TheEFAF

I just realized that a bunch of archive settings was available inside “Add New Page” even though your help file doesn’t list that this is how you create an archive page (in fact, the Webcomic beginner’s guide says that the only use for Pages is maybe an “about” page, so I never looked in individual page options for archive options). Of course, all the settings were inaccessible because creating a child theme caused it to cease being able to “see” webcomic and claimed it wasn’t installed instead.

I’ve decided to simply toss the child theme and gut the main theme to act how I want since your plugin simply doesn’t work properly with child themes.

After a bunch of searching around, I finally got it.
It was so insanely simple, I feel rather dumb. I’ve always worked on Linux/Apache servers. It had never occurred to me that I was working on Windows/IIS (I had not set up the server, you see, just came in afterwards and assumed). For Windows, you cannot use *nix commands like CHMOD. Instead, I had to go to my hosting provider and use their domain manager to change the file permissions to read/write for applications. For some reason I could not even access permission rights through explorer or any other way, just through the host’s back end.

I hope this helps somebody. If you are having this issue and someone says, “but Windows servers shouldn’t need to change permissions! That must not be the problem!” then check your hosting service.