The good news is that I’ve found a source of the original Night Vale openings. The bad news is that the source is YouTube videos so I’m going to have to download and edit the metadata of something like 70 episodes manually. Oh well, it’ll be worth it in the end. Plus then I can help others who are looking for the same thing! Assuming anyone besides me cares about that sort of thing.
- You Are What You Wheat by horizon
- com·pli·cat·ed by Monochromatic
- Unstable Sale by Estee
You Are What You Wheat by horizon
I came out of this confused. A bit like PRAT this seemed to not quite know what it was trying to be. Writing was better though! Characters maintained consistent from scene to scene. So I think this was just the author having some fun writing nonsense stuff.
com·pli·cat·ed by Monochromatic
Sweet Rarity & Twilight fluff. The author had something of a struggle writing this, apparently, but I thought it was a nice easy and fun read. If Monochromatic wrote nothing but this kind of fluff I’d be pretty happy with their output.
Take a silly running gag from a kid’s cartoon show. Extrapolate out to a realistic and a somewhat cynical final result. That gets you this story. It’s… Pretty good? Kind of depressing? Sort of meanders? Not really a story exactly? Yes to all of the above.
The City of Doors 
Horizon
September 18, 2018 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for reading YAWYW! It might help to know that it was a collaborative writing project based on a bunch of authors getting bored while waiting for a Writeoff round, and riffing back and forth at each other in the comment thread. “Seemed to not quite know what it was trying to be” is literally true, since everyone was pulling in slightly different directions!
Griffin
September 18, 2018 at 5:20 pm
I read it six months ago so can’t remember much about it except I was amused and very confused by it. Your explanation makes a lot of sense.