#Joseph decides the best fix is to use metaphors

[this-is-a-podcast-fanblog]

ok here’s my really long night vale meta

(I want to just start by saying that I love Welcome to Night Vale more than any other show that I’ve ever listened to or watched. I’m not sure if I would even still be here without the positive change it brought to my life and the art form it introduced me to. So although this post is critical of recent story develops, please understand that I critique with love, and that I have nothing but the highest respect for the writers and cast.)

So let’s get into it. 

This turned out way longer than I meant for it to be. 

Since the beginning, each season of Welcome to Night Vale is basically self-contained. The things brought up in them can stretch across seasons, but for the most part any conflict or Big Bad brought up will be resolved when that season ends, which typically is on June 15th. 

Let’s look at the first five seasons and their overarching in-season arcs. 

Season One: The introduction season. This season laid the groundwork for all the seasons to come and established Cecilos. The arc of the Apache Tracker was resolved within this season. 

Season Two: The Strexcorp season. This season taught us a lot about the characters, and about Desert Bluffs.

Season Three: The auction season. This is also the long-distance relationship season for Cecil and Carlos. Both plotlines are resolved beautifully by the end and relate well to each other. 

Season Four: The beagle season. Also known as “Who’s a good boy?”. The evil beagle puppy was defeated by the end of the season. I felt like this season’s arc felt very natural and was enjoyable to listen to. 

Season Five: The Huntokar season. A lot of things that have been building slowly come together. We finally meet Huntokar after hearing a lot about her throughout the show. The small arc of converging timelines is resolved, but as we will see, it later comes back.

So that’s the first five seasons. 

Now, as far as writing styles go, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are pretty formulaic. (This is also evident in their other shows, Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires). I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Quite the opposite - I think one of the reasons why Night Vale is so endearing to so many people is because you always know what to expect: the complete unexpected. The world is weird and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s consistent in its inconsistency. You’ll get a community calendar or sponsor, you’ll get deep thoughts about life, and you’ll get a weather. Similarly, with the seasons, you’ll get a problem introduced over the course of the season, and then it will be resolved. 

But as you can probably see from the list I’ve written out, the seasons don’t exist in a bubble from each other. The things that happen affect each other. The arrival of Strexcorp in town was what eventually drove Carlos through into the desert otherworld, which set up the conflict for season 3. The tiny city under the bowling alley in season 1 was revisited to teach us more about Huntokar in season 5. Each season has a different flavor, but they’re all ultimately the same dish, if that metaphor makes any sense. 

And this is where we get into the issues I’ve been having with the most recent three seasons. My biggest problem is simple. They just don’t have a distinct flavor like the other seasons do. They don’t have anything that stands out to me. 

Let’s take a look at seasons six and seven, and then the first episode that dropped today of season eight. 

Season Six: The guest writer season. This season was mostly written with guest writers that would do a mini-arc of two to three episodes. 

Season Seven: The Carlos’s Double/Blood Space/Lee Marvin/Thanos-Snap season. Not sure what else to call it. 

The basic premise of season six was that it would be a bunch of character-driven stories set in the world of Night Vale, most of which were written by guest writers. To me, worldbuilding and characters are more important than plot every time, so I didn’t hate this as a concept. It was just... the execution honestly wasn’t all that interesting to me. I feel like the way the characters were discussed moved their placement within the world, but it didn’t actually change anything we knew about them. Tamika’s episodes, for example, didn’t really show us anything new about her, they just showed us how she acted as a city council leader instead of a militia leader (spoiler alert: pretty much exactly the same). 

My biggest problem with season six is that it set up a lot without actually doing anything. All of the best moments from season six were things I thought we would revisit later: who will be the mayor now that Dana stepped down? What is it Carlos is still keeping from Cecil? What’s up with the shipwreck? But then all of these things were totally forgotten in season seven. It was like the writers didn’t care. That may be because they were established by different writers, but it still feels... I don’t know, *Cecil voice* Incomplete? 

Now let’s talk season seven. I think season six was definitely the weakest of all Night Vale seasons, but this was a close second (and that shows you how much I love this show, because even the weakest seasons had moments that blew me away, and I’ve relistened to most of the episodes at least once, if not more.) Season seven, like season six, just had way too much going on. For the first few months there was no plot whatsoever, just a bunch of disjointed episodes with seemingly no relation to each other. 

