Carlos has been very open about how home is about the people - in his specific case, Cecil most of all. They have both made this choice as individuals.

Also, I'm not sure what Cecil's experience with aging is. I'd absolutely agree that it's atypical, but I don't think he's literally millennia old. That's one thing I think Best Of speaks to, when added with some information from the first novel. Jackie Fierro has been 19 for decades, but her perception of it is strange, and more importantly: she was still born 19 years ago? More or less? But they do find a picture of her as a child, standing in front of a steam engine, similar to one Cecil sees of Earl in the podcast.

In the novel (which I don't have in front of me, but as I recall), this is explained as more or less… time bending? Jackie is 19 years old. She's been 19 for decades. So she must have existed for decades, right? When the picture was taken, it apparently depicted just… a normal scene appropriate for the time. But as Jackie stayed 19, the picture changed to reflect when it would have been taken relative to the time she has spent existing.

So it seems likely that Cecil experiences time like that. He has just… always been the voice of his community. He's been involved at the radio station since he was a teen (in some realities?? oops), and so he has teenage experiences as an intern when the town is settled thousands of years ago. But he's also in his late 40s, as far as his perception and physical age are concerned.

I've only been exposed to "Carlos might not be (fully) human" headcanons recently and they're interesting? But yeah I definitely think Carlos is human, too. Cecil and Carlos may just be more alike than we first realized - both humans with "odd" perspectives, relatively speaking.

#wtnv ramblings #i still don't know if this makes a ton of sense #but i also hope it was respectful!! #i get really into meta #also i'm not trying to argue these ideas can like #coexist i think #this is just my take on it #anyway thank you for sharing yours! it's interesting!!

[kerink]

214 react

cecil continues his crusade against astronomy vis a vis it being a religion

wtf phone ringing?

JOHN PETERS 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

it's the same actor but he sounds really different

What was that mime show that was on TV in the 1970s, Cecil? Come on, you remember. yeah i bet he does

he forgot to write it down...he's so cute

can you people stop calling cecil? you HEAR he's live. where's his fucking intern? i thought nvcr had front desk staff what's happening

Well, we have all been podcasters at one point or another in our lives. just like Well, we have all been scientists at one point or another in our lives.

cecil fucking harassing poor fink

ohhhh good a cecil freak out his little laugh is wonderful

WINGED SERPENT god i cant wait to learn more about this. i can't believe huntokar has yet another god to compete against

golden glow in the sky huh...almost like a smiling....no i shant say

"Lexell's Comet has not been seen since 1770 and is considered a lost comet."

cecil's campaign against the moon continues

#wtnv #wtnv spoilers /

[desert-bluffs-and-me]

WTNV quick rundown - 91 - The 12:37

Co-written by James Moran.

Need a rundown for earlier episodes, live shows or books? Click here or visit the tag on my blog!

Do not bite the hand that feeds you. Grab it first, take the keys, set yourself free, THEN bite the hand and run. Welcome to Night Vale.

The 12:37 train from Red Mesa has arrived at the NV station. The station which hasn't existed in over a century and which had the little league baseball field built on top of it. So basically it's just sitting in the field. Sheriff Sam, a avid transpotter, is investigating.

People in deer masks start to gather around the train (as well as people wanting to take selfies in front of it) and hand out cockroaches with slogans like 'business in the front ; knife in the back' and '#notalltrains' printed on them.

When the train opens it's doors, nobody comes out, but the SSP force some of the previously fenced in onlookers to go inside. They do not come out. The people in deer masks, same as those who built the subway station before, make a V formation.

The SSP enter the train. All the onlookers enter the train. Gradually, everyone in NV starts to enter the train, including Cecil himself, through some kind of psychic urge. The people in deer masks are pounding the ground with their open palms.

