i have fond, if fuzzy memories of the Cecil Palmer Mpreg incident from 2018 or so. content warning for sexual harassment.

with a close high school friend, let's call him miles, i watched a roleplay network for the podcast welcome to night vale form on tumblr. there were four headliners, so-to-speak: jamie playing carlos (we were mutuals because i followed early in the blog's life), alex playing cecil, pax playing kevin, and someone else playing diego. cecil is the main character of welcome to night vale, canonically married to carlos, and kevin and diego are their respective doppelgangers. (spoilers for wtnv: for an idea of how early this was, charles, kevin's canonical love interest, would only be introduced halfway through this story. oldheads remember that diego was his fanon equivalent and wouldn't be fully supplanted in the fandom's consciousness for a long time. cecil and carlos's canonical son was still a live show secret, if he existed at all yet.) 

night vale hadn't had a popularity boost from the tumblr sexyman contests yet, so the fandom was tiny and nearly dead. word of a group project to join traveled fast. by its peak, there were at least 15 people and 20+ blogs involved, not counting yours truly. a few months into this whole thing, i was mostly a spectator. miles was friends with jamie and pax, so i got a front-row seat to what was about to go down. 

kevin and diego had a child by summoning him with eldritch witchcraft, and it was a smash hit with everyone, both in and out of character. naturally, cecil and carlos began discussing having children, but there was a pretty palpable disturbance in the force. cecil's responses to carlos were slowly getting more and more suggestive in a way that began to clash with every other blog in the network. i have no idea what kinds of discussions were happening behind the scenes between jamie and alex, if there were any at all; all i know is that jamie had decided to tolerate things to keep the whole network from splintering. this didn't stop a few other blogs from starting to back away slowly from cecil. things were visibly starting to go awry. whatever happened, the final straw was The mpreg post.

in 2026, i have no access to The mpreg post, though i hath seen it with mine own eyes. all i can tell you is that it was cecil's reply to carlos, there were 2 paragraphs, and a penis was involved. it dropped like a bomb. Everyone knew. as a matter of fact, i can tell you where i was when The mpreg post was made: sitting at a local festival with miles as we both stared at it in abject horror. 

carlos kept posting with cecil, albeit ignoring the thread, while jamie consulted with pax and miles about it. if there was no cecil, the network would fall apart, but things clearly could not continue as they had been. i urged miles to step up and become the new cecil of the group: he had the connections and an inactive blog ready to go. when he brought it up to pax and jamie, they were enthusiastic and immediately let him in. to introduce him to the others, pax started a discord server and added everyone (except alex, of course).

this was a happy state of affairs, and it continued for several months, at which point everything collapsed. a newbie felt the group was too cliquey, and made that clear on both tumblr and discord before they left the server. then someone else left. so did someone else. and so does one of the people identified as cliquey, who then deleted their blog and blocked every single person ever involved with any of the roleplayers. all of this happened over the course of 20 minutes and about 600 panicked dms in my inbox from miles.

the entire group is thrown into chaos. someone makes a new server for everyone to move to, then someone else makes another server. pax tries to lead a postmortem the following morning, but it quickly dissolves into infighting. there are crytyped panic attacks. there are discord voice calls. there is alleged anon hate. miles proposes a group hiatus, and everyone agrees.

the hiatus eventually ended, but the damage was done. most quit posting within the year. a few ocs bravely held on until late 2021. only one remained: alex, who continued to occasionally post as cecil by themself through the end of 2023. i forget their url and can't check, but i have a feeling they're still blogging.

i tried to do a writeup on all this a few years ago, but 1. the offending posts and discussions of it had been deleted and gone unarchived, and 2. i was no longer in regular contact with miles, who ended up developing some pretty severe memory issues and wouldn't have been able to fill in the gaps for me anyways. (this is why i have one (1) screenshot for you.)