A Friendly Dessert Comunity...

so I really associate kevin with old timey music, specifically 1930s, and beyond the general aesthetic I actually did it because of the symbolism, so this is the rant 2 explain that. it may not be the most accurate ever buuuuut shhhh
Ok so 1930’s music is really happy and peppy and shit right? All bout the amarican dream and that jazzBut the thing is the 1930’s were like the hight of the Great Depression
The thing that started me on this whole thought process was “Dawn of a New Day” by Horace Heidt, witch has lyrics like “Here we come, young and old/Come to watch all the wonders unfold/And the tune that we play/It's the dawn of a new day” and “Better times are here to stay/As we live and laugh the American way!” And a general vibe of “everything’s great” But again it was written during the Great Depression things literally could not have been worse, people were homeless, people were jobless, the economy is in shambles.
Witch got me to thinking about why all the songs are like that (or at least why all the popular songs were like that)
And after a bit of rabbit hole-ing I came to the conclusion that people we’re trying to forget how fucking awful their lives were by putting on this sorta forced happiness
And you can probably already see how this relates to Kevin and the smiling god but I am going to over-explain anyway
so during the redecorating episode Lauren says something along the lines of ‘doesnt this make you feel great :)’ and Kevin responds with ‘does it? I hardly feel anything at all :)’ and I know that is the exact quote because GOD that is a line™️ And in tryptech we see post-Strex!Kevin
And a very iconic line from that episode is “I’m a smile and a twitch of the wrist” witch is often interpreted kinda sinisterly but. It fucking isnt??? Its not his villian song its not a taunt. You can hear the pain in his voice its a cry for help of “I’m not me anymore. I can never be me again. I was re-made to be bland and generic and happy and I can no longer be anything else even after all these years”
Because let’s be honest here Kevin speaks like an “inspirational” add for fucking Gillette razors or some shit
Witch again loops back to putting on that fake face of happiness for the purposes of being palletable
During the Great Depression poverty and homelessness rates were super high, but the conception of homelessness and poverty being a result of laziness was still there, so if you did anything other than pretend to be fine and hustle harder and pull yourself up by your bootstraps you would be shunned
in mudstone abyss we learn that being unable to smile effectively gets you banished from the community.

I can only imagine depression in that kind of society being handed two ways

• go to church and pray real hard and the smiling god will devour all your sad feelings! 🙂 (And we all know depression doesn’t work like that)
• banishment, like what happened when Lauren got a frown tattooed on her face

So what happens when your depressed In desert bluffs too? You shrug it off, you put on a fake smile, because you’ll be shunned otherwise. And I sure fucking hope none of those people took the story of all smiles day too seriously
Even if Kevin only has the smallest fragment of “Strex ideology” left in him (witch from his actions in the patreon eps and in cannon it seems like he has quite a bit more) since he’s at the head of the society he’s created, that little bit gets passed around and filtered out to everyone. You have to be productive, you have to work, and above all else you must be smiling. We don’t care that your life has been uprooted, we don’t care what’s going on in your life, we don’t care that thousands of Americans have lost their jobs. You have to be happy, or your shunned.
And thus, 1930s music acting like nothing is wrong, like we’re all living the American dream, and thus, why Kevin is so drawn to it. almost some sort of subconsious cry for help. You fukin KNOWWWWWWW im inasne about kevin and cognitive dissonance!!!!

I am NOT a fan of kevlos personally. I dont hold anything against the ppl who do obv im not a creep but I think the having them fall in love i think pidgion holds both kevin and carlos into roles that their dessert otherworld arcs were specifically about moving away from. that being said I dont think they h8ed eachother the whole time or had no relationship either, i mean they spent ten years together in the dessert otherworld and how they both were basically they’re only source of comfort during that time and also how they are litterally the same. it devours highlights it especially kevin is carlos if carlos prioritized science and “helping” people over actually listening to and helping them anyway the more carlos is stressed the more he locks himself in his lab and tries to science his problems away and sometimes that’s just not possible. and he completely tears himself up over it and you can really see it in it devours where he goes against all of his morals for the sake of protecting his family from the desert otherworld when in reality he’s actually making it easier to access and the WHOLE TIME he tries so hard to pretend everything is normal and even succeeds mostly! and like. hmmm unhealthy work ethic hmm putting on a happy face for the outside world when inside your dying hmmmm. like no fukin WONDER he has a complicated relationship with his time in the d.o!! they were friends they were on good terms!! they share alot of the same ideals and personality traits and they were working towards a common goal of making the d.o a more enjoyable and habitable place to be!! and then he walks in and sees how kevin “finally decorated” and he realizes. I can’t become this. so he leaves. and it’s not like he hadn’t been trying to leave the whole time but i think he was putting it off a little bit because he didn’t know abt the time dialation yet and like. fuck man, it’s been ten years. what’s changed? What have I missed? How can I get back to normal? Maybe it would be better to help the people right in front of me than go back to a town i who’s moved on without me. and then he sees it and he realizes he has to leave because if he doesn’t he will become something he doesn’t want to be.

