HEY, YOU!
on June 10, 2016 at 12:01 amOnce more I can feel myself speaking through Joyce, but probably not so transparently. A passionate anger is directed at, essentially, God. Bad things have happened to good people, but God is dispassionate. He’s too detached to really care. The dead are still dead, despite our pleas. The Cheese would stand in as an expy for The Almighty a few more times as It’s Walky! continued, primarily as Joyce battled her faith.
Which is thankfully another small reason to be glad Joyce showed up in the final version of this story, rather than staying topside. This was a good relationship to establish, going forward.
Otherwise, you can kinda tell that she wasn’t originally planned to be here by asking… what did she really accomplish by joining the story? The Cheese does what he wants and leaves. Joyce kind of yells at him a bit but everything would have happened the same without her being there, sans the revival of Hooper and his teammates. Despite my need for an infusion of positivity, I still needed the storyline to end with certain things in certain places, biding their time for later developments. And so, despite Joyce’s Big Heroic Return, the storyline ends the same as it would have.
All said, I think the take-away is to layer even your darkest storylines with some happy breather moments. I felt forced to here, but I think it ended up better in the long run.
I think you’re right.
Getting his attention, and even getting an answer, is pretty impressive.
“Who am I to decide?”
Uh, by yanking everyone out of the room and SEALING it, YOU DID DECIDE, ya jerk!
As always, hearing the process behind your story is fascinating.
I feel like the comic would have worked better if the Cheese had gone, ‘Who are you to decide?’. It flows better; who is Joyce to decide whether or not someone is good, and whether or not they deserve to die?
Really? I always liked the element of humility in his answer. It makes him seem wiser.
Except, as Cholma points out, the Cheese does decide. By sealing off the chamber he’s explicitly made a choice that Big Boss does not deserve help.
The Cheese does make an extreme effort to limit his meddling, though. The only reason he intervened here was because the Martian Embassy was breached, making powerful technology available to the wrong people.
Martian tech in Semme’s hands would probably be worse than in HA hands. I mean, it’s Semme we are talking about.
Naw, The Cheese saying “who am I to decide” tells us something important about The Cheese that comes into play later on in the story. He’s attempting to explain his self-imposed limitations; he doesn’t care about putting a stranger in her place.
Some days, you just want to scream at the world.
Joyce’s last conversation with the Cheese is, for me, the high point of IW and perhaps of anything Willis has made so far, and one of my favourite webcomic pages ever. It’s kind of funny to hear that the launch of that inter-character arc was kind of haphazard, but that’s how stories go.
so… why is his name “the cheese”? does he have a cheese head behind the shadows?
Yes!
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Humans cannot hope to understand God. But at the very least, omnibenevolent means being a good person to the evil people too.