Joyce and Walky!

When writing this, it was important to me to show that Joyce’s parents were smarter than she.  I dunno, at the time I felt like a lot of parents are written as idiot foils to their incredibly savvy children, and so I wanted to subvert that.

It was a quality that I wanted to preserve, somehow, when I started writing them in Dumbing of Age.  It is admittedly a little harder to pull off there, since Joyce’s parents can have some terrible ideas, but still you figure these guys are pretty old and seasoned in their ways, regardless of what those ways are.  FOR EXAMPLE, today is American Thanksgiving, and maybe some of you are going to have dinner with your Trump-voting parents.  You might have a few zingers prepared from your own experiences, and you might even be able to bring, like, charts and graphs to the party, but your parents aren’t dumb, even if they might have dumb ideas.  And so, for example, if you tell them, “um, my atheist friend isn’t the ‘REAL Nazis,’ she can’t even be a secret Nazi, she’s Jewish” and they’re all “I think I read on USASUPEREAGLEPATRIOTISM.NEWS.LIZARDPEOPLE from Facebook that Hitler was Jewish so CHECKMATE” then, look, I don’t know, just remember there’s pie afterwards.

Anyway, the snarky parental condescension you see here I made sure still manifested in her parents in the Dumbiverse, but it takes a less sitcommy tone over there.  Joyce’s story in Dumbing of Age is a specific one, and her parents had to kind of present themselves differently in order to better support that narrative.