And don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of these episodes were amazing. Are You Sure? was thrilling, totally game-changing for podcasts. Save Dark Owl Records was a really great look at Maureen and Michelle. I’ve relistened to UFO Sightings a bunch. But there’s a difference between enjoying episodes alone and thinking they fit in a larger story. And so while I really like a lot of the episodes of season seven... they’re kind of pointless story-wise. What disappointed me the most was the Kevin mini-series near the start of the season - Kevin is one of my favorite characters, and so while I liked to see him happy, I was annoyed that they forgot about him again after the arc ended and they moved on.

That’s because season seven didn’t really have a story - it had a bunch of stories. The problem is that they weren’t introduced until near the very end. We had the Lee Marvin arc that started somewhere in the middle, and I did like that. I thought it was cool to take what seemed like a throwaway gag and turn it into a story, especially one that seemed relatable. But running this arc concurrently with the Blood Space War arc didn’t make any sense to me. There were a bunch of times that I thought the two could relate - linking time travel to being trapped in time would be pretty easy, I thought. But that never happened. 

Then the Blood Space War arc nosedived into a pit of emotion after both Cecil and Carlos were erased from history, and I was ecstatic. Not that Cecil and Carlos had been erased - but that the show was taking such a drastic emotional change. It felt like a shift in tone, but also consistent to the show’s format, hitting that perfect sweet spot. I was even more excited when I found out that the resolution to this was that Leonard Burton would have to die again. That seemed like the perfect end to his (albeit brief) character arc, and a great emotional high for the season. 

And then the next episode was just... Cecil saying everything had been fixed. 

That really disappointed me. It felt so anticlimactic, especially considering the heights some of the other season finales had reached (I’m especially thinking of the dog’s ominous barking right before the finale of Who’s A Good Boy, and the town almost being destroyed). The ending to the Blood Space War arc felt rushed to me. I liked the close of the Lee Marvin arc, but everything else seemed a little off-beat. 

I think a big problem with season six and seven is they try to take us to new things within the world of Night Vale, but they do that in a way that doesn’t actually show us anything we need to learn. Eunomia hadn’t been in any other seasons and her backstory was minimal, so her death in season seven had no real impact on me. 

So why are they doing that? I don’t know. But it seems like the writing team has made the decision to utilize Cecil more as a voice for the town than an independent character, and are trying to let other people take the spotlight. However, because Cecil is by far one of the strongest and most beloved character, and because he drove most of the story for the first few seasons, this doesn’t work as well as you might hope. 

I hoped that season eight might go back to the old format. However, the first episode was another self-contained episode (although I do love Josh Crayton), so that has me worried. 

I guess I can say, there’s a difference between a story podcast and a storytelling podcast, does that make sense? Those might overlap, but they aren’t really the same thing. While a story podcast exists to have an overarching plot, a storytelling podcast just wants to put you in a world and let you look around. What I love so much about Night Vale is that it has always been able to be both. It has a plot, but it isn’t just a plot like many other shows are - it can let you walk around, run from government satellites, and NOT enter the dog park. 

However, it seems to me that Night Vale is forgetting it does have a story, too. There are still SO many things from past arcs that haven’t been resolved yet. What’s more, the show doesn’t seem all that interested in resolving them. You can have floating cats and five-headed dragons, but you can’t give up an essential part of your show. That doesn’t mean the show can’t still be fun to listen to, if they decide the plot no longer matters. But I think it will be a little less rewarding. 

And to finish I’ll just share my biggest fear: I really really really hope Night Vale isn’t going to become normal. At the end of season seven, time started working again. I’m so scared that they’re going to slowly convert the whole town to being normal before the show ends. And I think that would really suck, because it would change what Night Vale means to a lot of people, and what the town really is. 

TL;DR: although it is one of the greatest shows ever, Welcome to Night Vale has recently started to stray from its established formulas, tropes and characters, especially in seasons six and seven. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, I feel like the way it’s been executed has weakened the recent episodes. Seasons six and seven also tried to fit too much in without actually doing anything to advance certain arcs or plot points. Nonetheless, it is a great show, and I’m optimistic about the future. 

I’d love to have a dialogue about this so if you are the one person alive who’s going to read this, please don’t hesitate to comment or send an ask! Again, I absolutely love this show, these are all just my opinions, and my ability to critique the show exists outside of my adoration for it. 

