Feral’s brain is all-organic, non-industrially-processed.

So what’s she going to do? Throw meaningless pseudo-philosophical nonsense at them?

I think perhaps this has to do with her regenerative properties- after all- poison and regeneration are opposites

Mr. Patrick, tear down that wall! And that other wall!

I’m guessing this is but I really love you boy patrick and I accept you for who you are. hold my hand.

no, I’m melting, I’m melting, all my beautiful poutiness, gone, gone, gone.

yall i think its time to update the cast page lmao

I am incredibly happy about these developments with Patrick. I’m a little ashamed of myself for this, but tbh, sfp was my favorite comic and I had fallen completely in love with it on a deep personal level, and when I got to page 76 in issue 3, even though in retrospect it wasn’t that important, there was something that just completely rubbed me the wrong way with how Cleaver was characterized, that I ended quickly abandoning the comic for years.

Objectively, I don’t even think I was right. It’s just that when I get so deeply attached to something, I have a bad habit of really becoming emotionally invested to the point of unhealthy obsession.

At the time, it felt like the character of Cleaver idk…I don’t want to say his character wasn’t portrayed with respect, because that’s not true and it’s not like he’s my character. It was more like for me, on a personal level, how he reacted in that situation felt remarkable to me, but it wasn’t really framed that way. There he was stuck in a place of isolation and complete powerlessness, and here comes well-intentioned Alison, who was there to unload on him these deeply personal details about herself. And while in essence it really was what Daniel needed to hear, it never made sense to me that he would get at the essence of what Alison was saying immediately, or agree with her, considering the power dynamic in that situation in the first place.

At the end of the day, Alison still had all the power, and her ‘flaunting’ it in front of Daniel’s face and admitting to it is almost cruel. I think most readers, with the context of what we just saw Alison go through, understand exactly what she was trying to get at, and understand she wasn’t trying to flaunt anything but was trying to let Cleaver see a very vulnerable and angry part of her so that when she says she feels bad, Cleaver can see that it’s not just some shallow attempt at pity.

But the line ‘I’m not really different from you’ felt like such a cruel thing to say, even with what Allison says immediately afterwards. Idk. Idk what she could have said instead, but if I was in even a little bit of a similar situation as Daniel was in, and a person who I perceived to have received everything I didn’t growing up came into a room where I was literally chained, where she had all the power, and began saying these things, I would not have reacted nearly as well as Daniel did. So the thing I took out of the whole situation was that Daniel was truly an incredibly good and brilliant person.

And the issue I guess I took out of the whole thing was that it felt to me at the time like the story was framed in a strangely patronizing way towards Cleaver, that all he did in that whole situation was to react, and to agree with Alison, and there didn’t seem to be much consideration about the power inequality in that scene. To me, it felt like Alison was portrayed to be the one who was dropping truths that Cleaver had never considered, though there was that brilliant line written for him where he said ‘why are you telling me this’, implying he did think about these things and is annoyed at Alison saying these things like they’re something neither of them have ever considered. But then the way he reacted in the following pages kind of undercut this. It felt like there was a contradiction with how Cleaver reacted to what Alison was saying with how he then gracefully interpreted everything. I’m not explaining it very well, but I just got very frustrated with the whole thing. Daniel felt like such a powerful and interesting character, and in that moment it felt like all of that was created really just to service Alison’s development and to make us feel empathy for Alison and to get us to love her for how genuine she was, at Cleaver’s expense.

But anyways it wasn’t really even fair for me to feel those things. I took my love of the comic and plunged straight into toxic obsession and overanalysis, offending myself.

But the point is, with that context of where I’m coming from, I really love this arc. I think in my mind, Cleaver and Alison becoming friends should have happened much slower–getting Cleaver to trust Alison’s intentions and her words should have taken longer, and all the real trauma and pain that Daniel might have had to deal with, and whatever bad habits and bad coping mechanisms he picked up–none of that was really even acknowledged. It felt a little like that weird part of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age when one of the characters was raped and the story implied that no real trauma will occur and that the character simply pushing it to the background is the noble and strong thing to do. It made me a bit sad.

But with Patrick, we got what we couldn’t get with Cleaver–time. We see the conflict in him, with how much he wants to have connections with people, but we see his coping mechanisms screw him over repeatedly. We see how vulnerable he is and more importantly, how even when he was friends with Alison, his problems didn’t go away. I absolutely love how the comic has acknowledged a little bit of the sheer scale of bad habits and fears and pain that can come with any kind of trauma, how in that situation, even the act of trying get better can be a new kind of trauma, a very deep and cutting kind of pain.

Tldr, this arc is really great.

did i miss something