familial stranger: thoughts

this comic didn't get many cuts.
going into it, i knew it was going to follow a basic 4-part formula - preface, processing, plot, processing - and that was going to be a bit longer. i didn't feel too bad about it taking a while because i knew lola wouldn't be getting anything besides side comics from now on.

1) i'm going to get into the most uncomfortable topic first, i will be brief about it. there are a lot of weirdos on the internet, and a lot of those weirdos have a fascination with incest ships, especially with characters who are siblings in platonic children's media.
over the years, this has made me uncomfortable with writing loving family relationships or interactions at all.
i struggled to find balance between showing lola and jason bonding more than superficially, gestures of affection were toned down, any physical touch kept to a minimum, and lola's aloofness and hostility towards jason was embellished to rationalize this.
i still felt like it ended up coming off as very cold and sterile; the first thing that i did when i reconnected with my father over the course of this comic was hug him, and i'm not even a very touchy person.
just some thoughts i saved on that. i recently renovated mallory and marina, who were written as characters in part to try to calm down about the mere POSSIBILITY of weirdos being weirdos, so i will probably try to work on this aversion with them in the meantime, as they are supposed to be very close (hey did you know some psychologists say sister-sister bonds are the strongest bonds between people? i thought that was interesting)

2) sugar... sugar, sugar, sugar. (you know i'm not here to judge you, right?)
i already wrote a post about her, so i will keep this brief as well.
while writing sugar, i found myself often juggling symptoms i felt were characteristics and symptoms i felt were identifying integral traits of her personality with what i felt was a questionable lack of development or improvement in her quality of life.
for example... in drop-out sugar obviously self-corrected when she talked a lot from anxiety. however, it was difficult to draw the line between unhealthy thought policing and simply refining her words on the fly because she wants to be clearly understood. i don't believe a desire specificity and precision is inherently neurotic or self-deprecatory.
however, the blurb above is something that i wrote a month or two ago, as i forgot the specifics of much i wanted to talk about by the time i finished plain or simple, so i wrote notes in a draft this time.
by the end of familial, i was pretty happy with what i'd come up with for sugar's development; it's an interesting contrast with lola, especially considering drop-out.
recently, i was reading about trauma, and various neurological and physical reactions in response to it (the articles in question were specifically focused on the physical interplay of lengthy traumatic situations, and how to approach these reactions different therapeutically).
in these, it was noted that people tended to become very avoidant and reactive, or very numb and dissociative. interestingly, one article acknowledged that the latter sounds pretty innocuous at a glance, but seemed to affect the length and efficacy of therapy much more severely, because the numbness was as generalized as the reactive side of the coin. from my own experiences, i would agree with this, so it makes sense to me why lola has taken more time to grow.

3) this comic really brought some evident issues with my writing process to the center of the stage.
i mentioned "beats" a couple of times. these are normal elements to writing; i'm sure they're self-explanatory.
for me, what i've generally done with the side comics, because i stopped spending the large amount of time it takes to script one and opted for synopsis style "scripts" instead, is used a mix of "beats" and "modules" to fill in the blanks between the beats.
this is actually pretty easy to explain with simple mind-mapping, so i'll show an example of what i mean.

step 1: i'll start with a simple 1-2 sentence idea.

step 2: i'll structure this into a basic plot with a concept for relevance.

here you can see that i'll delineate literal plot beats necessary for the action to make sense, and conceptual purpose beats. i've always considered the latter's placement a bit more flexible.
still fine, simple enough.

step 3: now i need to go back and edit the story for narrative and rhetoric.

wow, that got messy very fast. you can see that i'm usually very vague about this part because i'm only aiming for some technical soundness. believability, pacing, logical consistency, etc.

step 4: i'll merge and organize the critique with the beats into a longer story structure.

now, all of the red bubbles here are plot spaces for "modules" -- general narrative demands that could be filled by a number of possible snips of dialogue, actions, reactions, etc.
these spaces, in the text summaries, tend to look something like "and then lola and jason catch up a bit and awkwardly shoot the breeze for like a page." it gets across the gist of what should happen, yes, but it gives me no specifics about what, exactly, they talk about.
to try to keep the pacing under control, i'd usually note anything that shouldn't take too long or shouldn't be too short.

step 5: now i just have to come up with some ideas to fill in those blanks.

ah.
here's usually the problem area... and why stories can end up a lot longer than i intended, even if i could summarize them in only a few paragraphs. i'll have a lot of ideas -- especially for characters whom i've had for long stretches of time -- and i'll grow attached to many of them for different reasons.
THEN i'll try to fit it into any flexible space in the structure, as long as they can make sense in the context of the current page and conversation.

so that's why i've switched to more rigid pre-planning for soft-pedaled.
i'll see how i feel at the end of it... it certainly won't be longer than familial stranger.
but i do know that one of the reasons i used this structure is because it kept working on the pages interesting and engaging for me throughout the process. i could still feel like i was interacting and able to be creative with the material as i was drawing it out, because i had to make executive decisions about the specifics. however, on bad days, this would leave me wondering how in god's name i'm supposed to progress the narrative to the next beat from where i left off.
i'm guessing it'll either seem satisfyingly concise and focused when it's finished, or it'll feel too choppy and formal like an essay. either way, i can decide if it still needs tweaking from there.
the only thing i didn't mention here is that panel count can be a little more complex when translating writing, but i am going to do a bigger separate post on my thoughts on that.

4) there were still a few bits that were cut from the story.
the cuts of note that i can recall off the top of my head are:
jason asking about elizabeth after lola mentions visiting her;
sugar mentioning she is thinking about growing her hair out again;
and lola asking jason about the picture frame she saw in his living room.

the first one was just replaced with something i liked more and quickly cut out of possibility by the flow of the dialogue afterwards... this was originally supposed to trigger the reaction that the picture album did instead.
i'm not totally averse to jason still apparently caring about elizabeth, but i wasn't too devastated to leave it out, because i know it's a pretty morally ambiguous interaction.

the second one was cut for conciseness with the theme. in the end, focusing on change and sugar's perspective on it, while not as satisfying in terms of ongoing canon development, was more fitting for the themes of the comic.
sugar was going to mention that she didn't like quite how much she leaned into looking masculine with the shorter hair, and explain that she realized her anxiety about gender and performing femininity did not necessarily mean that she must be more "masculine-of-center" deep down, but as she observed other people more closely, she realized that every woman has complications with her relationship to gender, and that she intended to grow her hair out to focus on getting the most comfortable dynamic with other people when they parse her gender instead of trying to organize what (conflicting) feelings mean what about her identity for the time being.
that one i really did try to squeeze in there, but it was either not workable given limited time with deadlines (ie. i would have had to add 2-3 extra rows of panels past the maximum for 2 pages), or too forced and quick.

the last one was connected to jason asking about elizabeth... they were originally going to have that "vague connection, hope for closeness" note at the end of the scene between them because lola would mention she was living with her girlfriend, and jason was to then blurt out that he has a husband to try to relate. he didn't know lola's take on homophobia before she mentioned that, and he would rather hide that part of himself than risk the budding relationship.
i AM a little peeved about cutting this part. i tried to throw it in as implicitly explained off-screen in the next scene, and i have no idea why it was bumped off for something else (somewhere around the line of "he's different from ME") again. obviously i'll just have to follow up at some point with lola visiting both of them.

WELL. that's about all i have to say about this comic. good shuffle, team, i'll be releasing it publicly around the 23rd of this month, but i wanted to get this done before starting the next short.
no image for this one, unfortunately, because i just explained the few small cuts without much struggle.