#every so often I'm like 'MAN maybe someday ill finish that fic' and then I remember how much effort writing takes lmao

[inkdemonapologist]

I have this theory and I made a post about it but I love your Sammy stuff and consider you like a premiere expert so I'm genuinely curious.

Canonical after re-reading the books (and are they canon anymore LoL but). Did canon!Joey *know* Sammy was tripping the light fantastic on ink?

Like the passage where he tells buddy 'why please a man when you can please a god' seems to imply wet cat prophet man is pissed about Joey and feels let down -

And then *later* Joey's like 'Sammy lured them all down here...but I couldn't use them' and I'm like ho-shit did bro become the guy's Walter white

Also hi your art is amazing and if you have original work I would read instantly.

LMAO GOSH, thank you for the kind words!!! also golly gee THIS LINE FROM JOEY DRIVES ME NUTS because JOEY COME ON MAN TELL ME MORE!!!!

There’s several little things in the background that implies SOMETHING between these two but we don’t get to see it! Thomas surely reported Sammy’s weird behaviour to Joey like he said he would (Sammy did not make a compelling case for himself in their argument), but the ink doesn’t disappear from Sammy’s closet until weeks later, so did Joey like… know about it and his only response was “huh interesting, let’s see where he goes with this!” or did he just blow off Thomas’ warnings as unimportant b/c Sammy is his special perfect genius who can do whatever he wants, or what!!! Also the thing where Joey is the one who’s furiously interrogating everyone about Sammy’s whereabouts when he goes missing, before anyone else had even noticed he was gone, and Buddy thinks Joey’s emotion seems stronger than the situation warrants – so how intense was Joey being, for his upset at being unable to find the guy who writes ALL THE MUSIC to seem like an overreaction?

ANYWAY,

I don’t understand breaking bad references, but my interpretation tends to be that by the end of DCTL Sammy had snapped enough that Joey had no real power over him, and this is part of why Joey was so angry at Sammy’s disappearance – for once, Joey didn’t have control over him and didn’t know how to take control. I think Sammy’s accusation of “living your sad little lives to please Joey Drew” is projection – that’s what SAMMY had been doing in his 15+ years at the studio, and he now condemns it as pathetic. I don’t think he was willingly or knowingly aiding Joey at this point.

Joey, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to have a master plan so much as an ability to just… roll with whatever happens and make it work for him. He tells Buddy, simultaneously, that this was “meant to be” and “the plan all along,” but that he didn’t actually know what he wanted to do with Buddy until the moment he saw him in the demon’s jaws. So, like, this was just a lucky break for Joey, a moment where the right person just happened to be dead in front of him at just the right time for him to turn that person into a cartoon, and it worked out great!! He didn’t orchestrate this – it was a series of accidents that he retroactively decided was a plan. Joey Drew is an opportunist! And I think the fact that he didn’t find Norman and the others until after “the ink had infected them for days” points to the idea that Joey didn’t plan that either, since he didn’t find them until much later. My reading is that once Sammy started murdering people, instead of getting that under control, Joey just kind of followed him to see if he could take those lemons and make lemonade, so to speak.

That said, I like the idea that Joey knew; it was the first canon-adjacent thing I drew in this fandom! I don’t think they were in cahoots in canon, but it’s still an idea I’m really fond of. There are a lot of little things that could be used to suggest that Joey knew what was going on with Sammy and enabled it for whatever reason (my favourite evidence for this is still the “who does a god worship” convo in The Illusion of Living – the idea that Joey really wanted to see if he could make something Sammy would worship gives him a solid motive here, and becomes interesting when Sammy is the ONLY person whose infection ends up with these religious overtones, see the end of this post), but it’s equally possible from what little we know that Joey was simply negligent, caught up in his own nonsense, and never thought to look into it until Sammy became an obstacle to his own goals.