#strex family

[mistress-strex]

More Insufferable Strex Family AUs that totally would have been a thing if they existed back in 2014

-What We Do in the Shadows

-Stranger Things

-Good Omens

-Wednesday

-Heathers the Musical

[manynarrators]

And all my life, I've never known where you've been There were holes in you, the kind that I could not mend And I heard you say, right when you left that day "Does everything go away?" Yeah, everything goes away But I am gonna be here 'til forever, so just call when you're around.

"Always Gold" by Radical Face

[mudstoneabyss]

having many untranslatable thoughts about Eat Your Young and Kevin and Strex and his dad and his fears in becoming a father and breaking the cycle of abuse

[neriumdelusion]

Kevin is always a spectacle, always dehumanised in some way. The prophet, the spokesperson of strex, the boy. What he is has always been seen as more important than WHO he is in every era, even as the voice of his town, there’s an element of what he can do for others being more important than who he is himself. He is a radio host, a performer, and oh boy does he perform. Year after year, no matter what he’s doing, he can’t escape being a spectacle, until the only way he knows how to seek self discovery and help is by turning up the radio station in night vale as a child and speak to the town he doesn’t even have connection to (as much as his own, he does have links to it obviously).

This man is always for someone’s gaze, when he was strex’s spokesperson it was more hammered home, no free will and being forced to represent propaganda, and even when he’s escaped that he can’t find comfort in anything else! In mudstone abyss he latches onto his religious power because the need for safety represents itself through his learned need for control and, not unnoticeably, his need to be a spectacle.

Of course people can just like attention and I’m not disputing that, but he is rarely given attention as a person (except like. By Charles and Donovan who are his family. And by Lauren I believe, who may not like him but she sure does see him as a person. Just the worst one she’s ever had the displeasure of being near. She also loves him. He loves her, I don’t care what you say to me.) so he goes to what he’s USED to! Being a symbol, being dehumanised and seen for an ideology, whether it was community pre strex, strexcorp, or religious power, and more recently, he’s the boy. The boy was a mystery and now yet again a symbol for night vales fear (as a figure for nv to project their fear and confusion onto)

KEVIN CANNOT ESCAPE PERFORMANCE. HE CANNOT HELP BEING A SPECTACLE. SOMEONE SHOOT ME

[grimbeak]

on a Serious note: I am very worried the conclusion to this arc will be the boy killing adult kevin, implying that certain people are too broken to be fixed. I feel like if the conclusion of this arc ends with current kevin being dead it'll undermine literally all of his baggage into "just some crazy guy" instead of. a guy with disorders the dsm hasn't even seen yet who deserves to heal from his past

on a more speculative note: it's mentioned talk therapy is illegal in desert bluffs too. the first idea they have for the boy is to take him to a child therapist, which is talk therapy. just thought that was interesting

Well,I had a whole answer written up, and then I looked at a transcript and it was gone. God bless Tumblr. I'm going to paraphrase.

I don't think they would do that. For one, this is a child talking about murdering his future self. He talks about how he is going to do it in explicit detail. While Night Vale has segments that are gorey and occasionally sad, even including the deaths of characters, I think this would be too big a leap. This is a more serious topic- for example, the episode we get where Old Woman Josie has died, and we spend it learning about her and her life. While she wasn't a big recurring character, it was clear that she meant a lot to Cecil and the town. There was so much about her we never got to learn.

Kevin. Kevin is a huge character. While not recurring often after his "defeat", we still hear from him from time to time. However, he's such a big character because of who he is. He's Cecil's double. While we really don't know much about Cecil (so much of what we have is just speculation from the vague hints left in occasional episodes), we know even less about Kevin.

Kevin... We really have no idea what he's up to. He wanted to take over Night Vale with Strex, but they lost. After Kevin got trapped in the Desert Otherworld, we could have easily never heard from him again. We've barely heard anything about Lubelle post-mortem, except that she's probably still under the cow.

You could argue that we didn't know much about Janet Lubelle. However, we did know her motives. We knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to explain Night Vale, plain and simple.

