Night Vale Community Fanon

A blog for all your Welcome to Night Vale headcanons, fanon, theories, ideas, and/or guesses. We run on reader submissions, so send us yours! We also have an archive of canon primers, to help you keep track of which ideas weren't made up by fandom. For easy browsing of the archives, don't miss our tags page.

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FYI

This blog has not been Tumblr-purged, and there are no active plans to delete it. But in case things start getting hidden, or something goes wrong:

You can download a ZIP archive of Night Vale Community Fanon here. All the images plus the post HTML, total size 810 MB.

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What happened to the taglist?

Tumblr removed all the links from the original one.

Rather than re-code them all manually, only to have Tumblr erase them again whenever it felt like, I replaced the list with an automated tag cloud, using javascript from post-theory.

And now the post-theory servers are down, for who knows how long.

Personally, I blame 2016.

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We’ve done Lauren and Vanessa, now let’s get to the Voice of Desert Bluffs himself. Sit back and enjoy our Top 10 Kevin Headcanons.

…or just be sad and depressed at what hasn’t been jossed. At least the “Kevin is evil even with Strexcorp gone, and is secretly trying to hurt Carlos and/or Cecil” theories did not come true! On the other hand, the “somebody is going to try to help Kevin, and eventually rehabilitate him” theories don’t look like they’ll be coming true either.

95) The last words to leave Kevin’s mouth before Strexcorp did whatever they did to him were “Why didn’t you warn me, Cecil?”

100) Before Strexcorp came to Desert Bluffs, Kevin wore glasses. His Strex employee health insurance wouldn’t pay to replace them, so eventually he opted to get the corrective surgery it would cover: removing his eyes completely and replacing them with Pits of All-Seeing Void.

105) During “Sandstorm”, Kevin was not yet fully controlled by the Smiling God. And when he was far away from it, in Night Vale, a bit of his original personality started slipping through: hence the really Cecil-like speech he gave while he was there.

107) Kevin is Cecil’s brother, and he was actually the one who was prophesied to take over the radio station. He was the one who made the tape recordings. When one brother moved to Desert Bluffs, the timeline got a little mixed up and they swapped names. Cecil has no memory of recording the tapes because he didn’t.

109) Kevin does not have his own Carlos. Kevin does not need or really even want his own Carlos. Kevin is asexual and/or aromantic.

110) Kevin is Cecil’s brother, but he wasn’t named Kevin. They gave him the new name after he went though ‘training,’ but the old him is still there and fighting for control. For this reason, he won’t ever hurt Cecil.

115) The more time Kevin spends in Night Vale, the more the city starts to influence him. This is why he seems to progressively get more annoyed with Lauren as the episodes go on. 

119) Cecil sees the news with a third eye, and that is how he reports instantly. To end Kevin’s matching omniscience, Strexcorp sewed his third eye shut.

124) As children, both Cecil and Kevin had normal eyes. Kevin’s became solid black through conditioning with Strexcorp drugs, and Cecil’s are solid white, ever since the event caught on tape in Cassette.

147) Strexcorp bought NVCR first – out of all of the things in Night Vale – because after their experience with Kevin and seeing how hard he fought and resisted, they knew it was really important to keep the local radio host under supervision.

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Many of the Deep Ones moved to Night Vale once they were released from the concentration camps, after the events of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” They now make up one of the largest Deep One populations not near a major body of water.

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Night Vale attracts so many strange creatures and cults due to its ability to bounce back from any disaster. Even eldritch horrors and deranged cults want to live somewhere that can actually survive their plans of conquest.

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You know, even after all this time, it’s still not clear how giant these giant warriors are. Alicia’s dog is the size of a Prius, but Doug was able to use a Carlos-sized funnel as a horn…?

Whatever height you imagine them at, these are our Top 10 Headcanons about the Giant Masked Army.

41) Doug looks exactly like a fifty-foot-tall doppelganger of Carlos.

41) Doug is a short for Dougostarifixtolomious the Soul Crasher.

41) Doug is big enough that Carlos can easily ride on his shoulder.

44) Doug and Alicia look like opera-style Viking women complete with historically inaccurate horned helmets.

45) The miniature city under the pin retrieval area is a wormhole leading to the Desert Otherworld thousands of years ago, appearing small because of temporal and spatial distortions. It is a barren desert through the Old Oak Doors because the war (and the shady people stealing their buildings) devastated their society. The Masked Warriors are a small resistance started by the Child King to stop the war. They believe Carlos to be the second coming of the great Huntokar.

