-- At the forefront of Night Vale's academic community -- In the middle of of a churning, lost desert -- At the back of your eyes, watching, waiting --
Are you a new night vale theme or old night vale theme person, a hiram mcdaniels or faceless old woman supporter, a bloodstone circle worshipper or a congregant of the church of the smiling god
Iâm in need of some daily character warm ups, so:
everyone who reblogs this byâletâs sayâJuly 31st will get a character based off their blog!
Theyâll include basic bios and physical descriptions at the very least, and I will be doing at least one or two a day until they are all finished. Â (And if Iâm really digging them I may even give them a deeper backstory or *gasp* put them in a short story!!)
Only ten days left to reblog this before I start writing these! Â Iâd love to create as many diverse characters as possible so feel free to pass this around!
hey, are you listening to Within The Wires? Are you going to do write ups about this and Alice Isn't Dead? I need more of your podcast write ups in my life.
You are, as always, too kind, dear angel. I am listening to both of those podcasts and I think that Alice Isnât Dead will get a write-up soon. I already have notes written around the time of the 6th or 7th episode, so I might as well wait till the story concludes and see how it goes.Â
Within the Wires will be challenging to write about. Fink appears to be the storyteller while Cranor is the poet (something I have suspected after reading their separate contributions to A Commonplace Book of the Weird). Iâm not sure if there is going to be a clear narrative for this podcast, which is kind of my bread and butter.Â
Letâs have some love for the old fans and the newer ones!!
I started at the beginning, right after âA Carnival Comes To Townâ was released. My best friend recommended it to me and I binged it all in two weeks.
I started from the beginning around the time âOne Year Laterâ came out ! It took me all summer to catch up with it, and then exactly one year later after that I made this Night Vale sideblog.Â
I started listening from the beginning around the time Faceless Old Woman had come out -- I remember taking the summer to catch up and First Date had been released just as I did.
Then, I started this blog shortly after WALK was released.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 90: Whoâs a Good Boy? Part 2
I look forward to the final episode of a Welcome to Night Vale season for two reasons. The first is because I know it will bring some form of resolution to a conflict that has been delicately layered over an entire year (although âresolutionâ is too strong of a word and I will address that near the end of this write-up ). The second is because WTNV walks a perilous, exhilarating tight rope between existential dread and life-affirming awe, and it does this best in its conclusions.
At the core of WTNVâs horror is the feeling of impending loss, that life is impending loss. The show is at its scariest when it reminds us how insignificant and fragile and submissive we are in the face of the vastness of the universe. The moments of true terror, at least for me, are when we are forced to realize that the truths and beliefs we build up are only so much dust drifting in the void.
But I love that WTNVÂ finds something uplifting even in the face of this horror. That it can find anything positive at all in tragedy is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn. Yes, the world is cruel and unjust and apathetic and impermanent. But it can also be so much more.
A Town We All Loved and Believed In
First, I want to talk about belief.
There are many schools of thought on the subject of belief, but I am firmly a member of this one: belief in a thing can can call that thing into being, and make it real (or make it just as good as being real). There may or may not be a God...but what does that matter? A billion people believe that there is one, which makes Him functionally real. Giving Him a name calls him into being and thus endows Him with qualities of being real.
In short, belief is an act of creation.
This is, I think, what we see in the conclusion of todayâs episode. Cecil doesnât know how the Strangers were finally repelled. In lieu of a formal explanation, he gives us a list of possible theories that seem to have happened simultaneously. Did any of these wild tales actually work to defeat the Good Boy and his army? I canât say for sure, but I can tell you that it doesnât matter. Each of the characters mentioned, from the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God to Hiram McDaniels, has their own beliefs about what finally saved the day, and these beliefs became stronger than all their previous beliefs about city loyalties and old hatred, and were manifested in prayer and in action:
A prayer march against a common enemy. How strange humankind is that two cities, Night Vale and Desert Bluffs, could hate each other so muchâŠand then hold hands so tightly in mutual hatred of something else.