Now? Kevin has a life separate from StrexCorp and even the Smiling God. Lubelle never had a clear life separate from the University of What It Is. Kevin has a partner, a stepson. A kind-of-friend in Lauren. An old companionship with Carlos. Kevin is a character that has been developed outside of his main focuses, and I think that's important to remember. Night Vale interns die because, well, they're interns. Not much we learn about them. The ones we did learn about? Still alive. Dana Cardinal- former mayor, now therapist. Maureen- owns dark owl records with Michelle. Even Kareem had something to distinguish himself- a double, and a family that didn't remember him. All of them are still living.

One of, if not the only character that's been developed to have a personal life and still died, is Old Woman Josie. Dead from a hip infection. And we got a whole episode (several if you count the ones mentioning her worsening condition) about her passing. She was a very important character, especially to Cecil. Based on those odds, and the extreme difference in death cause (natural hip infection vs murdered by your past/future child self), along with the whole topic being extremely heavy for the podcast, I don't think they're going to have Kevin be killed by himself. Kevin's a very developed character that we still know very little about, and we're only just learning more now. Along with that, Josie had a daughter, but they had a complicated relationship. During one of the last few times we heard from Kevin, he got a partner and a stepson. While it is odd that we didn't get a mention of them in the past Adult!Kevin episode, I think it can be easily explained by the focus being on a specific holiday and Lauren suddenly showing up and surprising him/the whole "smiling god doesn't actually love you" thing. The difference in time between the desert otherworld and night vale hasn't been explained fully yet. Who knows if it's still ten times faster? Who knows if the active portal is messing with the time? I think there's a very high chance that Charles and Donovan are still alive, and likely similar ages from when we last heard from them. I doubt finknor would give him a young child to care for and then instantly age him up without letting us see how that's affected Kevin.

If Charles and Donovan are still alive, then would Brinknor really kill a man in front of his child and partner? After the healing he clearly went through to get to that point? I don't think they've forgotten about Charles and Donovan.

Not only would it not make sense for his character, it would also be a very dark turn for the podcast. While Night Vale has had it's dark moments (Go To The Mirror), I think there's a huge step to make between cosmic horror and a child murdering his future self (who we've recently been purposely reminded exists! Who's recently been given more dialogue to a name!). Even if you see the "killing his future self" part as an average night vale plot, this is still a child. A child who we've grown to know both versions of. A child who, a few weeks ago in Night Vale time, was pretending to be an airplane in a park. While The Boy has gotten more serious and seemingly more unstable over the weeks, he's still a child. Cecil offers him goldfish crackers and a root beer.

The way the episode ends, especially with the addition of Carlos trying to help The Boy with symbolism, it feels very much like The Boy saying that he needs to murder his future self, and describing it in detail, is something that is not going to be tolerated by the other characters. Brinknor wouldn't suddenly switch up Carlos's personality and have him help Kevin continue the cycle of violence that he's clearly very traumatized from.

All in all, I totally understand your concerns, but I don't think it's something you have to be worried about. Even if it's his future self, a child commiting murder and that being deemed okay is a huge step for a podcast where the main character refused to work for several days because he didn't know trees grew from seeds. I think a likely ending is going to be about Kevin breaking the cycle of violence, trauma, and abuse. Whether The Boy goes back to wherever he came from, whether he gets to grow up in Night Vale and start again, whether Adult!Kevin helps him through his struggle, I think there's going to be a happy ending for The Boy that doesn't involve murder.

[desert-bluffs-and-me]

Also like, very sincerely, Kevin is such a liar. He can't help it. He lies to embellish but his embellishment turns to just straight up lies. The man just says things sometimes. Don't even believe half the stuff he says that isn't directly actually happen and collaborated with other people or actions that then happen. The man says he was basically in control of Strex and that Lauren was president and that's a pure lie. He mentions a random grandma but then says he basically has very few memories of his family. He says he's best friends with people who just straight up openly hate him. He's so funny lol

[asydicsydney]

WTNV 240 LIVE REACTION

(Title and art) YESSSSSS!!! Also "He is holding a cat" reference real

:0 John! Hiiii

I need my ears to listen to Night Vale, Cecil! >:T

Music still weird

(Pause) Tamika is housing the boy, yet she was the one most against Kevin

There's other places you can get knives, Cecil 🙄

Acting like a damn therapist

This isn't an "on to the news" moment!!

