People will be like “oh I love gay podcast characters” but won’t even listen to the ROOTS (welcome to nightvale)
nothing like hearing this on the very first episode of the show and knowing shit was about to go down
there’s something about reading the tags on this post that really gets to me because so many people are talking about how this podcast was their first exposure to a gay character that wasn’t played off as a joke and instead how powerful it was to see Cecil completely unshakable in his immediate love for Carlos. some people even talked about how they used to listen to this with their parents and how their parents actually became more understanding for their own coming out because of it. I know it’s a podcast that most of us listened to when we were 13 and haven’t caught up to in years and but it’s really refreshing to see how much that representation meant to people then and still now :)
it was also one of the first times i’d seen a jewish character whose jewishness was only used as a joke in explicitly jewish contexts. like not that “hey i don’t worship christmas trees” or “haha circumcision” or something.
the joke is never “haha cecil’s jewish” the jokes were an ancient chant being similar to one he learned in torah school and his mom covering up all the mirrors even though, as far as we know, no one had actually died yet.
he’s explicitly gay and jewish and neither of those things are ever mocked.
Oh hey, I have something to add to this. So when I was in college I majored in a cross of sociology and media studies, which effectly lead me to studying fandom, identity, and how what we love defines us. I started in 2011 so you can imagine when Night Vale was getting big I was smack in the middle of the everything, and as a fan I was approaching it through the lens of my thesis and studies.
I ended up doing an entire final on this and including it within my work, but the long story short on this one is that Night Vale does particularly, specifically well because Cecil’s queerness is the most mundane part of the show. In the first 2-3 episodes, we are introduced to:
- A floating sentient glow cloud - 5 headed multicolored dragon running for mayor - The weather report is music for no apparent reason - A portal that hocks dinosaurs into the school gym, a “minor inconvenience” - That our MC is gay
Now out of those five, Cecil being gay is the only thing that exists in the real world, and therefore automatically becomes the most relatable. Effectively, the usage of the fantastical as mundane makes our fantastical, to the story, mundane. The key aspect of Night Vale is that sensationalizing the queers would actively make the story worse. And it set such a good fucking precedent for queer people in fantasy, horror, just about anything- the queerness becomes the relatable aspect, and it was Night Vale.
So y’know. Yeah, go back and give it a listen, now that it’s coming up on 10 years old. And think about how far we’ve come.
