Joyce and Walky!

well she might have a few

This was a story I’d planned to do since near the end of the first year of Roomies!.  I wanted a piece of that sweet Make Other People Have Feels action, and so I planned to have a heroic sacrifice.  I couldn’t off anybody in the cast already — I knew where they’d end up later, whether it was fighting aliens or building intelligent talking automobiles, and so that’s where Ruth came from.  She was created to die.

She became part of Danny’s character arc, but just as importantly to me, she had an arc of her own.  She wouldn’t die solely in service of literally saving Danny but also in service of figuratively saving herself.  Or, at least, what I understood at the time constituted “saving oneself.”

This climax took on a few different forms early on.  To the left you can see some of my early scribblings which depict Danny and Ruth staring down a truck together. Presumably Ruth would push Danny out of the way.  …also at some point Danny let his hair grow out, I guess.  If you thought he couldn’t get any more hateable, well, you were wrong!  (And of course there’s some unrelated things, like drawings of Howard, Joyce, some random doofus, and a single quote from a lecture I was listening to at the time from which I should have been taking notes.)

I didn’t realize it would become such an intensely personal story to me.  The arc became more and more about disillusionment and depression, and ultimately Ruth’s death was kind of a murdering of my own problems on paper.  I murder a lot of my own problems on paper.  Just wait until we get into It’s Walky!.

These days, I’m quite content to be writing a Ruth who lives.