I WAS JUST TALKING ABOUT HOW U-VIEW IS THE ONLY FILLER DEC. 15TH EP WTF???

Please let this connect to Cecil's dad in It Doesn't Hold Up

Lee Marvin mention <3 (please bring back dad lore)

Cecil... Are you jealous they have records of their family?

Kevin used to journal... (I sound like a widow)

TRYING OUT DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE PERSON HE COULD BE?? IS IT NOT OBVIOUS??

The post office... That closed in year one?

I am a roleplayer in the year 1980 so this is helpful thank you

That's not.. y'know what, you do you Larry

INTERTWINING STORIES OH FUCK

He's educating himself on corrupt businesses, awww

Night Vale movie when? /j

That.. conversation is very Kevin coded

WHATTTT NONONONONONO (FULL NMAE MENTION AS WELL WTF)

Earl Harla- no it's Gino's, first date reference :)

The same names, double bar, vultures... How very doubles of you

Oh.. okay

Real

So Cecil has the knife now?

NOOOOO

AHHHHHHHHHH

Highly advanced techniques 🧐

"The secret of science is: so much of it is beautiful"

Anymore?? He's gathering information to return home...

I'll take vaguely menacing sentences for 200, Alex!

FAMILIAR TO YOU HUH? MAYBE CAUSE IT'S YOU IN ANOTHER TIMELINE, BITCH??

This weekend's weather? You've never said it like that. The weather for All Smiles Day, perhaps?

This weather is a helluva vibe

Vaguely menacing sentences...

"Past performance is not a predictor of future results" I swear to Smiling God that was in a Strex ad

🙂

MY SIDE OF THE STORY? THIS IS FUCKING SANDSTORM I CALLED IT

He's never gotten to live his story :(

Oh that's a hell of a line "please don't make *me* make this difficult"

He wants to KNOW

BE NOT AFRAID

HOLY HELL

Cecil wants to know nothing. Kevin wants to know everything

YESSSSSSSSSS HIIIII MY SWEET BOY

:O

END OF EPISODE WOW

YOU'RE TELLING ME WE HAVE TO WAIT TILL FEBRUARY YOU ASS

"THE VOICE OF THE BOY"

Actual advice? Oh, okay

The "From PRX" voice is different? Probably nothing to do with them

What if this Kevin story and Cecil dad lore intersected? We do know Kevin's dad.. and that he was a bad person

[songder-bot]

Warn me about Strex? Why would you ever need to warn me about an honest family business like Strex? Why, ever since they bought the radio station years ago, I’ve learned so much about good business practices and the value of hard work, and individual responsibility and smiling and destroying the weak and eliminating the lazy and smiling and smiling and smiling. 

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

Not that I want to go through the pain of this but like.

I need someone to threaten Esteban.

I know that sounds awful and like I don't want anything to happen to him, but I want to see what Cecil and Carlos would do.

Carlos killed the Smiling God last time his family was threatened. Cecil rebelled against Strex for Khoshekh and has already said there will be revenge for Sarah Sultan.

I'm just saying, whether it's the University of What It Is or something else, I need to see it xd.

[mississpissi]

KEVIN!!! IS!!! A!!! CREATION!!! OF!!! HIS!!! ENVIRONMENT!!!

since all the girlies are talking ab kevin i relistened to triptych and !!!

kevin is just cecil if the angels hadn’t stepped in. cecil is just kevin if strex hadn’t fought him so physically.

like DUH cecil ofc u like kevin pre-strex, he’s just you!!! kevin’s whole monologue about family and desert bluffs and community radio is 100% a monologue cecil could have given. no wonder kevin refers to you as an old friend- you’re the same person but of different circumstances!!

the life that the old kevin imagines for himself- a life without strex- is the life that cecil gets to lead. all because of circumstance, circumstance neither of them could really control. while cecil is allowed to remain, is saved by an otherworldly presence, kevin has to fight, fight with everything that he is until who it is all gone. until he is shaped into something else against his will. kevin is a tragedy of circumstance.

i also find it significant that old kevin says he hasn’t heard from cecil in a long time- that he hasn’t heard from anyone, that the future is desolate, that he is an ancient thing. has he outlived cecil? seemingly immortal cecil- are these circumstances that made kevin what he is the same circumstances that make him outlive everything? is the loss of “sentient heat”, of himself, the very thing that allows him to remain?

dniosqdnwekndj kevin !!!!

