Joyce and Walky!

Lindsay Ellis talked about in her “Independence Day vs War of the Worlds” video that alien invasion apocalypses in fiction are never just alien invasion apocalypses for the sake of being alien invasion apocalypses.  They’re analogs for some other thing!  It’s hard to escape their execution without there being any subtext, without the aliens really standing in for some other omnipresent cultural threat.  The two movies in that video, for example, reflected the dueling notions of a pre- and post-9/11 America.

And it got me thinking, hey, wait, what is It’s Walky!‘s alien invasion really about?  Oh no, did I somehow have a daft alien invasion free of depth just because I started writing the dang thing when I was 7 and plagiarizing G.I.Joe?

But after like five seconds of thought, I realized what my alien invasion was really about.  And those of you who follow Dumbing of Age and its broader strokes will probably not be extremely surprised when I tell you that the Martians (and Aliens) in It’s Walky! signify being gaslit by your parents.  That’s right, it’s Toedads all the way down.  Even the Head Alien was an evil dad whose primary weapon was tortured, misleading truths.

“Where is The Cheese?” indeed.  Where is that distant, ineffectual nigh-deity who is supposed to be solving everything, according to everyone you ever trusted.

P.S. apparently i forgot that sal killed like 12 people in the first storyline, unless daisy is being unusually specific about killing people only when you’re brainwashed i dunno