You sound like a very dull person.
Not a milkman!
This sounds almost exactly like what I thought when I listened to the first several episodes during a boring, several-hour car ride after watching the eclipse. I made the \"throwing every horror trope at the wall and seeing what sticks\" observation as well and found the music incredibly grating. It kinda makes me wonder how people managed to enjoy it in the beginning when it was just so damn boring and uninteresting.
Well, throwing in every single trope is the joke that the show is built on. It\'s supposed to be absurd that so many things could fit in a single town, not to mention the numerous contradictions (the Secret Police control everything... except that they\'re competing against a mind-controlling glow cloud, beings beyond human understanding, and at least three other government agencies with their own helicopters).
But I kind of agree that it\'s boring. What I do is that I play the episodes while playing games or even reading magazines. My thoughts often drift off, but it\'s easy to reconnect at any time and Cecil\'s voice has a soothing quality. Essentially I go through two things at a time because neither can hold my attention on their own.
And while i have my issues with the show as a whole, I have to say there are some very clever ideas in it, though they\'re not yet evident in the early episodes.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.Leave a Comment:
Too overdone to enjoy.
This bucks the current of effusive praise, I guess, but I found Welcome to Nightvale overwrought when I first encountered it in 2014 listening with some friends, and a recent relisten to the first three episodes only reinforced that view.
The biggest problem for me is the sheer amount of stuff that's supposedly existing or happening in and around Nightvale. There are so many references and mutually exclusive hints that I can't keep my disbelief suspended. It feels like they're taking every horror/conspiracy/scifi/etc trope they can think of and tossing it at a wall, and even if that's just some early installment weirdness, I can't get through it.
This may be an odd segue, but it reminded me of the Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon has at least one neurotic activity/custom/habit revealed every episode, until one can't help but notice that a single person can't possibly be doing all of those things - there simply isn't space or time in one person's life and living space (even a theoretical physicist should know that). Or Excalibur from Soul Eater, for whom even in a couple dozen described rules out of hundreds requires beyond full time attention. Both of those, however, become evident over the course of a season or a series, and only affect part of the story; in Welcome to Nightvale, it was obvious not just every episode, but every few minutes that not all of these things being described can possibly be happening all together in any structure of reality. This takes X space, and that covers half the town, and pretty soon there's simply no room left no matter how weird the town is.
Aside from that major issue, there are other problems. Soundwise, Cecils' voice is fine, but at times way too over the top for me to stay engaged. A far bigger issue is the music, which is usually over done and definitely too loud. The real world hipster politics that leak in from the creators personal views are jarring and annoying, especially when I might otherwise agree with it if they weren't hijacking the show to spout them.
I don't, and can't, enjoy this overdone, self important show, and have no intention of listening further short of being a shared activity with a romantic partner.