[videntefernandez]

Definitely keep going, onwards with general infos on the Creel family!

You got it boss

So like they're obviously very inspired by the strex family because I loved that whole thing and I'm sad it's over. I'm going on a nostalgia trip.

The dad, Richard Creel, is mexican but was born in america and has always been wealthy. He was an exchange student in germany where he met Karsten in High school and they've been best friends since then. He had a small loan of 10 million dollars from his parents and founded Creelcore which was initially just a robotics company (they made Babsy, who was the first nurse at the hospital). He had a boy with his first wife (José Luis, Joe for friends) but then divorced and married Diana. They had Diego and Diva who are 5 years apart in age.

Dick is the diplomat in the family, he's extremely social and could make friends with anyone. He's the first one to try the peaceful approach before resorting to violence, but he's also the first one to say "Fuck the rules". He's a party guy like Karsten and the backyard barbecue gets absolutely wild. This happens weekly. He also goes golfing weekly and they have family dinner and church on sundays (they say they're catholic for public image but their true patron is La Santa Muerte).

This is already super long so I won't get too deep into it. The mom, Diana Contreras is from Sonora Mexico which is a state that has a huge problem with drug cartels. Her family was killed and she was trafficked during her youth, until she executed the leader and took over the gang. She went through several people like that using her feminine wiles, which earned her a ton of enemies so she had to flee to the US where she met Dick and they fell in love. She already had a background in drugs, so she and Joe started the pharma branch of the company (running both the legal and illegal side) And they created the happy pill which makes employees like Kevin stay content and compliant at their jobs.

She's the ice queen, hates social gatherings and is having an affair with her robot assistant.

Joe is first in line to inherit the company, he's married with 3 kids and has a robotic eye prosthetic after losing his while playing as kids (he was the kind of problem child who stole cars and freed animals from the zoo only to hunt them down himself, and when Diego arrived it was double trouble). But the eyepatch is more intimidating so he also wears that. There's maybe more but this is already so long lmao

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

It Devours! Ramble

I should be going to be but instead have this rant about an amazing book

killing God but God is representation of your trauma, lies and repression and destroying it ultimately does nothing to solve the issue because ultimately the damage is coming from inside of and your own refusal to face how what happened still lurks in your life, and God was never really a god just a scared cornered animal acting out it’s own survival and it only has the status of a God because people are using it as a symbol to project their fears and hopes on, making it bigger and having it killed for their satisfaction

the world simply being as it is and people projecting different world views on it in their own feeble attempts at understanding and comfort

religion being primarily based in community and belief, fulfilling and yet also restricting. Science being primarily based in isolation and uncertainty, necessary for safety and yet eternally contaminated from its own ideals by human nurture. viewing reality from any angle ultimately guarantees bias and as such by witnessing and trying to understand the world we fundamentally misinterpret it and how at the end of the day the important thing is to be open to other perspectives and view points and to open yourself up to human connection even if it means being wrong, both in the technical sense and in the sense that you hurt someone even with the best intentions and those good intentions do not undermine the hurt

Nilanjana is amazing. I way over identify with her lonely girl who only needs work not friends routine

Carlos really hates local government and would be weirdly fine with seeing NighVale as a whole burn if it meant keeping the specific people he loves safe and that is very sexy of him

Loved Pamela. She’s just so much fun, well intended but terrible at communicating and that fits into the border themes of connection doesn’t it

the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God really went off on the aesthetic. both the pamphlet and the slide show sermon where so fucking good, a perfect mix of creepy, spiritual and well intended. there just enough authentic about the ideology to make you understand why people would fall for it and actually believe in what they say with just enough so overtly wrong it’s unsettling

there was little hits of the old Strex here and there, but for the most part this had no continuity with years 2 or 3 and thats kinda fine because it manages to take the themes and aesthetics of what came before and weave it into something new and amazing. the dessert bluffs and Kevin timeline is totally broken but time is literally broken so...

