Updates Tuesdays and Wednesdays
When you figure yourself out
Posted November 22, 2016 at 2:15 pm
Today's voting incentive is the least spoilery panel I could choose from tomorrow's page, I think? (If this all comes out even more discombobulated than usual, my carpenter is working on my kitchen and "Brick House" is playing and I cannot concentrate at. all., so this will be interesting.) More than having two elaborate transformations in this chapter, I wanted to focus on her acceptance of her werewolf side as that's sort of...the point of her character. I'm not sure how obvious it is that this scene is occurring concurrent with Elias fighting people, but time doesn't come across well in a comic posted over the course of months. Unfortunately, getting it across that she's finally accepting her real self is...challenging! Without a lot of dialog to support this page and the last one, I've had to rely on some pretty subtle changes. I ended up fighting with this pose for awhile, and finally settled on this diagonal up-shot, and it's totally what I wanted. She looks a bit Jesus-y, but a little religious imagery in a comic about werewolves can't hurt? I guess? It's up to you to decide if that last panel is her transformed or her wolf side "speaking" to her. Apologies for the rather...simple? page for today. I lucked out that this page came together fairly easily, because mentally, my brain is off the tracks this last week. Man, if I thought I was having issues with depression before this election, I guess I was kidding myself :P. Uncertainty about my country on top of shorter days giving me the winter sads on top of just life stress and I'M A MESS. I've been here before, and I'll be fine, but ugh. Just makes getting anything done that much harder. On the plus side, tomorrow's page has all sorts of things going on! In fact, it's the climax of this chapter >:). We're still about seventeen pages from the end of this chapter, though. I knew it would be long! Like, really, really long. But so it goes, this is what made the most sense in the end. In TV-watching news, because normal things are nice sometimes, I've taken to watching documentaries on Netflix again because they're easier for my poor brain to focus on. (I focus better on "information" than story a lot of time, I don't know why.) I watched one documentary called "Deprogrammed" which is all about the efforts to deprogram people from cults that popped up in the 1970s, specifically the efforts made by Ted Patrick. Basically, Patrick's work (he was just...very good at this, not someone with a degree or training) formed the basis for how we still deprogram people from cults and brainwashing today, though his methods partially only worked due to being...basically illegal. We're talking kidnapping, holding people against their will, sleep deprivation, etc. I'm not sure how I felt at the end of the documentary. As a coherent narrative, it had some issues. They featured some people who were legitimately deprogrammed by Ted Patrick, and a few who basically cottoned on to what he wanted them to say and just went along with things to get out of there. It seemed like for all the people he helped, he messed up others just as much? There's a few schools of thought in documentary film making that say you should let your audience come to their own conclusions without guiding their opinion. I'm not sure this documentary really gave enough information to form any opinion, though? I study cults and religious fundamentalism for fun because I'm a normal person with normal hobbies, so this kind of documentary was going to be up my alley anyway. Basically, after the civil rights movement in the 60s, there was a huge surge in cults alongside a huge surge in Christian fundamentalism/evangelism. The 70s was a wild time, culturally! So you ended up with televangelism on the rise with leaders like Jerry Falwell, which led us in large part to Republican party being co-opted by the religious right in current times. But, the 70s also had a LOT of charismatic cult groups pop up, like the Moonies, Branch Davidians, Hare Krishnas, Jownstown, Children of God, etc. A lot of those groups formed in the mid-50s and just grew in power as a result of the hippy movement. Anyway, history has a tendency to repeat itself, so...just keep all that in mind, I guess. We're going into another pretty weird time culturally, and the rise in extremist thought isn't unusual during major culture shifts. Yay. Okay, I need to go get my life together and finish tomorrow's page!
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