# Set 2 critique

## The favourite against its counterexamples
- 2-1 (submerged, closer): the grass crosses her completely; she is a dim figure made of the field's strokes; the cage, held up, is the one regular structure. But the grass now rises above her head: she is only "part of". Apartness has gone with the sky.
- 2-2 (standing clear, as the default): she is drawn in different marks from the field (paper with a contour) and reads as a scarecrow. The cage reads as an object held out. What is lost: the shared marks. When she stands clear she belongs to the sky, not the field: this is the default's split, and it makes her apart only.
- 2-3 (no cage): the raised empty arm in tall grass reads as distress: a hand raised from a crop, someone calling. The cage changes the gesture from a signal to carrying. So the cage is doing specific work: it gives the raised arm a reason and keeps the picture from becoming a rescue. Not a prop.
- 2-6 (bird on the cage): at thumbnail size the bird reads as a finial on the dome. Its only effect is a story cue (freedom, release). Nothing structural. The bird stays out: the prompt does not ask for it, and every default has it.

## The silhouette line
- 2-4 (cage at the grass top, silhouette): the cage dissolves into the blades and becomes illegible. "Pattern" taken too far: the cage disappears rather than becoming pattern. This marks an operating window: the cage needs part of itself clear of the grass to read.
- 2-5 (backlit, submerged): one dark mass; nothing reads. Drop the backlit line.

## A problem the set exposed
"The other hand absent": with the left arm removed (drop_l), the shoulder reads as a stump (2-1, 2-3, 2-6): an amputation, a wrong and loud reading. Absence has to be made by the drawing (an arm lost into the grass), not by the body.

## Decision
Carry 2-1 with three corrections, as set 3: the grass top at her chin (so the head is apart from the field and the body part of it); the left arm present, lowered into the grass (absent by being lost); and the cage at the boundary between field and sky, its dome clear and its base among the blades (between 2-1 and 2-4's illegible extreme).