I loved all the digressing and meanderings of the plot to focus on other set-random Nightvale characters rather than on the main plot and it really drives home the fact that Welcome to NightVale is about NightVale as a community rather than about any one protagonist or narrative. it makes that fact that you can pick up any piece of NighVale with no prior knowledge and jump right in work all the more because everyplace is just a small one in the grand mosaic that is NighVale where every person and every world view counts and this circles back around to what I was saying about community 

and you know what lets circle back around to what I said about Carlos being willing to let Nightvale burn for his family and the lack of continuity with year three and there’s really 2 main things to say, the first being the slightly bizarre retcon to make Carlos’ otherworld stay 10 miserable years instead of 1 where he’s “just staying, not trapped” and how I think we can all agree that Carlos’ “come move to the dessert otherworld with me and abandon all your friends and family became this otherworld is so great for research and my science work babe” and the fact that they never really felt with how Cecil was straight up suicidal and deeply depressed for the later half of the year and the lack of actual resolution to what was going through Carlos’ mind when he decided to come back with absolutely no shown issue or effort, and it is so much weirder for Carlos to try to talk Cecil into moving to a place where he is actually secretly miserable

and the second thing about that is that when Carlos comes back he refers to importance of NightVale as a community rather than a place and how Cecil needs to reconnect wth the people around him and focus “on the everyone” and how Carlos really did primarily come back for Cecil and to be with Cecil and how he says that NightVale is where everyone Cecil loves lives and Carlos really have a very small protective domain of people considered his own

Cecil literally be used as a stand in for the concept of love and connection and dependability itself with Nilanjana contemplating of wanting to find her Cecil and wanting to be Cecil for someone, the emphasis on the radio tower where Nil and Darryl's relationship gets physical for the first time. It is weird to read a piece of Nightvale that doesn’t have Cecil's perspective coloring every thing and never allowing me into his mind but its kinda cool because we instead just see him as a distant pillar of love, support and community and how those are ultimately the things the book believes is universal to science and religion and how concerning that then kinda makes Cecil’s statement that he would give up all of Nightvale for Carlos, even if he would much rather not, but also how good it is that Cecil is allowed to be selfish about something when he has had so much of life decided for him, being prophesied to be the voice of the community, being a tree who’s fruit is fed to the people, who’s truck is chopped down and used to make their shelter and how he nearly did almost once give up all of Nightvale for Carlos by going the the Otherworld with him

It was great seeing Abby even if only for a second

An entire book in the Nightvale style of deeply unsettling and profound and funny is a wonderful idea, with human nature so beautifully captured with in the pages and prose

the appearance of happiness being valued above the actual emotion. teeth as a fragmented symbol, being a part of something natural being a small segment of a symbol of joy and goodness and of course that piecemeal symbol being divorced from context and being made so creepy in that isolation, teeth both as a part of smiling and a part of biting, piece in isolation that could be either joy or devouring

always love me good cult

always love killing God and the horrible thing it makes of us

always love the conflict between understanding and belief

by the way, and I think this is a good thing, Never thought that any of the devoured people where dead. it would fuck with status quo to hard if Larry or Rico where gone. made it more a mystery of how they where going to comeback than an actual threat and thats a good thing

and you know how Cecil never actually talks about Homophobia or racism or any kind of discrimination is his show? and then we step outside of his heavily edited, censored perspective and it turns out theirs still antisemitism and racism and sexism and stuff like that in Nightvale? I think it makes me appreciate Cecil more to know that his pride in his identity and his dedication to showing a mostly egalitarian world, is intact a dedicated choice that he makes about his own identity and not just a passive aspect of his environment. Cecil overall came across as a lot more put together and reliable from other perspectives than his own. I would not have expected Cecil to be able to cook or be an emotional pillar right after his nice almost died. I think he might just have really low opinion of himself and it comes through in the show.

