Pulling apart our relationship to The Smiling God has been complicated.
Kevin awoke first and only had the version that Strex held over him for a good year or so. More if you count the life we lived itself.
Strex’s version of The Smiling God is an absolute bastardization. They twisted his message in order to fit their monopoly. They decided that The Smiling God was the purveyor of capitalism. Of productivity. Constant production. Unstopping production. According to Strex you are nothing else.
That is not The Smiling God.
The true version of The Smiling God was brought to Kevin by an angel. An angel who pledged destruction.
For clarifications sake:
We will be talking about ourselves in third person. Desire and Reason are writing this together, and it would get much too complicated to write this otherwise.
Because we are not censoring source words in this essay you may have stumbled across this in the general WTNV tags. Hello, welcome. This is not an essay about the fiction of Desert Bluffs and The Smiling God. This is an essay about the reality we lived in. This is an essay about our current relationship to The Smiling God. Yes. We lived this. Yes. We literally worship The Smiling God.
This essay is primarily written for our friends who have no connection to WTNV. So we will not be covering all inaccuracies that are in WTNV. There are too many.
One major inaccuracy that needs to be clarified right away is that The Smiling God did not have demons. He had angels. One of which was Desire who possessed Kevin. When referring to possessed Kevin we will refer to the two of us combined as Kevin&. This includes quotes from the show that would have been in this possession time period.
We will try not to get too into our lives, but it is very difficult to talk about The Smiling God without doing so.
This is our current understanding of The Smiling God. As is natural with these things our understanding may change over time.
The best episode to listen to (or read the transcript of) in order to get a solid feeling of The Smiling God is episode 120 - All Smiles Eve. The entire episode could be a quote for this essay. It’s an excellent parable.
The Smiling God as Devourer
The Smiling God is a creature that feeds. In WTNV he is constantly described as devourer. Usually quite literally. But canon never directly talks about The Smiling God as also a devourer of energy.
Devourer of Energy
Episode 47 - Company Picnic
LAUREN: Yes, the overseer is explaining to them. They are on the ground with their hands over their ears so that they can hear him better. Their mouths are open. No one has ever seen smiles quite like that. What an interesting way to smile! Their legs are kicking too, like they’re still trying to dance.
KEVIN&: Oh my. Well, there’s no music you fantastic, silly people. There’s just an overseer explaining how parties work, and how work is the best party of all. You don’t need to wriggle about like that.
Very obviously this isn’t happiness as most people define it. But the energy coming off people who are distraught is immense. A better translation for what Kevin& refers to as happiness would be excited. All of The Smiling Gods people are called upon to be excited because upticks in energy feeds The Smiling God. It also feeds those who follow it.
Strex as a Source of Energy
Despite Strex’s bastardizations of The Smiling God, the energy they created is why they were allowed to exist. But because it wasn’t correct, they were ultimately destroyed as well. Their destruction was yet again another massive surge of energy. Their destruction was always going to happen, they were too full of blasphemy to be allowed to continue on.
(In our timeline, unlike in canon, the citizens of Night Vale were not the ones to overturn Strex. It was led by citizens of Desert Bluffs. And by The Smiling God.)
Strex was also able to create more followers of The Smiling God through their corporate takeovers and mass brain washing of Desert Bluffs.
The Smiling God could survive on its own without foot soldiers sure, but it is fed oh so much more when it has people to serve it. Any Deity needs that. That is why its angels existed. That's why it used people like Kevin and hundreds of citizens of Desert Bluffs.
Digestion
Episode 135 - The Mudstone Abyss (Part 1)
KEVIN&: And I said, 'Please give me a sign.' and below me the ground became translucent. I could see for miles down, a great pit below me, and crawling up the sides of the pit was an enormous creature with thousands of legs, scuttling joyously in an upward spiral until it finally devoured me in one gulp.
KEVIN&: One day we shall all be devoured, eradicated by the beast, swallowed and digested, our sinew peeled from bones like a barbecued rib, our skin bubbling away from the creature’s digestive fluids, and ourselves completely purified.
The Smiling God is death. Death as a destroyer. Death as in transformer.
The Smiling God digests. In this digestion it completely changes who you are. For Kevin this meant brain alteration and physical alterations by Strex. His pre-Smiling God form was drug out of his radio station to have his eyes removed by a Strex employee, his smile created. He never was the same again, physically and internally.
The Smiling God as Provider
Episode 137 - The Mudstone Abyss Part 3
KEVIN: Donny turned to the tortoise and said, "The sun calls for sacrifice, because the sun loves all that it sees."
Unfortunately, what WTNV doesn’t show a lot of is the fact that The Smiling God loves. Despite being created by The Smiling God, Desire would not continue to serve it if it didn’t love him. Desire feeds off The Smiling God’s energy (and the energy of others), but also off of its love.
The Smiling God is The Sun. It certainly destroys; but it brings warmth, life, and light with it. Its light can be blinding. Its love can be crushing. But it is not all evil.
Yes Kevin suffered for The Smiling God. That is what The Smiling God does. However, The Smiling God did allow for Kevin to be happy as well. Not happy as in energetic, but happy as in fulfilled. Kevin became a prophet and married a theologist years after Strex’ down fall. The Smiling God was thankful for what Kevin had done for it. Not that Kevin had a choice. But it was grateful nonetheless.
