Joyce and Walky!

I believe I’ve seen this sort of moment termed gender euphoria.

This is where the storyline basically ends.  There’s a week, I think, of random stuff that follows, before we get to The Big Long Finish, but this is it.

I overanalyze this storyline superhard.  Should I?  Am I sometimes finding problems that aren’t there?  I’m not even sure I’m in a place of credibility to say.  It does remain one of my better-crafted Walkyverse stories, I think, and it’s definitely my wife’s favorite, as well as several fans’.  I think part of that is there’s just a limited number of stories out there that focus on Gender Feels.  Even if a story is tactless, sometimes it hits upon things you hadn’t known you needed to think about.

I’m reminded of my first year at college, and South Park was a new thing, and … jesus christ, Big Gay Al was probably my first introduction to a non-villified gay person character.  I mean, Big Gay Al is… probably not the best representation, but he was definitely a character that first opened my mind to “oh these folks we hate at church can be okay.”  God, I hope this storyline wasn’t, like, the Big Gay Al of storylines, but hopefully you get what I mean.   We take what we need.

Why even do a gender swap story in It’s Walky!?  I’m still poking my brain at that, to this day.  It seems like a very specific swerve, and I tried so very hard at doing it well with the skillset I had at the time.  I remember thinking, oh, sure, all these other webcomics doing gender stuff, they’re definitely “working stuff out.”  For them it’s a personal interest.  But not me!  I was doing this as an objective second-hand observer.  

I also write an awful lot of stories about being in denial, which is pretty weird, in aggregate.