CHAPTERS
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CH12P43
Posted on 21 February 2024 by rustyhearts

And that ladies, brings the Special Shez Event to a close. The next page will be coming out on Sunday as per the usual weekly schedule. I will also be retiring the bonus Thursday page - as beloved as she was - as I am dealing with some on-going medical stuff that limits the time I can work on pages. Releasing 3 pages a week has been so much fun though, and your reactions made all the extra work to make it happen, well worth it <3

30 thoughts on “CH12P43”

  1. anonymoo

    Hope Rocky will be able to heal. The violence was necessary and justified, but seeing this side of her sister and mother must be so scary and confusing. It really came out of nowhere for her 😢❤️ Thank you for the Shez event Rusty, I love this family so much.

    39

    1. rustyhearts

      Oh yes. At her age the events she witnessed would have a lasting psychological effects 😔 I do have plans for a little epilogue to this chapter (doesn’t quite fit with the story Shez is telling to the class) of their life post-Chris but pre-Yonique. So there’s some happier family moments to look forward to 🥰🥰
       
      So glad you’ve enjoyed the event 🥰🥰

      25

  2. dorothea

    Thank you so much for the special Shez event! It was a blast! I hope the medical stuff clears up for you.

    12

    1. rustyhearts

      You’re most welcome! And thank you, on a slow road to recovery but I’ve just gotta allow myself more downtime 😅🩷

      12

  3. Simp

    Is he dead?

    1. rustyhearts

      A very good question 🙂

      8

  4. NocturneOp55N1

    On the bright side for the poor little one witnessing this violence, the first time her dad hurt her physically he almost immediately got beaten into a pulp and then she never saw him again. It’s no doubt traumatic but also a way to teach your daughter what should happen to a man who hurts her.

    32

    1. rustyhearts

      Absolutely, small silver lining for little Crystal. Shez and Meriam broke the cycle of Chris getting away consequence-free, and thankfully that is now the standard Crystal knows.

      23

  5. Normal person

    Oof, there it is. Poor little Rocky… no matter how justified, to a tiny kid like that witnessing violence like this is definitely going to leave its mark just as much as Chris left the physical one on her arm.
     

    And to make matters worse, while Meriam and Shez were both realistically occupied – Shez was busy being killed and Meriam was busy saving her life – Rocky was left crying on the ground. No-one was there to comfort her, she had to pick herself up as she watched her mother and sister beating the hell out of the dad she (unfortunately) loved.
     

    I really hope Shez’s family situation manages to heal after this. The horrors may have ultimately made Shez and Meriam closer, but I just hope the younger girls don’t feel like they were left out in the cold.

    18

    1. rustyhearts

      Indeed 😔💔
      And right off the heels of being assaulted by her father for telling him she was hurting after having fell – which kicked off the violent chain of events in the first place. 😔
       

      12

  6. Terf-chan

    Aww it ended so soon! But I enjoyed a lot, thank you Rusty for all your hard work! Hoping you make a quick recovery <3 I'm glad to see they finally away from that Man.
     

    I love how you left his destiny in the open, like is he dead? Did he make a recovery and just never tried contacting them? Did he became severely injuried and died in the hospital? Who cares! We will never see him again. ❤️
     

    My headcanon is that he didn't die instantely, but he got injuried enough that the dingos finished him off lol and like weeks later the police found the abandoned house and car but they were under a fake name and never found the owner, and no one filed a missing person report because no one cared. He is forever erased from existence and our ladies are free <3

    6

    1. rustyhearts

      Time flies when you’re having fun~ (reading the story not experiencing what the characters did, of course!). And thank you, taking cafe to look after myself 🥰🥰
       
      I’m sure you’d be among many in the class wishing for their own, appropriately gruesome ends to Chris. ❤️

      1

  7. Ms. Clicker

    Mmm, I’ve been thinking about them. For them their dad is just a a nice happy dad and you can’t tell me watching this as a child wouldn’t leave some sort of impression on them. But that’s the complexity of the abuse; when there are children involved is twice as hard to get away.

    3

    1. rustyhearts

      Really is a difficult position for Meriam to be in. She’s tried to do the right thing by shielding her children from the stress of knowing their father is dangerous, but it probably also made this event all the more jarring, and thus scarring for the little ones.

  8. Blais

    Rocky 😢😢😢
    It just… it sucks that this was how she found out what kind of person her dad was. Rissa and Tina must have heard what was going on, but Rissa might not have had it burned into her brain the way Rocky probably will, and Tina might not remember.
     

    Probably Meriam tells the younger sisters when they’re old enough to handle knowing who their dad was and what happened to Shez’s eye and why they ran away from him.

     
    But Rocky? She grew up loving him and thinking he was an A+ dad who doted on her mummy, and then her mum and her sisters were taking a walk and playing a game, and then he hurt her and almost killed her sister. And then her mom and sister beat him so he couldn’t get up and try it again. And he’s seemingly gone forever.

     
    That must be an awful, awful scar in her memory, not to mention disorienting.
     

    (How do you trust people again after that? Chris isolated all of them. Rocky knew just enough people that she could count them on one hand, she thought all of them were trustworthy and peaceful, and then from her perspective, her dad turned into a monster who had to be put down. Something like this… people spend years trying to make sense of it.)

     
    I hope she finds a way to heal, or at least finds her family a peaceful place.

    10

    1. rustyhearts

      Yes indeed. Rissa was likely told by Shez to cover her ears, close her eyes stay hidden right before Shez rushed to confront Chris. So she likely missed the worst of it. And baby Tina is weeks old, so even if she was woken from sleep, she remained safe in her pram and has no memory of the event at all.
       
