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I'd argue that Abbey's abuse-is-abuse speech in Feline Filibuster played a major, and overlooked, role in setting Mike against Lucy.
Consider the timeline: Immediately before this, in Mischief Night and in Rehearsal, we see that things between Mike and Lucy had settled into a basically manageable place. They are, if nothing else, still talking.
And then Abbey says this:
Abuse is abuse. No matter a bully's excuses.. Violence should never be tolerated.
Abuse, huh? Sounds like something Mike's been hearing from his girlfriend for a year or so.
(In the first of these flashbacks Mike isn't wearing a scarf, which implies that Sandy started saying things like this in Mike's scarfless period between A Difficult Choice and Left Behind, early in their freshman year. I dunno if she'd said anything like this in the weeks immediately before Feline Filibuster.)
So Abbey gives his big speech, and the page ends on a panel focusing on Mike, who seems affected by it. And on the next page he's suddenly glaring at Lucy:
How interesting.
We don't see Mike again until the next chapter, Pillow Talk... when he decides to start giving Lucy the silent treatment, on her birthday, seemingly out of nowhere.
But it wasn't out of nowhere: Abbey's abuse-is-abuse speech accidentally prodded Mike into finally acting on that that "Lucy is abusing you" frame that Sandy, equally by accident, built for him.
And this, the silent treatment that began in Pillow Talk, is what first put the light out of Lucy's eyes and set her on a depressive spiral.
1st of all, yaaaaaaay at all your Sue posting
Ok now to the question, what are your thoughts on Sue's and Lucy's friendship in particular? I think its incredibly onesided, it's been shown multiple times that Sue cares a lot about Lucy, she always goes out of her way to do things that she thinks will make her feel better, but I'd say that Lucy at this point in the story feels like she mostly tolerates her? Something that makes me feel that way was the way Lucy reacted to Sue's hug in "It's all in the mind" page 9 and the way she has been acting in the current chapter, what did you think of that?
Thanks for all the Sue posts by the way
I'm glad you've enjoyed the Sue posting!
I agree that Sue's relationship with Lucy is pretty one-sided, but it feels one-sided in ways that are interesting because it reveals a lot about Lucy's blind-spots and priorities.
Sue has a lot of moments of care for Lucy. In sophomore year, Sue tries really hard to let her know she's there to support her.
But Lucy never turns to Sue for support, and can't understand why Sue would support her.
She winds up turning to Paulo and Augustus, a creepy near-stranger. While Augustus has appeal as an outsider who isn't part of her social circle, the same can't be said of Paulo. We have to address how Lucy's experiences growing up heavily shaped her sense of self worth and her security in relationships to examine why.
When Mike dropped her in third grade because he had a crush on Sandy, Lucy saw romance win out over platonic friendship. She also has primarily received "positive" attention because of her body, with Paulo, Daisy, and Mike all suggesting her looks are her only redeeming quality and there's no other reason to like her. As a result, in moments when she's desperately needed support, we've seen her try to use romance/her body to try to secure her relationships. Lucy struggles to feel secure in relationships that aren't also underpinned by people finding her attractive. Lucy also has big ol' hetero goggles that prevent her from considering that girls might like her too; she fails to clock that Jess likes her, even when Rachel is alluding to it.
The end result is Lucy doesn't value the friendships she has with girls as heavily as the friendships she has with guys in part because she doesn't understand why they'd care about her. Even though Sue is trying really hard to be a supportive friend, Lucy doesn't feel as secure in the relationship or understand why Sue's paying attention to her.
An interesting piece of evidence to this dynamic as a whole is in "December". Mike reveals he's only stayed at the table "because of Sue's stupid play", but when he reveals how he expects their friends will follow him, he doesn't mention Sue.
Sue's tried really hard to support Lucy this year, and while she's Mike's friend too, he doesn't really have a compelling argument that Sue will follow him over Lucy. So he just erases Sue from the conversation.
But Lucy doesn't grasp that Sue will be there and continue to show up for her. She's stuck on the notion that "Paulo won't leave" her, which Mike rebuts by citing his relationship with Jasmine.
So I agree that the relationship is lopsided, and that Sue is putting more work into it than Lucy is, but I do think Lucy genuinely cares about Sue as a friend.
