These darn emo kids and their darn poetry, amiright? What’s funny to me is that Amanda, while mocking Kevin’s lit knowledge, doesn’t even like poetry. She likes being smart, successful, and well-educated, though, so if she’s expected to learn poetry then by god, she’ll learn the poetry. Doesn’t mean she’ll like it, though. And unfortunately for her, it does mean she probably won’t really get in depth with understanding it either. Welp. Can’t be good at everything. Deciding you don’t like the things you aren’t good at is way easier anyway.
Here, have some links for further reading.
Little Red Cap, by Carol Ann Duffy
Alice Walker’s Official Website
To Change the World Enough, by Alice Walker
I Will Keep Broken Things, by Alice Walker
Going Out to the Garden, by Alice Walker
You don’t need to read each poem to understand the scene or to get anything coming up in Tomodachi Forever, not really, but there IS a reason each character is drawn to each poem they’ve chosen. Pretty much any time you see a specific song, poem, etc mentioned, it means something. Plus I just can’t help sharing the things I like with y’all. <3
Fun note: I had learned the E.E. Cummings styled himself as e e cummings, but I double-checked for this page and GUESS WHAT? He utilized decapitalization extensively in his work, but apparently did not extend that to his own name. Here’s more info, for the curious.
Some background links on the name drops in case you’re curious:
E. E. Cummings, poet
Todd Melicker, poet
Josh Ramsay, of pop punk band Marianas Trench
Alex Gaskarth, of pop punk band All Time Low
Max Bemis, of punk band Say Anything.
P!nk, aka Pink, US pop star
What’s-his-name, of hey, there will be always be some new pop star or child actor whose messy transition into adulthood with fame and money is publicly broadcast and we’ll all watch their meltdown, shake our heads, and indulge in copious amounts of judging people we don’t actually know.
I’ve also now broken the 1-word page naming pattern because I try to pull from dialogue on the page and this was worth it.
After I had the entire page done, except for backgrounds, I had to redraw Kevin in panel 3. He originally looked rather sheepish, which is so not Kevin. He’s an ambitious kid, but that’s when it comes to things like his music (hence acing the poetry journal). The rest of it? Fuck it. Perfect is the enemy of done, and the time he spends on homework he’s not working.
Ms. Singh is pretty cool. Good sense of priorities.
I almost named this page “Disgusting” but I thought it was a bit negative to follow up “Blech” with, especially since I, personally, don’t think Nancy and Kevin are being all that gross. Okay, maybe a little.
I have this semi-serious intention to write Tomodachi Forever as a novel so that y’all can have it all at once instead of tiny piece by tiny piece, but then when I do the pages I often wind up changing small bits of the script, so then the novel wouldn’t entirely match up. How much does that matter? I dunno. I also have over a thousand pages of script, but the farther out the script goes the more open it is to changes. Not sure how I’m feeling about this.
That and I have this fantasy of pitching to HBO, but I don’t foresee that happening. Besides, HBO is surprisingly bad at sex scenes (see: The Tudors, True Blood).
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Well, gosh! What an accident! Goodness.
I don’t even know if she’s on the correct part of the field from that perspective, but I don’t exactly care. I’ll look up all kinds of minutia and research things to death that you won’t even notice, but I can’t for handegg. It’s not happening. Sorry/not sorry.
Look how polite Amanda’s being! Making introductions and all. Gosh, I bet those two have a lot in common. Punk hair? Check! Body piercings? Check, check! Hmmm, what else? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I promise Maddy gets to speak again soon! She’s a quiet one, that girl. She’s actually a really hard character for me to write because she’s so quiet and I’m… not. Like, at all. Amanda, on the other hand, pretty much writes her own damn self.