And so all of these resolutions are real. And all of them are not.
I do like to think of these separate resolutions as being equally true. They are small instance of characters being themselves and being true to themselves, fulfilling the roles they were meant to be fulfilling. And that they do them together shows a city working in unison -- for once -- to unite against a common foe.
And so, by believing, the Strangers are banished. Belief is a fitting weapon against âhollowed outâ creatures like the Strangers. These monsters who act by negating and undoing are ousted by a simple and pure act of creation. And since there is not really a âGodâ character to oppose the satanic Good Boy, the use of prayer and belief in Night Vale itself is an interesting substitute.
The Problem of My Narrative
Donât think Iâve gone sentimental, my angels. WTNV wouldnât be the story that it is without a few complications. If this were a normal narrative, I might have been able to end with the previous section -- the Strangers (soulless creatures who annihilate whatever they touch) are defeated by their polar opposite (belief, and the act of creation that accompanies belief). Itâs the cosmic horror equivalent of the Care Bear Stare.
The Faceless Old Woman returns at the end of the episode to remind us of that tight rope I mentioned in my introduction -- yes, we have all this life-affirming belief going on, but there is another, darker side to consider:
âWe didnât drive them away, Cecil,â she said. âWe didnât win. They chose to leave.â
I argued that, surely, it was because we or someone forced them.
Chaos canât sustain itself. Any force that trends towards entropy and destruction must, by necessity, burn itself out, which is what the Faceless Old Woman is suggesting here. The Strangers simply left because they didnât have any reason to stay. They donât have any reasons at all. The result, of course, is the same as if they had been forcibly banished: Night Vale is rescued and a sort of status quo is restored. The chief difference in the Faceless Old Womanâs version of events is that the threat of the Strangersâ return looms in the distance, denying us true resolution. Yes, all of that heroic believing and praying and fighting happened, but it happened independently of victory, parallel to it. The climax, like so many things in life, was accidental.
Belief is an act of creation, but creation is impermanent. We believe in things, we believe in resolutions, in order to gain a feeling of safety from the threat of impermanence, however short-lived that feeling is. Plot structure requires resolution, but we rarely get any in WTNV (or in life, for that matter). This is the problem in Cecilâs narrative: WTNV defies resolution exactly when we want and expect it most.
So what are we to do in the end? I think Cecil has the right idea:
And we can go back to living the lie of reason and control once again! And it is a very, very comfortable lie.
Miscellaneous
Hey, talking about denying us resolution: how about that last minute of the episode after the proverb? Yes, there are a couple of Desert Bluffs citizens who stood and united with the Night Valians against the Strangers. But a whole bunch of them have joined Kevin out in the Desert Otherworld. The threat of strangers (a different kind of stranger than the antagonists of this episode) remains -- there are possible enemies within Night Vale and a trigger-happy Sheriff who has it out for them.Â
It isnât clear how similar the new Desert Bluffs will be to the old one (StrexCorp appears to be absent), but Kevinâs thinly veiled threat promises renewed conflict in the future.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 89: Whoâs a Good Boy?
Thereâs one at the door
At the gate to Damnation
And thereâs room for one more
âTil the end of Creation
While we donât have the whole story yet, thereâs much here to gnaw on. In particular, Night Valeâs interpretation of Hell warrants some special attention. And I, like a dog with a bone, am forced to give this attention.
In my previous write-up, I paid extra attention to Maureenâs mention of Hell. We donât get references like this in WTNV very often, and so we should sit up and take notice when we do.
As it turns out, Maureen was not being hyperbolic: Hell has come to Night Vale.
Less nuanced? My angel, you do yourself a tremendous disservice. You dared to utter names like Kristeva and Lacan. Names that caused me to flinch upon reading them as if being physically struck. Names that I have long since buried in my subconscious.
