When I first saw the “Guys, the ending’s going to be awesome’ comic, I knew it would be much funnier when the ending actually happened. And lo and behold.
So this storyline was that Leslie tried to hire a more diverse cast purely to spite some random dude (notice by the way that all these new hires aren’t in the final group shot, and in fact never had a line between them). This caused a hole in reality to appear for no reason, through which characters from a Captain Crunch commercial older than I am randomly appeared (again for no reason).
They are led, for no reason, by a guy in a giant robot suit called the Sogmaster, who rails against diversity as being “no threat to” his “identical white confederates”, and then ends with this page.
First off, the identical white confederates line is pure Willis, in that it’s both insultingly obvious and completely baffling due to lack of thought into the details. The soggies = white people. Got it. Except I don’t got it. Diversity is no threat to white people? Don’t 99% of social activist movements make that exact argument, and the people saying diversity is a threat to white people tend to be on Stormfront?
But, that’s one awkward line. It’s probably just a “mua-ha-ha” evil line that Willis put exactly zero thought into. It doesn’t matter compared to his story about brave diverse people standing up to white folk, in a story written by a white dude about a store run by a white dude with the final defiant line being given by a white woman protagonist, all the diverse people she hired completely forgotten, standing up against a nonhumain villain and a woman of color. No wait.
Okay, let’s not think about the politics. Willis sure as fuck didn’t. Let’s treat it as just an ending. This is clearly supposed to be a “and the adventure continues” ending. It’s the simplest ending in the world to write. Here:
Leslie: Wow, I’ve grown as a person and now I’m ready to take over the store/raise my kids/some other character arc
Malaya: Oh shit, we’re being attacked by soggies for some reason.
Leslie: *grabs nerf gun* Not on my watch.
*End credits as “Don’t Stop Believing” plays*
Instead nothing is concluded. There’s no real “this is the end of my journey” moment for Leslie, who I guess is the protagonist now. Everyone’s pretty much where they were six months ago.
So, in the space that could be used doing an ending episode (The store closes down and everyone gets new jobs, for instance), we have the soggies “And so the adventure continues” for a really long time. You can’t start telling a story and then just kind of give up halfway through because you’re out of time. It means we have pages and pages and pages of the finale that are a complete fucking waste. Willis said “no half-assed filler strips” but that’s literally all we got. He just did a storyline like normal and then halfway through it canceled the comic and called it a finale. The newspost about the finale has this image
If you’ve been reading Shortpacked, you may notice that two of the three characters Willis felt represented Shortpacked the most (he signed it this year, so this isn’t an old image) have but one-panel cameos doing nothing in the final storyline.
It’s just, so lazy.
The accompanying blog post, however, contains the following gem:
I tried to use i[Shortpacked] as a tool to teach myself understanding and respect, to put myself in the brains of others.
And that’s the funniest line in the history of Shortpacked.