It can be really hard to tell the difference between Cecil being dumb because he’s putting on a show for the audience and trying to get around censorship Cecil being dumb die to reeducation side affects and timeline shenanigans, and Cecil being dumb because he just is. theres so many layers of truth and deception

religion being about the community, belief and interpretation of it all even when the facts are horrible

My god Carlos would have killed so many people and 1000% believed that it was City Council hating him enough to cut off their nose to spite their face and never once stopping to question his remarkably biased assumption. He really took the conflation of hero and scientist hard and is complete willing to force the issue with his own self rightness. Baby Girl you are so deranged!!! and he’s completely head over heels for Cecil. nice to know it goes both ways

I would like to get some more Darryl and Nil feels but its 11:54 and I have work tomorrow

also catch me think that Luisa is ‘like that’ as a result of being re-educated a bit to hard after having a mental break down from watching one of her co-workers die from Strex. two scientists went missing that day and we still don’t know what happened. and least one could have died

Nils absolutely came to town later and not with the rest of the research group

Carlos really killed God with gasoline and a flare gun when It was helpless and pinned. Darryl really looses faith in God when that faith is corroborated by fact and the truth can never be as real as the fantasy. Nil and Darryl really don’t work as a couple blue they just don’t have comparable word views and Darryl winds up wth the childhood best friend he shares a life and community with. Nil hooking up with Kareem would create perfect symmetry of scientist and radio host, so they clearly won’t work because it not their story its just one their would parallel, but her trying for a Cecil stand in works thematically due to all that Cecil represents within this story and Kareem is closer to Nils world view as a acts as the rational outsider to Cecil’s world view in the podcast

Hey, hey. invisible food and how you may or may not be eating anything, about how devouring is about becoming full, finding nutrients and fulling your body and taking care of yourself. you are flesh and you take in solid sunshine to be able to move and live and choosing to take the risk of starving yourself, of putting nothing in your body when it needs something, hearing your stomach growling and contracting around imaginary food who’s taste you made up, because it would ruin the fun to find out if you were actually taking care of yourself. Jon Peters constantly insisting that he is a farmer because he is unsure if he actually is a farmer, how he lives in fear and shame that his identity, the identity passed down from his father, built with the brother he lost to a distant war, is actually a lie, that he failed at what he was supposed to do because of the facts of his environment and how he decided to make up a story, spin a fantasy rather than admit the truth. how Nightvale eats empty air and no one is willing to admit the truth of their hunger because nightvale is a town of lies, secrets and stories

contrasting that with the flesh and weight of the smiling god. how for all its lofty thoughts and belief at the end of the day its just blood and crunching teeth. what seems like a lie, a fantasy, a story is really just plain naked truth, the blood and sweat and bile that we are, how we are just lumps of grey matter draped in bone and at the end of the day we die and that Charlie Bair who wanted his ghost license so he could continue on after death, Charlie Bair who will one day pay 10000$ to have his brain scooped out and turned into a cyborg slave of the smiling god, how bodies are just parts, how his fear of death turned to eternal pain. the smiling god devours. you are food. you will die

a science that chooses lies and fantasy and a religion that chooses facts and flesh

there is no one with out the other

Kevin and Darryl and Kasper and church being a business that can’t feel like a business to all but those in charge. a cybernetics company and a church that looks like a cheap office building

community being death, love being clear so all you see is the real, practical things on the other side of it, love being what is, love being the act of going about your life, the fox eats itself, the fox kills its pack, you kill the fox, skin it and wear its face over your own, what could be fire or trees with what could be chemicals or water, what would harm one or save the other but you don’t know if friendship is toxic, destructive, mutualistic or beneficial, the many faces of a relationship 

Nils throwing up in church, in that yellow costume that hides all of what she is, that makes her just one in a crowd, you go to church hungry but she ate her fill and this becomes her salvation because it allows her to escape the pull and get away from the locked room of cultists she’s pretending to be a part of

starving and feasting. devouring and imagining

this wound up being more about the visceral then the communal

stand by for something more coherent, there is to much to say about this book

tldr; understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed due to human subjectivity so its only by opening ourselves to other world views can we find understanding

[manynarrators]

@fluctuating-fanby | 👀

You have opened a can of worms by allowing me tot talk and I appreciate it so much! ...I accidentally deleted the post but shhh... it's fiiiine.

First please enjoy a quick and easy map of how the Desert is laid out!

The capitalization is deliberate! It is a desert, but this one is specifically the Desert. It has some mild degree of sentience, and is protective over it's chosen Voices.

Each city is connected to route 800 through two exits, and this means that say... people in Night Vale can travel to Red Mesa without going through Desert Bluffs, just near to. Somewhere on the map is a secret, hidden 7th town called Radium Cavern.