My metaphorical hat off to you, my angel, for bring actual critical theory to the table.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 89: Whoâs a Good Boy?
Thereâs one at the door
At the gate to Damnation
And thereâs room for one more
âTil the end of Creation
While we donât have the whole story yet, thereâs much here to gnaw on. In particular, Night Valeâs interpretation of Hell warrants some special attention. And I, like a dog with a bone, am forced to give this attention.
In my previous write-up, I paid extra attention to Maureenâs mention of Hell. We donât get references like this in WTNV very often, and so we should sit up and take notice when we do.
As it turns out, Maureen was not being hyperbolic: Hell has come to Night Vale.
Oh yes WTNV actually went into the horror territory.
Wasnât one of the valid interpretations that satan is stuck frozen because he keeps trying to free himself by flapping his wings? Speaking of, wouldnât it take advantage of expectations by revealing that there is no antagonist? The hellpup being a red herring? I mean, it in itself is a thing - could it be that if it were exposed to that fact (which didnât happen before because KILL IT WITH FIRE), it would disappear in a puff of logic?
Wasnât there an episode way back with the main story being a race through a cavern? The one that was almost back-to-back to The Strangers?
We went there. We sent messages in Morse code to the people we once had been, asking for help, but they could not help us. They were outside of the Narrow Place.
(âŠ)
The Distant Prince wore a golden coat, and had always existed.
(With gratitude for @cecilspeaks)
Of course there was An Epilogue between, because why not ask the hellpup for coffee.
@Last Note Nightmare: in the last episode we had Cecil listening to ??? through a phoneâs speaker. This episode we have us listening to ???⊠through our speakers/headphones. Make of it what you will.
Yes, you are quite correct. The great irony of the Devilâs punishment in Hell is that he continually beats his massive wings to try and free himself from the pit, but in doing so, generates an impossibly cold wind that traps him more completely in ice. But that Dante imagined the depths of Hell to be filled with ice rather than fire (which is more typical) is a critical symbol of the distance from God,
I agree that there are probably some surprises still in store in terms of how Night Vale treats the Strangers and their terrible, adorable leader. However, it is also important (at least for me) that WTNV has a truly evil figure -- not something weâve really had. Every antagonist has been tinged with a bit og a backstory...while this hasnât excused their actions, it has made them more sympathetic. And while I do agree that everyone has a different perspective, it is possible that this âwanting nothingâ is reprehensible enough to warrant true villainy in the world of Night Vale.
Other antagonists have just been opposing sides of the same coin. The Good Boy wants total annihilation, which is quite a different thing.
Iâve also wondered about the Distant Prince. There are several obvious similarities between that story and this one, so I doât want to sweep it under the rug just yet.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 89: Whoâs a Good Boy?
Thereâs one at the door
At the gate to Damnation
And thereâs room for one more
âTil the end of Creation
While we donât have the whole story yet, thereâs much here to gnaw on. In particular, Night Valeâs interpretation of Hell warrants some special attention. And I, like a dog with a bone, am forced to give this attention.
In my previous write-up, I paid extra attention to Maureenâs mention of Hell. We donât get references like this in WTNV very often, and so we should sit up and take notice when we do.
As it turns out, Maureen was not being hyperbolic: Hell has come to Night Vale.
ânothing that suggests an existence of God or Heavenâ
Like,
Beings who are definitely not angels?
Who took Old Woman Josieâs salt for a godly mission?
Who grant âangelic protectionâ?
Who are radiant and impossibly large and have wings?
When the City Council in the very first episode announced that âthe structure of heaven and the angelic organizational chart are privileged information known only to the city council members on a need-to-know basisâ?
When everyone learns about angels in seventh-grade Transmigration Studies, and there are âreligious textsâ that talk about angels?
Ew, what an ill-mannered response. Bad form, my angel.
