one thing about night vale is that i will rarely complain about writing quality like ive been listening for years and if i know one thing about finknor its that their idea of a series bible is a napkin theyve written key character names on and thats it. sometimes they lose the napkin and have to remake it and they lose characters doing that sometimes. every episode might be written in the notes app in 40 minutes running on nothing but vague memory of an arc from 10 years ago and an idea of what sounds cool that day. and thats what I signed up for!! it fucking slaps thats what the shows all about baby!!!!

This is one of the most goddamn beautiful things ever written. They were insane for this

being in a fandom comprised of 12 people and a bag of corn chips is great because whenever anyone posts anything all 11 of your pals are like

That's so true. I still get likes on my 2017 instagram post about criminally underrated Starship Iris simply because there are way too few posts about it. Or maybe the lines about the unbelivabale odds of thesis being useful are just that great, haha.

Hi friends! I uploaded Memoria on gumroad, you can get all 80 pages for $1 here. Fair warning: it's a chonky beefy boi, the file size is 119 mb. I'll keep trying to find a free platform that works well for this format, but for now if you'd like to support me, head over to the link above! 💚

here's a couple of my favorite pages 💚

[⭐] wolf 359 / who’s there? : “well, no. not really. it’s not really officer eiffel. we have no voice of our own. so we’re borrowing yours.”

I put together these podcast recommendations based on books a while ago, enjoy (they also work the other way around, I highly recommend these books, I made it my life's mission to make people read radio silence, it's SUCH a great book and it got me into Welcome to Night Vale and podcasts in general. Thank you Alice Oseman)

i'm never good at summarizing things but I tried my best lol

I don’t think I can ever give enough praise to Mabel and Wolf 359, but I tried. Also, tried to only note things that are similar between the works, not gush about the podcasts in general.

Two more. Sorry for ditching colors, these were just meant to stay black.

cecil should get to say “i would do anything for my community” in the dirtiest, filthiest, sexiest voice he can muster. Lips pressed up against the mic. Long pregnant pause between “anything” and “for”. And It should be about volunteering at a food drive or something but we know. And he knows. And the town knows. And his idiot husband who needs to be humbled knows.

Yes. Please.

[📼] wolf 359 / memoria: “it’s a deleted scene. you put it back in, and you’re watching a completely different movie.”

ep 48 / ep 61 … there’s this promise eiffel makes to minkowski and hera in episode 48 (that whatever they have to face back on earth, they won’t have to face it alone) and it’s ultimately what makes both of them change their votes, and i keep coming back to how that wording parallels the final scene of the show. he’s keeping that promise.

i think a lot about how the final question the show leaves you with isn’t actually ‘am i still doug eiffel?’ but ‘wanna find out together?’

maybe there’s a case to be made that ‘wanna find out together?’ isn’t just the more significant question, but actually the answer for ‘am i still doug eiffel?’ because, really, deciding they’ll face whatever’s next together is just about the most doug eiffel thing he could do.

I put together these podcast recommendations based on books a while ago, enjoy (they also work the other way around, I highly recommend these books, I made it my life's mission to make people read radio silence, it's SUCH a great book and it got me into Welcome to Night Vale and podcasts in general. Thank you Alice Oseman)

i'm never good at summarizing things but I tried my best lol

I don’t think I can ever give enough praise to Mabel and Wolf 359, but I tried. Also, tried to only note things that are similar between the works, not gush about the podcasts in general.

once again, wonderful art of eiffel and hera from @quibbs!! 💫

clonecobi rights💥

instagram / twitter / patreon

Something always fascinating to me is the "character who thinks they're in a different genre" phenomenon. The theme of the story you are telling determines what the right and wrong actions to take are; but the characters, reacting in-universe to the situation, don't know what story they're in, and the exact same responses can be what saves you or damns you depending on what kind of story the author is telling and what the story's message is about what life is like.

In Wolf 359, Warren Kepler approaches the mysterious and powerful aliens with threats; he kills their liaison and tries to position himself as a powerful opponent. However, he's shown to be wrong and making things worse: his preemptive aggression is unwarranted and unhelpful and bites him in the ass. The aliens want to communicate and understand humanity and share our music. It's Doug Eiffel, the pacifistic (and kind of scaredy-cat) communications officer who loves to talk and share pop culture, who talks to them and understands that the aliens are scary not because they want to kill us but because they don't understand the concepts of individuals and death. Talking to them, communicating with them, understanding where they're coming from and and bringing them to understand a human point of view, is what succeeds. Openness rather than suspicion, trust rather than aggression. Kepler thinks he's a dramatic space marine protecting the Earth from the alien threat by showing them humans are tough and can take them, but that's not the kind of story this is.

Conversely, in Janus Descending, Chel is in awe of the strange and beautiful alien world around her. She wants to touch it, understand it, get up close to it. When she sees a crystal alien dog, she wants to befriend it, despite Peter's warning. But when she gets close to it, extending her arm in greeting, it attacks her and drags her down into the cave to try to eat her. This sets the inevitable tragedy in motion. Suspicion is warranted; trust will get you killed. Because this is a sci-fi horror, with a major running thematic reading about how racism and sexism will destroy your brain and your society, and how the people who think they're too smart to be prejudiced don't see their own prejudice and will end up ruining the lives of the people they still don't fully see as equals, this kind of trust that Chel shows this strange alien is tragic. However it is also a horror story where there are very real hibernating space snakes ready to wake up and eat the fresh meat that has landed on their planet, and by being too trusting Chel has accidentally introduced herself to one.

