Thank you for adding the tw. I know a lot of people were complaining about it, but it's really nice to know that you care about your audience's safety more than you care about shock value. A lot of people (including me) appreciate that.

In these awfuller subjects, I generally I try to avoid it being about the shock value as much as possible! That’s why a lot of these awfuller things in my stories are not the final panel, allowing for some sort of quick oasis to rest on in the 24 hours between updates. But this particular set-up just wouldn’t allow it.

We can’t see through Becky’s eyes a moment afterwards where everything’s okay – the conceit of these strips are that she’s seeing things that happened in her own house, so jumping to a hospital where her mom might be awake again is impossible.

And I had said over and over again that nobody is dying in this webcomic, so ending a strip on what appears – without any further context – to be a potentially dead body, especially of a character that we know to be dead as of the beginning of the comic… that seems a betrayal of the trusts I had put in place beforehand. I had previously assured a certain level of safety, and that strip kinda super trespasses it.

But mostly, yeah, I don’t want anyone unfortunate enough to have suffered something similar to do anything bad to themselves by being thrust back into that headspace without warning. I wanted to tell Becky’s story without any real people being hurt. I don’t WANT the shock value. I want the information told in an interesting way. I learned long ago that shock value is easily cheap.

Thanks to everyone who sent me Tumblr Asks with thanks, I appreciate them. I apologize for not answering all of them. I am kind of beat this week.