#tell me if you do

[veilord]

I’m writing this because I can’t stop thinking about sbg and I’m really excited for the next chapters but I’m really impatient and I can’t buy coins :(

I love “School Bus Graveyard” so much and I recently reread the entire comic because I stoped reading for a while. I had fun but it really reinforced the major criticisms I have with it, and that is the pacing and telling instead of showing.

The best way I can think to explain it is that the story goes to fast, especially in the first season.

Like it starts with the cold open to the kids almost getting got by the phantom before going back to give us the context of what’s happening. And this works great to hook readers when the start of the story is a bit slow. Then we have the kids bonding on the trip before they are pulled into the phantom dimension for the first time, and it’s great!! I love the first night and was getting so invested in what would happen next! Then it skips back to the time during the opening.

Skipping boring or irrelevant stuff in a story is expected, we don’t want to watch the kids go to all their classes during school if we don’t need to. This skip isn’t like that, it skips over a lot of interesting story that we need to know about to understand how the kids got into the situation they’re in during the opening. So the story has to full us in on the stuff skipped and dose so by just having Ashlyn monologue about it.

I didn’t notice when I was reading but thinking back this happens a lot, the story skips ahead to the more plot relevant and exciting stuff and has Ashlyn fill in what we missed. This results in the story having almost no downtime which, isn’t good. It makes the story very fast and can be confusing, like when preparing for getting the jeep Ashlyn says it takes a lot of preparation and practice, but we don’t see any of it. So when the plan goes wrong because the keys were moved we aren’t as panicked and confused as the kids. Well it may have been weeks or months in story for us it seems like a few days at most. I have no clue how long they have actually been dealing with the phantoms but the way the story is paced makes it seem like they have only been dealing with it for a short time, making how stressed and tired they are seem like to much.

But I find the biggest problem with the pacing and lack of downtime is how it screws over the characters. When the time skips happen we lose so much character building. We don’t see how they interacted right after the first night in the phantom dimension, how they handled the second night, how they all got to the graveyard, all the arguments about going back to savanna, what they text in the group chat, visiting each others houses, Tyler teaching Ben guitar, just hanging out. When we are told backstory’s they don’t hit very hard because we don’t know much about the characters, we never got to know them. When Tyler falls on the tree and we get his backstory it’s informative and sad and stuff, but then it tells us that Tyler sees the gang as a second family and… what. When I first read that I was genuinely confused, it felt like it came out of nowhere, like they just met, he barely knows any of them. But they didn’t just meet, they’ve known each other for months and have been surviving together every night and hanging out often during the day, but we didn’t see any of it. We only see them in stressful situations so we never really see Tyler warm up to the group, we don’t get the sense that any of these kids are really friends most of the time. The few hangout scenes we get are so good, they let us relax and get to know the characters as they get to know each other. And we know that they hang out more than the two times shown so it super sucks we don’t see more.

The characters need more room to breathe and establish themselves as individuals and as part of the group. As it is whenever one character get more focus it feels like the others are pushed to the side, like there isn’t enough room for all of them when I think there could be more then enough room.

I hope this makes sense I’m not proofreading it lmao. I do really like this story and a lot of my complaints feel less relevant to season two, but because a lot of these problems happen in season one when set up and character building is most important for establishing a steady base for the story to build on it’s very noticeable even as the writing improves. Maybe one day Red can go back and improve the story somehow, but that seems unlikely so I hope these issues continue to be improved as the comic goes on.

[drowsydomme]

Damn, now you got me wanting to try the lace on 😩

you are so adorable 💜

[paintedcrows]

Did anyone tell Ford (bonus doodles: Family Movie Night, 70s Classics)

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[ursulaklegay]

its so scary to put yourself out there but a SINGLE message saying "hi i loved what you made it touched me in some way" makes it all worth it 10000%

[kryptonite-cutie]

🦝

I wanna know who this is now cause raccoons energy is fun 😍

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Hey now, Let her cook!

[nothingbizzare]

You have a good heart

[blueskittlesart]

same old story...

[chubbychiquita]

late night tummy posting

[eydilily]

would you bite the hand that feeds you?

[mochasucculent]

Was looking at refs and since Viktor has two different leg braces I was wondering, do we think he wears them simultaneously?? The refs don't perfectly line up perspective-wise so it's hard to tell but parts of the one he wears during the Hexcore scenes look like they could maybe line up with the brace that he wears over his clothes, but also some parts really don't and look like they'd be super uncomfy. Also HOW does he take these on and off. Experts weigh in

[hellspawnmotel]

intimacy between an evil spiteful building-sized supercomputer and the lone scientist left behind after everyone else ditched and forgot about her (in which computer wants to kill scientist really bad but her programming wont let her so she just attempts to make her as miserable as possible instead, which also doesn't work because scientist is a freak)

[podoro-vines]

MIZISUA

[elbiotipo]

I was a kid (granted a very curious one) when George W. Bush was president and I very clearly remember how everyone thought he was a menace to world peace, a fanatic conservative who started a period of war and ignorance. What do you think Green Day was ranting against in American Idiot. Even down here in Argentina we knew what a menace he was, we knew he invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, everyone knew he did it for the oil and to control the Middle East. While watching the news with my family we wondered, and this wasn't crazy thoughts but the logical thinking after watching a madman invade two countries in the span of mere years, if Venezuela and so the whole of South America was next.

Then when Obama came everyone forgot about it (even many people here) and yankees were all like "support the troops" without even thinking why there any troops to support in Iraq in the first place. Trump came, had a mediocre presidency, and then people were like oh Bush was better, unironically. The man who has the blood of millions of people on his hands, who invaded and ruined two countries that are still under war and chaos. It's insane.

[kryptonite-cutie]

🧷

Hmmmmm I wonder who this could be 👀🤭