X Never Marks the Spot

I FINISHED THE DANG NIGHT VALE STREX-FIC! *flops over*

From the Ground Up (157104 words) by Xparrot
Chapters: 32/32
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Characters: Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), Dana (Welcome to Night Vale), Original Strex Characters, Kevin (Welcome to Night Vale), Cecil Palmer
Additional Tags: Drama, Angst, Drugs, Dystopia, Strexcorp, Present Tense, Memory Alteration, Canon Divergence
Summary:

"The colloquial name is bloodstone," says the man from StrexCorp's Acquisitions division. "Heard of them?"

Carlos shakes his head. "No, but I'm not a minerologist. Are you certain this wasn't intended for the geology department?"

~

Carlos is a loyal company employee, who has never been to any place called Night Vale and never met anyone named Cecil…which doesn’t explain the mysterious woman appearing in his lab, or these dreams he’s started having…

( a bit of rambling on the writing of it, mostly for my own record ) ...Actually, according to my stats, I've written more words for WTNV than any other fandom (the majority in this fic.) Wow, how'd that happen? (Don't kill me, gnine! *hides*)

Now it's time for the regular sit-here-and-compulsively-check-email-for-comments-as-I-stress-about-everybody-hating-the-ending! (I can't be the only one who finds posting final chapters stressful...)

--I got a comment! They liked it! \o/

Concerning Welcome to Night Vale ep 47, Company Picnic, all I have to say is,

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

*deep breath*

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhghfgjdkgdfjkdgrlw!!!!!11!!!

(where is Cecil!?!?!?!?)

The worst part of the new Veronica Mars movie is getting the damn theme song stuck in your head for like 24 hours. Other than that, really enjoyed it! I'm new to the show - gnine showed it to us last year to prepare for the movie, and we didn't actually watch s3 as she said (repeatedly) that it was not worth it. And I didn't have any trouble getting the movie despite that. It felt a lot like the first season, decent mystery, good character beats, great lines, some h/c. Not enough Weevil (or Weevil and Logan) but otherwise a good time! And they definitely knew the audience they were playing to, without feeling entirely gratuitously fan-service-y .


(Not that there is anything wrong with gratuitous fan-service, such is what made the new Gintama movie one of the best based-on-an-anime movies I've ever seen...!)

Then there was the latest ep of WTNV, which judging by Tumblr and AO3, I think I speak for the whole fandom when I say AHHHHH KHOSHEKH STREX HOW COULD YOU?!!!?? Okay, you're an evil megacorp but still, here is a line, and it happens to lie before hurting an innocent spine-ridged venomous floating kitty cat. The show is often at its best when Cecil shows genuine feeling, and for all his building frustration with Strex we've maybe never heard him this angry before. I still am not sure where the Strex storyline is going (given the nature and style of WTNV I will not be surprised if the majority of it is resolved off-the-air and in passing) but the slow way they're building the tension - mostly background mentions but increasingly more often brought to the forefront - has been really effective so far. (All the more impressive because objectively speaking, Strex/Desert Bluffs is arguably no worse than Night Vale itself - that is, Strex is absolutely horrifying; but Night Vale might have an even higher mortality rate! But Night Vale and Cecil are the devil we know and have come to love, while as Kevin is just terrifying and wrong, and we want to see Strex go down as much as Cecil does...)

Then there's the question of what happened to Khoshekh. During the confrontation, the first sound is pretty clearly Khoshekh's growl that we've heard before, but then there are what sound like normal cat meows and it's hard to tell whether that's Khoshekh or the Strex-pet. Did removing Khoshekh from his fixed position also remove some of his more unusual attributes, render him more like a normal feline? And was this deliberate, Strex, bringing the bizarre and the unique down to a baseline, perfect normal, as they will try to do with all of Night Vale...

Naturally I had to write up some of these thoughts into an episode tag (me and half the fandom!) Mine is: Displacement, in which Carlos comes to Cecil, and to some realizations.

Welcome to Night Vale Live - so much fun! \o/ Non-spoilery recount of the evening on top, some spoilers for the ep itself under the cut.

The theater's doors (the Neptune in Seattle) opened at 7, with the show starting at 8. The sibs and I went early to eat in the area - when we got there a bit after 6, there was already a line outside the theater; when we got back after dinner, the line stretched down and starting to go around the block. Fans do love their queuing! Standing in line was a bit like standing in the middle of a Tumblr tag feed; the group ahead of us was discussing meeting Misha Collins at a bar, while random people cheered at my brother's Hero of Space Homestuck shirt.

It was cool night but not freezing or raining, not too bad. The crowd was about 4 to 1 female to male, I think (an unusual ratio, I'm used to either 50-50 for anime and SF events, or 99% female!) and the age range was all over the place - skewed toward the younger but we weren't the only 30+. It's a pity it was night because there was a lot of cosplay that was hard to see in the dark. There was a girl with a fantastic and adorable glow-cloud umbrella, internally lit (and the colors kept changing, slowly but every time I saw it it was a different shade) who got applause from the whole line when she walked by. The theater was low-lit as well, but there was a hooded figure, an Eternal Scout, and a Faceless Old Woman sitting in front of us, a bunch of various Cecils everywhere, including a guy who is getting a half-sleeve tattoo inspired by fanon!Cecil's - it was about half done (he said it had been about 12 hours so far), absolutely gorgeous work (Gnine has pics, I'll get 'em later.)

And the show! Cecil Baldwin is omg so adorable how even - he can't stop moving his hands the whole time he monologues, despite holding the script in one of them (someone on Tumblr described him putting on an invisible finger puppet show, which, yes) and he clearly had a blast, voice flipping between the sinister and the giddy and the occasionally terrified. It's really worth it to see him live, he's one of those performers who feeds off the audience and gives 200% when he's up on stage.

