andrew

it's easy to point this in its oldest form (probably) to Welcome to Night Vale, which interestingly enough, never states that Cecil Palmer has his ubiquitous third eye. still, that common fandom design has persisted. it just makes sense to a lot of artists- because it represents his omniscience, which is the backbone of the show.

consider the extremely contrasting characters that are arguably the most popular protagonists in audio dramas right now- Jon from The Magnus Archives, and Arthur from Malevolent. their eyes are probably the most recognizable parts of fan design, though like WTNV, they remain (mostly) undescribed in the show.

they are opposite sides of the same coin. the eyes are important because of how they function within the medium. audio drama is the only type of non-textual media that has no visual aspect, and despite that, the imagined visual aspect is often the most important part. in the absence of real visual, the genre creates its own exaggerated form of the visual.

it's much easier to tell a story about a strange desert community if your narrator is omniscient, giving him the eyes to describe everything going on in town and convert the most amount of information to audio form. it's much easier to tell a story about strange instances in people's lives if the narrator can see these instances in visceral detail and pry them out of people. and it's much easier to describe an action/adventure story if, ironically, your protagonist is blind, with a built-in narrator in his own head. their eyes become your ears. and in audio drama, information is sparing, always having to make the most of what little you have. if you cannot have the omniscient author or the eye of the camera, you must fact your protagonist become the author or the camera.

audio drama is about audio, but also, it's not. we latch on to the characters who see more than any normal human ever would, because we're visual creatures, and we want as many scraps of information that can be gleaned out of audio fiction as possible. we want omniscient Cecil and all-seeing Jon to describe impossible scenes, and guide-dog John to tell us the walls in front of us and the darkness ahead of us. then we see it for ourselves.