do you still think about it, page 6 (gore warning)

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alright, so, here we are, at the meat of what this comic is.

i really had to think hard about showing gratuitous violence, especially to a relatively beloved character, even if it's all imaginary.
as i've mentioned, sugar is my character who just Doesn't Get Better, only gets better at hiding it, coping with it, controlling herself. in fact, i think that, internally, the events of drop-out made her worse. it was like her entire world was already on fire everywhere and then a plane spiraled out of control and crashed into it too -- it could only make her guilt and self-loathing complex worse. comics written about characters with established canon must build and develop the characters in what they depict.

in terms of characterization, i wanted it to be a sharp departure from the ideation of sugar from drop-out, who wanted what she perceived as painless, planned, meaningful, romantic death. the ideation of sugar in this "fast forward" is a canister of pressurized gas, explosively repressed, able to be triggered by any object or circumstance capable of being used for suicide, and excessively violent and painful where possible. i wanted the violent and persistent nature of the fantasies to contrast with her canonical aversion to pain in general, emotional or physical.
i also wanted her external demeanor to sharply contrast with her demeanor in drop-out, less expressive, less concerned with the outside world most of the time, carrying the strange, placid demeanor of someone with a plan.

in terms of metatextual motivation -- why draw it at all? why not just write out that she thinks that way in a couple of sentences instead -- as i've thought about my characters with dissociative disorders and how to depict them (showing inner experiences vs. a voyeur's external perspective only), i've come back to thinking about depictions of suicide. even though drop-out tries to explore the characters' emotional lives, it doesn't really ever touch what i feel like is actually experiencing suicidal thoughts.
i don't know if i could adequately render the intense dysphoria that comes with them, but i could at least render some kind of intense revulsion, a desire to look away and actively choose to see what happens next at the same time, for a similarly unpleasant experience.
with the ideation -- i just think this portrays what it feels like to be quietly, actively obsessed with suicide to me more honestly. more honestly than drop-out, and more honestly than just rendering the scene by having sugar stare at a knife.

this page was REALLY hard to draw, and i'm STILL not happy with that panel where she stabs herself over and over again.

i tried drawing streaks of canyon to show the path of various stabs, but it became either incomprehensible or too full of information to process. i ended up trying to lean back on repeating the visual language of the first stab to communicate several rapid-fire stabs.
the third panel also gave me significant trouble.

i needed the third panel to give closure about what the blue in the first two panels was -- the canyon, so i needed A LOT of guts spilling out. 3/4ths was not working for me... i initially wanted to show sugar dropping to her knees, too, but this made the page too long (the page was originally supposed to end without showing this was a fantasy yet,  but it felt like too much tension while actually reading through it).

the canyon itself -- i knew i wanted to censor the gore in some way, but it was hard to think of a meaningful one. i ended up thinking about how in anime gore can be censored by just coloring it all in black, and decided in another instant that i could just fill it in with an overlay of the canyon instead. a lot of the undercurrent about the comic focuses on the canyon haunting her, so i was pleased to find an overt, repeating place to put it.
i also had to decide if i wanted the gore to be more realistic, or over-the-top; i ended up going with the latter. i didn't want to look at references for realistic gore, and i felt like because it IS all an over-the-top fantasy in sugar's head, it was acceptable to have the gore be inaccurate.

i think that's all i have to say about this page! may the final product be better than the sketch.