University Days: Season Four (Alternate Ending)

Starting Over

Hi guys!

Anyway to the point: I have been considering starting the comic, University Days, over from Season 3.

There are quite a few reasons, but mainly I just don't have the heart to put my character, Sarah, through this misery anymore.

Yes, she's fictional and yes, it was for good cause, but there is no genuinely happy ending for her after this series. In the best case, she'd graduate with her physical education degree, get a job eventually, keep in touch with Mia and Calvin, and live on by herself.

There's potential happy endings in the way that she can be a great PE teacher and be more confident with herself, but she is never getting her best friend back and that's never going to get any easier for her to deal with.

This comic is my heart and soul, and it used to be my everything. I would be so excited to get to work on it, to get it to where I knew it could get to. I believed in it so much, but there came a point that I had to start faking it. It broke my heart to consider that I could love it and believe in it less than I used to. It broke me to see that it was draining to work on, and began to feel more like a finals project I had to deal with. I lied to myself and tried to convince myself otherwise, but it just drained me more and more. I knew this writer's block meant that I just went in the wrong path with this story. It didn't have the same heart that it did when I started, and it took a while to trace through. I re-read my older content that I remembered so happily working on and still felt so proud of. I followed it up to a comic in which I remembered pushing through to get done. That was the point where I realized that what I planned didn't align with what my heart desired from the lessons the story told. I was deviating from the story I wanted to tell, and just went with a plan I made "for the drama" and "intensity." There's other ways to convey that message, but I needed to keep the theme strong and that's what I lost.

It was a light-hearted family and friendship theme that I lost when I knocked off Sarah's twin sister, Emily. I realized that there was no happy ending this way. Maybe there would be a friendship theme ongoing, but it was so dark and heavy. Instead of being a story of escape, it felt like University Days became the opposite, a trap and a spiral. Sarah is a character that people with social anxiety can relate to, and instead of showing hope, it felt like I was just showing the worst possible scenarios. I never wanted that, and it's just way off base. I created this story to bring hope, not hopelessness.

I want to change the story.

Now I do not intend to delete anything I've created so far, but I plan to leave these last two seasons as an "alternate ending" to the real one I plan to redo. I'll label them and such, and update you all when I do publish the up and coming "redo" seasons!

I may continue this "sad alternate ending" over time as I work on the happier one, so nothing is really lost. No worries! :)

Love, Blue <3