character development: sugar

familial stranger is the first canonical revisitation of sugar and lola since the end of drop-out; however, the story focuses on lola's character development. despite this fact, sugar is present during some of the comic, and she has an undeniably different demeanor.

when i asked myself what the most obvious difference was, i immediately thought: she looks tired.
... which is true. her eyes are almost always half-lidded, and she doesn't emote as often anymore... but she DOES emote in familial stranger, usually when a reaction is appropriate. maybe she isn't actually tired, then.

i asked my wife if she thought sugar seemed different, and if so, in what way. she said... i'll just quote it.

 "sugar seems to have expanded her focus energy from just interests to also reading people
like, in drop-out she could get specific about the balisong but was less so about why she felt bad (especially nearer to the end)
whereas she's nailing observation over the phone in familial stranger (while the pillow seems to indicate her not discarding old interests? which is why i think expanded ability more than moved to new thing completely ability)"

this was a very interesting (unexpected) answer to me. i looked at the balisong scene, and sugar's eyes were also half-lidded by default.

obviously, i drew all of drop-out, so i remember it a certain way. when i asked MYSELF, i immediately thought of "you have to think about who has to deal with it after you die."

also from the same scene:

"anything besides silence" huh? even though it's been established that she's pretty sensitive to noise. 

it's pretty obvious sugar doesn't like silence because it gives her thoughts too much space to wander, but wouldn't static be something consistent to focus on instead?
here are some other scenes with half-lidded sugar that i thought of while recalling off the top of my head:

she's usually thinking about other people. i also noticed this sequence, which i thought was really interesting on the topic, because the transition in her thought process from focusing on information of interest to self-assessing again because she lost interest after focusing on a static, consistent piece of information.

sugar has a lot of intrinsic energy (she's hyperactive for god's sake), and she can put this energy to very productive and intense use if given direction, as with school, or her plan in drop-out.
however, sugar thrives on logical thinking: incontrovertible facts and proofs. these are things that don't change, and don't need to be fixed, so they're useful for solving problems, but it also means they can't sustain her attention more than temporarily.
with nothing to occupy her, she tends to instinctively... try to find something "of interest" in herself -- something to objectively fix. maybe she wouldn't always need to focus on something with the intention of fixing it, but she is a fairly consistent and methodical person, meaning that she probably finds herself boring. spending too much time introspecting makes it feel like something there needs to be fixed inherently, because it feels bad.

you can also see sugar do that in familial stranger, where she becomes much more energetic when talking thinking about information about herself again.

as an example.

so, what changed about sugar? mainly her thought process. she can think about herself, but finds more purpose in doing so when it's contextualized in contrast with outside information, which changes more.
then, how she sees herself, and her innate qualities, is more like assessing a fact that can be used to solve or prevent a problem, rather than a cage trapping her from moving forward.

why did she change at all? because she wanted to... i think that she realized that, at the end of drop-out, her situation wouldn't change.
the canyon wouldn't change the fact that angel's dead.
it wouldn't make her happier. neither would staying alive.
so it became, in a way, boring for her to think about. and she wanted to think about other things.

it sounds sad, and sugar looks sad and tired in familial stranger compared to how she looked in drop-out, but, again, maybe she isn't tired. maybe she's just content.
i think it would take a lot more work on herself to get to the point where she could introspect about what motivated so many of her unhealthy lines of thought in drop-out, and to reach a point where she no longer has a default nervous motivation to make herself useful.
however, it's arguable as to whether she actually NEEDS to reach that point at all, or at least any time soon. while this sort of mental work is usually to help people feel a more stable, more mature sense of internal peace and happiness, if what sugar said is true about being unable to feel happiness most of the time, i think all she'll find on the other side of that battle is an understanding of herself that only leaves her feeling nihilistic dissatisfaction.