They have moments when they just are in sync and seem to have fun together:
I also think this moment is really important:
We get to see Lucy reaching out to Sue with a sincere affirmation of her work. And it's also, unspoken, a goodbye to Sue. She knows she's moving and changing schools, disappearing without an explanation right after the play, so she's providing a positive note for her and Sue's relation to end on, a little notion that it's okay, the play is good, and it's not Sue's fault (even if Sue won't wind up feeling that way). She reaches out to Sue before her departure, not Daisy, David, Mike or Abbey, and I think it conveys genuine care on her part.
But the dynamic following Lucy's return was mentioned, so let's get to that.
Sue continues to be really considerate of Lucy, reaching out and always happy to see her, in addition to trying to prioritize her against Mike/Paulo
And Lucy rises to accept Sue's invitations when she reaches out. She doesn't have to; she has been describing the group as "ex friends". But if she didn't care, she could (and I'd argue would) blow Sue off. Instead, these two genuinely have fun together:
But as was mentioned, things aren't all rosy. We have to talk about that hug. I've seen someone (I forget who or I'd link it) make a comparison between Sue's response to Lucy's hug with Mike's response to Lucy after he falls off the archway.
Lucy and Mike are the injured parties, but they are to some extent expected to comfort and reassure someone else. Lucy in particular is drained before this hug happens; she's already made it clear she doesn't want to talk about what led to her absence. Sue kind of is pushing that boundary before this hug; she's not asking for information, but she is asking for Lucy's emotional engagement and reassurance on a topic Lucy's established she doesn't want to discuss:
Lucy doesn't want to linger on this topic, but Sue is messily prodding at it and asking Lucy for reassurance. That's why I think we get that look.
An alternate reading is that the panel of Lucy's reaction to the hug has a grey background to evoke Lucy's confrontation nightmares, although I don't favor this interpretation as they don't really come back until post-Eternal Flame and a grey-tone is used in other backgrounds in this chapter to convey being unamused. However, this is a good segue to "Tickets Please", as Lucy's "Confrontation" trauma is actively a wedge between her and Sue during the chapter. It's the reason why she's so surly at the beginning of lunch; see the stars in the 4th panel.
For a more comprehensive dive into this topic, I'm going to redirect you to eesbegovic's post, which delves into Lucy's nightmares, how Sue is portrayed in them vs how she actually acted, and how this trauma stands between Lucy and the table.
We can't blame Lucy for being really traumatized; it's really sad that Sue is in these dreams considering she didn't bad-mouth Lucy the way Paulo and Daisy did and has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated her care in acts out outreach and support. But it is what it is. Lucy is having traumatic dreams and related thoughts about Sue that make her less inclined to spend time with her and makes it more difficult for Lucy to trust in their relationship.
As for the rest of "Tickets Please"... Well, it reveals a pretty disappointing failure of Lucy's to empathize with Sue. I don't think she understands Sue and Paulo's dynamic and why Sue reacts to Paulo the way she does. Lucy is incredibly competitive and loves ruthlessly trying to prove herself; Sue does not. And of course, Lucy also proves incredibly thoughtless in her challenges, to a comedic degree.
And we can't ignore this, either:
I doubt this particular movie was to Lucy's taste, but for a lot of this chapter, I was holding on hope that she and Sue would see a different movie together to give us a positive note for her and Sue to end the chapter on. That's not going to happen now. Lucy ignored and brushed off Sue's attempt to reach out to her. She doesn't respond to Sue's invitation, creates a scenario that threatens Sue's access to the tickets, and starts to walk off when Sue does get the tickets. She doesn't want to see the movie with Sue.
Before, she was taking Sue up on spending one-on-one time together. So, what's changed? The nightmares and the table. Nothing else has changed in Lucy and Sue's relationship. Lucy's pushing herself a lot harder in the day to engage with her friends, at a point when she feels alienated from them, and it's taking a toll on her.
