Weekly Update - 56 (Patreon)

HEY!  We like, JUST got the notice of our official move date this morning.  So I'll be checking out of this city in mid-late April and settling in to the new one just a little after my birthday.

Until then, gonna keep the updates going as long as I can, because I suspect I'll probably have to skip a week or two in there.  Also AGGGGHHHHH, this is page 99 and I still have NO IDEA what I should do for Page 100!  *deep breath* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.  Excitement abounds!

Posting this week?  Yes.

Poster Progress:

Kiera - Nearly done!

Max - Still scared to touch it.

Riley - Needs more shading/highlights.

Drawing: Page 99

Playing: AI Dungeon (I'm so sorry)

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Weekly Ramble:

I had... too many topics to cover today, but this one seems appropriate given this week's page.  Settle in, peeps, this is going to be a really looong one cuz much like Max, Riley derailed my plot!

In the first draft, I envisioned Riley as this girl Kiva would go to for aid with anything technology-related.  She was a tertiary character that didn’t really matter much at all aside from showing that yes, there are a few people in Kuserra who actually do know how to use and salvage some of the Ancestor’s technology.  In an early chapter of that draft, Kiva and Kiera want a gun, and Kiva doesn’t know anyone in the city that’s better at fixing tech than Riley.  We learn he’s in debt to her, but he exploits her memory problems and social quirks to avoid paying, then they have a silly back and forth, and that’s about the last we see of her in that draft.

Thing is, I’ve wanted to write a character that could be my Ed/Tiny Tina/Entrapta ever since I was in college, and Riley is finally my chance to do so.  So when I was reimagining the comic for what would become its second draft, she fell into that trope.  Maybe a little too hard.  In order to make her distinct, I wanted to give her a serious mental condition.  I didn’t want her to just be silly or whacky or quirky.  I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with psychology, so to the books I went!  I was able to find a lot of articles and case studies and psychoanalysis notes and youtube videos about people struggling with real mental conditions, and I learned a fair bit about them and applied a few to Riley.  So she stopped being a whacky, quirky genius and became more of a schizophrenic genius.  Schizophrenia, of course, is probably one of the MOST stigmatized mental conditions, (though it also tends to be overdiagnosed and more recent research suggests that it is more of a category of illnesses with a wide variety of causes and symptoms and scientists are beginning to break them down into better, specific conditions with more consistencies and the possibility of more effective treatments, but I digress).  I knew that, if I was going to embrace a serious mental condition like schizophrenia with Riley, I had to be careful.  She was meant to be a fun, lighthearted character, and I didn’t want to her schizophrenia to come across like it was a joke.  Not only would that completely undermine the character, but it could also really hurt people that read my comic who relate to the character and who suffer from her conditions as well.

And yet, in draft 3, that’s exactly what I did, and I realized as I was coming to the end of Chapter 4 that I had done the character of Riley a serious disservice in my writing.  Her mental conditions were still popping up pretty much only when it was funny for them to do so.  Her outbursts were often just punchlines.  Well I scrapped that script and quickly tried to write a new one for Chapter 5, despite being so short on time.  No longer was she a schizophrenic genius.  In fact I stopped trying to diagnose her altogether.  I decided instead to give her a long list of itemized symptoms, which were more or less consistent with Schizophrenia, but also consistent with a few other conditions as well.

And then we see her in Chapter 5, which was incredibly difficult for me to finally nail down.  I tried my hardest to get into her head but for the first half of the scene I was failing to make the connection because it was so complicated.  I had to try and imagine the mind of the character I had created, AND everything that was going on with her, all at once, just to figure out what she might SAY in a single panel.  There were so many symptoms to consider, so many things to think about, so many different angles and approaches and STUFF happening in her mind and trying to decide the most natural thing for her to do or say at any given time was a serious struggle for me.  All the while, she needed to help advance the plot!  Along the way, Riley had become an important component of Kiva’s story!

But then, around page 81 I think, I was drawing the part where she’s stuck talking in numbers, and originally, I'd planned for that moment to end with a big smile and a "no prob" sort of attitude… but the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand just how terrifying it would be for her to be unable to speak the words she's trying to speak.  To want to say a specific thing, but only have numbers come out instead.  To lose control of your ability to communicate, even if only briefly.  And that’s when it hit me:

Riley is just a normal girl.

Her brain shows her a different world and it doesn’t always function properly, but that doesn’t change who she is.  She is a normal girl, and she is behaving exactly the same way anyone would if they could see what she is seeing.  That is what this character means to me.  I hope, now, that I am depicting her properly… and I hope that you love her as much as I do.