Cecil says he could hear and feel the train moving but it didn't seem to actually go anywhere, more the world outside the train started to go back in time, becoming more wild. Sometimes he was seated next to his fellow citizens, sometimes he was there alone. A woman in a deer mask approaches him. She tells him in a vague way about the people who are moving crates containing miniture buildings. She says she is the destroyer. Cockroaches swarm all over her and then over Cecil, who tries to swat them away. When he does, he's suddenly alone in the baseball field. Nobody seems to know anything about the train and Teddy Williams won't answer any questions about the mini town under Lane 5 or it's buildings. Cecil has a cockroach on him which has 'Huntokar' printed on it's back.

Weather: "Windows" by Angel Olsen

There are hundreds of people gathered on Somerset, making a line which seems to have no end and doubles back on itself despite seemingly being straight. Nobody knows where it's going but citizen Wayne Ferry says it 'must be something cool' and is standing in line with his friend Shirelle. This is a part of the day which is still in existence when Cecil 'exits' the train.

The traffic segment is possibly about Diane Crayton or at least someone who works at her old office, as Catharine and Tina are both mentioned and these were Diane's co-workers.

The Lazer Tag Adventure Pit is being reopened at the Desert Flower BAAFC. Teddy says he just never thought to turn down the power on the lazers before and apologises for it. He also directly calls Cecil out for how he takes somebodies statements and turns them into long, rambling quotes that you almost forget are others statements until he says 'so-and-so says'. He also says he thinks Cecil is condescending and dislikes how Cecil puts on voices and mocks his venecular and punctuation.

Stay tuned next for the sound of a beating heart, a muffled sob, a nearby whisper while you are supposedly alone in the dark, and all of your other favorite jams of the 1980s and 90s. And as always, good night, Night Vale. Goodnight.

Proverb: Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open it up and see all the people screaming about the giant that just tore the roof open.

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #wtnv quick rundown #wtnv ep 91

[throwing-summers-at-the-walls]

What's up with the planet of awesome size (lit by no sun, an invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans) ? Where does it come from ? Is it some sort of warning, like "hey something bad is gonna happen". Huntokar saw it before trying to save night vale and also when she speaks during a story about Huntokar. We've heard about it several times before but I can't remember when. It's apparently linked to the men transporting crates ? But Huntokar saw it before the nuclear attack and there's no link between the bomb and them ? And what the fuck are they doing ? Why are they stealing houses from the underground city ?

And who is the smiling god ? Huntokar doesn't mention him when she talks about the other gods in the mudwomb. She doesn't even mention desert bluffs. Though at the time of a story about Huntokar desert bluffs had already been absorbed by night vale if I remember well. Is it the nuclear bomb, made into a god ? DB is maybe another version of NV. Cecil and Kevin switched places during the sandstorm. And there's several characters in DB that are very similar to characters in NV. But idk if DB can really be another version of NV, bc all NV collapsed into each other. But DB have been here since the beginning. And both towns don't occupy the same space contrary to all versions of NV. Or DB is the original NV, hence the similarlies and the smiling god aka the bomb, but it still doesn't explain why Huntokar doesn't talk about it and why NV and DB aren't in the exact same space. Plus we learned in a story of love and horror that people coming from another dimension are dangerous to all dimensions bc they're not in their own dimensions so NV and DB shouldn't be able to coexist if they're both different versions of NV.

#i forgot to post this #wtnv #welcome to night vale

[cecilspeaks]

109 - A Story About Huntokar

This is a story about Huntokar, said a voice on the radio. A voice you had never heard before, though she has been speaking to you your whole life.

I am Huntokar, the Destroyer. You have already been destroyed, you just don’t know it yet.

Once, long before this sorrowful now, there was only the mudwomb. We gods waiting to be born. The Woman from Italy, the Distant Prince, so many others. We waited for time and space to begin. In the mudwomb, nothing ever happened. Even the idea of action was impossible. In the mudwomb, you weren’t yet but you knew that some day, you would be.

And then history began, and we scattered out into the light and the hours. How simple and easy everything seemed in those first few millennia! There was only ever one of anything.

