Our friendly desert town: Alternative podcast culture in welcome to Night Vale

Abstract

Despite its frequently horrific context, Night Vale's community aspect represents one of its most-loved facets, with fans embracing and developing the show's fantasy of shared location, listenership, and identity. This chapter posits that Night Vale fans build and experience traditionalistic forms of community through imagined and performed "Night Vale" residence and community "radio" listenership; collective visual construction and definition of Night Vale's invisible spaces and inhabitants; and communication and collectivism enacted both as "cyber" and physically co-present audiences. In these three elements of reception, Night Vale may realize fresh potential for new audio-media and expose alternate desires in audio-media users, as with each "broadcast" fans continue to cultivate old modes of community, traditionalism, and collectivity in very new ways.