I’ve been in this exact situation before, sitting on the couch with a laptop talking to a friend about some class at UIUC I hadn’t been doing well in. [I went to the same college that these dudes are currently in lol.]
Btw I love Aaron’s design. He’s charmingly supernerdy in an incredibly realistic way. I wonder how he’s been coping with the horrific death of his friend… :(
U of I represent! Sprinting to the DCL from Allen for your 9 AM CS 233 lecture represent. Hanging out in the dick-shaped cemetery next to PAR represent. Fighting the -10 degree Illinois windchill on your way to play board games at an RSO meeting in the Union represent. Breaking your brain over pointer arithmetic all night and then realizing you have a CBTF exam tomorrow for another class represent. Having a mental breakdown in front of a useless counselor who nods silently for 30 minutes and then hands you a pamphlet about depression represent.
It sucked ass even without trauma from a dead sister. I hope that new content warning isn't what I think it is.
FUCK YEAH ILLINOIS REPRESENT
Being an art major at an engineering and research university represent. Going to the dick-shaped cemetery next to PAR with your Art 110 drawing class and sketching gravestones for an actual group exercise represent. Riding your bike from Flagg Hall back to Allen Hall at 4am smelling like turpentine and oil paint represent. Having a terrible roommate at Allen Hall represent. Wishing you’d transferred to an actual art college represent. Only going to discussion sections for your gen ed classes and skipping lecture represent. Going to McKinley for bronchitis and just being handed an inhaler like “oh well sucks to suck” represent. Being followed around by the extremely bold squirrels on the Quad represent. Sprinting for the bus at the student union, hopping over a bush, getting your foot caught on a branch, landing flat on your face, and still missing the bus represent.
I’m also very concerned about that content warning…
omg I love the Allen Hall representation in this fanbase, too true!!
I’m trying to remember where all this comic is set? we know that Claire and Aaron and Audrey are currently living in Champaign-Urbana, and I remember that Crystal Lake (a predominately white middle-class Chicago suburb some three hours’ drive north) is tied to Milo somehow, but I don’t remember if Crystal Lake is where all these characters grew up or if that’s just like where his grandma lives, and I also don’t remember if it’s been established how far Milo traveled to move in with Gage. I’d be super curious to learn how far apart Milo and Claire currently live from each other, and how far that is from the prison Griffin is in
crystal lake is where milo's grandma lives but milo & co are from chicago originally. gage and milo are pretty close to champaign-urbana, somewhere around like rantoul or mahomet.
i'm not american so i have no idea what half of those acronyms mean. i had to duckduckgo [1] "McKinley" and "Allen Hall" in order to understand what you meant. i still don't know what ’PAR’ is. i learned something new, though. this is what strangers hear when i speak with my best friends in a language the three of us have created, i think.
[1] search engine. google alternative that is more privacy focused. in this case, it is used as a verb rather than a noun.
i find it very sweet how claire and aaron have stayed best friends through all of this and still chill out together like they used to when they were kids. i sure hope nothing ever ruins their bond!!!
i just wanted to commend the tiny details in every single panel. it really makes this feel real and i can connect to these characters in such a unique way. but most of all, cheez its and bud light would hit so hard right now.
When I said "make a fucked up decision that completely totals her life" I didn't mean it like that!
I'm actually starting to like and relate to Claire. I really shouldn't be surprised though that spending time with someone and seeing more of their internality has that effect.
Looking back at the chapter content warnings, I like* how "character has firsthand audio experience of someone dying, and discovers the fresh body" is just sort of an unremarkable baseline expectation by this point.
(* this is the wrong word. This is the very wrong word. But I don't know how to actually know my emotions well enough to know what the right one would be.)
... have we seen either the abuse or the substance abuse yet this chapter?
So so far;
-Trauma: we all know what happened to her
-Abuse: Griffin abusing Hailey before killing her
-Substance abuse: The slushie-alcohol mix
-Transphobia: Claire deadnaming and misgendering both Milo and Griffin at the event
My guess is that Claire is going to attempt suicide. She's the protagonist and she clearly isn't well so I wouldn't be surprised if she tried to do that
(Note I could be wrong here. Maybe someone else'll try to do that, you jever know with Max)
Personally I think if it is Claire (could be someone else, could even be a stranger who was discussed in Death Class), it'll be a flashback to a previous suicide attempt, not a new one. Although maybe this scene is gonna go downhill really fast, I dunno. The content warning was for the next update and while she's depressed she doesn't appear to be either impulsively suicidal or in crisis.
re: Lower, hope you know I misread that as "I'll bet Milo's dad is an Applejack fanatic"
like, yes, *this* is why he's abused and neglected Milo throughout their relationship,
Milo's dad: "I realize now that I've been enabling you. Look at you. Starlight Glimmer? First of, her design is so boring. She looks like every other pony. We could have had Sunset Shimmer instead."
Milo: "Dad it's not her design that counts, it's her character arc!"
Milo's dad: "You stan a cult leader? Do you know realize how problematic she is? Do you realize how problematic you are for cult apologism? Honestly, I expected better from a child of mine."
Milo's dad: "You know who is hard-working, honest, and reliable? You know who is truly the best pony? Applejack. If you'd let go of your fucking Starlight Glimmer bullshit, you'd realize that the solution to your problems is right here all along!"
And with that he rips off his jacket to reveal an Applejack t-shirt beneath
Milo’s grandma enters the room. “Now, son, you know I love applejack as much as you do, but she wouldn’t want to see you trashing her friends like this. Applejack has accepted Jesus into her heart, and that means she loves everypony, including Starlight Glimmer.”
Wait this entire time I’ve been assuming that Starlight Glimmer was a knockoff of Twilight Sparkle to avoid using a real character lmao (I have not touched any MLP in a decade so I don’t really remember most of the character names)
I only knew that because of past comments, I have no knowledge of MLP after Gen 3. I literally Googled MLP lore just to make a typo-riddled fanfic in the comments of a webcomic
I really like the way you stylize pupils. It didn’t always parse that they were pupils when i was first reading; sometimes i mistook them for a glare or eyelashes or something. it gives a remote-ness to the characters’ expressions at times that suits the subject matter, like so many of these characters are refusing to look shit head on and their existences are so heavily mediated by Online…it’s a cool effect!
I'm loving this comic! I hope things get worse for everyone moving forward! Is there a way to put a blanket CW, like at the top of the site/comic? I would prefer to be surprised, rather than have a heads up every time something interesting is about to happen.
i see what you're saying, but i think it would be hard to cover everything that might be triggering to substantial amounts of people over the course of the entire story. a lot of comics do have briefer, vaguer content warnings (for ex. drop-out, which is also hosted on comicfury) but that's not the way i went and i don't feel strongly enough about the issue to overhaul my approach to cws on the comic.
is there a way to put the cw in like, a spoiler tag people can open? i've seen another comic do that and it worked well as an "opt in" way of handling it
Author Notes:
cw: suicide attempt.