What if Carlos started pushing Cecil away because of all of the whole ✨I’m deeply fucked up inside ✨ thing and started to sleep at the lab
What if one day Cecil gets worried and comes in with soup to see him absolutely broken
Bags under his eyes hasn’t showered in weeks the whole sha bang
Imagine him hunched over a Petri dish with some kind of liquid in it
Cecil knows that something has been going wrong with the experiment because Carlos told him over the phone
But what Carlos didn’t tell Cecil was that the reason was because his tears kept falling in and disrupting the results
Because that’s what he cared most about at this point
Not his own internal suffering
But the fact that his suffering is interfering with the world around him
Imagine in the weeks/months leading up to this moment he made huge strides in science, he developed a vaccine for throat spiders, he helped fill in the holes from it devours
And each time he was applauded and praised but he felt nothing
He had to do better
He had to take the next step
Imagine Carlos calling Kevin even though he promised himself to never associate with Kevin again
Maybe he was drunk or maybe he was just that desperate
He didn’t want to worry his perfectly imperfect Cecil with all this... but even if Kevin did blab it’s not like it would have any consequences right? Cecil doesn’t trust him anyway-
Imagine Kevin offering up a solution
Imagine Kevin saying that his amazing and productive work ethic would be better appreciated in the desert otherworld
Imagine Kevin saying that no one ever has to deal with those pesky emotions under the smiling god
Imagine Carlos seriously being tempted by that offer before hanging up
And blocking Kevin for good measure
And now we’re back to Cecil and Carlos in the lab together
Cecil holding a tray of food
And Carlos looking like he’s half dead, surrounded by various colored liquids in the dead of night

I saw a theory on reddit a while back about the light in the tree being the smiling god,, or that Cecil’s dad was a worshipper of the smiling god,, And I don’t think it’s the most convincing theory but also that would be so fucking cool in the weird destiny side of things. Like we already know about how Cecil basically always wanted to be a radio broadcaster and how he was also pretty much destined to be the voice of nightvale but it would be so fucking cool if he was also destined to have the whole fucking Kevin double thing. Low key it would make a great au where their dads were friends and then something went horribly wrong witch caused Cecil’s dad to die and Kevin’s dad to become a fucking centipede that only says kev.

anyway do you think that after cecil’s mom left he realized that anyone could disappear from your life and any moment and that’s why he gushed about carlos so much because he thinks that at any day he could just wake up and he’d be gone. just a thought. ms palmer really gave all her kids permanent issues neglected them used them as magical substitutes and then left. you love to see it

Okay so we all know suit cecil is a scourge upon humanity HOWEVER The jury is still out on Kevin and suits
Pre-Strex? Absolutely had Cecil’s fashion sense. Pre Strex Kevin would wear antlers and fishing boots for a casual Friday
Strex!kevin wears suits but not in a good way they are way to fucking small for him and it looks like he’s dying the whole time
D.O!kevin is were it gets tricky. Technically speaking? Strex is gone. However kevin hasn’t quite reached post-Strex levels of self awareness. He’s shifted gears and put more emphasis on the smiling god side of Strex than the constant work side, but the influence of Strex is front and center the whole time.
He wears the same suit that he was wearing when Steve threw him into the portal but it’s ripped and teared and loosened a bunch. Maybe once the desert otherworld started becoming a Society he went to a shop and got it fixed up a bit but I think he still wears them their just slightly more comfortable
Post-Strex is pre-Strex fashion and Strex fashion combined. When he’s lucid he tried his best to get out of that fucking suit that holds so many awful memories but he’s just to old and frail to, and when he isn’t lucid he’s breaking himself trying to be productive ™️ when he physically cant handle it. “Sometimes I am one me and sometimes I am another” is most exemplified here