The Woman from Italy dipped her hand into the stars, running her fingers through the great glowing coils of the universe. The Distant Prince explored every far-off cave and every out of the way hole, all of the dark places. The cloud in the corner of the sky glowed, changing colors every second and dropping dead animals long before animals ever existed. I sat cross-legged in a lake for 10,000 years.

But nothing lasts forever, not even us. Soon there were other beings in the universe and everything changed. The Woman from Italy became fascinated at the pain that could be inflicted on these creatures. The Distant Prince began to shape some of them into wounded servants driven wild by what he had done to them. The Glow Cloud controlled the minds of any that got too close.

And I? I thought I was the exception. I thought that I would nurture them, rather than rule them. I was, of all of us, the only good one. But it was I who would end up truly destroying them.

I’ve spent every moment since my mistake trying to put back together what I took apart, but – it is beyond me. Every action that endeavours to improve only causes more suffering and terror. Even my appearance, once a source of awe, is now to them strange and horrifying. Nothing fits together like it used to.

Cecil. Sweet Cecil, who I tried and tried to guide toward the truth. I could never quite say the words. I am the Destroyer, I would say to him, but what could he make of that? My cowardice concealed the details of my crime. I couldn’t bare to repeat them. Until now.

I say this in every world at once: everyone must understand what happened. This is a story about Huntokar. But it’s also a story about you and them, and every poor soul who hears it. Of course I say Cecil singular as though there were one of anything. But as we now know, there is not one of anything. There’s a Cecil who would not listen. There’s a Cecil who listened, but could not comprehend. There’s a Cecil who did his utmost but who failed. There’s a Cecil who was gone long before I came. There is Cecil and Cecil and Cecil and Cecil and then there is me, trying to explain to him over and over about the choice I made. But all that ever comes out is the truth.

I am Huntokar, I say. I am the Destroyer. All true. All useless.

Each of us in those early days chose our domains. The Glow Cloud in the clouds. The Distant Prince in the distance. The Woman from Italy everywhere but Italy. We could each of us do whatever we wanted in the places we chose.

There was no criteria for my choice. I came across a valley, dry, almost lifeless. Save for a few brave people who had worked out how they could be sustained there. And I chose them, I guided and taught them, and gradually a town grew. Night Vale. The one place in the world that was truly mine.

I am the Creator.

And it was, I suppose, in the moment that I first felt love for my creation, that the fuse for the unraveling of all things was lit. Although it would not happen for many centuries, but the very inception of my greatest satisfaction and happiness, this tragedy became inevitable. Worship of me started, as they became aware of my kind presence in their lives. Their love gave meaning to the passing of my years and in exchange, I gave them a better and better world. They developed ceremonies devoted to me, wearing soft meat crowns and building what would become known as bloodstone circles.

And this is how it was for a long time. Night Vale was not a place with any distinction to anyone in the world, except for me, who watched over it and loved it. A love that would spell its end.

Now, in this destroyed world, I am forgotten. Still they have bloodstones and still they worship, but never does anyone ask: what is being worshipped in those circles? Why do we have all of this meat strapped to our heads? What once was tribute is now a series of gestures, as human and meaningless as they were before I came along.

They see glowing arrows in the sky, dotted lines and circles and they think nothing of them. Air traffic, space debris, weird birds. They cannot, will not read the messages from their God. The only ones that truly remember me are the oldest ones, the ones that stand outside of time. The Faceless Old Woman, who came to this country trying to find some answer to a long ago betrayal. She remembers me, although she would never speak up for me. Her ways are ways of sorrow and they only lead her to herself. She is a closed loop of a person.

The Glow Cloud remembers me, but can do no more than flash welcoming colors to say hello. I have no human mind it can control, so there is no way for us to speak. And of course the others, the Distant Prince, the Woman from Italy, the five-headed dragons, that… beagle. They know exactly who I am. And more is the doom of Night Vale for that.