A note on all the voices: There are 3 sets of 2. Red Mesa and Cactus park, Night Vale and Desert Bluffs, and Haven Lake and Pine Cliff (Radium Cavern is weird). The same applies to the towns themselves. Additionally, each Voice has two main people in their family, none of which are the same. (Ie. Kevin and Cecil have an older sister, Emory and Edward have a twin brother).

The impossible geography is never mentioned or made a note of. It’s treated as perfectly normal. So onto the the towns themselves!

Towns

Night Vale Central Horror: Probably surveillance mixed with some more eldritch aspects. Emotion?:Suspicion Voice: Cecil Palmer Distinguishing geographic feature: Flat, dry scrubland Common NPCs or other fun facts: Theseus Noble (weatherman— he and Ted are Doubles, Rian is not). More or less canon compliant-- in the particular AU where these cities originate, it falls to Strex.

Desert Bluffs Central Horror: Business Emotion?: ...Joy? Voice: Kevin Distinguishing geographic feature: sand dunes (The reason why Strex uses Kevin as their Voice, instead of killing him and replacing him with someone loyal is due to this! They nearly did his first re-education, until the city itself started to sink into the sands. Strex decided it was better not to kill him, and it stopped. The Desert is mildly sentient thing and it protects its chosen Voices). Common NPCs or other fun facts: Vanessa (radio intern), Ted (weatherman), Dan (Vanessa's brother, former intern, current mayor), Maddy (Kevin's sister), Jocelin (Maddy's kid), sometimes Daniel (producer- former human, under Strex made into a biomachine).

Red Mesa Central Horror: Space, to a smaller extent, aliens. Emotion?: Guilt (They took in a decent number, but no where near enough refugees and escapes from Desert Bluffs as Strex became more entrenched) Voice: Pandora (Probably the most well-adjusted one of them to be honest). Distinguishing geographic feature: Mesas-- the city proper is built on the largest one of these. Common NPCs or other fun facts: Zadie (would have been Vanessa's fiance. Left DB when Strex came), Pandora's father (schoolteacher), Pandora's Uncle.

Cactus Park/Stone Meadow (Eventually it will become Cactus Meadow, but that's still a ways off-- the art is discordant as a result_. Central Horror: Beauty (The reason it's split is the town itself is. Half of it values a sort of unnatural beauty-- everything is fake, plastic. There's a massive income of plastic surgery. Stone Meadow values the beauty in the natural world instead. The two sides do not get along). Emotion?: Disgust Voice: Persephone (alongside Kevin, they are the most physically altered Voices; she keeps her third eye closed, but can, if so desired, open it). Distinguishing geographic feature: Cacti Common NPCs or other fun facts: Persephone's father (Left the city when Cactus Park became more powerful. Stone Meadow through and through), Persephone's Uncle (Agreed with Cactus Park, powerful figure in community). For those who go under the knife, it's tradition to keep a locket of what they looked like before

Haven Lake Central Horror: Religion Emotion?: Devotion Voice: Emory Hable (he and Edward’s tattoos are both still. Edward because he is a ghost, and Emory, in the great flood, died very briefly… and saw nothing. No God, no Heaven. His tattoos didn’t start moving again). His tattoos are grey/white. Distinguishing geographic feature: The entire city is built on a lake. The original city suffered from a drought one year, and then there was 40 days and 40 nights of rain, creating the lake. The original city is long gone. Common NPCs or other fun facts: Lisette (Radio engineer), Rian (weatherman, Lisette’s brother), the other two or three (as yet unnamed) people who work at the radio station, Cyrus (Emory's twin and defacto leader of the city. Head of the church), their mother. Has a sort of vintage vibe to the whole city. The city has virtually no cars, but does have an incredibly refined trolly system.

Pine Cliff Central Horror: Ghosts Emotion?: Acceptance Voice: Edward (His tattoos are black vines) Distinguishing geographic feature: Cliffs! Pine trees! You would never guess it's inside a desert. Common NPCs or other fun facts: Edward's twin and their mother. The Doubling effect of the cities is why Pine Cliff is a bunch of ghosts and not wiped out, and why Emory is sort of perpetually caught between.

Radium Cavern Central Horror: Knowledge Emotion?: Pride Voices (a set of triplets): Cassius, Elijah, Penelope Distinguishing geographic feature: bioluminescent phenomena inside the cave the city is built in. The central bell-tower is called the Citadel.