47) Carlos is about the size of the masked army’s equivalent of a largeish Dollfie. To keep from wearing the same outfit every day, he’s been borrowing high-quality doll clothes from some of the aficionados in the army. As repayment, every once in a while he has to let them dress him in the most impractical-for-science outfits, put him in different poses, and take cute photos.

51) The masked warriors are a group of very dedicated LARPers who wandered into the desert otherworld a few years prior to Carlos’ arrival. Due to the time distortion, most of them believe that everything that has happened is just an elaborate week-long campaign organized by Doug, who is doing everything in his power to keep up this illusion until he can figure out how to get them home.

65) The Otherworld Desert changes itself to be perfect to whoever is in it. It creates rival armies for the Masked warriors to fight, scientific discoveries for Carlos, and both strange Night Vale stuff and beautiful romantic stuff for Cecil.

104) The angels were pretty cranky after they heard Cecil praising the “helpful masked army that can build anything” as one of the perks of moving. “Anything, really?” complained Erika to Josie. “Can they build an opera house, huh?” And “Are we not tall enough for him?” And “Would it help if we got masks?”

118) Carlos’s research into the mysterious light was drawing him into the influence of the Smiling God. Doug and Alicia figured this out, and destroyed his research on purpose, snapping him out of it.

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The radio show is the remaining part of a Twitch stream on which Cecil long ago started playing a mysterious ARG, and never noticed that he was becoming part of that world. The sand wastes are the only thing that remain of Twitch Plays Welcome to Night Vale.

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Kevin self-harms.

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Listeners, please, stop sending in letters asking for Cecil to get a raise. But do keep sending in new contenders for our Top 10 Station Management Headcanons.

61) Station Management is actually eating interns and altering people’s memories about where the interns went.

61) Station Management are the offspring of Cthulu.

62) Intern Dana was not interning to be the next Voice of Night Vale. She was training to take over for Station Management.

68) The City Council is Station Management’s extroverted cousin.

70) The Woman from Italy was an eldritch monster of the same species as Station Management. That’s why she never came to Night Vale before the Strex takeover – she didn’t want to invade another cosmic horror’s territory.

95) Station Management entered Cecil in the secret police Auction just before Yellow Helicopters, so that Strexcorp wouldn’t be able to buy him as well as NVCR. They were trying to protect him; training a new Voice would just be SO irritating.

107) Even though Night Vale is ridiculously hot, Station Management cannot survive in those temperatures and so the NVCR station is always freezing under the AC.

107) Judging by the sounds that Station Management makes, compared to the sounds that Khoshekh makes “when it’s time to eat”, Station Management is actually a giant cat.

115) Station Management thinks of humans in much the same way as we think of our pets. When they go into full-on roaring, thrashing, terrifying-the-life-out-of-Cecil mode, it’s basically their equivalent of swatting him with a rolled-up newspaper to chastise him for misbehaving.

124) Station Management use radio waves as sustenance. That’s why they founded their station. The reason they don’t like to be talked about over radio is because they feel like it’s cannibalism and prefer food that isn’t morally objectable like that.

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Everything in Night Vale is exactly as Cecil describes it. That which has not yet been described exist only as vague impression in the public consciousness.

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Intern Vanessa is a ghost. She is currently attached to her skull, which Kevin likes to keep in the studio, or take with him on long trips. 

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They’re the few, the proud, the extremely-likely-to-die. (Which Cecil somehow didn’t notice, until Maureen pointed it out…?) Hopefully you’ll survive a trip through our Top 10 Headcanons about NVCR Interns.

76) Only very experienced interns get to do broadcasts on their own. Cecil is the only one to ever survive that long.

76) Only interns mentioned by name on-air die. The Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency does not allow this information to be shared, but some interns still notice the trend and apply using fake names.

79) Even though the tablets down at City Hall have the name of the future voice of Night Vale carved into the stone, carvings that were created long before the owner of the name was even conceived, each citizen is required from ages 18 to 21 to spend one year in internship at the Night Vale community radio station. Some of course do not survive these trials, but for those who do, it looks great on a college application.

80) All the interns that appeared in the show improbably survived their supposed deaths, but they keep pretending they got killed because they know that’s the only way to quit their intern job. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck in an endless loop of almost dying and barely surviving. Intern Maureen is the only one who didn’t do that, partly because she didn’t want to make her family worried and partly because she wanted to tell Cecil how much his internship program sucks.