The path to this destruction was laid by the humans. They invented a bomb of utter dread, a weapon so horrible, it could never be used and then threatened to use it. Fools! They faced across the water, squabbling over misunderstood ideas and announcing in louder and louder voices that they were prepared to end their species’ history over a point of pride. Some of the gods encouraged it, enjoying chaos and fear as entertainment, and spreading paranoia as they moved through the world. I tried to keep Night Vale calm. But even my children weren’t immune to the growing fear.

And then the day came, November 7, 1983. A practice Armageddon mistaken for the real thing, and so through this misunderstanding, transformed into actual Armaggedon. Hmh, the power of a fearful thought. The bombs were in the air, there were only minutes left, the people of Night Vale huddled waiting for the end to their story.

I could see it when it as it was about to happen. I could see the flash and the tower of fire, the heat that transforms a body into only its shadow. The slow sickness and the drying of crops, I could see starvation in a winter that would not end. I could see all of this, as though it had already happened.

I looked up into the sky, as the people around me wept and said goodbye to each other. And I saw something else: a planet of awesome size lit by no sun. an invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It hung so close that it filled the entire sky. And that was the moment that I decided, no. I would save them. I would save the town I created, I am the Saviour.

It was a simple idea. I would have to remove Night Vale from this ending world. I didn’t know if it would work; I had never seen any god try this. but I only had minutes, and I knew that I must save my only town. I was naïve, but lovingly so. You should not forgive me just because I had love in my heart. Intension never matter.

Night Vale would stand alone, disconnected from all of the rest of the universe, but safe. Or, that was what I thought. No action is without consequence. I am the Destroyer.

What happened next was a horrible cracking noise. A noise like I had never heard before, like no one had ever heard before, because this particular thing had never been broken, not in the history of all possible histories. When I tried to lift Night Vale out of the world it belonged in, I shattered reality. And I did not shatter reality just in my Night Vale, but in all Night Vales. All Night Vales that were or could be, every possible Night Vale in every possible universe broke simultaneously and fell into each other.

There was a Night Vale exactly like my Night Vale, but in which on a single day, a single citizen wore a green shirt instead of a yellow shirt. There was a Night Vale that had grown into a great metropolis: skyscrapers and crowds and little bars where people sat and talked about the great things they would write when they stopped going out to litte bars so much.

There was a Night Vale that never was, in a world where humans never came to be. There was a Night Vale in which Old Woman Josie would never die, and there was a Night Vale in which she had never lived.

There was a Night Vale in a world that had flooded, and this town floated on the water and thrived, its light spreading iridescent over the waves like an oil slick.

There was a Night Vale in which there was no Huntokar, and this town should have been safe from me, but then all of the other Night Vales fell into it, and it too was destroyed by my action.

Every Night Vale then, every Night Vale now, every Night Vale past and present, every town with every possible person making every possible important and unimportant choice, all of them, a fractal of Night Vale, an endless iteration of Cecil and citizens, and in my moment of foolish hope, in my belief that I could save anything… I reached out my clumsy hand and destroyed them all.

[deep sigh] I guess here is where Cecil would say it, so Cecil, I’ll say it for you. Let’s take a look at the weather.

[ "Full Metal Black" by The Royal They]

Night Vale is shattered. But for now it’s still here. Hmh, time is startlingly persistent in that way. Even badly wounded, it moves. And so the towns, every possible version of the town, balanced precariously on their broken reality. Some versions of the town fell completely into other versions, becoming folded in their reality and unexpected combinations. Others merely opened borders with my original Night Vale, doorways through which travel was possible, but not advisable. For a while, I believed we could go on like this. If we only put our heads down and insisted on living, without looking at or considering the world around us, we could just keep moving. And the main thing was to – keep moving. Denial was key. As long as we denied, then nothing was wrong.

The other gods were attracted to the site of my teetering domain, but I was able to arrange truces with them. They did not do anything that would upset the balance by which my world barely hung, and in exchange, they could poke their heads in, look around, maybe take a few versions of my Night Vale to turn into playgrounds for their terror-filled delights.

