What are you doing to do?
on September 12, 2021 at 12:01 amChapter: The Wedding
Location: The Wedding Church
Here’s where the whole “Oops Rachel Was A Secret Plant” bombshell hits the wall. Like, honestly, it’s just a random cruel thing to do. It’s only poignant in that Joe… isn’t going to “hulk out” as he laments here. He’s just going to be devastated. That’s not fun. This was a dumb idea. Way to go, David! Don’t try to build up pathos just because you feel expected to! Fix this later!
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I mean, what’s he SUPPOSED to do? He only worked out his crotch muscles =p
like, I personally would have to build up anger, specifically… like being demiromantic but for violence toward others
idk if I’d even be able to fight off a wild animal if attacked, and I’d have to be specifically targeted
See, I always thought this hit really well.
This treated Joe’s trauma as serious and real. He isn’t stronger for this – he wounded. And it takes him a great deal of time to get over it. And we see that – we see him begin to heal, but the trauma doesn’t go away – he just learns to live with it.
And yes, it works as such because Joe can’t read the tags. He doesn’t know, in this moment, if Rachel was EVER real. She might have always been an Alien for all he knows.
Obviously he learns the truth later, but here, in this moment, Rachel isn’t just gone – she may have always been a lie. That disrupts every single moment he has ever had with her.
…huh. I hadn’t actually considered the possibility that Joe might now think that Rachel was never real.
That interpretation actually does kinda make this scene work better.
At this moment that is absolutely what he thinks, and that would destroy you.
Even what actually happened isn’t much of an improvement. The woman he loves was abducted and replaced by a doppelgänger and he was fooled, he failed to notice.
Dang, I had never even considered that. She was probably underdeveloped enough for that to be plausible.
I think this moment works for Joe, but it’s still a bad note to leave Rachel on since the Fake Rachel plot wasn’t seeded early enough to let her actually do some concrete, onscreen sabotage or leave some clear hints about a mole. So we have a reveal that exists solely for shock value and angst. As later commentary would admit, Rachel got fridged here.
Joe should try becoming ‘The Incredible Sulk’!!
Don’t make him sad, you won’t like him when he’s sad.
put the armoir down
I don’t know, I think recognizing how common the hulk out moment is yet not being able to do it himself is in itself a good moment for Joe/the story in general. People react to trauma differently after all, and being plain stunned is one way. Plus compared to all those people who have hulked out in the past, Joe’s actually pretty well adjusted and hasn’t had HA ruining his life/his brain for years (aside from the obvious original time he was abducted).
I think the only problem with the twist is since the story of J&W is primarily based around J&W* means that we don’t get much time to focus on Joe and the fallout from the reveal (that is, I’m assuming that the story doesn’t focus a lot on Joe and his personal fallout from here on since Willis’ commentary seems so negative, I haven’t actually read it before).
*I mean to an extent it’s kind of always been about Joyce and Walky since after all the name of the strip prior to this was It’s Walky, but IW definitely had a lot of focus on other characters in its ensemble cast whereas this one has basically only had the old cast show up as guest stars in Joyce and Walky’s lives post-SEMME.
I will note having read this but trying not to spoil too much that this wedding is the finale to J&W!, and there’s a fair bit of ground still to cover. (Dorothy, army of future kids, how to get a Head Alien out of a Dorothy.) As I recall, there wasn’t much time for focus on Joe’s crisis, because that’d be a bit of a downer, and anyway the end of the wedding was posted AFTER the followup story that does this plot point justice. I think this might be the last big moment Joe gets here.
After this, Joe would make some VERY intermittent appearances in Shortpacked!, where we’d hear allusions to Something Bad that happened involving Rachel at the wedding. By which I mean ‘a couple cameos and then appearances in a couple storylines, focused on characters who were actually major actors in Shortpacked.’ This was basically it before the followup story in December 2012. (I don’t remember when exactly the wedding is supposed to take place and straight don’t know when this sequence aired since I read it, at earliest, in early 2012 well after this had been posted, but we see Joe with his post-wedding Sadness Beard in January 2010.)
So yeah, the note this plot thread is left on for three years leaves Rachel missing for Joe’s angst with no plot impact beyond pure shock value, and has a sequence where Head Alien jokes and the narrative framing backs it as a joke about Joe being raped. There’s a damn good reason why that followup arc was necessary, and why we’re all happy to take that one strip as ‘oh thank GOD at least we can all retcon that he wasn’t’.
Yeah I’ve read the whole Shortpacked “sequel” to this one and, while I get that it was technically a story in that comic and so I guess it had to focus on characters of that comic, the resolution feels more like a “look I didn’t actually fridge a character!” saving throw tacked on to a Leslie story.
That would basically be what it is. The negative commentary here is also born of regret.
I actually kinda like Joe’s reaction to this. It’s nice to see that not every former SEMMF member reacts to bad things by “hulking out”.
I get the commentary, but for me this definitely works. I believe Joe is one of the best characters both in the Walkyverse and the DoAverse, and this is a great wrap-up for his Walkyverse arc (with hindsight about the Shortpacked! coda). Sorry for Rachel, but she never got to be a real character except for the few strips where she appears as Ultra-Car mom.
I mean, Rachel at least… kinda gets to be a real character in DoA on occasion.
Although I can’t neccesarily say she’s a real character I like, considering she told a suicidal woman who’d literally just gotten out of the psych ward that she’s an irredeemable monster. Hoping we get more development on what exactly happened between them back in their freshman year.
I agree that DoA Rachel has the potential to develop into a real character whenever we get her backstory with Ruth, meanwhile she’s just a device to let us know that Ruth has a real dark side.
I mean everyone reacts differently I suppose.
Soap Operas find themselves in this situation a lot. They usually fix it by trashing the dead or dying character and trying to make viewers hate them.