fresh meat, page 53

no sketch or flats with this one, it was pretty bare-bones from start to finish. i worked on it on-stream for most of the day anyway.

let's see... edits first...

cut out one line here for space reasons, but also because sugar can go 2 ways: she can over-explain or she can make conversational jumps without clarifying. she has a fun time. she'd already explained a lot, so here i had her make a jump.

removed "i don't think so" because i do feel like i lean into tending to have characters recall information without total confidence. this comes naturally for me because of some extensive gaslighting and over the years i've noticed many people feel completely confident in their own sense of memory even if they're frequently wrong.
because i don't really think kim has the same background, this was just to give her less of my own voice through conscious effort, although i have had her question recall other times. what you usually eat at home just wasn't a time where it felt justifiable. you often have to do this with filler words you use yourself to help give characters their own voice, which can be a struggle, but, y'know. writing isn't easy.

didn't screenshot the first version of this but originally kim didn't pause to say "like" in this sentence, just said i'm not a psycho. it didn't feel natural, hence it was edited.

some parts of this were also cut based on the more aggressive attempt to not let the pages go beyond ~15 panels.
originally sugar was going to say "and don't smile too much" after "just do what they say"... obviously to indicate to kim that it kind of irritates the staff to see your teeth. kim was going to say that didn't make sense to not smile, since you're supposed to not be depressed anymore when you leave -- another reason this got cut is because a different line was cut earlier, in this scene: 

which kim was then going to reference. while it ended with sugar stating that the way to leave is to "follow some rules," an alternative way of expressing the same sentiment would have been to just act happy like in the scripts they give you and they let you go.
kim was then going to ask at this point, remembering the previous conversation, what to do if you are so depressed you can't even pretend you're happy anymore.
sugar was then going to say they aren't trying to teach you how to be happy here. then "trust me, it works every time" would follow.

i still could have manipulated the conversational beats to include not smiling much, but it felt like it would either be too long, or would be prioritizing edgy flavor text that i consider clever over continuing to develop the themes.
ultimately the way this page ended was continuing to build on the idea that kim thinks she's different from the other patients by posing sugar in a conversation with her where she says things very similar to kim's sentiments and also lists personal reasons close to kim's. the camera then backs away to show her quietly chewing over the cognitive dissonance and her lunch just like everyone else in the cafeteria.

the other conversational beat removed here, also for time, was sugar trying to elaborate, in between where she says it doesn't matter if it makes sense and that it's hard to explain, that sometimes things don't make sense, but everybody else believes them, and no one explains even when you're just asking to understand. in fact, oftentimes they get upset when these unstated social norms are pointed out verbally, but it's more important to agree with what the majority believes sometimes, especially when they decide if you're better or worse. she was going to express a sort of uncertainty about how to deal with pretending to believe something when you don't fully understand how others come to believe it in the first place, and then just re-state to not think about it.
although this built on sugar's canon, again, there were constraints, and she's already had plenty of development as a character. this would have also indicated to kim to stop stating what she thinks all the time, which would really help her case, but that can be brought up later.

aside from kim's internal viewpoint here, the other theme that got developed was the carnivore thing, which basically was pointed out to be almost wholly meaningless outside of a social flag for a hierarchical system... in different words.

on an unrelated note, scenes in the cafeteria really challenge me with the continuity of who's sitting where... i can get away with a lot with the silhouettes, but i still kind of have to keep an approximate location of different patients. kerris is obviously sitting in the distance behind kim at a different table. the other 2 appearances that are probably recognizable... diana the wolverine and meg the alligator.
other than that i try to populate with general silhouettes, or a couple general designs i keep in mind, like this one round-eared lion-looking figure, or a couple generic wolves and a lizard/wolf hybrid (there's supposed to be at least one table i can fill in the background that's just a pack of wolves sitting at it).
if i was super into continuity i would probably have them sit at the same tables every time... but people did move around sometimes in my experience anyway, so, the amount of energy needed isn't worth such a small thing.

anyway, i think that's all i really have for this page.