Others were drawn, not only gods. There were those who came to help, like the angels that Night Vale denied as strongly as strongly as they denied their own situation. And there were those who came for debased purposes of their own, like those awful men and their awful crates. The important thing wasn’t a life worth living. The important thing was just a life that continued.

But now the five-headed dragons in their grief and anger have pulled all of the other gods into this situation. And our fragile truce is ending. The cracks are widening. All possible Night Vales are opening up to each other. There will never be only one of anything ever again. When all realities are real, sense cannot be made. Everything at once is essentially nothing at all.

I’ve tried so hard to keep Night Vale moving forward, unaware of what happened to it. Blissfully ignorant. But my efforts end here. The world is finally falling apart, piece by piece, and I stand by. All the powers of my thousands of years, and I can only watch it fall.

Cecil, sweet Cecil. Whose life lies directly on the fault lines of this broken reality. He narrates his own ending without realizing it is his ending. He does not understand what is happening to him.

And so, here I am. Telling you this story, so that at least in your destruction, you will understand who has destroyed you. And you will understand that she destroyed only out of a loving desire to save you. May you perceive her as foolish and naïve, rather than monstrous.

Even as I speak I look up into the sky, and see that dark planet of awesome size perched in sunless void. Invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep turbulent oceans. It’s so close now. I can see it just above me. Maybe even, if I tried very hard, I could touch it.

This has been a story about Huntokar. She who thought she could save. She who, in saving, instead destroyed.

I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. Huh. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells.

Good night, my Night Vale.

Good night.

Today’s proverb: Less is more. Simplification is the way to happiness. You are not your things. Anyway, thanks for your wallet, byeee!

#welcome to night vale #wtnv #wtnv transcripts #episode 109 #a story about huntokar

[sleepymarmot]

even Huntokar apparently doesn’t know what the dark planet is

it’s a death omen only seen by those who have interacted, interact or will interact with more than one reality (Huntokar, You & They & Lucia, Cecil) but why? what is it? where does it come from?

#welcome to night vale #wtnv spoilers #blah blah blah

[haberdashing]

i just listened to the latest night vale (the missing sky) and wow do i have thoughts

i’ve been wildly thinking and theorizing with a friend on discord but i think i’m just gonna put all my ideas n stuff here

(spoilers below the cut)

so i’m gonna format this as basically a list of differences between tiny!night vale and what i will call normal!night vale (though that name is... definitely a misnomer) and then my thoughts on each difference

first off, the biggie: tiny!night vale was, at some point, transported into the hole in the pin retrieval area of lane five in normal!night vale. given that this hole was discovered in the pilot episode, one can guess that the transport happened shortly beforehand.

where exactly they were beforehand is unknown, except that they were a small town able to communicate with the outside world. did they originally belong to a parallel universe? were there two night vales at once beforehand?

also, tiny!night vale residents don’t seem to have noticed any change in size. were they always tiny, or did they just not notice because everything got smaller at once, and the missing sky and rest of the world was a more pressing issue regardless? (the physics of this is probably iffy, but this is night vale, physics schmysics.)

this is described as being due to huntokar, who tiny!night vale residents regard as a god and pray to for help. normal!night vale knows of huntokar both in regards to tiny!night vale’s worship and otherwise (see: ash beach, cecil saying that huntokar “is super weird” and that it “makes sense that she would be behind this whole ‘ash beach’ thing.”), but normal!night vale does not seem to regard huntokar as a god, or at least not as one that is worshipped.

from then on, tiny!night vale has been the subterranean city featured so prominently in episode 1, saw regular!carlos as a giant and a threat and attacked him, etc.

tiny!night vale still has pamela winchell as mayor, and her speech seems like a pretty regular mayoral speech, in stark contrast with normal!pamela winchell, whose speeches are... not.

