dupe
patreon
character comparison 1
🕑 Added 2018-06-14 06:24:36 +0000 UTC so i've been wanting to make more posts to the $10 tier for a while now, and i know that i originally wanted to do more... writing and analysis for this tier.one idea that i had was comparing characters who had similar roles or personalities. in this case...
it's that sugar and jason have similar personalities.
i guess i'll start by outlining how their characters are similar. this is a bit of a challenge for me, because sugar's personality has changed a bit drastically since drop-out, and she hasn't been given much screen time yet to show what she's like now.
sugar and jason are both very left-brained people. logic, patterns, hard rules - these are what their minds default to and prefer.
they both have a decent amount of anxiety, especially about making mistakes.
and they both have strong senses of conscience and morality. their moral compasses are usually composed of things they know are definitively right, and they're unafraid to try to share that knowledge with other people if they see someone struggling relevantly.
but both of them are very emotional and sensitive. guilt hurts them the most, and crying isn't a novelty to them. both are very empathetic, especially to others' pain.
and the both of them can be extremely loyal and stubborn in general. they probably don't make decisions unless they feel that's the logically correct choice.
anyway, enough backtracking and walls of images. how are they different...
the first thing i thought about was that sugar and jason pursued different fields of study. sugar's major in microbiology requires more contextualization of math than pure mathematics and physics.
i think that contextualizing information isn't either of these characters' forte; that's why they can struggle to guess other characters' reactions in conversations.
however, i think that sugar feels an obligation to make an attempt to contextualize, whereas jason simply ignores that there may be information he's lacking. they're both still rule-based minds, though, and what this leads to is sugar's sort of frenzied, confused attempts to guess how she could be wrong, and jason's habit asserting corrections if it's implied he's made a mistake.
sugar has less confidence in herself in general. i believe this is probably the misogyny, which jason doesn't have to deal with. it's probably also related to sugar's experience with psychiatric abuse, which can heavily involve gaslighting; she's much more willing to doubt her own perception of reality than jason is.
the other thing that i noticed jason really, REALLY does not like fighting; sugar is much more willing to pick and end a fight, but jason is overtly timid, and states that he doesn't want to fight frequently.
this one is probably related to the fact that jason is a black man and sugar is largely read as white; even with lesbophobia considered, the repercussions for fighting back are much less severe for sugar.
sugar probably also feels more at liberty to be aggressive because of her generalized fear of possibilities, and her status as a butch; she's there to protect and serve, to some degree, in her head.
(jason also doesn't have a wicked set of teeth to maul someone with.)
however, both of them are aware of how to back down and shut up when they feel they're dealing with someone who has power over them. jason clearly never reciprocated liz's physically intimidating body language when arguing, and sugar will tolerate a lot of bossing around from her therapists.
sugar has been shown to be aware that she can scare people, though, and she hasn't liked what that implies about her. despite this, she still more openly voices her anger than jason does.
i conceptualize sugar as schizophrenic; she's canonically schizophrenic. emotional dysregulation is a common symptom, and the schizophrenic brain has been shown to be much more reactive in the amygdala area than in those who aren't schizophrenic, along with higher general cortisol levels. i conceptualize sugar as someone who has a much stronger fight or flight response (this could also be why her anxiety is so much more severe and pervasive).
this also makes sugar a more high-strung, energetic person than jason. she constantly wants to do things, she's constantly thinking, and it's uncomfortable for her to just sit back and relax. you can see jason doesn't fiddle with things nearly as often as sugar does in conversation (he even forgot to smoke most of his cigarette while talking with lola).
regarding the schizophrenia... i think that jason is also much more down-to-earth, and not just because he's older than sugar. you can see sugar slowly developing into a more "relaxed" person, but this is likely from blunted affect and sense of helplessness than a truly more comfortable understanding of the world.
sugar seems to see art as a magical inexplicable phenomenon that has no rules, of which she's slightly envious (sugar is also much more prone to envy than jason due to the low self-esteem mentioned earlier). that is a world without the confusing nuances and consequences of reality that sugar likes to sink into, even if it's primarily video games and anime.
jason used to be a musician, but he seems to have abandoned it; it wasn't interesting enough to maintain without positive feedback or friends from him. he also wasn't the lyricist of the band, and he likely saw the music as much more mechanical than artistic expression.
mentioning friends: jason is an introvert, but he's still evidently much more interested in people than sugar is. this probably also comes, at least in part, from his confidence.
interaction is extremely stressful for sugar, and she feels like she's always making mistakes even if it's not stated; over time, she's probably lost any emotional interest in making friends where jason eventually found some enjoyment.
by proxy, sugar doesn't have as many deep connections with people as jason does. she probably dumps all of her trust on just one or two people, and saves the rest of her emotional burden to shoulder herself, making her a much more repressed individual who's much more afraid to make the one mistake that topples her small tower of cards.
i also wanted to mention the difference in these 2 characters roles on a writing level... jason was obviously written as a supporting character (for lola, specifically), whereas sugar was written as a whole ass main character who was meant to have flaws and overcome struggles.
both of them were written with lola in mind and given personalities that would bounce well off of lola's (probably why they are so similar at all), but sugar's character was given more artistic liberty and freedom.
interestingly, due to the time jump in jason's appearances, he actually did develop quite a bit as a person, but it was largely off-screen, and in a way that could be easily summarized through exposition.
i think that's all i've got for now. this is still fairly new for me, and i might go back and add more images here, but the image part actually takes a pretty long time, with this one taking about 2 hours to write as-is! i hope it was interesting, though.
Comments
gray Folie
of course. i would say that the assumption is assigned to about the degree that one would claim a masculine body is born to hunt and kill in a hunter-gatherer society; it's fairly common in general, but varies from person to person, and a handful of traits commonly viewed as "predatory" are not really indicative of carnivorous metabolism at all (for example, many herbivorous species have claws as well for self-defense, climbing, etc.) i believe that a society that wants to normalize and capitalize on violence will consistently posture violence as a relevant looming threat, as though the hypothetical capacity to hunt an elk with your bare hands would be at all relevant in downtown boston regardless of whether the claim is pseudoscience or not -- so it seemed natural as a consistent parallel that mainly thrives off of reinforcing already existing substructures of bias. as a side note, this interested me in the furry community in real life; there is a lot more focus on "predator" and "prey" subspecies than i would have assumed, especially given that most of the characters are self-inserts or effectively cheesecake fodder. people will frequently choose fursona species based on whether the public perception is "this animal eats meat" or not, and concurrently build attractions and fetishes based on traditional food chain dynamics and "taboo subversions" of them. one has to wonder why a fandom primarily touted as a form of free creative self-expression needs to have such an intense, categorized focus on presumptive violent power dynamics in the first place, though.
frektane
“jason also doesn't have a wicked set of teeth to maul someone with” - i’m curious about this, if it’s alright to ask. sugar used the “predator” parallel to talk about her identity in drop-out a couple times; how common in this world is it for people’s animalistic traits like teeth or claws to play into how they’re perceived by others, beyond the quirks of body language you’ve discussed before? i attributed that parallel initially to sugar’s own perception of herself wrt internalized lesbophobia rather than any societal view, but you mentioning it again here makes me wonder if it’s more widespread, or something you’ve considered part of the worldstate. (i also haven’t been following your work for very long comparatively, so it’s possible you talked about this elsewhere and i missed it)
bramblepaws
this was really cool & interesting to read! love how much thought is put into their backgrounds as very different with relation to their genders & races. very interesting, and it's really interesting to see the variations in how they interact with Lola.
