Week 103! (Patreon)

This panel comes from 277 - Alone II, which occurred during the thirteenth arc where Gus's obsession with Ashley comes to a boiling point due to the intervention of a bunch of other people.

I've talked about this before I'm sure, but the entire climax of this arc, where Gus becomes so fed up with everyone arguing over his situation and on how to deal with it that he gets emotionally overwhelmed, culminating in him blowing up at them and then running off to be by himself in confusion and depression, was something that I felt was really important to show and tell. Too often in TV and comics and movies, you have these two characters who aren't working out, but either through the advice/help of friends or just through plot convenience, they end up working out in the end easy as that. 

Things don't work like that most of the time in the real world, though. Friends don't just have all the answers that will solve your problem, and sometimes their advice will even make things worse. People don't just rush in and solve everything for you like a deus ex machina, without you having to learn or change or put in effort, or even can offer you the comfort you desperately want. And even if you finally come to your own conclusions and try to make things right in the best way possible, they sometimes won't work out regardless, and you have to live with that and move on.

In retrospect I'm not sure if I'm wholly satisfied with the way it came out. I tried to make Gus's sobbing to himself read like how somebody in that situation and with his personality would actually sound, using and repeating simple words and sentences due to being at an utter loss and being overcome with despair. Sometimes writers will have a grief-stricken character be a little too verbose and conscious, but in my experience, both personal and external, when a person gets into this specific type of depression... this tends to be how they talk. And I wanted to get that across, for realism's sake on an important issue I don't think is covered much at all in creative media.

I suppose, as probably anyone would say, I'd have refined things and done them somewhat differently in hindsight, but at the very least I hope this scene touched some people and resonated with them. It was admittedly drawn from personal experience and feelings I had felt and thought were important to share. Didn't have as many comments I don't think as the infamous Campy-Kale kiss, but this arc did get me a Ursa Major I guess, so who knows.