[mistress-strex]

I think it was you who made a post about how there would have been an insufferable Encanto strex family au but either way I'm here to instead raise the absolutely heinous our flag means death strex family au

Okay so I have no idea how old this ask is, but OMG YES it would be HORRIBLE. Divina is absolutely the Spanish Jackie of this au. She’d totally have 20 husbands

[grimbeak]

your physical appearance and personality will have undergone such radical changes vs. ethically brutal methods that left me forever physically changed.

you've become a small, living piece of the sun here on earth & it has bestowed upon you great and terrible gifts vs. 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 & sometimes i am one me and then again i am the other. what they did to the sentient heat trapped temporarily in my body & the power of the smiling god is an endless flow. it ebbs like the tides, but like the tides, it returns.

emerge hours, or possibly years, later with a deep, fully baked color and a completely new mindset. even your closest friends and family will barely recognize you after just one session & you may not even recognize yourself anymore vs. do you remember nothing of the you that was & what do i remember? i remember being a real grumpster & i'm not myself anymore. i'm a smile and a twitch of the wrist & kevin...even my name is a strange figment. my tongue has forgotten how to form the word. and once i was so good with words. now i am an ancient thing, withered away by what they did to me all those years ago.

[desert-bluffs-and-me]

Do you think Kevin would be mad that the people in Night Vale are only worshipping a metaphorical smiling God?

Hi! Good question! Well, first (and this could be your phrasing, so excuse me!) the Congregation in NV /does/ worship a literal Smiling God, it's the 'devouring' part they've chosen to interpret as non-literal. And the religion itself? It's kind of weird. I've ranted a lot about Kevin and the fact he likely invented this whole thing and then Strex got hold of it too and made it worse so I won't go too much into that. I just want to say a couple of things - for Kevin it's clearly a profound and very real spiritual belief. It was probably also this to those in DB and the few citizens of NV who worshipped a Smiling God too. For Strex it was more of a way to make a cult around themselves and restrict people's lives to being all about them and their views even more. We know the Congregation seems unsure about what a Smiling God really is and this is because Kevin himself was pretty vague about it too (if that is, he was the founder anyway and not just somebody who added a lot to it). His 'holy book' is just notes on a giant centipede that he's choosing to call a Smiling God but he's also worshipped the genuine Smiling God which was a light in the Desert Otherworld and spoken of a Smiling God which had a long fleshy tongue and teeth. It's this version (tongue and teeth version) which gives us a clue as to what Kevin sees a 'devouring' as useful for. He speaks with relish and happiness about the idea that a Smiling God will devour a person's 'imperfect self' leaving only the perfect self behind. Now, this is all very vague and up to interpretation. If he wants the perfect self to be left behind, he could mean it non-literally (as in, if you worship a Smiling God, you will become perfect), or he could believe that there is a way for a Smiling God to simply but literally 'devour' a part of a persons psyche whilst leaving the rest. Or he could mean that your perfect self can only exist elsewhere once all of your physical self is devoured. Again, he speaks of it so broadly it's difficult to tell. He certainly wants some kind of devouring. Or did. The thing about Kevin now is that he's with Charles. Charles is a theologist. It's kind of his job to question things about any religion (well, not just that or specifically that but I don't want to ramble on) which is good for Kevin because if Charles starts to question his religion, /Kevin will listen/. Kevin, who has already had doubts, will be encouraged to properly fine tune this weird and kind of non-specific dogma he's invented. This might include any number of interpretations of the 'devouring' part of his beliefs. Sidenote: Considering only Pastor Munn(+simp) believed in a literal devouring, based on the book they didn't share with anyone being about a literal beast which is probably not a Smiling God, I kind of lean towards them having a unique and unintended interpretation. So long as people continue to worship a Smiling God, and to believe in the specific things he considers to be important virtues (family, community etc), and to believe in a kind of Devouring, I think he'd be fine. Or at the very least, just view them as their own 'branch' of his religion which I think Kevin would find pretty neat. He's got a bit of an ego it turns out, so I think he'd be happy to have further inspired a wider interpretation of his beliefs so long as they don't deviate too much further.