Hal, it's about cats

Thoughts on Bittersweet Candy Bowl! I'm the crazy timeline guy.

[itsaboutcats]

So I may have gone into a wild frenzy and created a Bittersweet Candy Bowl timeline. It contains everything that's publicly available in BCB.

It's got tags to filter events by characters and character relationships, chapter descriptions, links to events, and notes on what I considered when placing each event. I'm sure I'm missing some tags here and there, but it's a fun way of looking at events in the comic and was a massive labor of love.

Guide to using the tags is under the cut!

Character tags: Major characters are tagged when they appear in a chapter, including if they are sending text messages but are not seen. If a major character is discussed but does not appear, they would not be tagged but their relationship tags with the characters discussed would be used.

Minor characters are tagged when they appear or are mentioned. Some of them may have a relationship tag or two with a major character.

Relationship tags:

Relationship tags track interactions between characters. All relationship tags sort the characters' names alphabetically, so Mike and Lucy is tagged "Lucy & Mike" and Paulo and Abbey is tagged "Abbey & Paulo".

Some tagged relationship tags reflect very minor interactions, like giving someone a side-eye but not saying anything. Note that there are some instances where the number of relationship tags applicable to a scene exceeded the limits of the software and the less relevant ones regrettably had to be cut.

Utility tags: A few utility tags appear at the top of the tags list.

Date range: This tags the date ranges of when the major characters are in school. It can be helpful to toggle on when looking at another tag, like a character tag, to help contextualize when events fall.

Exact date: There are some events in the comic that we know exactly when they occur. This tag reflects that. There are a lot of birthdays, but also some holidays and things that could be calculated out.

Rough estimate: The opposite of an exact date! These events were placed with very little date information to work with. They might be placed in the wrong month, or even the wrong year, and it's possible they are out of order in relation to other major events. This mostly applies to flashbacks or events we know happened but did not see.

[itsaboutcats]

"Mother's Day"/"Time Out"

Paulo really does most of his opening up about his mom and turning relationships around outside the principal's office, huh?

[itsaboutcats]

Design Corner: Tess

Oh hey, remember "Design Corner"? Let's take a walk through Tess's everyday design, from her earliest chronological appearance to her last.

We get one glimpse of Tess in what's implied to be her freshman year.

Tess's hair was long wavy brown. She has the center part and prominent front locks of hair we'll see throughout her design, along with crimped whiskers, but she has no visible accessories at this point.

In her sophomore year, Tess falls in with Roger and totally revamps her look.

She starts dying the front locks of her hair pink and seems to straighten the back of her hair. She accessorizes with a collar and a changing assortment of bracelets, as well as a tank-top and skirt combo that shows off a little of her midriff.

She gets four ear piercings and has three tail...piercings? clips? Two look like studs and one looks like a ring. The ring is normally (but not always) the furthest from the base of her tail. She also gets an eyebrow piercing on her left eyebrow, just like Augustus.

But by junior year, she's broken up with Roger and is trying to reinvent herself. Enter High School and enter, Tess! This is her introduction in the comic.

She's ditched the earrings, eyebrow piercing, tank top, collar, and skirt and cut her hair short, but she's kept the tail piercings and the pink dye in the front of her hair. She's also opted for two thick black bracelets as a standard part of her look and debuts her locked-heart necklace.

The very bottom of the back of her hair is also dyed now. In its original design, her hair was a little longer, sticking up at the top and longer all-around in the back.

The front locks of her hair were originally drawn way longer very shortly after her introduction, but in revision they're kept around chin-length.

By December of that year, the front of her hair does grow a bit, going past her chin and forming little fluffy puffs at the bottom.

Tess's look doesn't shift further until the Silvershore Isles arc ushers in a new art style:

The fluff at the bottom of her dyed hair was drawn with some extra texture in this style, but that got removed in revision.

More notably, while the prominent flyaway bits of hair on top of her head were edited out of Volume 1, they survived the Volume 2 edits. They'll also return later in a flashback where the original scene has since been revised to remove them:

At any rate, when senior year comes around Tess comes back to school with a new haircut:

She's cut her pink hair the shortest we've seen it, getting rid of the little tufts at the end. The back of her hair also is cut shorter, eliminating the dyed back. The two strands of hair that were sticking up on top have been shorn for good this time.

Tess retires the locked heart and debuts her star necklace in "Feline Filibuster"

The watercolor era brings a few changes to how Tess is stylized.

Tess's pink hair meets in a center part and forms a prominent "V" shape in her forehead where the locks grow. In previous styles, her hairline would often be level across her forehead, with more pink hair in the shadow of the prominent locks lifting up in the front. That doesn't happen anymore in the watercolor era, simplifying the design to the "V" shape. The effect gives Tess a dramatic widow's peak-esque look. The ends of her pink hair also don't taper off in a point anymore, but instead are fluffy.

