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Drop-Out (2015) 🌠

7 min read

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2020-05-13

i think i love this.
although i don’t think i had to do as much thinking to figure out why i connected so much with this one, in the way that i had to do with psycho nymph exile

like of course that premise is catnip to me. i love road trips, and i love the idea of suicide as its terminus. that’s always how i had planned to go out – back when i was seriously contemplating that sort of thing. actually go out and live my life for once and when the money runs out, *krxxx*

i don’t think i would’ve ever gone through with it though, if only because i hate to travel alone, so this setup solves that problem too.
plus i just have a massive case of wanderlust and i love having that sated by proxy.
(oh also holy shit oops this premise is similar to what we planned for session #000)

i think where this hits closest to home for me is in its depiction of two fuckups who are locked in an unhealthy relationship because they’ve grown dependent on each other. that’s my theyfriend and their girlfriend, that was me and my girlfriend, and i think this is going to be a theme that’s bound to pop up increasingly more often in my life. and i hate it, but also i get it, but also it hurts every time. it hurts to love someone so much and be powerless to fix their problems.

but also this is starting to hit really close because, over the past year or so, it has started to really sink in how i’m only one or two clipped wires from ending up just like them.
and it’s been such a weird trip! like, i used to think that i was perfectly normal and healthy, just moody. and now, as i’m potentially on the verge of receiving a pretty prestigious accomplishment, i’m genuinely baffled as to how i managed to not screw it up. in a lot of ways i’m just as helpless as them, but just have the advantage of not being as bad as them, and also have a history of being able to push myself to undue degrees if the situation calls for it.
there’s an element of “there but for the grace of god go i” in reading this, but also i know how closely i stand to the edge of the cataclysm already. i may be behind the yellow safety line, but just barely.

  • sugar’s crisis about being a predator hits so extremely hard for me, which is kinda funny because we’re both dealing with the same baggage in opposite ways. i couldn’t stand with being thought of as a predator so i tried to efface that from me in any way possible, she has a hard time dealing with her desire to be something that’s been beaten into her as being predatory (her parents must’ve been radfems).

  • also, as i was reading, i genuinely didn’t know whether or not they were going to go through with their plan. like, i wouldn’t put it past this genre of storytelling for the author to turn out to be death-positive.

  • there’s probably a solid argument to be made that, had they not gotten detoured in idaho, they probably would’ve ended up going through with it. our decisions are fickle that way, and coincidence has a surprising way of shaping us.

    • best guess for how they ended up in idaho: they took i-80 up to i-15 north (murray, south of salt lake city) instead of south, and followed it for 90 miles. given that they were having issues with keeping their phones charged, this seems like the simplest route that wouldn’t involve much gps use.
      i mean, i can relate. i’ve gotten on the wrong junction a few more times than i’d like to admit, and highway driving has a way of zoning you out like not much else.

    • canon explanation from page 51:

    idaho is about a 15 hour drive from their destination, meaning it will now take them an extra 2 days to get there, pushing the time frame of sugar’s alibi to its limit.
    they’ve been taking an interstate highway called i-90, and have been notably off-track since page 30.

    • hm… page 30 shows a junction between i-90 and i-39. either that’s meant to imply that they were supposed to get on i-39 then, or they were supposed to get on i-70 way earlier (if we’re going by google maps recommended routes)
      so either they seriously fucked up early on, or they took a suboptimal route and fucked up a little near the end.

i just thought about it, did lola realize that they were going the wrong way earlier on, or did they both just get it then and there?

> that's purposefully left up to viewer interpretation!

on one hand: she has been shown looking at the street signs a couple times, like on page 30; she’s had a keen awareness of their surroundings in other ways for a while; she has done other things to stall during the trip, too.
on the other hand, in this page, at the end, she pauses; she’s the one directing now, and she could have lied about which direction to go at this point if she were truly bent on stalling the trip, but it’s clear in the next scene they’re headed in the right direction.
her eyes are wide, but not completely open. she could be surprised learning they’ve been going the wrong way, or she could be just coming to the realization of how far she let it go.
it’s really up to what you think is more believable for her.

  • oh wait the sign also says “entering pacific standard time zone”, which looks like they would’ve had to cut through montana and enter through the top half of the state.
    they really fucked up

on the redacted pages:

  • 73–74: ok the shot of them reaching for the glass did make me cringe. but i guess there’s enough context for me to know what happened there so it’s ok.
    • EDIT: sometime in 2022, gray rewrote these pages to instead search for a back door into the building. i guess this still lets us not outright see the gore, but they still cut their hand getting in
    • it’s up to you how much you want to egghead into whether this portrayal should actually change how we understand lola as a character. the original plays more into our understanding of lola as kind of a delinquent: this isn’t the first building she’s broken into. the new version plays more into our understanding of lola as someone who doesn’t want others to see them suffering. both things about lola can be true, and both things are…
      so why does it still feel like a punch pulled?
  • 96–97: this is an absolute gut punch and i don’t understand why they decided to pull it. the internalized transphobia? the use of the word “crazy?“
    those all ring true to me though. sometimes that’s just how it is.