And like... This chapter obviously feels a lot worse for Lucy's relationship with Sue than Lucy's relationship with Paulo, even though they both feature in her nightmares and Paulo really earned his spot in them with things he actually said. And I don't really have a good explanation for why that is. Maybe Lucy's annoyed by Sue's assumptions about what she wants at the end of "Line in the Sand". Maybe she's experiencing some guilt about invoking Paulo's words against him and wants to be nicer to him. But those are guesses, and not ones I'm really confident in. We just have to wait and see how things play out.
This feels like a bleak chapter for Lucy and Sue's relationship, although we don't have a clear sense of how badly Sue was affected by Lucy's behavior or if Lucy was having an off day and will be more thoughtful from here. I do think they genuinely like each other, but a lot in their relationship right now depends on Lucy's ability to work through her trauma, and even then, there's still the issue where Lucy undervalues her friendships with girls. It makes for a sad state of affairs, and breaks my heart a little bit because I love these two an their friendship.
It's funny how Paulo keeps becoming things he once made fun of.
For example, Tickets Please is about the revelation that he's been embracing his nerdy side, despite his well-known opinions on nerd culture.
And yet just a few months of hanging out with Abbey has gotten him reading sprawling nerdy epic fantasy novel series, much to Abbey's shock and Sue's disbelief.
Consider also his long-held mid-2000s-vintage homophobia, which escalated just a teeny bit once Matt entered his life...
This meant Paulo had to do a LOT of soul-searching once he realized he was starting to have weird feelings for his male friends.
We can get more abstract than this. For example, he used to make a habit of bullying Daisy's boyfriend...
One reason it's my favorite ship is that Paulo & Daisy make each other better.
[As many have pointed out, the implication of Paulo's embarrassment at the end of that page is that the "good influence" isn't Mike at all, it's Daisy, and he doesn't want Abbey to know.]
Contrast this dynamic with Mucy.
Mike and Lucy make each other worse.
Mike struggles with a victim mentality and an inability to effectively advocate for his needs; Lucy is brash and "high maintenance" in ways that amplify his weaknesses.
Lucy, meanwhile... where do I even begin?
Given her fast friendship with Augustus in her sophomore year, I'd argue she thrives in relationships that are actually kind of vicious, in a performative tsundere "I only called you pathetic and worthless or either Abbey or a rapist because I love you" way. And that's fine! That's not a character flaw. I'd argue her friendship with Paulo was built on a variation of this dynamic. (If a weird unhealthy variation.)
But this isn't a dynamic Mike likes. When she tried to spin it with him, half the time it devolved into her mistreating her best friend.
I concede that it wasn't always this way. When they were kids, Lucy desperately needed someone who wouldn't reject or want to change her for being a girl with masculine interests, or try to shove her into boxes like "girl with feminine interests" or "boy with masculine interests." Mike was the only person in her life who accepted her tomboyish nature at face value.
But that was a long time ago.
Nowadays she has Paulo and Sue and Daisy and Amaya and David and Abbey and even James.
At a time when Mike and Lucy each harbor doubts that no one can love them without wanting them, doubts that the other embodies far too perfectly.
The weird thing about the trivia contest in "Tickets Please" is I can't decide whether or not it's supposed to read as a deliberately rigged contest. The questions didn't just come out of a box; if they did, it would have read unambiguously like a bad break for Sue. Instead, James, Abbey, and David specifically came up with them.
If we look at the questions Sue answered, "Name three countries in the southern hemisphere" and "Who was Socrates's most famous disciple", they're a geography and a philosophy question. Neither Sue nor Paulo have been stated to have any specific interests relevant to either of these questions. If they asked a question that was about theatre, that would feel it was catering to Sue's interests and expertise and probably shouldn't be included.
And if we look at the questions Paulo answered...
What is the safe temperature for cooking chicken?" James works with Paulo at Burger-Tron. We don't know if they have, say, chicken tenders on the menu, but it seems plausible that James knows definitively that Paulo knows this, which would make it an unfair question to ask.
"What's the name of Max Thunder's estranged daughter?" Apparently, this is a question about Danger Throat, and David talks incessantly about it to Paulo:
David almost certainly wrote this question, which makes it feel pretty overtly unfair on reflection, setting up a question Paulo is sure to know the answer to. Paulo even gives Sue the context that it's David he know it from.
