fresh meat, page 85

this page was so irritating... way too long, but just short enough to not be able to slice in half. i've been shading this for 11 hours straight now, so my commentary is going to be sparse.

in this scene, i was planning on carmilla getting a little more... subtly antagonistic or malicious once the toes of her delusion were stepped on. this could have been implying that she was younger than lupe, or calling the blood drinking self-harm.

originally, i was going to end this scene with a shot of lupe guarding the remote. however, last page, i drew her finger tapping the table to put something fresh in between a stream of headshots. this was where the remote was supposed to be. since i didn't draw it last page, i had to write it out completely.
this means she just kind of drops the argument, and makes her seem a little more like she has been shaken in her beliefs than i originally intended. not the end of the world, but it was certainly frustrating when i realized such a stupid small detail would cause a domino effect like that.

for kim, her reasoning isn't anything groundbreaking. this is a way a lot of self harmers feel. it's a little bit undeveloped, as she's a teenager, and obviously doesn't have a hefty relationship with cutting like lupe does. there is a high chance kim has only maybe cut once or twice under distress rather than regularly.
most of the meat of kim's development to the viewer here relies on a little bit of footwork thinking about incongruencies her rationalization for self-harm and her rationalization for suicide, because dying isn't really as much of a punishment, and makes even less sense as a punishment for "ruining her life."
i'm not super happy with how the Face Journey turned out in the middle of this page, either. just not a lot of time to tinker over it. expression development like this is interesting, because there's no easy way to write how it should look exactly. i kind of just have to feel it out. for this one, it kind of went hesitant, but no development to establish the shot -> looking up for guidance on what answer should be -> looking down, rubbing face out of stress -> looking at her hand, gathering thoughts -> calm, somewhat embarrassed explanation, while making eye contact.
this page had 6 scrapped panel attempts as well (usually have 1 or 0 per page), 3 of them were just expressions of kim that i didn't think worked.

this page in general has very nofna vibes leaked onto it that i'm not super a fan of, it's just very difficult to make conversations in a dimly lit room with few features on the walls between characters who are sitting in stationary positions look interesting. it is what it is.