fresh meat, page 16 (Patreon)

and sugar is introduced... this scene got a little bit of work-over; it's been a little strange working on a story concept that i came up with quite a while ago, actually. fresh meat was something i thought of during drop-out's scripting phase, and it was originally written at the top of drop-out's document.
i drew the first concept of this scene on october 6th, 2015, which i dug up here:

you gotta excuse the roughness; you can tell how old this one is because it was before i decided i didn't like the "round tail" style for my speech bubbles, which was a switch visible in the first few pages of drop-out.
kim was originally supposed to be a serval, but she was drawn as a lynx in this; she flip-flopped on species a lot, which can make it hard to remember what came when on the timeline. i blame furries, but it's a long story.
fresh meat was also supposed to feature many more already established characters in the cast, but i scrapped that idea later for the sake of believability.
meanwhile, this is what the modern script for this page looked like:

...the nurse who explained the cafeteria protocol wasn't originally scripted to be included, either.
i don't necessarily feel bad about making off-the-cuff changes to dialogue that i know won't cause plot holes if changed, but they end up grinding me down very quickly as i try to include everything, which i already talked about in a different post... here, i felt the comic relief was a little more important after seeing how long the introduction ended up being, and the nurse's exposition about breakfast-lunch-and-dinner didn't exactly contradict the goal of the entire comic, either.

sugar herself is very different in this from drop-out, too. one commenter said it would be interesting to see people's interpretations of sugar if they hadn't read drop-out, and i agreed more and more as i was working on this page and editing what happened to allow more lighthearted dialogue and fostering audience attachment.
another big reason besides that sugar obviously acted differently ~5 years prior to drop-out is that... while i don't think much about giving myself a defined "writing style" to stick to, one element of what i knew i wanted from the beginning was "no thought bubbles." at most, i would include them for comedic effect, but never to show what a character was thinking. i wanted to figure out how to show instead of tell, in that regard, it felt fitting for a visual medium.
but this story is still from kim's perspective. she thinks everyone else in this hospital clearly belongs there as crazies. so sugar's dialogue and interactions for a while are through the lens of someone who legitimately thinks she's about to shank them for one wrong move. a little interesting interesting to write, all things considered.
i realized as i was thinking about that that kim actually never really states that she thinks the other patients are crazy with the script i've currently written; she just IMPLIES it when she says she ISN'T. so i wasn't averse to taking more time to show kim's hesitance and reactions to sugar here for that reason, either.

i think that's all i have to say about this page besides that I WISH IZZI COULD BE IN THIS COMIC IT WOULD BE SO FITTING but alas.