I will, however, blame flaws in my writing. My intention was to stress that there was no opposite for the Good Boy. My central idea is that the Good Boy shares much in common with the Christian version of the Devil (while still subverting or adding to the mythology).Â
That version of the Devil usually comes with an idea of Lucifer being the Adversary to Godâs benevolence. We donât have a God figure in WTNV. The only one we get is the Smiling God, who actually does share some things in common with the Abrahamic God...but not ones that make it an opposing force to the Good Boy (the Smiling God is not even clearly sentient).
Thereâs also no place in the afterlife that is reserved for people who live good or righteous lives (as we conceive of Heaven). There are quite a few places where mortals can go after they leave this world in WTNV, but none of them are âheavenlyâ in the sense that they are an eternal reward or a loving place or even permanent. Dead people in Night Vale actually show up frequently as ghosts.
So, yes, we have angels (who donât appear to work for anyone but themselves and Old Woman Josie) and a couple of instances of the word âheavenâ or âgodâ but nothing that quite matches what we get from the Good Boy in this episode. Youâll forgive an old blogger for using a touch of hyperbole, Iâm sure.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 89: Whoâs a Good Boy?
Thereâs one at the door
At the gate to Damnation
And thereâs room for one more
âTil the end of Creation
While we donât have the whole story yet, thereâs much here to gnaw on. In particular, Night Valeâs interpretation of Hell warrants some special attention. And I, like a dog with a bone, am forced to give this attention.
In my previous write-up, I paid extra attention to Maureenâs mention of Hell. We donât get references like this in WTNV very often, and so we should sit up and take notice when we do.
As it turns out, Maureen was not being hyperbolic: Hell has come to Night Vale.
The Burning Standards of Hell
The Christian version of Hell has a rich mythology that is informed by a variety of sources. Thus, Hell is imagined to be many different kinds of places. What they share in common, though is distance. The chief function of Hell is to be the dark reflection of Heaven, its polar opposite, the place that is at the furthest point from God. Look to Miltonâs âwide womb of uncreated Night / devoid of sense and motionâ in Paradise Lost, for example -- Lucifer, after his fall, ends up in the bottomless depths beyond Creation. Or, better yet, Danteâs Satan is trapped in a pit so distant from the warmth and love of God that he is eternally frozen in place.
Night Valeâs version of Hell shares this critical component. Take a look at this description from Francis.
âSometimes you feel as though there might be other lost people, also searching through the mud. Maybe you can even hear the soft swish of them in the black but your hands never meet, and you cannot speak out. You are alone. Sometimes the mud goes over your head, and sometimes it is just a slight damp beneath your feet.â
...
âYears go by. You feel yourself hollowed out by time. Everything that was you slips away. There is a great power that replaces you with his desires. He is your leader, and you want what he wants, and he wants nothing!â
The physical description conjures an image of the grave, that place of greatest distance between the living and the dead. What makes this chilling is it creates the idea of being dead when you die instead of continuing on in some version of the afterlife (which, in Night Vale at least, would allow for future communication with the world of the living). In this Hell, you are only vaguely aware of the presence of others, but are doomed to never interact with them and to never return home. That Francis states she is still in the mud implies that her soul has been removed, placed at a great distance from her body. Everything about her account tells us that Night Valeâs Hell is hellish precisely because of how it removes and distances in different ways.
Purely Realistic
The key differences (because it wouldnât be WTNVÂ if it didnât challenge our traditional views) between Night Valeâs Hell and other versions? Chiefly, thereâs no opposite, nothing that suggests an existence of God or Heaven, which presents us with a bleak view of the future if the Strangers continue to run unchecked.
Our more common ideas of Hell require this, something that combats Hell or reveals its weaknesses and flaws. I am reminded of C.S. Lewisâ The Screwtape Letters, in which Uncle Screwtape, a bureaucratic demon, tells his demon-in-training nephew that, âthe justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results.â
This version of justice is the kind that exists without mercy, almost an eye-for-an-eye mentality which Screwtapeâs nephew learns the hard way when he fails to acquire a human soul.
