Smiling Gods, or, why Kevin's so cheerful
Headcanon of Kevin being perfectly functional & human in all regards, rather than monstrous and impossibly sadistic.
He’s just a bit… /adapted/ to his living conditions. So while he can intellectually realise that things are wrong and being covered in blood is wrong, he can’t actually bring himself to say anything that might be perceived as negative because negativity is the sort of thing that results in retraining.
So he has, carefully and thoroughly, eliminated almost every possible use of the word ‘no’ from his vocabulary, and almost all other negative terms.
He survives Desert Bluffs being marched on by the Advanced Readers from neighbouring Night Vale, but that doesn’t mean he can just drop back into being the Kevin he was a decade ago, before Strex and so much retraining and Employee Motivation.
When you ask him what the weather’s like, he’ll say “Gosh, we’re blessed with lots of sunshine today!” when he means he’s getting burned in it. Or “Nothing like a brisk breeze to wake you up!” when he’s so cold he can’t feel his extremities. If you ask him a question to which the answer is obviously ‘no’, he’ll work his way around it until he can find a positive, upbeat spin. He’s not *able* to be negative any more, as a survival tactic.
He might be able to get clever about the phrasing, but not too clever. Never clever enough to arouse suspicion. Never treading the lines to where he thinks anyone, anyone at all, might pick up even a faint trace of sarcasm. Ask him about blood, and he’ll list every nice thing he can think of just to be on the safe side.
"It’s such a nice colour. And aren’t you glad not to be all dried out? Blood’s so good for the plants, too. All that iron and those other lovely nutrients! Why, it’s all just dandy!"
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