fresh meat, page 94

okay. there's a lot going on here, but i am fatigued, so i dunno if i will comment adequately on it.

i decided to have kim's grandmother pick her up instead of her mother or stepfather. a couple of reasons: i think that kim's parents are at work and would not want to leave to pick her up.
i wanted to establish that kim's family network is a little more robust than just a small nuclear family, especially since she's an only child. it was believable to me for her to be reared by a multi-generational family, because this is common for chinese families.
i also think of her grandmother as a softer person, as many parents (and grandparents) become more understanding over time as their internal rules and values that they wish to impose on their children become challenged over time by the complexity of life. this also made the conversation more pleasant.

kim's grandmother is to the point with what she says, which i feel may make some readers interpret her as ruder than she's being. heavily considering editing "make sure you're ready" to "don't forget all of your papers" or something similar, because the last few bubbles are mostly filler. it's common in chinese culture for two people on the phone to extend a conversation without hanging up, as hanging up too quickly might come off as rude, so i wanted to include some waffling at the end of the call. kim hangs up first so that her grandmother doesn't have to. the only other small things to indicate that there isn't really a lot of hostility in the call is kim asking for shoes and socks, and saying more friendly things like "see you soon" instead of "i'll be ready."
nicknames are also very common in chinese culture, especially among family and friends, so i would have her grandmother call her by a nickname. at first, it was going to be "little fire" to note her temperament, but that ended up also meaning something else. instead, her nickname is "雨云" -- "rain cloud" -- to note her depression and sadness in an affectionate, rhymey way, instead. 

as for the rest of the page, this is the last scene before kim's release, and the end of the comic -- it actually pretty directly transitions into that scene, as well. i wanted the last scene in the ward to be kim saying good-bye to sugar, similarly to how she was the first one in the main cast who she talked to.
sugar is an especially significant character for a lot of readers, and to me, honestly, so it felt appropriate to have her tie the bow on this comic. i think it will be the hardest one emotionally, because both of these characters carry the weight of the story's purpose in glancing at psychiatric trauma. many readers are aware by now that this trip seems to have not helped at all with kim's actual problems, and this just kind of finally addresses that, with sugar holding the ending's hand to get it to where it needs to be, hopefully adding depth to instances where kim had appeared in drop-out, as well as sugar's reaction to angel's death and relationship to psychiatry and its ability to help her.
in this page, with sugar's answer about the ECT, i wanted her to falter from being honest, making her answer clear in her lack of an answer; it's what you aren't allowed to really speak about without being punished. if nothing helped, then she would kill herself, obviously. this is inappropriate to say to someone younger than her, so she opts for a vaguely hopeful sentiment instead.
i think that sugar is genuinely still hopeful that psychiatry can help improve her quality of life at this point. i think that she showed this kind of ability to believe in it in cross-check, and, with frankie probably improving with medication herself, and being an invested STEM major, i really do think she had a heavy investment in believing that anything is possible with science. i wanted her answer to allude to a sort of resilience in this mentality by her switching from saying that the ECT has to work to "something" has to work.
then i wanted her to finish off the page by going further, and saying something has to "fix it" to help connect to both her mentality in drop-out as well as the underlying belief that led her there - that suicide is fixing it, even if fixing it isn't making it better, and that she needs to be fixed in some way.

alright, i think that's all i have in me, haha.