There has to be another way!
on December 3, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Same Planet, Different Dementia
Location: Rosenthal Industries, Shortpacked!
Dang, can you imagine being stuck at an early Shortpacked! level of artistic rendering for nearly half a decade. The worst!
Anyway, here’s where we learn what happened to Rachel in our universe. The slightly crankier version of her was an Alien piloting a human mechsuit, while Head Alien II suped Rachel up and sent her to rescue a version of him that was trapped.
I imagine Head Alien II has been around so long and in so many universes that this sorta thing happens to him all the time. Every other minute he’s just sending folks to other universes to get him out of jams and also keep paradoxes from happening.
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Paradox maintenance sounds like when I check one of our company’s records and it has the files for another record, and THAT record has the files for another record, and x1000 DX
…moderation? huh? =’
Ahem. LET’S DO THE TIME LOOP AGAIN~!
And meanwhile, OW to that backstory Rachel. Even if she wanted to make the best of a bad situation, she can’t, because this universe’s Joe will never undergo sufficient character growth to be hers until that tag is pulled. No one will! It’s awful! Hell, given Joe’s parents were still married while he was in college, imagine being stuck in a marriage you absolutely DESPISE and can’t divorce because that would change the status quo. Joe’s mom is probably trapped in the role of Shrewish Sitcom Wife (who everyone realizes ten years later that actually the dude was a turd and she was reasonable,) and she can’t escape.
Apropos of nothing I went to continue reading this storyline on Shortpacked.com and man, the picture quality increase since even 2013 is impressive.
For some reason, I find the idea of Robin being dead… really upsetting. Like, more upsetting than a lot of the deaths that happened in the main Walkyverse.
Maybe it’s because Head Alien II specifically killed her as a child, but… well, I guess that sorta hits the nail on the head, really. Robin acts like a big kid that never really grew up, so her being dead would always feel like murdering a child. She’s something that should always exist. The universe without her is just plain wrong.
I wonder how life is going for the Leslie from this universe. Is she still in the closet? Pretending to be someone she’s not, because the Tag won’t let her say otherwise? Married to Leo, and yet all alone? I’d like to hope that after the Tag was finally pulled, things went okay for her in the end.
Really disturbing when you think about how it probably happened, given the flashback we got a few months after this.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/flashbacks-galore
Huh. I suppose that would be a useful way to keep that villain around and viable.
Why the chuffing fucknuggets is my comment awaiting moderation? I haven’t changed my name or address or computer or anything.
WAIT. Is everyone awaiting moderation? IS that why no one has commented for 40 minutes?
Late reply but yeah, everyone was stuck for a while. Not sure why.
Chuffing fucknuggets is now my favourite expression.
**grin**
Okay, so let me see if I get the timeline straight.
HA2 arrives in Pamelaverse and casually murders Kid Robin. However, he ends up stuck because of the Drama Tag. One day, Rachel lands there, having being sent by Future HA2. She escapes and lets him out in the process.
HA2 eventually arrives in Walkyverse and captures Rachel. He then sends her back in time since he knows that she frees him in the past, preserving the time loop.
HA2 can’t go back in time to before he murders Robin, because that’s a separate timeline completely.
Yep, that’s how it goes, at least as far as we can tell.
HAII also doesn’t seem to have time travel among his power kit to our knowledge – he might arrive in different universes at different points to be able to kill abductees as kids, but that may just be because different universes are running on a different time frame or something. So he landed in this one much earlier in that universe’s chronology presumably, and is stuck here significantly earlier in his own than we saw when he entered the Walkyverse proper for this timeloop to occur, but he can’t consciously jump around in a universe’s chronology as far as we’ve seen.
Wait, that’s got to be a mistake. It’s been up for almost two hours and no comments? No way!
How does HA2 know that murdering Robin as a child trapped him, surely he must have murdered many of his adversaries as children in this world by the time it progressed to the present day.
So killing Robin in this universe somehow resulted in Pamila inventing the drama tag, thus trapping Head Alien II here. Or am I missing something?