"What gift does Charlie give Bella at the beginning of Twilight?" This one's complicated. David and Abbey know that Paulo dressed up as a character from Twilight. Sue has read Twilight, but this isn't established when David, James, or Abbey are present. Twilight is seen as a book for teen girls, so it could be seen to skew towards Sue. But they know definitively know Paulo has engaged with Twilight in some capacity, which skews towards Paulo.
Paulo's win isn't framed like some sort of conspiracy. Abbey has too much integrity to collude and seems to genuinely expect Paulo to lose.
And James probably wouldn't react like this if he helped rigg the contest:
But it's kind of weird, right? Maybe Abbey, James, and David weren't thinking too closely about the questions they wrote and how much they intersected with what Paulo and Sue know. But That Danger Throat question in particular stands out. David could have pulled from Danger Throat because it's something he loves without weighing the fairness of the question. Or maybe different characters wrote different questions than I might guess; maybe James has never had a conversation with either of them about Danger Throat and wrote that question, in which case it becomes an unlucky break for Sue. But unless, say, later in the chapter David fesses up to having thrown Paulo a bone, we're just not going to know whether or not this was deliberately rigged.
The optics of its fairness aren't clear. It doesn't help that it's also on the heels of Lucy's wildly unfair physical test:
So I really do feel for Sue here.
I think she has some legitimate reasons to be frustrated with the fairness of these tests. It might feel like the whole group is conspiring against her, which would be really hurtful.
And if it was deliberately rigged, I feel for Paulo too. He was genuinely trying his best and really excited to be able to answer the questions. David cooking the questions would tarnish his win by no fault of his own.
And if David rigged it... God help him if Sue ever found out.
Veronica: I feel like this Sue chapter has been understandably rough on you so I want to come in and say that this game show segment was not rigged! So definitely don’t worry about a potential future chapter where Sue is further dunked by a revelation that she had no chance to win as all her friends were conspiring against her. That did not happen!
I can explain the thought process with the questions.. in retrospect I can see why this is ambiguous.
I wanted the questions to be:
1. A question only Sue would know
2. A question only Sue would know
3. A question only Paulo would know
4. A general media-related question, so it can go either way. Which made me think of Danger Throat, which would allow Paulo to explain that David is the reason he knew that answer, due to hanging out with him.
5. The Twilight question, for the added joke that Paulo only knew this answer due to someone else, this time being his ex.
Danger Throat turned out to be a tricky choice in retrospect, because yeah it’s something clearly Paulo would know. Would Sue know? Is she at a disadvantage, then? I always imagined Danger Throat being something like House MD or SVU or whatever, so I feel it’s mainstream enough that Sue would know about it, even through cultural osmosis. Paulo certainly made her aware of it in Volume 4.
One notable choice I made is that if I made David ask this question, it would feel rigged.. so I made Abbey ask the Danger Throat question. Because Abbey has no reason to feed Paulo any rigged questions! This implies Danger Throat is popular enough that even Abbey knows about it, enough to come up with a trivia question.
This is admittedly why I had to sacrifice the joke where David very blatantly shows his tie, because a question from him and a panel showing David asking a question Paulo would get right would make people think “oh is he rigging?”
You can tell this was already something I had in the back of my head as a concern lol
The only chance I had to feature David, then, was with the first two questions (he would have come up with one of those), but I wanted the sequence where Paulo looked further defeated instead while Sue looked happy. Sorry, David! Sacrifices had to be made!
Because David wants to larp as a serious trivia game show host man I imagined him asking more serious questions, like history and such. In his brain, trivia is fanciful Jeopardy stuff. Meanwhile I imagined James, a guy who loves media, asking the Twilight question, why would he know about Jasmine?
In retrospect maybe this panel shoulda been David instead. I guess I wanted his tie revelation to come later, but then it didn’t properly come at all. Whoops! Perhaps I should change it……..
As for the chicken question.. I wanted a question Paulo would know due to being a practical guy instead of a literary one. I wanted it to be distinctly different from the first two questions, and Souppy mentioned cooking chicken. Would he even know the temperature for cooking chicken at Burger-Tron? Burger-Tron is fast food crap, I imagined the chicken comes in frozen and pre-cooked already so it just needs to be heated up, rather than properly cooked from scratch. Paulo knew this answer because he cooks at home, not because of Burger-Tron. At least that was my intention! And my intentions can always be dismissed in favour of other beliefs/headcanons of course!
