elitetrick

Friday Sketch - She's Okay.

Added 2020-07-31 19:51:10 +0000 UTC

You know I nearly chickened out on posting this, but, well, fuck it. None of you have even met Riley in the comic yet, and I have about four more pages to draw before she debuts in Chapter 5. I've already started to sorta touch on some of this stuff in previous sketch posts already though. By this point, I've had to learn and write every minute detail about this character, and I've done a fair bit of research into her mental illnesses, because not only do I find them fascinating, but I really wanted to treat them realistically and respectfully.

I foresee, perhaps, a slight problem with depicting this character fairly, however. The comic is being written from Kiva's perspective... and so we will only ever get to see how HE sees Riley. From the outside, her quirky behaviors, the strange things she says, the things she might do can seem odd, crazy, dangerous, or maybe sometimes a little funny. People in the story likely often dismiss her as crazy, or (like Kiera) they might think she's violently psychotic, but that's only because they aren't looking deep enough. Originally I think I'd planned for her mental illness to be her defining flaw, but I've come to realize her mental illnesses do not define who she is. She struggles with them, she might suffer from them at times, and she is a person apart from them. Riley's defining flaw is NOT her mental illness. She is a person first. Her mental illness is the antagonist of her own story. It is the obstacle she has to fight to overcome every day.

So she might seem crazy on the outside. But on the inside, I think she wants everyone to know that she's okay.