the dana arc probably never happened due to various differences between the towns, but night vale was due for an election at the time regardless- did tiny!night vale not hold an election when regular!night vale did? was the election called off due to the emergency of the town’s isolation? did they simply lose track of time (they don’t know day from night, and time is weird in night vale anyway)? or was mayor winchell re-elected? does tiny!night vale’s election system actually let the people elect their mayor?

from what little we hear of tiny!night vale’s ace hardware ad, it sounds like a pretty normal ad for a normal hardware store, again in stark contrast to what we see from normal!night vale.

the city council in tiny!night vale is not some strange eldritch being, and had nameable, identifiable members (”Harriet Ramone” and “Benjamin Gould” are mentioned by name).

one week later happened june 15th, but tiny!night vale’s anniversary of the events therein is beginning now, on may 1st.

is this because of timeline weirdness, or, due to a reference to “Great Weeks of Memorial”, is is just because the event in question is to be months-long?

tiny!steve carlsberg didn’t see things in the sky until after the sky went missing, and tiny!cecil wishes he could see what tiny!steve saw. tiny!steve and tiny!cecil generally seem to have had a better relationship than normal!steve and cecil, and while some of this could come from romanticizing those no longer with us, some of it could just be a difference in timelines.

tiny!cecil never met tiny!carlos. or any scientist, for that matter. but he uses the same phrases to describe normal!carlos as normal!cecil does (”perfect hair”, “teeth like a military cemetery”).

one notable similarity is that, while tiny!cecil is discussing the moon’s disappearance as it relates to the missing sky instead of just the moon’s appearance in general, his dialogue there directly lifts phrases from when normal!cecil discusses the moon way back in episode 5, including the lines “Hey, watch us, moon! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try.”

tiny!night vale has weather reports that... are actually just cecil reporting on the weather. not music like normal!night vale.

this is sort of vague, but when tiny!cecil lists scientists, he lists two real-world scientists and then one real-world figure who is definitely not a scientist, in a style that fits into night vale’s normal weirdness and solidifies that their world is not, and was never, our own.

tiny!john peters is “john peters, you know, the war hero”, but since tiny!cecil references “helping john and jim peters in the fields”, it seems that john peters is still a farmer, but is better known now for his war heroism. notably, jim peters was mentioned in ash beach- (normal!)john peters had a false memory of hanging out with his brother two days ago, when in reality (normal!)jim peters had been taken away to join in the blood space war almost forty years ago. tiny!jim peters’ continued presence shows that the two towns differed well before the timeline of episode 1.

if there’s some sort of “they were the same until-” thing going on, it’s at least forty years back, before even the uncertain events of 1983. i don’t think this is a case of timelines branching at all, though. they’re just parallel towns that somehow, possibly through the intervention of Huntokar, became connected.

tiny!cecil’s traffic is... not a normal traffic report, but not the surreal weirdness that is normal!night vale traffic reports, either. like with the weather, it seems like it is what we would expect from actual reports of that kind.

tiny!josie passed away several years ago.

is this timeline weirdness? did tiny!josie’s death go differently than normal!josie’s? part of me worries that tiny!josie was squished by regular!carlos. i really hope not, but the timelines are vague enough that it’s possible, though i’d imagine tiny!cecil would probably have referenced that if it were the case.

tiny!cecil never really knew tiny!josie.

erika is a single human person who uses she/her pronouns and is not originally from night vale.

so, to recap: tiny!night vale has a pretty normal mayor, a pretty normal city council, and pretty normal weather and traffic reports. it differs from the night vale we know and love in a number of ways, going back decades at the very least, which cannot be traced to a single cause. up until they were mysteriously transported, they were, it seems, a pretty ordinary small town, one that would be fairly unremarkable in the real world (though they are not from the real world).

also, huntokar seems to have caused that transportation (or at least, tiny!night vale is under that impression), and is probably causing the false memories and holes in reality that are plaguing normal!night vale now. (no word on whether tiny!night vale is affected by any of that.)

i’m not sure where all this is heading, but i am excited to find out.

#the missing sky #night vale #welcome to night vale #wtnv #wtnv spoilers #personal #shitpost