But I figured rambling about the thought process would be interesting. I really should write more behind-the-scenes patreon posts if I’m just gonna YAP like this lmfao
Burger-Tron is fast food crap, I imagined the chicken comes in frozen and pre-cooked already so it just needs to be heated up, rather than properly cooked from scratch.
<flashes back to the training I took many years ago to be certified to serve food in the great state of [REDACTED]>
when reheating food it's critical to heat it past the DANGER ZONE quickly and efficiently to an internal temperature of 165 fahrenheit and then hold it until served at a temperature of at least 140 fahrenheit to keep it out of the DANGER ZONE approved reheating techniques that safely heat food out of the DANGER ZONE include-
Look at you fools, running around rigging and counter-rigging this puerile little contest. But what do you take me for, a minor side character in some webcomic? Do you seriously think I'd agree to your asinine plan if there remained the slightest chance of it affecting my decision?
I made it thirty-five hours ago.
On the next page, Paulo just needs to be kind to Sue. She's been spiteful and judgmental and has shown off her superiority complex, and he needs to be kind to her.
Auditing Paulo and Sue's relationship over the course of the comic, I noticed something. Sue clearly cared for Paulo and tried to be a good friend to him for a long time. They weren't ever close, but she tried.
She asks after him first when he rescues Mike and Lucy from the river.
Sue helps Lucy make a cake for Paulo and Chirpy's birthday.
When Paulo rushes off because of a fight with Tess sparked by a question Sue asked, she seems worried about him.
Sue genuinely wants Paulo to be involved in her play.
Even after he's mocked it, she's disappointed he can't audition:
She encourages Jasmine to say nice things to Paulo to help repair their relationship after a fight
When Paulo trespasses backstage during her play seeking Lucy, she directs him to her:
She's not happy about it, but she does the genuinely kind thing because she sees how important it is to him, even though she has every reason to throw him out: she's at her most stressed, Paulo has repeatedly mocked the play and sent rude notes into rehearsal and Lucy supposed to be on in a few minutes and should be getting "in the zone". But she does it anyways, because it's important to him.
When they're outside Lucy's house after she leaves, even after Paulo physically shoves Sue out of his way to yell at Jordan through the door, she reaches out but backs off when his fur starts standing up on end.
Even after their relationship becomes more contentious in "Critical Hit" when they both throw hurtful barbs at each other, she gives him chances. Immediately after he's insulted her at the con, she still extends him olive an olive branch:
But Paulo never is kind to Sue.
This is not me cherry picking. They're sometimes amicable together, but the closest it gets is him being kind to her is when he's performatively nice to her because Daisy is watching. I asked other fans to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and the only thing anyone could of was how he fought to protect her during "Confrontation", just as she fought to protect him. While laudable, that's not really the same as being nice in a social setting.
He never was nice to her, no matter how many times she was kind. He just was rude and sexist and belittled her and her interests again and again and again and again while she got more and more upset.
So she gives up. She stops giving him chances and starts saying mean things about him after he throws that olive branch away at the convention. She becomes spiteful and indulges in her superiority complex and it gets us all the way to this moment in "Tickets Please":
And just. Paulo has to be kind in this moment. He need to be the one to extend the olive branch. If the next page is literally anything else, I don't know how they're going to go anywhere good from here.
Paulo's been the bigger person before.
He needs to do so now. He needs to engage with Sue with empathy for the first time. He needs to chose to be kind.
Poor Sue, she tries so hard to be a good friend to these cats and I don't feel like her efforts always get reciprocated.
Paulo disrespects her, Mike seemingly doesn't care much beyond their MMO group, and Lucy's used her attempts at outreach as ammunition... twice now? (Witch Hunt, Sue drags Lucy into trick-or-treating but Lucy decides to wear her I-tried-to-commit-suicide-and-then-left-Roseville-for-most-of-a-year-the-same-evening-I-wore-this costume... and just now in Tickets Please, when Sue floats seeing the movie with Lucy & Lucy says "actually I'd rather watch you and Paulo fight over the tickets.")