Even though this sort of infernal justice is cruel and terrible, it is still something we can understand and fight...largely because itâs a kind of justice that we see even in our own society (and which we saw in The Trial of Hiram McDaniels). But there is no justice in the Good Boyâs Hell -- it presents us with an alien concept: nothingness. Ideas and explanations are overturned and destroyed in this Hell...and what defense do we have against that?
The Spirit That Denies
Why is this a fitting version of Hell for Night Vale? WTNVÂ says much about the nothingness that lies underneath existence...but it never really confronts this idea. Indeed, the beautiful message of WTNVÂ is that our lives are so meaningful precisely because of how brief they are...we exist in spite of the odds telling us we shouldnât and we create even though everything created eventually dies.
Enter: The Good Boy. A being that represents the danger of nothingness, nihilism incarnate.
This isnât the Smiling God, people. The Smiling Godâs destruction ebbs and flows as if in the natural order of the universe. It can be fought and controlled and contained. Cecil repackages its influence into a wonderful message about the beauty of impermanence at the end of Old Oak Doors.
But the Good Boy? The Good Boy defies Carlosâ science. It takes over Cecilâs ability to speak and to narrate. It is antimatter, touching and annihilating its opposite...and everything is its opposite. There cannot be ebb and flow here. There can only be nothing.
It is easier to see now what Chad was hoping to accomplish. In The April Monologues, Steve Carlsberg mentions that Chad was greatly disturbed by what he discovered about the World Government. Therefore, itâs telling that Francisâ conversation with Cecil includes this as their chief goal:
Soon there will be no things. We will take away your government. Your laws. Your infrastructure.
It looks like Chad had hoped the Good Boy would dismantle the World Government and did not, perhaps, realize that the Good Boy wouldnât be satisfied with stopping there. Like Goetheâs Faust, Chad makes a bargain with something he didnât quite understand and the consequences are dire. Thereâs a reason why we get the phrase âFaustian bargainâ from Goetheâs poem. Deals with the Devil rarely turn out the way they should, and thereâs often a very hidden and very steep price to be paid.Â
I also bring up Faust because of this line, delivered by the demon Mephistopheles as an introduction:
I am the Spirit that Denies
And justly so: for all things from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed:
âTwere better, then, were naught created
The Good Boy acts as a modern version of the demon summoned in Faust, making good on his promise that all Created things deserve destruction.
Miscellaneous
1. Cecilâs speech was oddly affected near the end -- much more stuttering and hesitation than weâre used to. I canât decide if this is because he is not technically on his radio show and was done to create this effect of amateur, on-the-scene reporting or because Cecil is being affected by the Strangers. He sounded a little like his interpretation of Francis.
2. In the more famous version of the Faust story (Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, the demon summoned mentions that all demons are never very far from Hell (even when they are summoned to Earth) because they are still removed from the presence of God, which is Hell enough. Interesting parallel with the Strangers who are also always in Hell even when they are wandering the town of Night Vale.
3. One other connection -- Lucifer is frequently described as being the most beautiful of the angels and (depending on the story) still retains its beauty even after the fall from Heaven. I liken this to the Good Boy, which finds its power in its ability to charm with its adorable looks.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 88: Things Fall Apart
Todayâs episode title is ostensibly borrowed from W. B. Yeatsâ poem, âThe Second Comingâ. Written in the aftermath of WWI, the poem offers a bleak look at the future of the world â considering the advent of a second World War about twenty years after the poem was publish, Yeats was prophetic in this vision.Â
Just as Yeats saw a lingering sickness in post-war Europe, this episode reminds us there is, too, a lingering sickness in Night Vale.
a thing struck me here: you said that the call cecil received in the end, after calling maureen, the one that was only breathing and muffled groans, was chad. was it confirmed officially or what, or was it said in the episode itself but i somehow missed it?
