fresh meat, page 81

before anything else or anyone asks, here is a picture of lupe's drawing with the brightness turned down and the contrast turned up so that it's more visible:

in the original script, she was slated to draw nothing at all, because that best represented how she feels. i based the later decision to have her make a white drawing on this original idea. the drawing itself is an arm with its wrist slashed, and other hand reaching towards the slash. are they pulling it open? are they trying to help? this isn't obvious and may even be intentionally ambiguous on lupe's part.
her arms may make apparent already that her character focuses heavily on self-harm, and her essential scene after this revolves around not only her self-harm, but kim's, which, up until this point, has not really been explored at all, and rarely even acknowledged. it made sense to me that she may draw something related to this to express herself.

kim's drawing in this scene i felt the least conviction in my decision. when teenagers who aren't artists know how to draw something, it's usually eyes, which are extremely eye-catching (no pun intended) features of the body with radial detail that tends to be easy to render with a high pride yield.
the eyes would naturally be crying, but that seems a little surface-level, so i tried to bring it back to her sense of shame about emotions, and subsequent explosive expressions of said emotions, as well as her continued suppression by psychiatric care.
i initially considered her showing her drawing upside down at first accidentally for a touch of realism. it would take too many beat panels just for something so simple, so instead, she didn't finish coloring within the allotted time frame.
i still think it would have been funny if she held up her drawing and she had been the one to draw a crude dick.

the nurse here is definitely not meant to be 100% wrong, and that makes her more frustrating as a character. none of the characters are meant to be 100% right or wrong, and the protagonist must synthesize their own personal views based on this fact, rather than deciding a specific ally or set of allies based on who is right. more pressingly, writing in this way (IDEALLY...) allows for characters to be correct or incorrect situationally within the rhetorical framework of the narrative, instead of stamping everyone as right or wrong "objectively."
much of what this nurse says not just in this scene, but in the prior scene as well, is information that can be useful in scenarios that aren't essentially a glorified hostage situations. she definitely has more obvious flaws, but her most prominent one in my head is a continuous failure to apply discretion or intellectual flexibility based on the appropriateness of the situation.

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