Ooo feeling extra opinionated about cats the comic today ooo😔
I think i'm one of the few people that doesn't think Augustus request for Mike to stay inside was unreasonable. "Can you please go to your other 10 friends to give my friend that you've traumatized for the second time the SINGLE hour that recess lasts for to take her mind off of you?" To me, it's the least he could do.
People be trynna argue that "he's in the track team, they gotta run OUTSIDE" Guys...it's recess. For eating. We've seen it, and Augustus sure saw it too, that Mike, James, and David were the only ones going outside at that time.
And Augustus was right. Mike does have other friends, and he might've very much benefited from following through with his promise of staying in. Not just so Line in the Sand wouldn't happen, but so he could have evaluated why he even wanted to go after James instead of joining his other friends so badly.
But Mike's got the hindsight of a rock so...what happened was probably necessary. Just hope he takes the recent knowledge of Lucy's feelings to make better choices instead of fucking dying.
I'm still thinking about this moment. Lucy can be quite the cipher, and she’s been keeping her feelings about Sue, Amaya, and the others close to her chest. She’s had complex, hard-to-untangle feelings about them from the very day she returned to Roseville, when after an initially joyous reunion she spent most of the day avoiding the group. Augustus asked her why, but Lucy very conspicuously dodged the question.
She still hasn’t said why explicitly. Lucy dodged the question again in Unspoken Rule...
..but Augustus claimed in First-Degree Burn that Lucy wants to give Mike space.
But there’s something else going on, there has to be, something eating at Lucy badly enough that she can’t sit down to have lunch with people who love and value her without scowling in disgust and murmuring about how she’s only doing it for Augustus.
…
Something related to that visual motif of a star-filled sky taking over the background of otherwise ordinary moments, usually understood to indicate a flashback to the events of Confrontation. And how it's been recurring as she spirals in the wake of Eternal Flame.
(I think that’s that same starry-sky motif in panel 4 of the page from Tickets Please, but the background is grainy enough it’s hard to tell.)
The Nightmares
The visual of a star-filled sky is understood to be a reference to Confrontation because a) it’s prominent in Lucy’s PTSD dreams, starting from the nightmare-within-a-flashback in Escape Route...
And because b) despite its frequent appearance, the artist has been careful to avoid using the motif in moments when Lucy isn’t supposed to be thinking about Confrontation.
We learned in First-Degree Burn that prominent in those dreams are Lucy's "ex-friends":
The silhouettes are, in order: Sue, Daisy, Paulo, and Alejandro.
Lucy’s “haven’t you gotten what you want out of me?!” is paired with Paulo’s silhouette, and no points for guessing why she might feel that way. “Why can't you leave me alone" is paired with Daisy’s silhouette – and yes, in the months since Lucy came back, Daisy’s been hanging out with her (and/or accidentally transitively stalking her) not infrequently.
But pairing Sue, the friend who’s usually been most sensitive to her needs, with “Why are you always taunting me”?
And thinking about any of them in the same way as she thinks about Alejandro?
Something has gone very, very, wrong.
Lucy's friends have been nothing but supportive since she returned, and were nothing but supportive in the six or so months before she left, yet they've become recurring figures in her PTSD nightmares, interchangeable with Alejandro as people who just want something out of her.
These aren't new feelings
Speaking of the nightmare-within-a-flashback from Escape Route, how did that go again?
Ah. Right. Lucy has in fact known these people for much longer than “the six or so months before she left,” and for most of that time:
Paulo was openly a creeper
Daisy envied and hated her
Sue, um...
I think Sue has been fine. But Lucy…
Lucy clearly doesn't.
We may recall that this isn't actually what Sue said in Confrontation:
But time, the vagaries of memory, and Lucy's own insecurities have distorted Sue's words from nondescript venting into a targeted attack.
Lucy is imagining a Sue that targets how distrustful, standoffish, and unapproachable Lucy is – personality traits that she developed as defense mechanisms against a world that she never really fit in and that increasingly wants one thing (her body) from her.
Trust No One
We can observe that Lucy is, due to her life experiences, a deeply suspicious person.
She keeps everyone, even her own family, at arm’s length.
The only people she’s ever really trusted are Mike, Augustus, and arguably Paulo.