I havenât seen that confirmed anywhere. Some possible sources of breathing Iâve seen suggested are Chad, the beagle itself, and one of the Strangers.
The Strangers would make the most sense to me, since audible breathing is kind of their thing, but Iâm not sure if they can dial a phone much better than the dog, so maybe itâs Chad. Who knows?
yeah the breathing (for obvious reasons) and that sort of scream (as it was said that perhaps the strangers are in so much pain that they canât do anything but stand and breath) made me think it was a stranger, it was said they turn people into one of them, and it was directly after cecil super worrying out of the blue about carlos, so basically it made me think it was carlos, being turned into a stranger, calling him in his last moments.
so thank you for giving me other ideas, aka tiny precious slivers of hope
I agree that I made an inference about Cecilâs final phone call that was not directly stated in the episode. Hereâs my reasoning:
The Strangers donât appear to be able to do much, and so I assumed the making a phone call would be beyond them. They also donât have any motivation to call Cecil -- Lucia tells us in Past Time that they donât want anything. Anything they could accomplish in a phone call could be accomplished (to greater effect) in person.
Cecil says he doesnât recognize the number, so I donât believe itâs Carlos transformed. This is not to say that Carlos is completely safe, but that a threat of this nature would be more effective from Carlosâ own phone number...but then we are at the same problem about Strangers making phone calls.
Iâm not sure why thereâs confusion about the noises heard -- thatâs a dog yelping or baying, perhaps with some distortion added. I donât hear screams, just the dog.
I know that Chadâs beagle is not necessarily an actual beagle as we know the animal, but it seems silly for it to be dialing a phone. I think we hear the dog because it is rarely far from its owner, suggesting Chadâs presence.
Lastly, I feel like it really was meant to be a thinly veiled threat. Cecil calls Maureen and canât reach her. This is immediately followed by a call to interrupt Cecilâs voicemail.
I guess I kind of forgot two important things in my write-up. Letâs call this the Miscellaneous section.
1. I neglected to mention the most important representation of the Apocalypse, the one thing that, above all the other examples, is the chief moment that âthe falcon cannot hear the falconerâ, that communication has broken down, that Cecilâs power as the narrator is at a low point, that the Strangersâ form of communication is dominant over all:
Cecil forgets to say âI love youâ at the end of his conversation with Carlos.
Fear not! There is still hope. He notes:Â
My love was implicit in the way was talked to each other. Love neednât be verbalized when it exists in intuition and physical contact. He knows I love him.
Acceptance of nonverbal communication. Realization that emotions do not need words to be real...that nothing needs words to be real. Presenting love as something that can be shared in stark contrast to the Hell that the Stranger share. This. This is what good writing is all about!
2. Things Fall Apart is also the title of a Chinua Achebe novel about life in a small African village that is overtaken by British colonialists. I would put this firmly under my tinfoil hat section, pointing towards something with StrexCorp, our much maligned corporate colonizers. However, we could more simply connect it to the invasion of the Strangers.
Without spoiling too much of the novel, the protagonist ends up doing something that goes against the very core of his beliefs and customs in order to frustrate the colonizers and deny them victory or ownership over him. I wonder if this is what we can come to expect from our protagonists? This would be a good way to reject the Night Vale of the past and to embrace a better version of Night Vale for the future -- which is what Cecil has wanted to do all along.
WTNV Theories and Ramblings - Episode 88: Things Fall Apart
Todayâs episode title is ostensibly borrowed from W. B. Yeatsâ poem, âThe Second Comingâ. Written in the aftermath of WWI, the poem offers a bleak look at the future of the world -- considering the advent of a second World War about twenty years after the poem was publish, Yeats was prophetic in this vision.Â
Just as Yeats saw a lingering sickness in post-war Europe, this episode reminds us there is, too, a lingering sickness in Night Vale.
The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer
Symbolic of the lack of communication and the destruction of the old hierarchical systems, this line from the poem explains the central conflict of this plot line nicely.