The way the star necklace is shaded also changes, giving it a much greater appearance of three dimensionality. It also shifts a bit between being pointy and rounded.

As time progresses, the front of her hair grows back out to almost chin-length.

And so, that completes the evolution of Tess's design! Farewell, Tess! It was fun watching your design change as you reinvented yourself and grew as a character.

[itsaboutcats]

Let's talk about Lucy's advances towards Augustus in "Burnt Bridges" because it was bad and honestly had the potential to be so, so, much worse.

The color is all pink like this might be a romantic moment. Let's call this scene what it is: it's Lucy assaulting Augustus. She does not telegraph her intention to kiss him, giving him an opportunity to turn her down. She just goes straight for the kiss.

Augustus has to physically push her off and tell her "No".

Even then, once he's pushed her away, expressly told her "No", and is clearly upset, she tries to go for another kiss anyways.

We also should acknowledge that is happening his bedroom, which is the first place he's had to himself that felt safe. If we consider the layout of the room, Lucy is physically between him and the door. It's a windowless basement room with no other exits. To leave, he has to go around/through her. He can't easily just walk away.

It's only after he threatens to make a scene that her family will hear and invokes Lucy's rhetoric about consent that she actually stops.

While clearly upset in the moment, overall Augustus doesn't seem to be very affected by the assault. He comforts Lucy through a self-loathing spiral, accepts her apology, and affirms his platonic love for her. There is no indication that he feels less comfortable around her going forward; if anything, her breakdown drives him to be more protective of her.

And I genuinely think what we got in canon was just about the best possible way for this to play out, because the alternatives are so much worse.

In canon, Augustus's sense of safety wasn't damaged, but given the situation, it very well could have been. Lucy came into the one place he should have unequivocally felt safe and assaulted him. At this point in the story, he hadn't really started making friends with Jordan and the seniors; she is his only friend. He's living under her roof and doesn't have anywhere else to turn. He would have no one to even talk to about this, even without the stigma surrounding it and the worry if anyone would believe him or take him seriously.

And if Augustus was really uncomfortable with Lucy, it would have really messed up Lucy too. In canon, she immediately spirals into self-loathing for what she did and Augustus helps comfort her through it.

A version of events where Augustus removed himself from the room because he was uncomfortable and would have reaffirmed Lucy's perception of herself as "a bad person" and left this self-loathing spiral completely unchecked. In the aftermath, she wouldn't be able to turn to Augustus for social support anymore.

It's also worth acknowledging how Lucy is putting him in an incredibly bad position in relation to his housing. The only rule we actually see Lucy's parents establish was him not having a romantic relationship with Lucy:

If he were to reciprocate, he would be risking his housing, and being kicked out of her home would land him in a worse scenario than he was in before he left. At best Toby and Alejandro are angry about his lack of loyalty and at worst Alejandro has been told about his relationship with Melanie and is homicidally enraged. Augustus has been afraid of Alejandro's wrath to the point that he gets held back a year trying to appease Toby. His options would be to go home expecting to be severely beaten or to immediately become homeless.

It's also worth noting that Lucy has positioned herself as having control over Augustus's housing as well. She's the one who persuades her parents to take him in. She also lays down conditions for him staying there:

How would Lucy's parents know if Augustus was skipping class or pursuing Daisy? If Lucy told them. She never threatens to have him kicked out or tries to leverage his housing against him, but him remaining in Lucy's home is implicitly contingent on him having Lucy's support. She has a lot of power in their relationship, and just because she doesn't wield it against him doesn't mean Augustus isn't aware of it.

Augustus has a lot to lose if his relationship with Lucy sours. There is a parallel between Melanie and Lucy in that they're at the time of their advances, they're the only real friend Augustus has. We saw Augustus passively acquiesce to sexual advances he wasn't really ready for with Melanie.

Fortunately, when Lucy makes advances, Augustus is older, more willing to assert himself, and knows more about consent from his conversations with Lucy. Honestly, Augustus shows a lot of trust in "Burnt Bridges". He trusts that Lucy doesn't want to hurt him or take advantage of him and he trusts that if he had to make a commotion and involve her family that it wouldn't backfire on him.

Augustus is really at his best in this scene; he clearly deeply cares about Lucy and it reflects well on him. I'm glad that he was resilient enough not to be really aversely affected, but I think it would be completely understandable if he was.

It's always been wild to me that this scene doesn't often come up in conversations about assault in the comic. Honestly I think there's a big gender bias at play and suspect if you swapped the genders of Augustus and Lucy people would have reacted very differently to this scene.

