me: *stops listening to Hamilton to listen to Night Vale*
Night Vale: Anyway… so I listened to this album from the musical Hamilton…
You, too, have survived—survived everything up to this moment. Grip tight, hum, laugh, cry. Forget nothing, and think many things of it.
Cecil Baldwin, Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 15: “Street Cleaning Day”
It’s weird how comforting this stuff is. Sometimes they say stuff like, “If you see something, say nothing and drink to forget” and sometimes they’re all supportive and life affirming.
but that’s it. that’s what’s so beautiful about night vale. they take all your existential despair and background it with absurdity and fantasy and horror (but in such a way that it remains connected to the absurdity and horror of our everyday world and so also connected to your existential despair) and then every so often they turn it around and point out to you that there is reason not to despair.
you have survived. the future is coming for you but it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. your loved ones love you back. all of this stuff is every bit as true as the 1984-style government domination and your crush getting a terrible haircut and misspent funds and natural disasters and people in your life dying and the corporate domination of desert bluffs (and how brilliant is it that these two opposite mirror towns are microcosms of state domination and corporate domination, there is no better alternative because today we are not offered one). we have survived everything up until this moment. we do love and are loved in return.
this is why we all love night vale so much. not just because it’s clever, not just because we like all things strange, not just because of the criminally beautiful romance; because, like all good speculative fiction, it reflects us back to ourselves, and it makes an effort to do so in a way that is not only true but, for a wonder, comforting.
…oh my god i just realized that in this sense night vale has more in common with star trek than it does 90% of speculative fiction
I…I didn’t sleep well last night. I imagine none of you slept well last night, what with all the chanting, and stomping? I could see from my window a stark, white V, opening skyward, just to the south of our apartment, with its inverted cone, long shadows cutting in and out, a vertical static. I could hear a distant repeated chant.
Recent studies show that levitation isn’t Khoshekh’s fault – actually the poor cat is just a victiom of very stubborn lack of gravitation in this exact spot when the pet exist. But the inability to hovering on his own doesn’t make Khoshekh less special and JUSTa cat. We all know that there’s something weird and a bit demonic in EVERY cat. And that’s why we love them, don’t we?
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 