Did everything shift?
on December 1, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Same Planet, Different Dementia
Characters: Amber O'Malley, Galasso, Honey Bun, Leslie Bean, Malaya Eugenio, Ninja Rick, Pamela, Rachel Jackson
Location: Shortpacked!
Amber seems to notice we’re in full color now. Rachel notes that this feeling happened once already, presumably when Leslie arrived and things became the watercolory style they’ve been for the past few strips.
Rachel has to have an attack style that must be hilarious if she wants it to work, so yes she has arrows with boxing gloves.
I guess it’s been four years since the Walky/Joyce wedding? Machete does look about three.
Amber’s response in the last panel here raises some questions we’re probably going to ignore.
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Shortpacked! started as line art only, so this tracks
also Leslie ends up keeping Rachel for herself EVERYONE WINS
so was it B/W like the start of Shortpacked before Leslie arrived?
Check back to HAII’s flashback strip. Notice how the flashback’s in black and white?
Yep. Leslie’s dimension-hopping and brief drama tag potentiality from the sugar high caused the shift to the gradient colors. Rachel finally getting there shifts us back to full colors.
ah
So Wack’d, as you were saying about how retroactively no one in the Walkyverse will be straight? I for one totally forgot this panel.
YAY. (Even if we are ignoring it for now.)
Maybe she’s getting off on seeing Galasso punches?
Well, kneed in the head, which is still damn badass.
i was saying!
i had also forgotten this panel. it pleases me
Speaking of unexplored hints of queerness in Shortpacked, I’ll note that Ken does appear in the crowd for the Diversity Closet strip (where said closet is specifically for sexual outliers) and does not appear in the final panel where everyone else has shoved themselves in. Presumably for comedy, but hey, room for headcanoning.
The Diversity Closet isn’t exclusively for queer people, Jacob was straight but his sexual hangups qualified him for entry
Well aware, but again: room for headcanoning, especially because Ken’s been firmly in the realm of background character in DoA so the ‘retroactively, no one in the Walkyverse is straight’ factor has yet to include him.
Okay, I actually like Malaya as a character, but something about Rachel punching them while saying “the source of this world’s problems” does give me a bit of a laugh, even if that’s not remotely what’s meant in context.
Same.
Rachel’s never even heard of Malaya – like, she first appeared in 2011, and Rachel went missing sometime in the realm of 2009ish (per the ‘four years,’ but we also know she was replaced ahead of the Christmas elopement,) so by the time she was kidnapped NO ONE SHE HAD EVER REMOTELY MET knew them yet. It’s purely a meta gag, and I’m not 100% sure it was an intentional meta gag given Malaya wasn’t intended to be hated so much more than Mike, but it nonetheless works even as I enjoy Malaya’s existence.
Malaya’s a fun character, but also one of those characters it’s fun to watch get taken down a peg.
It’s not just any punch, it’s an offhand backhand, the ultimate dismissive blow in the fight choreographer’s lexicon.
Also, Machete looks about three…where? It doesn’t look like he’s been born in this universe.
Machete looks about three in the regular Walkyverse, as seen at Amber and Mike’s wedding.
I like Malaya as a character in the Walkyverse. I find her much more annoying in DoA.
I have always loved Leslie’s line there at the end.
I love the entire last panel. The whole strip showing that Rachel became really badass while in this comedic universe is great.
It makes sense. She is her daughter’s mother.
Sometimes i forget how she’s supposed to be smart
And here we see the author, having been feeling somewhat bad about how he fridged a character, going out of his way to make it up to her.
Doing a very good job of it, I might add
It’s a funny thing to think about.
It’s easy to view stories as these perfect things formed from nothing where everything works as intended instead of something made in the moment that one can reflect on later.
Fridging Rachel at the wedding to make Joe sad was the best possible idea, in that it was the best idea at the time, and when it stopped being the best idea it led to this, something even better.
1) Great demonstration of why Maggie once described a character study of Rachel as “the hottest girl” Willis ever made.
2) Yes, that does look like a plunger at the end of an arrow shaft!
i’d be curious to see this study
Well, it’s not my study; my personal preferences are for shortish, curvy, and glasses (Amber. Faye or Marigold from QC. Ellen from Leftover Soup. Carol or Alex from Between Failures.)
However, from the DofA Tumblr, here it is.
My take on this Amber is basically unchanged from when this story first ran: I don’t think she’s VERY bisexual, but she’s so frustrated from years in a sexless marriage (with a guy who turns her crank but clearly isn’t interested) that her desires are now “all over the map.”
Sometimes it is okay to kill a character to make a protagonist sad: that’s how we got Batman. I didn’t really object to Rachel’s treatment on the grounds of it being a fridging. I objected because it was an anticlimax. “Oops fembot all along” is not really a good follow-up for “Joe’s girlfriend is suddenly cold and distant,” nor is it really satisfying after reading other scenes where “something bad happened to her but we won’t say what.” It mostly seemed to happen because Head Alien needed his “trademark emotional suckerpunch” and wearing the body of Walky’s ex-crush wasn’t getting the job done. It’s totally in character for him to torment Joe by not providing him any closure, but we needed closure here, too. Thankfully, this story (and its lead-ins) came through spectacularly.