[itsaboutcats]

Sometimes I have a point I'd like to make related to current discourse, but I'm like, "well, I really should unpack these other two topics that are foundational to my point first". Then I have two prerequisite essays to write and by the time I get around to my original point no one's talking about that topic anymore, and that's assuming I didn't peter out partway through my self-assigned three essays. Unfortunately, I am like this.

[itsaboutcats]

We first saw Lucy's nightmares introduced in "Escape Route", but because the entirety of the flashback was in greyscale, Lucy's dream appearing in greyscale wasn't distinct. It's only in "Seeing Stars" when we see Lucy's dreams in greyscale again that this becomes a distinct motif.

In her dreams, she runs through brick alleyways, trying to evade her pursuer. But Lucy is trying to hide her nightmares from the people in her life:

This setup makes the artistry of the moment when Augustus asks her about her nightmares really clever:

Augustus is guessing something that Lucy wants to hide: the return of her nightmares. And in this moment, the background changes to greyscale. Lucy's back is against a grey brick wall just like those in her nightmares. While Lucy wasn't caught in her dreams, she's caught by Augustus here. The greyscale brick evokes both the nightmares themselves and this underlying feeling/idea of being caught and trapped.

[itsaboutcats]

I'm interested in seeing how Augustus will interact with the dynamic of the seniors and alcohol. Matt, Jess, and Rachel at least are social drinkers; Jess drinks at 21+ clubs. They had beers at Rachel's house for her birthday before Paulo brought more alcohol.

We don't see them drinking at junior prom, but it's the intuitive reason why they would ask Paulo to drive Matt's car instead of Matt just driving, or planning on Rachel, who Matt knows better and is a more experienced driver. They joke about drinking pretty openly. They don't always drink at their parties, but drinking is clearly part of their social culture.

Augustus's experiences with alcohol are very much not that. His mother is severely alcoholic. His parent's substance abuse defined his childhood.

He's around alcohol a lot, between his parents and the implication that Alejandro and Toby drink, but we've never seen Augustus drinking. Given his desire to escape his circumstances and live a life different from his parents, combined with the hereditary component of alcoholism, I suspect he doesn't drink at all and has strong negative feelings about it (that he compartmentalizes).

Because of this gulf in experiences, I'm interested to see how Augustus would actually respond to the seniors' social drinking. For their part, the other seniors have some awareness that he had a difficult childhood, but it's unclear if they know about his parents' alcoholism. Even if they do know, teens can be thoughtless and they might not consider how Augustus might feel about it. Augustus is hanging out with them outside of school more, and eventually they will probably break out the alcohol. I think it's most likely that he'd tacitly weather it or remove himself from the situation, but this likely would be a bitter disappointment for him.

[eesbegovic]

Oh cool, Lucy's graduated from "accidentally being triggered while bringing Augustus homemade brownies" to "deliberately seeking out her trigger out of what I assume is a misguided desire for control over her life."

This is Not Good for her mental health. Maybe there's someone she trusts that she can talk with about this.

People Lucy Trusts

Her Mother

If I'm reading the tea leaves here correctly, it looks like when Lucy was in private school and staying at her aunt's house, she briefly mentioned boy trouble to her mother in a phone call or something, and Carol got involved to a degree that was deeply unnecessary and/or unfortunately necessary.

Or something. I'm extrapolating here.

But it looks like whatever Carol did severely damaged Lucy's trust in her. So her mom's out.

Augustus

No good, she's run out of patience for his well-meaning coddling and won't let on that anything's wrong. If she tells him about her anxieties then a) he'll start coddling her even harder and b) he might feel he has to stop hanging out with Jessica's crew to take care of her. Which would ruin her plan to convince him she's fine so he'll hang out with his new friends.

She can't let Augustus father her, she's trying to mother him!

Paulo

Fine, this one was a stretch before he went all "I know about what Mike did to you and I remained friends with him anyway" and/or "I will totally abandon one of my oldest friends if you invoke something rash I said in a fight like a month ago."

Mike

bwahahahaha <despairing laughter>

[itsaboutcats]

I support Daisy and her undying love of chocolate

[itsaboutcats]

Find the truth, Sue. Do not forget. Obliterate him.

[itsaboutcats]

This is Amaya erasure, right here in an Amaya chapter :(

[itsaboutcats]

Sue's reactions to the Blasto contest really underscores in how her patience and goodwill has been completely exhausted between sophomore year and junior year.

[itsaboutcats]

Daisy and Mike both were out there doodling their crushes on their school papers, to different end results

[itsaboutcats]

I'm enjoying the reappearance of Daisy's nightgown from "Pillow Talk".

[eesbegovic]

Abbey's Disaster Dominoes

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.

[itsaboutcats]

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 a comparison made 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.

[itsaboutcats]

How the turns table...