fresh meat, page 80

today, i realized that i had misnumbered pages again. this is page 80, last week was page 79.

anyway, i'm not sure what i want to say about this page. it's definitely interesting to give diana this much dialogue, considering she isn't a core character. this is almost 100% a bid for "realism" in the story. it would be strange for only core characters to participate in a setting where many people are kind of "warehoused" together.
diana in particular has been present at pretty much every therapy scene shown, and she's frequently in the background at lunch. she clearly wants to leave, and is putting in the effort to do so. i pictured her as the kind of person who feels like she's here because her alter did something to land her here, and she just wants to go home. she's not amused, but not surprised. she's mentioned having therapy before, and it's kind of alluded to that she has been in the psychiatric system for years and has a lot of experience with it. here, i had her say something about her drawing that clearly pleased the therapist, as well, with the intention that this was purposeful on diana's part.
her drawing is based on the common occurrence of "shadow people" as alters -- this is what she illustrated.
i had to make a choice about how accurate to her body i wanted her drawing to be... i made the shadow person thinner and more proportionally human than her, as i thought these are things that would be easily internalized in her self-image, but i had her stick two pointy ears on the side of this relatively simple figure because it made more sense from a furry standpoint. conversely, she didn't put the ears on the head the right way to accurately represent where they are on her head or what they actually look like; they are just generic pointy furry ears.
additionally, i had diana draw her piece with the paper oriented horizontally, because i knew that the others would be better done vertically. it would have felt weird to have them ALL draw on the paper vertically.

lupe is referring to no one specific real life painting, but a pseudo-genre of abstracts where artists paint on white canvas using white paint, often utilizing texture or contrast between the white of the canvas and the white of the paint to achieve some sort of shape or form.
i don't really see it as much of a cliffhanger, because she basically just explained that the paper will appear to be a plain white piece of paper. i wanted to have lupe explain hers before she showed it, but i also kind of wanted the pacing to be a certain way, so i just didn't include hers on this page. i had her explain before showing the art for, similarly to why diana's drawing is wider than it is tall, variety, mainly. it felt more natural to have characters explain their art in their own ways.
lupe was the most fitting, as her explanation involved mostly lore to preface why she drew the way she did, and because she is significantly older than the rest of the group and probably feels less of an urge to follow the leader with the same script.
in her explanation, she also hints at the fact that her relationship with her husband was initially much more pleasant. i considered whittacker and lupe to both be immigrants, but whittacker's relationship i felt was more to move to america directly and always kind of hated her husband, whereas lupe moved to america because of her relationship, where the vulnerability of being an immigrant was taken advantage of as the mask peeled off.
like many women with abusive husbands, i tend to view her interpretation of her situation as much calmer and more accepting, because she believes that her relationship is salvageable. there were many women in my experience who have abusive husbands in wards, but the vast majority of them simply wish their husbands would come back to them or for the flaws they believed caused their husbands to change more than they wished for the relationship to end, so this felt realistic, and possibly more sympathetic, for lupe.
her dialogue is always a little fussy to write as i consider what kinds of ways she would speak idiomatically, if she would make "verbal typos" or not based on how spanish translates to english, etc. she tends to speak in bursts, too, so it's a game of space. here, i think the only thing that got cut was her saying she was the stupid one after realizing the painting was not blank. this was mostly to kind of characterize her as casually self-flagellating, but moreso open-minded, especially regarding making mistakes.
i think this might be the first time lupe's first name is actually mentioned, but i can't be 100% sure.

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