do you still think about it, page 33 [sketch]

so i uploaded these pages to ko-fi, and i noticed that they're numbered wrong... i'll fix it after it's finished. ;_; i skipped page 25.

this page has as much going on as it can have. it's been really challenging to keep the camera engaging while they talk. there are tons of beats necessary for the tone, too, so there's no solution by just speeding up the dialogue to require fewer frames. i can't say if i've handled it well or not, but there are at least a handful of moments in the scene that i feel were very respectfully thoughtful, like the panels with sugar's upper body and her tail no longer moving congealing into a mostly full picture of her.

i already mentioned just a couple of pages ago, but, what lola finds pleasurable and what sugar finds pleasurable are very different things -- this will come up and ideally be tied off on the next page, albeit indirectly.
lola seems to dislike few things as much as she dislikes feeling forced into a specific way of being -- feeling trapped. the ability to abandon a position or experience is very freeing to her, and i see it as correlated with the relief she feels from (lowgrade) dissociating from stress through a variety of means. ultimately, she's turned it into something healthy and productive.
as someone highly sensitive, reactive, and easily overwhelmed, sugar doesn't find the idea of a blank canvas so comforting; routine is a form of moderating stress by preventing it, and gives her mind permission to  relax, and forego  frantically trying to predict what will happen next before her immediate reaction in the moment sabotages her. unfortunately, while structure makes her fairly functional, it's made many unpleasant behaviors perfunctory for her. it's debatable whether sugar COULD make another routine which made her feel more fulfilled; structure is founded on discipline, and this almost always means disciplining the playful, spontaneous parts of the ADHD personality into nonexistence. the necessary freedom to be spontaneous requires temporal spontaneity as well, which is incompatible with routine.
i've noticed myself that as i have more responsibilities over the years, the more i rely on routine; it's nowhere near as strict as sugar's, but i am nowhere near as consistently functional as her. even with the much more flexible nature of it, the routine i do have is both extremely comforting and suffocating. the natural cycle of boredom, exploration, and explosions of interest that provide satisfaction an ADHD brain is completely halted, and it seems that the mask can't compensate. frequently, because of how unnatural it feels against the background of ADHD symptoms, reliable routine feels like a house of cards that will collapse under any unpredictable stressor, but the constant suppression of emotional reaction in the routine becomes the default, creating an existence that is simultaneously more competent than your self-esteem expects, and more miserable than it feels it can tolerate.

sugar is an intensely interesting character for me to focus on, but i feel like any given analysis will imply that there is one (fixable) thing causing her anguish. consequently, the comic (spoilers, i guess) ends heavily implying that sugar is, on some level, making the autonomous choice to stay as she is by identifying with said anguish (within a lose-lose scenario created by society); it's a complicated subject, as plenty of ableism from the toxic positivity mindset claims that depression is only caused by active sulking. regardless, it is definitely a reality i wanted to explore, so i'll probably save talking more about it for the next page or so.
for the ending itself, i suppose i decided i'd rather have it able to be taken in bad faith than imply that depression has an answer for how to fix it. i talk here about her ADHD because it isn't something that comes up much in the actual text of the comic. she's been diagnosed with it for so long, i don't know how much it's ever examined as if it could yield novel information. i don't think it would ever come up in therapy, aside from making any surfacing symptoms go away as soon as possible; i don't think sugar even knows that ADHD masking is a thing.
this is to say, some of the factors for her are so deeply embedded as a given reality for sugar, and so far outside of her consciousness, i couldn't imagine any kind of ending to the comic that was more hopeful -- there was no way for those factors to be addressed at this point in her life.
in terms of outward disposition, she's a lot more like jack now. i've been kicking around an idea about sugar talking to her mom about gender for a long time now, but it'd be equally interesting, if not a little less loaded, to explore the differences for the sources of their dispositions.

backtracking to the technical aspects of the comic here -- originally, i was going to have sugar's expression in the last panel be more stoic. i could tell that it would be too easy and likely to interpret this as thinly veiled envy directed at lola, when i wanted more ambiguity about her sincerity there. with a smile, the possibility that she isn't expressing all of what she's feeling about that is still there.

anyway, i think that's all i have to say about this page.