…two of these three people very clearly had ulterior motives for most of the time Lucy knew them.
We can infer a thought process that goes something like this:
Everyone has an agenda. Lucy won't trust anyone until she knows what it is.
Paulo's agenda is girls in general, and often-but-not-always Lucy specifically. Usually with that joking-not-joking energy he used to bring. So she’s figured him out.
Augustus's agenda in sophomore year was, by Call Waiting, fairly obvious to Lucy: manipulate her the way he manipulated Daisy. But knowing his agenda meant Augustus could managed... which ironically seems to have made him more trustworthy in her eyes. Part of how the two became such fast friends.
(It helps that she desperately needed a friend not tied to Mike, and that Augustus was recreating, arguably deliberately, the... acerbic... energy that used to define her friendship with Mike that she was missing so dearly.)
Mike is almost an exception: he's been a fixture in her life since preschool, long enough that "Mike is different & special" became something of an axiom for her. But Lucy seems to have long harbored suspicions that he sees her as a backup for Sandy.
(“You think I didn’t know what I was that whole time?”)
Contrast with, say, Sue. Sue does not obviously have an agenda in wanting to hang out with Lucy. Which could mean she really, truly enjoys hanging out with Lucy. Which would be good. Or it could mean that she has an agenda and Lucy hasn't figured it out. Which is potentially very bad.
[The above paragraph also applies to Amaya, David, and James.]
And, of course, Sue specifically was also present for Confrontation, and she was part of the group that watched Lucy get viciously attacked and threatened, physically and sexually, and did nothing.
The picture becomes clear
With all that established, we can start tying the threads together:
Lucy is a suspicious person in general
There is this group of people – Daisy, Paulo, David, Sue, and Amaya – who she has, through Mike, known for years
They all act like her friends, but she has lingering suspicions
(Which she is in turn somewhat insecure about, as reflected by dream-Sue's dismissive comment in Escape Route)
All of them present for Confrontation let her down
(Seriously, she was being beaten and threatened savagely, and they just cowered)
They all let her down* again in sophomore year, after Mike started freezing her out
(*They didn't do nothing. But whatever support they offered wasn't enough; was being offered by people she mistrusts; in Sue's case was ill-conceived on multiple levels; and in Paulo's case was not provably not a play to get in her pants)
Yet after leaving them for private school she was, apparently, miserable
So yes. Of course Lucy has very complicated feelings about this group. And:
When she comes back to Roseville, all these people she mistrusts immediately start bombarding her with love and affection.
They continue doing so over the following weeks and months.
(One wonders if Lucy even likes this kind of relentless affection: her friendships with Mike, Augustus, and Paulo were all characterized by vicious merciless banter – or in Paulo’s case, whatever you'd call the their dynamic in pages like this – not the uncomplicated “we love you so much!” energy that the others bring.)
She’ll hang out with them sometimes, like before class or whatever, but she’s also keeping a distance from them, like at lunchtime, for reasons she never really explains
(That are almost certainly Mike-related)
Lucy and Mike finally have a heart-to-heart in Eternal Flame, but it ends in that infamous kiss, and then he betrays her spectacularly by getting back together with Sandy the same fucking evening.
Thus confirming her long-held fear that she was never more than Sandy’s understudy.
Then she learns that her “ex-friends” have, retroactively, let her down again: they all know about what Mike said in December yet remained friends with him.
Paulo gave his big "you aren't alone, please just let us help you, say the word and Mike's gone" speech in Double Down, but…she was already feeling tense going into the conversation (see the claw marks from clenching her fists)... and Paulo spent the conversation ignoring her boundaries… and he offered to stop being Mike’s friend in a way that Lucy may not have actually taken all that well
(Depending on how we interpret her turning away and maybe tearing up a little and generally not looking very happy at the thought)
So the effect of Paulo’s big speech was mostly to give Lucy a PTSD flashback – observe how the starry-sky motif takes over the page – and cause a huge fight
In Line in the Sand she agrees to rejoin the lunch table. But…
Hanging out with the group is physically painful
(In that page she’s clutching the side she fell on in her suicide attempt, the implication is that it’s still injured)
And they can be startlingly insensitive…
...not just to her, but also to Mike - who she maybe still cares about, despite everything
Aaaaaaaaand they're also walking PTSD triggers
“It’s for Augustus”
The proximate cause for Lucy’s distaste at joining the table in Tickets Please was probably, as observed earlier, another Confrontation flashback. The flashbacks are, obviously, a PTSD response.
