Irreparable damage
I want to vent about my own vent art a little bit.
This is the first time I try to make art out of something personal. When I started writing it, I decided that I didn't want to turn this into an exposing document. The real situation is way too messy and complex to fit into a single comic, and I wasn't exactly confortable with sharing personal details.
So, in order to keep my privacy and to make a comic that isn't 10 pages long I decided to keep things simple.
With this piece I wanted to express the grief of losing the person I thought my friend was. How a fight could get so bad that all the good memories of them got overshadowed by the bad ones.
The things they said to me on the comic are all taken straight out of our real conversations, and making this comic really helped me to process all this mess.
However these phrases are, admidetly, taken out of context. My ex friend wasn't the only one speaking during our fight, of course I talked and replied too. Some of the phrases aren't even part of the same conversation, half of them happened over the phone and the other half happened two days latter via text when I tried to reach out to fix things. They also weren't really screaming for the most part, I just did the speech bubbles this way to better express how they affected me.
But, the thing some people had issue with is that I didn't explicitly show the reason behind their breackdown.
This was pretty much an intentional artistic decision, as I said before I just wanted to express my feelings and so the full context behind our fight was irrelevant for that.
Most people accepted the ambiguity as a creative choice and could relate to the comic either way, but a small minority on r/comics took the ambiguity as a deliberate attempt to hide away the truth of what REALLY happened.
Some of them took the "how dare you talk shit on my back" line at face value and decided that they were mad because my friends and I were making fun of them on their back.
Others decided that the whole reason I was picturing them as the bad guy was because they were having a breakdown, and then assumed that I didn't try to understand what were they mad anyways.
One even questioned the title of the comic saying that the damage was likely not "unfixable"...
I don't mind criticisms of my art, but I took those really personally. So in order to prevent anything like that on tumblr I just wanted to say:
No, we were not talking shit on their back. My ex friend asked another friend if they could sleep on her bed. They made her deeply unconfortable and after her rejection they only avoided the topic. (This is hinted at on the small text of panel 5) She tried to call them out for their behavior in private, and so my ex friend tried to shield themselves on their SI thoughts.
She only reached out to other people to ask for help. That's the "shit talking" bit.
Because back then my ex friend and I were really really close, I decided to explain to them her point of view in order to try to fix things.
But here is the thing, exfriend was deeply insecure about the idea of other people not being "upfront" with them. And so, choosing to speak to other people instead was seen as a huuuge treason, causing them to unleash all their rage towards her. I begged them to please, calm down and talk it out, but it was no use. They kept victimicing themselfs and blaming her for daring to ask for help. And so, they blacklisted my friend and decided to never speak to her again.
I hang up, I decided to wait for things to cool down. I started to reflect on our friendship and I realized that I needed to set some boundaries, because this was not the first time they alter my social life because of their "blacklisting" behavior.
I tried to explain to them how this shit affected me and sudently I was the bad one for not telling them how toxic they were before. The last part of the fight broke out and so, our friendship was over and they cut tied with me and all of my friends.
This is the context of the specific event the comic based on.
I know posts in tumblr can resurface at any time, and I wouldn't like to get any more comments like the ones of the subreddit, so I'd like to put this here just in case. This was a lot longer than I wanted and I honestly just wanted to vent somewhere their friends wouldn't seeme. So yeah. Im doing good, I have full support from all of my friends and this person is nowhere near my life anymore.
I don't regret making this comic the way I made it and Im glad it could resonate with so many people's experiences.
I understand the impulse of wanting to see the other side of the story when people try to depict someone acting "crazy and irrational" but this is not r/AmITheAsshole. I just wanted to create art about my feelings and I don't owe any stranger all the details of a very personal event.