Oh hey, I have something to add to this. So when I was in college I majored in a cross of sociology and media studies, which effectly lead me to studying fandom, identity, and how what we love defines us. I started in 2011 so you can imagine when Night Vale was getting big I was smack in the middle of the everything, and as a fan I was approaching it through the lens of my thesis and studies.
I ended up doing an entire final on this and including it within my work, but the long story short on this one is that Night Vale does particularly, specifically well because Cecil’s queerness is the most mundane part of the show. In the first 2-3 episodes, we are introduced to:
- A floating sentient glow cloud
- 5 headed multicolored dragon running for mayor
- The weather report is music for no apparent reason
- A portal that hocks dinosaurs into the school gym, a “minor inconvenience”
- That our MC is gay
Now out of those five, Cecil being gay is the only thing that exists in the real world, and therefore automatically becomes the most relatable. Effectively, the usage of the fantastical as mundane makes our fantastical, to the story, mundane. The key aspect of Night Vale is that sensationalizing the queers would actively make the story worse. And it set such a good fucking precedent for queer people in fantasy, horror, just about anything- the queerness becomes the relatable aspect, and it was Night Vale.
So y’know. Yeah, go back and give it a listen, now that it’s coming up on 10 years old. And think about how far we’ve come.
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