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do you still think about it, page 32 [sketch]
🕑 Added 2022-06-03 20:29:05 +0000 UTCeh, i finished this last night, but i needed to add bubbles and do commentary and it was just a little too late for that.
this page is a LOT of medium shots of lola. i'll talk a little bit about her: i think she's the kind of person who thinks everyone can benefit from making art. i think she also assumes that, usually, the creation of art is highly personal, and will yield personal insight -- ie. if you told someone to make some art, they would make art about their feelings or opinions.
additionally, i think lola is definitely trying to frame her feelings in a way that would specifically speak to sugar while she's talking here; altho it isn't completely inaccurate to her own experiences.
lola has a few cues to make assumptions from here: 1) sugar brought it up, so she must want to discuss it; 2) sugar brought it up specifically framing it around lola's thoughts, so she must want lola's thoughts about it; and 3) sugar's not facilitating discussion about it, even though she brought it up, so she must want lola to talk specifically. whether lola's interpretation of sugar's signals is wholly accurate is up for debate, but they are married, and lola for sure knows to some degree that this is an incredibly charged topic for sugar, who has rarely if ever brought it up in the last few years -- so it's probably with purpose.
lola's body language has been challenging to work with, because i need to balance making her not look STRESSED, while still not treating the conversation casually. i've tried to pay attention to the way both of them are oriented relative to each other, and i think having lola half-mirroring sugar's posture here, with sugar coming off much more defensive and closed off, kind of takes the edge off of the dynamics flying around in the conversation. their clothes are kind of reversed in that regard, interestingly; sugar's showing a lot more of herself without sleeves or legs on her pants than lola is.
also, i specifically tried to have lola speak in first-person here, even while trying to appeal to sugar's feelings, because speaking in second-person about her own feelings was a trait of hers in drop-out, and i wanted her to seem more self-possessed.
some may know that my absolute favorite webcomic has a serious problem with overwriting -- characters repeat themselves with slightly different sentences (usually fragments) all the time, because the author can't pick which one best describes the concepts at hand. this is a lack of confidence in the reader, the author, and subsequently, the characters.
i bring it up because i was really tempted to add in "if i'm not my feelings and i'm not my thoughts, [what am i]?" it's not in the script, and lola's (rhetorical) question at the end of the page here already implies that. you have to make several jumps to get to that subtext, though, and her question might come off as nonsensical to less introspective readers. it's hard to tell myself that it's better to let some people fall behind than to actively push back readers closer so that everyone is close to the same page. i have a natural tendency to overexplain myself out of anxiety, and reading my favorite comic series feeds that compulsion.
i've learned, at this point, that the goalposts will move if i try to compensate for a less-than-ideal audience; readers who weren't going to get it will continue to not get it (become more belligerent, even), and readers who would have gotten it have an actively worse experience between boredom and condescension. it's still very hard to catch myself and decide where the line is!
also also, i need to figure out where she dropped her phone on the bed, lol. the frogs in the background are what lola was working on on this particular day, with a fan aimed at it to dry it. i probably want to populate the background a bit more too.
well. that's all i have to say about this page, lol. there are like, 12 sentences left in the script, so we shall see how fast this wraps up.
![do you still think about it, page 32 [sketch]](https://img5.patrefans.com/storage/1/jb/ov/563145-019e8434-05d6-73c0-a706-bde15e9a31ec.png)