Cecil has lost control over his interns -- Chad and Maureen, specifically. For years, Cecil has enjoyed a very formulaic relationship with his interns: they apply, they do their jobs, and then they are killed in the line of duty. Whether or not this has been intentional on Cecilâs part (and I believe it is), this has largely been the status quo with the only obvious exception up until recently being Dana.
Cecilâs âconversationâ with Maureen is one-sided and without any real communication. Itâs a delicious but also frightening bit of poetic justice. Cecil has been dismissive of many of his interns and of Maureen, particularly. He has often been seen to shut Maureen down when she attempts to hold him accountable for things or when she asks for help with her college credits issue. Now that he needs help, she cannot be reached.
Her voicemail is filled with important violent imagery that perhaps is a parallel to Night Vale itself. She first mentions the moon ripping the oceanic skin from the Earth (and tellingly uses the word âwhirlingâ to describe the battle -- see below about âThe Widening Gyreâ). She also calls this a battle between siblings and a case of large fighting small. Reminds me a little bit of the battle between Night Vale and StrexCorp -- again, see the final section of this write-up for a little more on this front.
Her next description is about being the âvoicemail you get when you dieâ, which is yet another example of miscommunication -- missed calls, missed opportunities, missed conversations -- and this is expanded to a much larger and much more permanent kind of miscommunication since it is created by death. As we know from The Auction, âThe dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and silence.â
Her final description is a gruesome one about a raccoon with a cellphone lodged in its gut. Itâs a definite analogy to Night Vale, which is struggling with its own internal disorders. My favorite part is this:
The raccoon â andâŠthis is kind of cute, kind of sad to think about â walks diagonally, all the while emitting a little ââ« doo-de-lee-doo-ooo, doo-de-lee-dooooo, doo-de-lee-doo â«â ringtone, all muffled from within its quivering torso, and questioning its âeat everything it can findâ dogma, and thinking perhaps to just limit that life philosophy to trash cans.
Night Vale has spent the better part of the last year or two questioning its dogmas, its beliefs, the very things it has rested on for so long. And although itâs a little silly, I canât help but see a little bit of Night Vale in the sad raccoon Maureen describes.
Although we get much from Maureenâs voicemail, Cecil gets almost nothing -- this lack of communication is key to Night Valeâs problems.
And Chadâs âconversationâ with Cecil is even less productive. Even though it is mostly breathing and silence, it is a clear threat. It canât be mere coincidence that Chad chooses to reach out to Cecil just as our plucky protagonist delves a little too deeply by calling Maureen.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Again, the parallels are so tasty that I am compelled to write about them. The desert setting, of course, is obvious. Yeats also mentions a Satanic beast that moves slowly towards the holy city of Bethlehem. The slowness and the blank and pitiless gaze are traits reminiscent of the strangers, and that it resembles a dog like Chadâs pet/eldritch master is just a cherry on this imagery cake.
Yeatsâ poem contains several religious images like the ones above, so I also wanted to briefly mention Maureenâs reference to Hell. This is a word we donât get to hear often on WTNV. Itâs so specifically Christian and WTNVÂ is so specifically not. Gods and angels, Heaven and Hell, these things do not behave in Night Vale as the Christian versions do, and there is, in fact, a great deal of subversion of these ideas in WTNV: the god of light is impersonal and destructive; the angels are associated with darkness and are beneficial; death doesnât have the same implications for Night Valians and so the idea of an afterlife does not match a Heaven/Hell dichotomy.
So, Maureen mentioning Hell is a big deal to me. Is it also going to be subverted as we learn more about the Strangers and where they come from? Or is Hell a place where bad people go when they die, even for Night Valians? According to Michelle Nguyen, the Strangers do appear to be in an eternal state of suffering, which is par for the course as far as Hell is concerned -- it is interesting that Hell is something the Strangers appear to carry around with them and can share with others.