92) When a prophesied Voice of Night Vale becomes an intern at NVCR, they start existing as a fact of Night Vale from the beginning of time until the end of the universe. They are not aware of this, which can lead to strange memory problems. They also cannot be killed - the universe will go to great lengths to make sure they are not harmed, even deleting an entire third world war in the 80’s from existence. 

102) The bloodstone doors at NVCR didn’t always require you to bleed on them to get out. In fact, by a strange coincidence, they only started requiring this after Strexcorp bought the station. Interns can still get out without any blood loss at times. By another strange coincidence, this only seems to happen when there are no Strexcorp supervisors watching.

103) While working for the station is technically an unpaid internship, Cecil often pays the interns in bizarre philosophical fortune cookies.

106) Being an intern under Leonard was significantly less lethal then being an intern under Cecil.

113) You do not “apply for a job” as a Night Vale intern. A Night Vale local, between the ages of 15 and 23, just appears in the radio station wearing an intern shirt and holding an intern name tag right after the previous intern gets offed. Nobody knows how an intern gets chosen, except maybe Station Management - but nobody tried asking them for obvious reasons. The fact that fifteen years old Cecil apparently got the intern job by asking is yet another thing about the Cassette that confuses Cecil.

171) For every dead intern, there’s an alternative universe where Cecil died instead of them and they became the new Voice of Night Vale.

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Strexcorp is inherently evil, and corrupts anyone who tries to run it. This is why it’s wreaking such havoc on Desert Bluffs’ municipal services: the angels no longer care what effect their projects have on ordinary people, any more than Lauren Mallard et al did. The only safe thing to do is disband the company altogether – before it’s too late…

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Welcome to Night Vale and Our Fair City take place in the same universe, what with Herbert saying it got colder the farther east he went. They both take place in an extreme global warming environment some time in the future, Night Vale using its own calendar. Large corporations have taken control of many cities in this future, like Strexcorp or Hartlife. Welcome to our fair city - I mean our fair Night Vale….

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There’s been a ton of theorizing and speculation about Cecil’s niece…and at least half of it has been jossed, as we learn basic facts like “which of her parents is related to Cecil, and how.” Here are the Top 10 Janice Headcanons from what’s left!

81) When Steve specified that Janice has been unable to walk “since birth”, that might not sound notable. But in fact, most other infants in Night Vale are like baby horses: able to stand within a few hours of birth, and walking later that day. It’s a key adaptation for survival in this town, where you’ll be in a life-or-death chase sequence at least once a week.

83) Cecil sometimes takes his niece Janice bowling for fun, and when Old Woman Josie tags along, she embarrasses Cecil by telling Janice old stories about Cecil from when she was a little girl.

85) Janice is the one person who can make Cecil stop badmouthing Steve.

86) Janice managed to evade Strex’s capture through the help of some of the other kids who weren’t so lucky. They needed to make sure she was safe, since she was one of the youngest kids in the resistance, as well as to prevent the power Strex would have over Cecil if they had his beloved niece.

96) Janice needed to destroy the Registry of Middle School Crushes because she had a crush on the Glow Cloud’s child. If that ever got out, it would be like, super embarrassing. Have you seen its new haircut? Ugh. Gross.

102) Janice doesn’t age at a normal rate, or in a normal chronological order. In Old Oak Doors, she was ten. Later, in WE MUST GIVE PRAISE, she was eight. Back in One Year Later, she was unborn (so when Cecil refers to Carlos’s presence as “the most precious thing to me”, it’s not that his not-yet-boyfriend is more precious than his niece, it’s that he doesn’t have a niece yet).

156) Janice uses a wheelchair which is a fully-certified off-road vehicle, complete with all-terrain tires.

180) The reason Janice can’t walk is that she’s a mermaid.

181) The Night Vale school system groups children into grades, not by academic level of skill, but by combat skill. The child of the Glow Cloud is only a few years old, but is a freshman in high school because it’s so formidable. On the flip side, Janice is a few grades below average for her age because wheelchair combat takes longer to master.

204) Janice was one of the great generals of Tamika’s army.

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The reason the sun is described as noisy and giving off a shout of light is because people in Night Vale (or at least Cecil) have synesthesia that makes light have a sound level.

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Night Vale is part of the spirit world in the Avatar series. Every avatar has visited at least once and Aang went every summer.