Untitled for Now..

A bcb fanart acc, with a default name lol just because

[twilidramon]

eh ill post em here too

every once in a while i think about the cast of bittersweet candy bowl as actual cats/dogs. david is a massive chocolate lab. sandy is a prized showcat. sue gets to navigate a cast without crutches. mike's always tripping over his scarf. somehow, augustus has a jacket and an eyebrow ring

same drama. just on four legs!

[magicalbunart]

getting back into drawing with the bittersweet candy bowl girls

[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 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.

[that-otoishi-kin]

I've got no more awesome, factually correct opinions to give😔 but i have thiiis. Lucy Bittersweet Candy Bowl, they'll never make me hate you, Lucy Bittersweet Candy Bowl (yeah, that's her full, legal name. She's the entire Bittersweet Candy Bowl)

[quicklypurplebeard]

kinda crazy how this chapter has really created a bunch of discussion about sue, paulo, friend dynamics etc

if anything it just reminds me how much i dislike paulo LOL

[quicklypurplebeard]

Yaaah not buying paulo on the update but it def is a step forward

it might be similar to when he immediately picked on abbey then daisy scolded him and he turned around but abbey didnt accept it. IDK paulo has grown but ehhh poor sue

[itsaboutcats]

Have a daisy.

[symliadoo]

forgor to post! bcb doodles from the anniversary :>

[itsaboutcats]

Paulo and Sue, and Sexism

Paulo is something of a lady's man, a flirt who hits on girls freely and attempts to charm them. He flirts with basically every girl that moves in middle school.

But he's never makes a pass at Sue, even though they were on pretty amicable terms all the way through freshman year and the beginning of sophomore year.

When pressed on his opinion of her as a romantic candidate, Paulo describes her as "kinda cute", but it seems really half-hearted, like he knows there's objectively nothing wrong with her appearance but he just isn't into her. Her personality's part of it, but that didn't stopped him from pursuing Katie, who he described as "selfish and bratty". Sue just isn't his type. Which is fine! There's nothing wrong with not being attracted to Sue, and she probably wouldn't appreciate his romantic attention.

But Paulo clearly treats Sue differently than her female peers. He's rude to her, casually disrespects her, and puts her down completely unprovoked in a way he just doesn't with the girls he likes, starting back long before his relationship with her truly became contentious:

So Paulo is rude to Sue and doesn't respect her. But he jerk to most people early on; just look at how he treated Abbey and Mike! But it can't be ignored that Paulo does not have any female peers he both respects and isn't attracted to. We can't extricate his treatment of Sue from his sexist worldview of women:

Paulo says this to get a rise out of Mike, but it's very much at Sue's expense. He's reducing her to a sex object, with the implication that the only reason Mike would be inclined to do the play with her is for sexual reasons; Sue as a person or an artist has no merit. Paulo personally doesn't find her attractive, but he's still is reducing her to a sexual entity because he fundamentally doesn't respect women:

Paulo explicitly frames himself as valuing women's bodies and not their personalities, characterizing women as conquests and objects to be won by men. This is deeply gross and sexist. Even if we've seen him care about women in genuine ways, this is how he talks about them. He's broadcasting a worldview that values women based on how sexually desirable he finds them first and will only maybe consider them as people second. And it's not like these examples are all ancient history; two of these are from within the past year and reinforce that he still believes those earlier, nastier, explicitly stated positions.

And 4/5 of these examples happen in front of Sue. She's aware that this is how he thinks about women. And Paulo also has specifically attacked her body, the only metric he claims to value in women:

Sue is failing to live up to her ideals here; she thinks fatphobia is bad and is trying to discourage mocking people for being overweight, but she is still a teenage girl who is insecure about her own body. Paulo takes the opportunity to insult Sue's in a scenario that will render her a hypocrite for being insulted by his insult. He's doubling down on the notion that it's okay to make fun of and not respect girls he doesn't think are attractive.

Paulo only has been shown to respect women he's attracted to, and he laughs at the idea of being attracted to Sue.

So of course all of this is is going to make Sue think he's really sexist! Sue is overtly unimpressed by Paulo's objectification of women and is someone who thinks about gender politics.

And if you're Sue and Paulo has communicated that he only is willing to treat women well if he's attracted to them, the implication winds up being that he's never going to respect you, no matter what you do or say. But Sue so deeply wants to be respected. She can't debate her way into being respected with someone who's deeply sexist. Sue's not going to be vulnerable and ask for respect when Paulo's already given her an answer about how he sees her and women as a whole.

I think Sue commits so heavily to the position of "Paulo's and idiot and therefore undeserving of respect" in part because of this. If Paulo's never going to respect her, then she's never going to have to respect Paulo right back. She doesn't want to see qualities she respects in Paulo when he's positioned himself to never respect her.

The lack of respect obviously has exacerbated Sue's insecurities, and there's more that goes into their dynamic than this, but the sexist elements are palpable. Paulo may have grown a lot, and his treatment of women has improved significantly, but he still doesn't have any female peers he both respects and isn't attracted to and has started making up sexual scenarios to degrade, humiliate, or provoke women- including Sue.

Sue's ego taking a hit in a contest isn't going to fix her issues with Paulo; it's just going to make her feel worse about how Paulo doesn't respect her. Paulo needs to extend respect to Sue to actually break this paradigm. I believe he's capable of it; he just has to prove it.

[iggy-666]

[iggy-666]

happy 20th anniversary to my favorite webcomic ever 🤍🩶🧡💛

[quicklypurplebeard]

Hello hello been a long time reader and these cats gave me the itch to pick up the digital pen again

Happy anniversary :’ ]

[quicklypurplebeard]

Winter fit check

[quicklypurplebeard]

i gotta make more bcb art sometime sorry yall ive just been busy

[karmagicians]

some lucy outfits

[quicklypurplebeard]

do you have a main bc id wanna follow u there!

oh i do actually! its more so a reblog tumblr but if youre looking for art specifically i do have one its just not active at all

the main is @ / brokedope65 itll also have a default icon just bc i think its funny

and if you want art id probably recommend either my twitter/insta both arent active but it has more recentish art up both are -> (sbits05)

[saffranin]