Aunt Joss
on September 30, 2021 at 12:01 amIn addition to Donna Warner, here’s the other thing I was able to squeeze into this story since I took so long to finish it! That’s right, we get Jocelyne, who we learned a bunch about in Dumbing of Age. Otherwise, she’d be, uh, you know, not Jocelyne. And since I had one of Joyce’s siblings accidentally obscured in an earlier page, as remarked upon, I was able to reveal her in her full glory here! (And of course, Machete remembers his Aunt Joss, though I’m sure he knows a twenty years older version.)
Speaking of writing things later, here’s the portal to other dimensions that I first designed for a story in Shortpacked!. Put into chronological order, it looks like I’m totally planning this out all mastermind style, rather than just creating transitions to stuff I’d already written earlier.
I had to go dig up a billion-years-old Tumblr post to figure out if that was Jared or Justin to the immediate left. Turns out the guy with Joyce eyes who isn’t Jocelyne is Jared.
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I was SO HAPPY when this page went live originally =D
Is glasses-Brown the mysterious Jordan???
Per tags and old Tumblr post, yes! Jordan is the Brown sibling besides Joss in the Walkyverse who wears glasses!
HE EXISTS!
Now for the Dumbiverse debut.
Eh, some of the Brown siblings could just share a name to keep things simpler to remember. When you have that many kids with alliterative names there’s bound to be overlap.
Reminds me of that one episode of Phineas and Ferb where their cousins were named “Beckham, Beckham, Pelé, Beckham, Pelé, and Eliza… well, her middle name is Beckham.”
I’m writing this before reading the commentary, because I needed to get my thoughts out.
I knew, going into this wedding arc, that Jocelyne made a brief appearance near the end, in one of the two major cases (the other being Donna) where Willis took advantage of the story’s delay to include a character who hadn’t been created when they began drawing it. And God, if this cameo isn’t just one of the most bittersweet things Willis has ever drawn.
Because on the one hand, there’s something inexpressibly wonderful about seeing Jocelyne, in any universe, finally free to just… be. As the person she is, the person she’s been all along. To see her accepted by her family– not just by Joyce, who I’m pretty sure will come through when that day finally comes in DoA, but seemingly by everyone around her. Finally free. There’s power to that.
But at the end of the day, it’s a short-lived power. Because Jocelyne isn’t a Walkyverse character, not really. She’s a Dumbing of Age character making a fleeting cameo in Joyce and Walky!, in much the same way that, say, Tony is an It’s Walky! character who makes fleeting cameos in Dumbing of Age. And at this point, we’re in 2015, Shortpacked! is over, and the Walkyverse is no more. This is not its continuation, this is its ghost. And so, barring any unforseen developments, we will never see this version of her again. Because this, ultimately, is a reminder of the life that Jocelyne– the “real” one, the one we’ve followed since Freshman Family Weekend– will never have.
Because Carol is never going to accept her. Considering the lengths she went to to justify every horrible thing Toedad did to Becky– and to Joyce, for that matter– it’s clear that she doesn’t have the capacity to evolve beyond her sad, pathetic world. So long as Carol is breathing, it will never be safe for Jocelyne to live as herself openly, because there’s no telling what Carol’d do. And as much as Hank has grown over the course of DoA… well, I have my doubts. He’s changed a lot, but there’s no telling if and when he’ll reach a wall.
It was at this point in writing that I got too overwhelmed to continue. TL;DR– I can’t help but smile, seeing her so happy, but still– fuck.
Yep. Sometimes I hope we’ll maybe get a Walkyverse Kids Fight the Martians (and/or Soggies) storyline. Maybe then we’d get Walkyverse Jocelyne in any real capacity. But most likely, it’s just this. I’m still happy with how Shortpacked ended, but I do miss those nerds, and Dumbingverse Robin and Leslie’s roles as adults means they’re unlikely to get quite the spotlight time they’d need to overtake the Shortpacked pair as my ‘real’ versions of them. (I am 100% certain Robin and Leslie’s roles as adults were intentional to keep them from spotlight stealing while Shortpacked was running, like how Amber only really started becoming a protagonist in DoA after she’d left the store. Which was a totally reasonable decision, and they’re primed to have more active roles this season. But even still, they’re adults and that means they don’t naturally get as involved in everyone else’s storylines as active players.)
And agreed re: Dumbingverse Hank. I hope his fear of losing his kids will allow him to make that next critical jump, but I can see it being the one he just can’t manage.
Yeah, something like , but a webcomic with Machete & The Triplets, guest starring Aunt Joss.
Sorry for the slightly garbled HTML tag.
How exactly did Carol get over Jocelyne being a girl in this universe? It wasn’t brought up a lot, but Carol is still an Answers in Genesis type.
For all Carol’s obsessing over having grandbabies, she does seem to be a little more accepting of LGBT people than her Dumbingverse counterpart (similarly to how Ethan got on better with his parents in Shortpacked!, if I recall) – remember how she was insisting in It’s Walky! at first that Joyce had to be lying about her love for Walky, because she “knew” all the signs pointed to Joyce really being a lesbian?
Carol hasn’t been radicalized by decades of Fox News in this timeline circa 2010.
Looking at that Tumblr image: dang, Jordan looks like Dorothy. No wonder DoA Joyce imprinted on her.
…Not sure if this helps or hurts the ship, but wow, you’re right.
Correct version:
Yeah, something like this , but a webcomic with Machete & The Triplets and guest starring Aunt Joss.
Inteded as a reply to Regalli above, sorry again.
Having never read these subscription strips until now, it’s nice to see a version of Jocelyne as who she is, and apparently accepted by her family. I wonder when (or if) we’ll get to see something like that with Jocelyne in DoA.
So I missed commenting on this in all of my Feels, but holy shit Machete’s powers are ridiculous. Not necessarily in a bad way, but wow.
Like, mind-wiping? Okay, sure. Head Alien did that all the time, albeit not of his own inherent ability. But mind-reading? Was that a thing before this? I wonder what else he has up his sleeve…
That’s one hell of a time skip