      I’ve touched on how this affected Rocky in the cast bios (going public at the end of the chapter), and also have some epilogue pages taking a closer look at how she processed what happened. Looking forward to sharing them 🥰

      7

  9. SBD

    Aww no, She saw all that 😢 poor lil sis.

     
    I think this marks the end of the flashback right?? While i’m gonna miss the extra pages a lot, people’s health always comes first in my head and i’m also eager to see adult Shamzey and the cameo ladies again.
     
    —–
     

    Offtopic question:
    What’s your wife’s favourite chapter of the serie & favourite character of the whole cast?? Thank you for the special event! hope you make a swift recovery in the following weeks 🤗

    4

    1. rustyhearts

      Yes! Thank you for being along for the ride 🥰🥰

       
      —-
       
      My wife had a hard time choosing when I asked her, and she was surprised to get a question directed at her 😅
       
      Her favourite chapter: 7 – specifically all the Port Adelaide destinations they rode by. “Especially the jellyfish page and the lighthouse page.”
       
      Before chapter 7 came out, it was always chapter 1, specifically the flashback panel of Riley trying to coax Muddles out of the rain. She says it’s still a close second now.
       
      Favourite character(s): Muddles was her immediate answer 🤣. She said she’s looking forward to where Riley’s characters will be going (she has access to all the spoilers), and also really likes Parniya. Shez is also up there.
       
      She also wanted to add that Blaire is her least favourite character – also for spoiler reasons 🤣🤣

      10

  10. K

    Thank you very much for the Shez Event! What a ride. I really hope the entire little family can get therapy or at least a really stable and supportive social network now – not immediately, but in the near future. And I hope they can all heal in as much as that’s possible after such experiences, especially the little ones who didn’t see that side of their dad before.

    If Chris happened to die there, of whatever cause (eaten by dingos maybe? Or dehydration?), well, that’s life sometimes. If he made it to civilisation (boo), hopefully he’ll at least never find them again.

    8

  11. alpaca

    Me, having paid to see bootsy cast bios: *loudest scream*

    4

    1. rustyhearts

      Burden of knowledge 🫂🫂🫂

      4
      1

  12. feministdragon

    i’m so grateful you sped up the posting schedule for this, I barely could wait through the 2 days, waiting a whole week for each update would have been (even more) agonizing.
     

    this whole thing has given me a lot of food for thought, because seeing the violence on chris (esp the footprints!) was viscerally upsetting in a way that seeing the violence upon shez wasn’t.

     
    we’d all been cheering for chris’ beatdown and looking forward to it and then when it actually happened I could barely look at it, every time I opened the page I had to quickly scroll past asap. I think it’s the subconscious lifelong training that male pain is way more real and human that female pain.

     

    and female rage is so rarely seen or depicted that the raw result was way more intense than seeing any kind of male rage.
    anyways, I wonder if anyone else felt this way?

    8

    1. rustyhearts

      I understand where you’re coming from for the most part. The Chris brutalization page is quite confronting, I think, because it is so graphic compared to the others, which was deliberate on my part. It is the one page I considered doing an individual warning for.
       
      It also gave my test readers pause. Not because they thought Chris was undeserving of his beat down, but because of the graphic visuals and how they stand stark against pretty much everything else I’ve done in LB.
       
      Conversely, I took very careful measures to NOT be graphic about Meriam and Shez’s pain. It’s all implication. You don’t see what Chris did to Shez’s eye, but you know she can’t see anymore. You do not see the slap to Meriam, nor the rape she endured, but you know they happened.
       
      I did this as a direct acknowledgement of how often it is the other way around. Male Character pain being shown with respect, care, and tastefulness, while writers think the best way to show Female Character pain is to have her physically or sexually assaulted on screen – the latter of which often ends up on porn sites.
       
      I definitely think misogyny is influencing your reaction, and was part of my initial consideration to give Chris’s page a content warning, so it’s good to discuss and think about.
       
      Thank you for sharing.

      8

  13. Catherine

    I don’t comment much, but I check every update and I want to say you are an amazing story teller, both writing wise and visual vise. You improved so much and you are definitely one of my inspirations and reasons to not give up trying to be better in drawing in hopes of making webcomics of my own in the future ❤️ Wishing you be okay with your medical stuff!

    7

    1. rustyhearts

      Thank you so much for popping into the comments to share such kind words ❤️❤️
      I hope you continue to enjoy reading LB. When I finish each chapter, I always feel like I can’t possibly improve further, but as I begin the next, I am always pleasantly surprised that that is not the case. 🥰

      2

  14. gendie lb fan

    What a fucking rollercoaster that was!! Definitely my favorite chapter so far, there’s nothing like a good Revenge On Evil Men storyline ❤️

    1

    1. rustyhearts

      So glad to hear you enjoyed it 🥰🥰

      3

  15. Mrin

    The Shez Event has been fantastic. We’ve all been thoroughly spoiled!

    Wishing you all the best with your recovery, Rusty.

    1

  16. Lilith_Winged

    Like other ladies have pointed out, showing Chris like that in the last panel is really viscerally powerful in a world that treats male pain as this valid, dignified thing; and female pain as inferior and often glossed over and even fetishized instead.
     

    And of course, it’s women’s pain and the female rage associated with it that deserves so much more space and respect at this point than anything males can complain about….whatever pain they may have they cause themselves; whereas they torture women in numerous ways. Men are the main cause of women’s suffering.

     

    Needless to say, I really appreciate what you’ve done here (: He genuinely seriously deserved all of that, and more. I hope before I die that I see humanity shift, specifically women shift to rising up and standing with each other and more appropriately punishing abusive misogynistic men…but that’s just me fantasizing.
     

    Thank you for the special Shez event, I’ve really liked it!

    1. rustyhearts

      Thank *you* for reading it and leaving such thoughtful commentary throughout! 🥰🥰

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