FFZZZT!
on December 9, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Same Planet, Different Dementia
Location: Shortpacked!
The irony in going back to unfridge Rachel, I kinda ended up swapping narrative spots with Pamela. And so here’s at least one more moment for her to be awesome before she goes.
This Shortpacked! store now lives in unDrama-Tagged space now, and as such I had to… fully render this stockroom. Dangit! Hoisted by my own visual language!!!!
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HAII wobbling around as he reforms always reminded me of laminated paper.
Dang, HA2 turned into Roger from American Dad for a single frame
Those boxes a pulled-drama-tag thing, or are they always “this side up” down?
It’s been a running thing for basically all of Willis’ webcomics that, if there is a visible arrow on a box, it will be pointed down. I think there’s been at least one exception to show something as being really viscerally wrong, but I can’t recall where.
It’s usually only pointing up if Joe is holding the box.
Also I see the classic “this side up” gag makes a reappearance.
You know, for a character who existed just for this storyline, you did a damn good job fleshing her out enough that I am genuinely glad she lives in DoA. I see why she and Galasso work together. I would vote for a Pamela bonus strip. I should vote for a Pamela bonus strip sometime.
Fridging (to me) is defined a lot as whether or not something feels like fridging. This really doesn’t.
Pamela has agency, she has character, she dies after heroically shooting an alien in the face with a plasma cannon of her own design, all the good stuff.
Yeah. Just ‘getting killed’ isn’t fridging.
I have this conversation with my wife a lot. In her side of the novel series, she’s planning to kill one of the major female characters, and she’s worried it might come off as fridging and bury your gays. And I have to remind her that when the entire cast is bi, killing one of the bi characters as a major plot point and the culmination of may plotlines where it is a central focus of the narrative is neither of those things. It’s the ‘killed off for real’ trope. Entirely different.
(I may spend too much time on TV Tropes)
Also helps that she fills the same kind of role, especially in the main Walkyverse, as your Uncle Ben and Wayne parents. Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend gave the term its name, since it was exceptionally gruesome (among other things, how do you go about stuffing a body in a refrigerator? Because once you’re already going to the trouble of killing this person, it’s not a huge stretch to assume the answer was ‘dismemberment’) and she stuck around just long enough to be something resembling an actual character, but Death By Origin Story is generally acceptable, if a bit cliche in basically every form by now. (Dead parents? Yep. Dead romantic partner? Yep. Dead best friend or sibling? Plenty. ‘Dead children’ tends to be a bit rarer, at least on its own, but there are still a few.)
Walkyverse Pamela was always out of the picture before this story happened. Maybe without this storyline she could still have been written to be out there somewhere, but even before this point it’s established Conquest knows/believes her mother’s dead. So yeah, this story ultimately kills her, but since this story is also the only reason she gets any screentime at all, it doesn’t feel like a fridging so much as expanding on a character who came pre-dead in the series, like a flashback story about the Wayne parents. (I mean, THIS Pamela dies as a result of this story, but we’ll discuss that in a bit too.) It makes ‘Conquest’s mother, Galasso’s partner’ a PERSON and not just an empty space where we know someone had to exist, and we can assume a lot about Walkyverse Pamela being quite similar to this one based off creating the drama tag and their shared last words to Galasso.
Also, it’s her own narrative getting her killed, it’s not to fuel Feelings for Galasso.
It’s the opposite of fridging; it’s redshirting, which is possibly worse?
Not just Pamela, but this entire universe, plus whatever universes HAII is going to hit after it, is going to be subjected to a massive murder spree so our three characters can get home. And that doesn’t matter because none of the people who will die are viewpoint characters.
Some unknown universes (or at least the abductees in them) will die. Unfortunately due to time paradoxes, they had already died by Leslie and Rachel’s version of the timeline.
But someone has to get our intrepid trio out of this mess. After all, UC hasn’t yet gotten home to get the look that would eventually be Carla. And last we saw, there were at least three combat-oriented abductees on hand while looking for Leslie and UC, Walky’s probably callable given the circumstances, and they have no idea what’d be on the other side. So this universe might not be doomed yet.
Seeing Ultra Car upside down just makes me wonder:
Can she right herself up? Is she like a tortoise? I guess she has her pie hands.
The pie-throwing arm doesn’t look strong enough to flip herself over directly, but if she gets herself rocking she should be able to do it.
Righting herself is actually the arms’ first demonstrated utility: https://www.itswalky.com/comic/shoop/
I think this is the closest we ever get to seeing what’s under an Alien helmet.
We did see a naked-and-suitless Head Alien I once in silhouette, after he’d been revived by the Martian Resurrection Machine. That might be closer.
Is what’s going on with Halien here a consequence of his powers, whatever Pamela hit him with, or residual effects of the Drama Tag? (Or, you know, a combination thereof.)
(‘Yes.’)
HAII has size-shifting powers. Pamela shot a bigass plasma beam through where his brain presumably is (Panel Three.) Because he’s an immortal with some degree of shapeshifting, he can just reconstitute himself while looking pretty weird in the process.
The drama tag’s powers were weakening the closer it got to pulled, but once it’s out, it’s out. Batteries are running now.
If you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.
I’m not sure if it counts as “fridging” when Pamela was already gonna die from a terminal illness anyway before she made that drama tag. Depends on how you define the term I guess.
I just looked up the “official” Women in Refrigerators Wikipedia thing, and dang, I guess I fridged one of my characters’ entire family haha
(feels like it’s basically “horrible death as reason for revenge”)