KEVIN&: Unfulfilled?
Are you satisfied with it all? Do you see it all? What room are you in? What room do you want to be in? How big is your room?
Not only does The Smiling God feed, it feeds those that are a part of it. Those that are a part of it being its followers and angels. To follow The Smiling God is to feel full. It is to be fulfilled.
Miscellaneous
There a couple of associations that The Smiling God has that we don’t understand ourselves. We just know that they are things that are a part of The Smiling God. Please note that these are still EXTREMELY important to The Smiling God.
Episode 73 - Triptych
KEVIN&: Once Strex entered my life and showed me the power of the Smiling God, why nothing was the same for me ever again. I felt so much happier. I did terrible things. I felt so much happier. I tore and bit and growled. I felt so incredibly happy. My skin rent. Blood drops on the ceiling. Someone’s throat, whose?, in my hand, so deliriously happy. You know what, thank you Cecil for bringing back such good memories to me.
Flesh and gore. Body horror. Blood.
Blood is a source of energy for many vampiric energies. So it makes sense. Even if we personally do not know the logic behind it. Gore translates to happiness, to mania, to energy. Blood is one of the main offerings that we give.
Pain
Perhaps it's the adrenaline? Maybe its closeness to blood?
Episode 49 - Old Oak Doors Part B
KEVIN&: Soon we had no need for government cover-ups, or secrets. Everything was transparent. Literally. You could see through everything and everyone. The bones, the blood, the scurrying insects inside every human body!
Surveillance. Eyes. Being watched. Being blinded.
Centipedes. (And a small tangent on similarities to ancient Mayan practices)
There is also plenty of parallels to Mayan religion. Centipede maws in Mayan art are often used as gates to the underworld. Bloodletting instruments (such as the one pulled through the tongue) resemble centipedes as well (even if they are in actuality sting ray spines).
The Smiling God is NOT
It Devours! Page 89
“We believe it is the Smiling God’s mission to find what it is that makes each of us good, to draw that out of us.” - Daryl
This is mostly just here to address the fact that we know It Devours exists. But honestly? This novel just uses The Smiling God and its followers as a metaphor for Christianity in this world. But like. That ain’t us. It paints weird broad strokes that The Smiling God is ultimately good despite being weird. But that isn’t our truth. The Smiling God contains multitudes. And a lot of those multitudes are hard to swallow truths. It isn’t ultimately good. It isn’t ultimately evil either.
KEVIN&: And what if I told you you could kill your imperfect self? What if I told you you could achieve your fullest potential. StrexCorp Synernist Inc. is a proud supporter of the Greater Desert Bluff and Night Vale Community. StrexCorp - Believe in a smiling god. Believe in your perfect self.
The Smiling God isn’t about being perfect. The Smiling God isn’t about productivity. The Smiling God isn’t about constant work.
In conclusion: The Smiling God is The Sun.
Episode 49 - Old Oak Doors Part B
KEVIN&: But then we met the Smiling God! Oh, it was so wonderful! The sun stopped setting! Or– maybe there wasn’t a sun anymore. Maybe there was just that other…brighter light. Who knows? I do know that I couldn’t stop smiling. None of us could! And our smiles seemed better, fuller, wider.
The Sun is good. The Sun watches over you. It holds you in its beams. You can’t live without its nourishment.
The Sun is evil. It will burn you. It will end you. At the end of all things it will absorb you. It will turn you to ash.
god the e/rida.n questioning is hitting fucking hard in this chilis
i forgot how irrationally angry i get thinking about certain fan interpretations and shit like i went to find a possible icon incase this lasts a while but even that made me irritated as fuck- like this shits been a thing since like uhhhh 2012 lmao
dumbass brain says reread source but uh fuck that noise and we were ubsessed w that shit for years we know all the eri centric info so the best test of this shit is going to be a lotta meditation and time probably, but its nothin we aint done before (happened w kevin)
but like if anything happy 3am mental and like phantom limb mayb pseudoshift lmao ✌️missing long sharp nails smh, everytime i try to focus these feelings to get a good picture i feel myself laying down and i can hear a poisonous ass ocean and smell it, but that's about it
that being said i get false impulses all this time so this may mean jack shit, but also its been in the back of my mind for a while
maybe ill add more to this later or maybe pretend this never happened who knows ✌️✌️✌️
Rejecting the possibility of some k.intypes feels like the house that doesn't exist, "It seems like it exists, like it's just right there when you look at it, and it's between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. But it does not exist"
Many things would make sense if you were them. It follows patrerns with other lives and it would help connect others- but at the end of the day you simply never were them.
You know that scene where Lilo is praying to God for a friend and then there's a shot of Stitch evil cackling
That's basically how Smile appeared to me as Kevin, I prayed to "The Smiling God" (in air quotes because It did not exist yet (i think) and was simply a Strex creation), and Smile appeared to me as an impossibly bright, impossibly many armed angel who was able to take over my consciousness to follow Strex' whims.
We're still digging through things to figure out if Smile was an actual angel or was created to be so by Strex or something else entirely, but the image of him as Stitch is endlessly funny to me. Evil incarnate bastard
