do you still think about it, page 34 [sketch]

this page is super sloppy. i gotta tilt lola so the camera angle where she flops down stays on the same axis, among other things. 

so, i was watching a video about the complications of writing mentally ill characters, and, i didn't like it. regardless, at some point in the video, the person talking mentioned that suicide is frequently a "last resort" option in the mind when someone feels that they have no other options and no control over their life -- self-harm is, just as frequently, a stopgap behavior in order to avoid the last resort option, even temporarily. neither of these statements is universally true, since we see people who are suicidal while manic and clearly not feeling hopeless, and in people who have just invested so much schematic stake in rationalizing suicide that context no longer matters to them, and conceding their points would be a greater loss than loss of life; we also see people self-harm during suicide attempts independent of the actual "death factor." they are true more often than not, though.
i'd like to focus on "control" as a prevalent factor in self-destructive behavior; i think that it's rarely on people's conscious minds, and conflating "control" and "autonomy" frequently triggers a defensive reaction in people due to the implication that a desire or sense of entitlement to autonomy is equivalent to a manipulator's desire to control others. if i reframe this as behaviors to assert autonomy, it reads as a lot more true to me (still not universally true).
so i'd love to provoke some thought about why sugar may be so reluctant to change, and why refusing to change, even if the change is turning away from misery, can have very reasonable motivations; by integrating her suffering into her sense of self, she's started to perceive it as a choice -- to what degree it is a choice is debatable. once it's a choice, harboring these symptoms from resolution is a form of control over how her life goes -- even if it's unpleasant for her. few things are more unpleasant than having a certain way of life forced onto you.
anyway, i thought that was a really interesting way to think about it. similarly in fresh meat, one of the last conversations between patients that kim participates in is the one about self-harm, with lupe arguing that self-destructive behavior is for control. this was the most appropriate place to put it to me, because it's precipitates kim flips her perspective on one of the loses in her lose-lose scenario and convinces herself that's an autonomous choice she's making; she either has to cut loose the ends she has (leaving the hospital) or the means she has (being true to herself), and she chooses one as more important over the other. ultimately, this choice is one that accepts destroying herself in some capacity to get what she wants, which only solidifies her desire to self-destruct by suicide,  made apparent in the second-to-last scene of the comic. sugar makes a similar choice here, but her end goals are more complex and long-term, inherently requiring her to stay Biologically Alive.

the next page should be the last. on concept, sugar beginning to play the game again was supposed to be the end of the comic, but i decided to tweak it a bit more. the continue here is super ambiguous due to how... game graphics work in realtime, and relies on the next page showing the character spawning back into the world, so it definitely would have been choreographed differently, and may have been the same length in terms of pages anyway.