This ersatz form of communication between the Strangers serves as a nice contrast to actual communication. Cecil spends the entire episode on the phone, talking to anyone he can find in order to help Night Vale, to little effect. His power has always been in his words, in his role as the Voice of Night Vale, but his role is not working in this new crisis. Meanwhile, the Strangers are communicating far more effectively -- without words -- and, in doing so, are destroying Night Vale.
Surely Some Revelation is at Hand
Want to hear something sad about Maureen? I think sheâs more broken than sheâs ever let on. She has always appeared tough and volatile, but I think this episode revealed a different side of her. She says:
And that would be helpful, because sympathy is critical to good teamwork, and if you donât care about your job, youâre not gonna make anything of yourself.
I am! I am making something of myself! Just sculpting away! Hereâs a clump of Maureen, letâs work it with these hands. Yeah, this is looking great! This is a really nice Maureen here, all ready to be put in a fire, cooled, painted, and set upon an alabaster pedestal in the foyer.
There is something reminiscent of Dana in this. In Cookies, Dana mentions how she saw her future-self and realized she must have become something. This is immediately followed by one of Cecilâs most heartwarming remarks about how Dana always was important.
 We know that Maureen doesnât like being compared to Dana, especially since she feels she compares unfavorably to Dana. We saw this in After 3327:
Cecil: Oh, Dana? Oh! So proud of her! My best intern. Ever. Sheâs really doing some great things for this town. You know sheâs mayor now, right?
Maureen: I know who Mayor Cardinal is! Everythingâs about Dana, isnât it? âOh, look at me, I got college credits, and I get to be mayor, not like Maureen. Maureen has to lead an army, or whatever, to get those credits.
Certainly, Cecil doesnât help matters by putting Maureen down. Maureen must know about Cecilâs pep talk to Dana since it was broadcast, and I think itâs clear that thereâs some resentment here about how sheâs been treated. Her comments about âmaking somethingâ of herself do not sound convincing and I sense something mocking in her comments about âan alabaster pedestal in the foyerâ, almost as if this is direct at what Dana has become.
Cecil seems to realize this, and he tries to compliment Maureenâs initiative and efficiency in running the army of Strangers...but the revelation is too late.
The Widening Gyre
This is strictly a tinfoil hat section. Yeats envisions the world âturning and turning in the widening gyreâ -- spinning out and away, out of control as if in a whirlpool. A gyre is a ring, or a circle...or, more pointedly, a spiral or series of concentric circles. Maureen uses this image herself in her voicemail.
I canât help but see the same image in the Desert Other Worldâs version of the Smiling God. In my mind, âthe great glowing coils of the universe unwindingâ presents a similar shape to the gyre Yeats mentions. And both are representations of death. In âThe Second Comingâ, the gyre is the setting for Yeatsâ doomed vision of the world: as the earth spins farther and farther out, so too are its people separated and distanced from one another. In WTNV, the Smiling God is a death deity, not only corroding everything it touches in the Desert Other World, but also acting (on a cosmic scale) as the great dissolve that erases all that it passes, in which life is just a brief moment.
The plot does not necessarily correspond to every line of the poem, of course, which is why this is strictly tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing. However, the fact that she mentions a war between siblings, between the large and the small, is too delicious a reference to overlook. And a second coming of the Smiling God would be an interesting twist.
I do, my angel! I even wrote something about the road as metaphor (and how itâs played with in the most recent episode). Maybe I will post it one day!
EYERYONE BREAK OUT THE CHAMPAGNE CAUSE S.E.E IS BACK!! We missed your theories, man/woman/angel of incomprehensible characteristics.
Thank you, my angel. Iâm afraid I canât keep up my posting schedule as I have in the past, but I will do my best to be around more frequently.
And hey, I have plenty of comprehensible characteristics. I have eyes, certainly. And also words. Yes. Eyes and words. Isnât that all that humans are made of?
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