The Weather was Jason Webley, who did the Weather for PYRAMID - he has quite the spectacular if unusual voice, and is one of the more entertaining musicians to watch, as he accompanies himself on accordion for half his songs (acoustic guitar for the other), as well as keeping rhythm by stomping on the stage. Alex Guy accompanied him on viola for some of the songs and damn she can play. So pretty much everything I love about the Weather, as it's not usually the kind of music I would listen to but then am glad I do. (The best song was the Giraffe Song, which is hilarious and the story with it ("Forget About The Giraffes. Put Them Out Of Your Mind!") is perfectly Night Vale.)

So yes, if you're a fan of the podcast and have the opportunity, the live show is totally worth going to, highly recommended!

As for the episode itself - we were asked not to spoil the show for those going to see it later, and so far on Tumblr people seem to be being pretty good about that (it will all be recorded and released eventually online, of course). And if you are going to go, I'd go unspoiled! But if you're not going to be able to make any of the tour, here's a brief ep review - not a full recap, since any plot summary I could give wouldn't do it justice; as is often the case with Night Vale it's less about the story and more about the performance and the precise words. But I'll mention a few things for the purpose of headcanon construction.

( Spoilers for The Librarian )

So yes, had a great time - though it's going to be such a looooong two weeks until the next ep, after the delight of getting two in a row! :D

There needs to be some kind of fanwriter confessionals. "Mother, I have sinned. I have failed at even the simplest of kink."

Either that, or I'm just going to blame it on Night Vale's weirdness. And ace romance being so table-flipping adorable.

First I wrote (my first?) sex pollen PWP that skips the porn in favor of angst:

Anyone But You (no one but you)

Then I wrote (definitely my first) tentacles fic...in which Carlos discovers his boyfriend has tentacles, and then they happily proceed to have no sex whatsoever. While my headcanon Cecil is more human than eldritch, when else would I get an excuse to indulge in G-rated tentacle not-hentai? (And for some reason, probably because Night Vale fandom is awesome in very special ways, people seem to really enjoy fluffy ace tentacle shenanigans!)

5 Things to Do with Tentacles (other than the usual)

Have been keeping up with my NaNo wordcount! Though much to gnine's dismay, my fic setting seems to be stuck on Night Vale for the moment (though there are still Loki-fic and SGA fic I want to finish soooo will see how it goes). I'm near enough to the end of this one to start posting it (probably will be about 25K words total but don't quote me on that...) Big thanks to joonscribble and naye for reassuring me that at least some of my wacky headcanons make sense outside of my own head...

Unvoiced (5890 words) by Xparrot
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences | No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil (Welcome to Night Vale)
Characters: Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), Cecil (Welcome to Night Vale), Old Woman Josie, Dana (Welcome to Night Vale), Steve Carlsberg, Other Night Vale Residents
Additional Tags: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, POV Carlos, Present Tense, Headcanon, Cecil Headcanons, Spoilers for Cassette, The Voice of Night Vale, Hospital Vigils, hurting Cecil to make Carlos angst, (for fun and nonprofit)

StrexCorp makes its move against the Voice of Night Vale, and Carlos struggles to handle the aftermath, as the entire town rallies to save their community.

Any comments, kudos, etc much appreciated (this thing takes itself too seriously for a proper Night Vale fic, I fear, but I couldn't help myself. And Carlos guilts so well~!)

The weirdest thing about this video of Cecil Baldwin (the VA) talking about how he first envisioned Carlos is that Cecil Baldwin apparently does sound almost exactly like Cecil the Voice of Night Vale - at least Cecil in his more chipper off-the-cuff swooning-about-Carlos moments. I've been wondering whether NV-Cecil was his real voice or not...apparently yeah?

I've devoured a bunch of NV fic of late - it's a fascinating fandom to read in; it's got some of the most widely-accepted fanon, and paradoxically the most contradictory fanon, of any fandom I've ever been in. Not the least of which because a lot of authors seems to have multiple competing headcanons and happily write any of them. I admit to being jarred whenever any story attempts to assign distinct physical attributes to Cecil (hair/eye/skin color, or the tattoos - where did the tattoos come from?) OTOH, with my happy-ending tendencies I prefer fic that is lighter in tone than the canon itself feels to me, so I can hardly cast stones...

And Night Vale has bumped me out of my writing rut (thank gods and little fishes, this was too long a dry spell; it feels so good to have characters talking in my head again. Even these freakishly weird characters...) And now I'm writing crack that is turning out much longer than it should be. Completely unsuitable crossover crack, since gnine & I have also lately been rewatching an old favorite and decided it would make perfect sense if Carlos was formerly a scientist on Atlantis...lalala I don't care if our sense actually makes none at all, I'm enjoying myself...!

Not sure if I mentioned it but I've been listening to the Podcast that Ate Fandom for the last couple months now. I just listened/watched one of the live shows - due to be made into a podcast later, but it's up on youtube now. (thanks to joonscribble for the link!)

Am terribly jealous of those who were there in person; just watching the vid is a strange and special experience, both for the live audience (who giggles and cheers like Cecil Baldwin is a rock star, and squeals at every mention of Carlos) and to see the performers in person. Cecil Baldwin looks totally different from the Cecil in my head (who looks totally different from all the fanart as well - putting aside the fanonical tattoos and 3rd eye, I can't get my head around a white-haired Cecil for some reason?) and it makes you admire his performance even more, that he can bring the town to such vivid life when it's 95% just his voice.

As for the episode itself - it's great fun, especially for Carlos/Cecil fans (...which is all of us?) ( spoilers for the ep with the condos )