Now I should sleep. 

[theliterateape]

The New Catch-22

by Don Hall

“Catch-22” comes from the title of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel. In the story, “Catch-22” was a rule followed by army doctors in The Second World War. If a frightened pilot tried to avoid a dangerous mission by claiming he was “insane,” this was seen as healthy and the doctor would diagnose him as “sane” and eligible to fly. 

In contrast, any pilot who actually wanted to fly was marked as “insane” and would not be allowed to do so. So “Catch 22” was the perfect example of an illogical rule, which made everyone unhappy. After the release of a film based on the book in 1970, the phrase “a Catch-22 situation” or “a Catch-22 fix” became widely used to mean a paradoxical problem.

SOURCE

On the ApeCast last week, David told a story about finally getting a day off from his relentless work schedule and spending the day free of social media. That wasn’t the point of the day. The point was to hang out on a boat on a beautiful day with his dad. The escape from Faceborg was a side benefit.

He got home and just before bed he opened his phone to check out the ongoings of a thousand people. Not because he was interested in what his friends or family had posted online but to see what the raging masses of idiots had written. He realized it was simply to become annoyed with the avatars of humans he could despise.

Not long ago (I actually can’t remember the day, so I can’t know how long ago) I hit the wall with social media. I found myself glued to it for what amounted to hours a day and that the effect was a low-grade disgust for everyone. It seemed that my job, on top of being a casino manager, a husband, a writer, was also to sit in judgement of every person around me with the impulse to share his/her thoughts publicly.

I didn’t sign up for that employ so I quit.

I deleted my Faceborg account. I deleted my Twitter. For some reason I kept my Instagram.

The new Catch-22 is that with social media, I am trained to hate my fellow humans. Without it, I feel like the world is passing me by. Keep the accounts, hate people. Lose the accounts, miss them.

I grew up bouncing around. We moved a lot during my most formative years. The result is that I don’t give a lot of stock to the idea of a stable home or group of friends. When, as a tyke, I’d make great friends in the fourth grade only to move to another state for fifth grade, the roots of livelong community were not allowed to grow. Thus I am an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ sort of jackass.

Tom Flaherty was my best friend in fourth grade. Peoria, AZ. Alta Loma Elementary. We rode our bikes over construction mounds in the desert. We created a pancake stand as a response to all the lemonade stands on our block because I’m an idiot contrarian and Tom thought it was funny. In the cinema of my mind, that year was filled with Stand by Me revelations (no dead body, though) and Tom and I were nothing short of bosom buddies.

Then we moved. I can’t recall where we moved but I think it was still in Arizona. Tom became part of that tapestry hung in the corner only casually referenced once in a while when I think of dirt bikes or pancakes.

I’ve been married twice before Dana and had a four year relationship with another woman in Chicago. I don’t have a single photo or reminder of them. Out of sight, out of mind. That whole rolling stone sans moss metaphor is on point. No moss on me, gang.

Social media, however, is moss. Lots of green, sticky fucking algae. Would Tom and I be Faceborg friends? Who knows? It’s as likely that he doesn’t even remember I existed. My deletion has had few negative side effects. Literate Ape has less exposure as does my ability to market my own website. I’m not as plugged into the lives of people I care about and both my mother and mother-out-law no longer have access to photos of Dana. Once in a while, I get that addict’s twinge of wanting to be in the know but I have plenty of doomscrolling I can do with so much news media.

When Dana and I split for Vegas, I’d been a resident of the Third Coast for thirty years. Thirty years gathers a lot of moss but I’ve found that those memories and attachments tend to become distractions in the now. Social media chained me to the going ons of people and institutions I no longer had stake in. After a year and a half in the Silver City, there are only a handful of people and things about Chicago I’d have reason to see should I ever decide to visit. A few friends who have become essential to me. One bar. One restaurant. Not much else.

For the most part I’m happier without the non-stop reminders of that chapter. Eliminating the online nagging of missing out of things I used to live within has opened me up for my new home. I’m not sure what Nevada has in store for me especially in the slow descent into economic madness and gradual rebuilding that must occur eventually but free of the presence of Chicago is the only way to dive in.

And still…when news of Chicago comes on the televisions in the casino, I perk up.

Catch-22.