Kepler, suspicious and ready to shoot any alien he doesn't understand, would likely have survived Janus Descending; Chel, with her enthusiasm for learning about and meeting aliens, would have been a wonderful and helpful member of the Wolf 359 crew.

In a similar manner, in Alien, Ellen Ripley yells to the rest of her crew not to bring the attacked crewmember with the alien on his face back on the ship and into the medical bay, you don't know what contamination that thing might have; she's ignored. She tells them not to let the crewmember out of quarantine even though he seems fine; she's ignored again. Ripley is the one person protesting this isn't safe, we don't know what's going on, and she is consistently ignored, until an alien bursts out of her crewmate's chest and then eats everyone and Ripley is proven to be right and also the only survivor. (And it turns out that the science officer consistently overriding her protests was an android sent by the company that contracted them, and said android was given orders to bring the alien back so the company could study it and do weapons development with it, try not to let the crew find out about it, and kill them if he had to in order to do so!)

Ripley's paranoia and mistrust of the situation was correct, because Alien is a space horror and the theme is in space no one can hear you scream (also corporations consider you expendable).

Conversely, in All Systems Red, we have a damaged and almost-combat-overridden Murderbot being brought back into the PreservationAux hab medical bay after being attacked by other SecUnits. Gurathin becomes the one person protesting this isn't safe, we don't know what's going on, he doesn't want to let Murderbot out because it's hacked and probably sabotaging them for the company contracted their security and sent it with them. Gurathin thinks he is the Ellen Ripley here! He is trying to warn his teammates not to make a dangerous mistake that will get everyone killed!

However, All Systems Red is a very different story than Alien, and Murderbot is neither a traitor on behalf of the company to sabotage them and steal alien remnants for weapons development, nor a threat to the humans - it's a friend, it's a good person, and it wants to help them against both companies willing to screw them over. Trusting it and helping it is the right thing to do and is what saves their lives. Gurathin is proven to be wrong.

If everyone on the Nostromo crew had listened to Ellen Ripley, they would still be alive (except Kane. RIP Kane), because this is a horror story about being isolated and hunted and going up against this horrifying thing that wants to kill and eat you and just keeps getting stronger. If everyone on the PreservationAux team listened to Gurathin, they would all be dead, because this is a story about friendship and teamwork and trust and overcoming trauma and accepting the personhood of someone very different from you.

Same responses. Different context. And so very different moral conclusions.

Warren Kepler was about how the brash violent over-confident approach to things you don't understand is wrong, and that openness and developing that understanding between people is what's important; Chel was about the tragedy of trust destroying a Black woman who wanted so much to believe in a world that could be kind and beautiful. Ripley was about a woman whose expertise and safety warnings were ignored and brushed aside and everyone who did so died because of it; Gurathin was about how even justified fear shouldn't mean you make someone else a scapegoat and mistrust them because they seem scary.

Sometimes you're in the wrong genre because you need to be, because the author is trying to show how not to react to the situation they set up in order to build the mood and the theme they're trying to convey.

Wow this post is amazing. A very nuanced analysis of the four situation.

My melodramatic brain, however, only made my cry over Chel again. I can imagine how fascinated she would be by Dear listeners. Also, had she been with the crew in “time to kill” we will most probably have had one more Jacoby.

Speaking of “Time to kill”. That ‘s the episode that would be mad interesting to dissect on topic of genre-accurate behavior.

I LOVE YOU COMEDY WITH AN EMOTIONAL CORE

I LOVE YOU COMEDY THAT USES OUTRAGEOUS CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS TO TELL STORIES OF HOPE AND COMMUNITY

I LOVE YOU COMEDY THAT INTRODUCES SEEMINGLY INNOCUOUS DETAILS FOR COMEDIC EFFECT AND THEN HAS THEM COME BACK LATER WITH AN EMOTIONAL GUT PUNCH

I LOVE YOU COMEDY THAT CAN MAKE ME LAUGH AND CRY WITH THE SAME LINE

I LOVE YOU COMEDY

You there!

Watch 20 to Midnight. The D&D actual play stream by Gabriel Urbina, Beth Eyre, Emma Sherr-Ziarko, and Mike Schubert. It's delightful.

Here, let me get episode 1 for you

episode 35

I think audio only format actually makes certain gags that rely on visual cues infinitely funnier, and my proof is the scene in Wolf 359 where Minkowski asks Eiffel if he checked his pockets for the screwdriver, and Eiffel says no, pauses, there's a sound of fabric rustling and then a second, more confident no.

that post that's like everyone in w359 fucking hates each other until they introduce a new crew member upon which they band together and hate the new guy is soooo true but it's funniest with kepler. that bitch stuck to his guns for nearly the ENTIRE show he lost a hand and jacobi and command and maxwell and he was still talking about the big picture but rachel young takes one step onto the hephaestus and he's like actually fuck you i have morals now

Communications Officer Dougie Eiffel?

(I started listening to Wolf 359 last week and ya girl is already on episode 38. Send help.)