But they also reflect a dynamic where Lucy’s struggling to decide what she thinks of the group as a whole.
Where in one moment she’ll scowl in disgust at the thought of hanging out with them, and the next is gleefully kicking off a tournament arc.
Because on the one hand, yes, this is a group that has been showering her with love and affection for several months now. In December Mike claimed that they’d side with him over her, and yet she has a seat at the table and he doesn’t.
But.
However friendly Sue, Daisy, Paulo, and co. act towards Lucy.
They have – in her mind – repeatedly proven they cannot be trusted. When the chips are down, they will fail her.
After returning to Roseville, Lucy was probably keeping her “ex-friends” at something of a distance out of some combination of wanting to avoid getting entangled with Mike, wanting to give him space out of a perverse continuing affection, and lingering guilt over how she treated them all.
Not to mention those nagging insecurities that probably never really went away.
Yet despite her mistrust and insecurities, some part of her was willing to take the chance that the love and support her “ex-friends” were offering was genuine. So things between her and them were mostly fine.
Tender, even. The closest we ever came to seeing the starry-sky motif was, well, it was when she had to break Paulo's heart.
But overall, things were mostly fine.
Until Eternal Flame.
Mike – Mike, her special person – proved, in the most spectacular way imaginable, that he too just wanted to use her.
After everything they’d been through, she was nothing more than an easy rebound.
The darkest, most suspicious corner of her psyche was right about Mike.
We've had lots of night scenes where Lucy's present, and lots of scenes with a star-filled background, but surprisingly few night scenes with both Lucy and also a star-filled background.
The flashback in Love Again doesn't have any stars despite clearly being at night:
(Diegetic explanation: it's snowing, clouds are in the way)
I don't think there's a single page in Witch Hunt with stars, despite the entire chapter taking place after dark:
(Diegetic explanation: light pollution, probably)
There aren't stars in the chance encounter in Eternal Flame...
(Diegetic explanation: snow again)
Or even in New Year's Resolution.
(Diegetic explanation: she's only outside for two pages, the sky is never actually in frame.)
Of course, artistically, this is all probably because the visual of a star-filled sky has become a metaphor for Lucy's trauma over her assault in Confrontation...
So the artist is careful only to use that motif when Lucy is actually supposed to be thinking about it. Which means it's generally excluded from night scenes; but sometimes it's used in day scenes, to communicate that she's having a PTSD flashback.
One of the few recent chapters to have both Lucy and literal, non-metaphorical stars is Seeing Stars. And even there, motif is still used to communicate that she's having a PTSD nightmare.
The other time I've found literal stars in a Lucy scene is near the end of After You. They don't appear until fairly late, though, and not even when she and Paulo first get on the Ferris Wheel o' Heartbreak. They appear shortly after, when Lucy gets a little too in her own head and/or decides to address the elephant in the room, before putting the final stake through any last hope for Paulucy.
...You know, I believe I do in fact recall something from Confrontation that is relevant to how Lucy might feel about Paulo.
So we can agree that, looking back, the thing Paulo was so desperate to keep between Abbey and himself was interest in some kind of nerd thing, right?
The sort of thing he used to mock Sue over?
There's been speculation that Paulo & Abbey were talking about Mike, but:
a) Paulo's "I promised not to be friends with Mike" usually gets expressed as quiet guilt, and not outright panic
b) In the past, when we've seen him express high-energy panic it's over things he's deeply insecure about, like his bisexuality that threatened to undermine Paulo's idea of who he is
c) Paulo and Abbey apparently have some kind of book club, and he has a growing interest in Nerd Shit
No real comment, I think the only new information is that they pushed up EA release from iirc July or something to May 14.
tfw you push back an ea release for like a year solely to screw over three people, but then a judge orders that all relevant timelines have to be extended for the duration you had ousted ted gill specifically so whatever we can push up ea release a little.
