Alicia (Damsel in the Red Dress) in this scene from "Peekaboo" snapping at her not-boyfriend.
I mean, I get her being angry but come on girl:
“Oh, big surprise. They’re staring. Did the prince just forget how hot he was for a second? I’m sure it’s such a pain. Too bad you left your paper bag mask at home next to the fan mail, and I’m not in the mood to fetch it for you right now. So if you could just try to think about something other than yourself for 0.2 seconds, we’re supposed to be on a date right now. Do you think you can do that for me? Do you think?”
I mean... Alicia and Andrew's parents...yeah....they did a lot:
“Well…it is what it is,” he says with an attempt at cheerfulness, “We can’t change the past…”
I’ve wished that a thousand times if I have once. But maybe it’s better - I can’t.
I know there are too many things I wish I could undo - I’d probably destroy the whole universe trying to cure my own tragedies.
And if I could only pick one…I’d just be stuck forever trying to figure out what hurt the worst.
The accident? Etan? Things with my mom?-
Which part…? I-
I wouldn’t have let Andrew go.
I would have done something to make sure we stayed together through the divorce even if it meant uprooting my whole life to go with papi out to Arizona - at least then I could have done something for him in the midst of it all-
…
When Daddy pried Andrew away from me because we couldn’t make him leave I would have told him to take me too.
Leia is blackmailing her little brother into caring for himself. While the intentions are good the methods so very much so aren't.
We’re playing that game again. Mom’s pretending to suspect nothing. I’m pretending not to notice that she’s pretending not to notice, while Riley’s pretending to check texts to get out of eating his breakfast.
He’s texting me.
I keep the sound off, watching the text bubbles appear on my blue wallpaper one after another - forcing each other upwards on the screen like little drowning men pushing each other toward the surface.
It feels like we’re playing monkey in the middle - lobbing messages over mom’s head through cyberspace.
“Just cut the act and let’s go. I’ll tell mom we have to leave early so I can find parking, but I’m not helping you out of lunch.”
“Leia…”
I look up and glare at him, so I won’t start screaming.
I’m so sick of being the middleman - girl - the land bridge between the three islands I call my family - trying to play damage control-
But I’d hate saying something even more. I’d hate breaking Riley’s trust, and I’d hate what mom and dad would say and do if they found out.
It has to be better this way, right?
I talk until my face hurts - anytime mom asks a question - just so that Riley won’t have to-
He’s so much worse at lying than I am. But I’ve had more practice.
“Look, if you just eat whatever fruit mom packed in our lunches today, I won’t say anything else about it for the whole day. I promise. Deal?”
He doesn’t look up but I feel his expression quaver with a wash of inexplicable fear so palpable I can almost taste it. I feel sick to my stomach, and the bubbles spam the screen.
(this is available for free for everyone to read on my Patreon public posts
Ooh, constantly. One of my antagonists is so needlessly cruel and manipulative that I'm ashamed of him. Every time he adds one more miserably mean thing to the heap of crimes he's committed, it makes me all the more glad that I can mete out a suitable punishment for him in the distant future.
A few other characters have habits that I'm not terribly fond of, but it makes them more real, so I left them in the story. They make choices I wouldn't, have preferences I don't share, and pursue goals I would eschew. It helps with making each character unique and distinctive from one another, and not clones of the author.
I guess I just find it kinda funny(?) when a character is a completely unrepentant asshole. I have a few characters like that. The kind who would stab you in the back even after you've fallen in love with them and had a tender moment under the moonlight. And then laugh about it over a beer.
Not to say they don't feel any compassion at all. They do. But here, the backstabbery outweighs any and all altruism.
Black comedy stuff. Quite a few comic strip and early webcomic characters are sorta like this to varying degrees, I've noticed.
While I can't entirely blame the female lead for this, because it would be understandably uncomfortable to ask people what they're thinking all the time, she has a tendency to assume people's motivations and why they do the things they do. She's not great at reading and understanding people, and these assumptions are often incorrect, and that obviously leads to her forming negative opinions or at least unpleasant ones that could otherwise be avoided if she talked things at.