plain or simple: cuts and thoughts

this is a little later than "a couple days"; while i was working on this, we had a power outage for a day due to a storm and i lost most of my progress on this as well, and had to redo it.

the topic of art and its social roles was one that i considered for the comic, but i felt it could also fit easily into the themes of drawing a blank, and you can see it's pretty lengthy to talk about, so it was ultimately cut out to focus on abstract art and politics.

other things that were cut from the comic's "script":

• an elaboration in the tail end of the comic after outis says abstract art is like a concise summarized argument where they use the example of advertisements. here's what i wrote specifically:
  "keshet accepts this and thinks for a minute and then points out that it reminds her of how some artists paint entirely blank canvases and call it abstract art
  outis concedes that their statement was a bit too open-ended, and that some abstract art is like that, and that's why they prefer cartoons to abstract art in general. they talk about how there are rules to cartoons, how even stylized there's clearly ways to exaggerated reality that look "wrong".
  they compare it to how you could describe a car in a sales ad, and you could omit that the car is silver, or you could omit that the car has no engine, but only one of those choices would be frowned upon
  keshet comments that they're both pieces of information that should be listed either way, and outis is like "yes. that would be the easy way, just to lay it all out there in black and white"
  they go a little bit into mentioning that advertisements also need to omit an extreme amount of information for efficiency and profitability, and keshet comments that they even usually omit information to make the product look better than it is
  outis is like "exactly, that's what cartoons do, they make a simpler, prettier version of reality. i prefer to spend my time creating an interpretation of life i want to live in than how things are"
  so keshet's like "you don't want to live right now like this?" and outis pauses for a minute and then says there's nothing wrong with wishing things were simpler"
• related to that topic, outis's opinions on realistic art were shaved down a lot; originally, it was much more emphasized that they find reality boring to interpret, and that they find cartoons specifically to be fascinating instead of non-representational abstract because there seems to be a "right" and "wrong" - an undiscovered logical undercurrent to the process. the row of panels where outis talks about "a best art" is a slight artifact of this element in the original plan for the comic.
  the main reason i cut this part is due to a specific circumstance set up by one line keshet says in the beginning scene of the comic (that she needed to say for the plot, in a literal sense) which affected the mental state outis was approaching the painting from.
• a brief acknowledgment that the internet is subsidized by the government in the canon, and that this was a recent change in the political landscape, implying it was not a widely available commodity before. i felt that social media influence on art was an entirely different topic and could also just be left for drawing a blank
• keshet mentioning she's an introvert and that hanging out with other people is mentally exhausting to her

my overall thoughts on the comic after finishing it are "i wish i had planned more thoroughly" and "i wish i'd had more time and space for pacing" which is nothing new. i enjoyed writing outis and keshet's dynamic but found myself getting anxious near the end of the comic about writing them. who knows why, though. i felt like i was juggling anxiety about constantly reasserting keshet's individuality in opposition with letting the story focus on the protagonist, while not turning it into a conflict to give them both reason to actively participate.
one thing that i did not expect when i was writing this is that outis ended up being portrayed in the light of several different triggers (i will make it easy and say that the number is 3); i only originally planned to show 2 of these. their behaviors can change drastically and suddenly, and this can make them sort of a confusing character to figure out, so this was a pleasant surprise for the first piece of writing they're shown in; however, i've also noticed that many readers tend to readily accept whatever a character does most of the time, and their concept of the character builds off of what is repeated the most or presented the most dramatically in a story.
definitely a lot of learning that i'll keep in mind for how i'm planning out drawing a blank.