Pamela invents the drama tag regardless
But for some reason, Robin is the only person (other than Pamela) who can see and interact with the tag (Rachel can now, because she was specifically modified to be able to)
Honestly I just realized, but modding Rachel with Robin’s specific Drama Tag Ability, whatever it is, would explain why specifically he was lurking in the basement waiting for Robin to pull it in our universe – presumably he needed to observe her with some hidden Science Implements or something to see what allows her to handle the tag.
Oh, also: Galasso can also handle the tag, at least once it’s pulled, but has a vested interest in not pulling it same as Pamela.
Man, early Shortpacked! universe without Robin has to be awful. Can Rachel modify HAII genetics and make him into Robin? Then new Robin would pull out the drama tag and this universe would get much better. But I guess this is not what will happen.
Hey Willis, when you wrote this, were you conscious of the fact that you were essentially un-fridging a female character, or was that just a nice byproduct of the story you wound up writing?
Definitely conscious, as explained way back then in a Tumblr post.
https://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/40848152188/so-i-figure-i-can-finally-talk-about-how-this-big
In regards to the concept of fridging, here’s my thoughts: In a vacuum, I think it’s fine to kill a female character for the development a male one. Even the example that defined the term, the murder of Alex Dewitt, the girlfriend of Kyle Rayner, it’s Kyle’s Uncle Ben moment! I’d be really sad if I found out my girlfriend died! Now he knows to take it seriously! It’s not a fun game anymore!
(please disregard that actually maybe you could have told a really good and interesting story about Kyle having a stable and loving relationship with a cool professional photographer whose professionalism and blase attitude towards superheroics naturally balances out really well with Kyle’s impish and earnest personality and his boyish glee of having superpowers dropped in his lap)
And even specifically with Joe, we do get a pretty good character beat out of it. Everyone else always hulked out and went crazy violent, and all he can do is weakly mutter and stop himself from breaking down. He’s dying on the inside, the woman he loves is gone and has been for years if she ever existed at all. That’s actually really good pathos!
But, you don’t invent a term like ‘fridging’ in a vacuum. Gail Simone sure didn’t, even as early as the original posting about Women in Refrigerators it was a ridiculously common storytelling idea, and it’s not like it’s gotten any more uncommon. An individual story about a man being motivated by the death of a woman can still be good, it can still be a story, it’s just happened so often that, innately, it has to prove itself as worth it.
J&W! didn’t really do that, to be honest. Even as a good character moment for Joe, that’s all it was and then it’s not like we were supposed to see him move on from it. Joe was one of the original cast members of the Walkyverse and his final scene is him lamenting that he’s sad and broken because the love of his life is gone in somebody else’s story, that bites! For everyone!
And so here we are, with one of the high points of Shortpacked! as a series, where numerous character arcs and plots get wrapped up in one big finale. It was completely correct to kill Rachel to make Joe sad, because otherwise we would not have gotten this.
Thank you for linking that old post! Wasn’t sure if I could find it down the line and it looks like we won’t get quite the same commentary.
Yep, this story exists to unfridge Rachel, even as it’s mostly ABOUT Leslie, Pamela, and the fear of change. But despite the logistical trickiness of solving a J&W! problem in Shortpacked, it manages to be one of Shortpacked’s best stories, especially if you’re a fan of Leslie.
Head Alien tended to accidentally screw up his own plans fairly often, so I guess it’s not surprising that Head Alien II kinda expected he might screw things up for himself and made plans to fix his own mistakes in other universes.
See Nono’s comment – this is a past HAII in his personal chronology, so the HAII who eventually reached the Walkyverse remembered getting stuck in the Heyoverse and that he’d have to send a Rachel back to pull the Drama Tag.
Uh oh, Leslie probably won’t react well to that revelation.
Is dumbingofage.com down for anyone else? Won’t even load for me
The way HA2 acts through this entire scene definitely feels like he doesn’t consider this to be a particularly strange occurance.
It does make sense that HAII’s ‘go to various universes and kill the most fun-to-kill abductees over and over again, for funsies, forever’ plan probably had some serious consequences when you sometimes kill an abductee too early.