catharsis, page 15

i really struggled with that last panel, particularly because the page was thumbnailed, and pushing the eyes and mouth wasn't as easy on a larger scale, with eye whites surrounding the pupils...

...............................

probably the panel that made me doubt the thumbnail method would work great for me in the long-run. my art has been really stiff and i've just been in this funk i don't know how to get out of. eventually i'll either figure out why, or it'll go away, but it does suck that it's Here.

felix saying "it happens when i'm not nervous" was added solely to sprinkle in some harmless white lies to the conversation. it's true that he stutters even when he's not nervous, but the way it's phrased makes it sound like it ONLY happens when he's not nervous, and that's intentional. his stutter definitely gets worse when he's nervous, and he is literally nervous, so the implicit takeaways are not really operating on truth. benefit of the doubt is the key there.
i'd prefer him to lie more throughout the scene, but i ended up only sticking a few in, one of which is the most important.

unrelatedly, i had felix look up (specifically, up to his "blue side") in the fourth panel's second image while charlotte looks around to her right because i think felix retracts inward into his noggin when he feels threatened, and charlotte's scanning to see who else is around as an exit plan if needed. she already knows who's around on her left, so she looks right. both of these are just some subconscious processes, but that's why i had them look the ways they did.

charlie's nickname, while not pertinent to the plot itself, is a "foot in the door" with felix here - he's genderfluid, so, functionally, he'd notice this more than some other details, and he'd also interpret it as something that makes charlotte more "trustworthy" because she's a little more like him. charlotte reciprocates the trust because felix noticed a part of her identity she probably feels like is hidden by more immediately visible parts of herself.
the fact that she knows what felix's name means is absolutely the first domino falling for felix's disproportionate investment in charlotte's perception of him. it's not something anyone else has known off of the top of their head before, and felix's personality, which is modeled with hpd in mind, makes him prone to overestimating how close he is to other people - he thinks that she "gets" him a lot more than she does.
ironically, over the course of the story, he tries to get her to understand less about him to have a better impression of who he is. i'm reminded of this line a youtuber said in a video about a guy who faked car crashes for insurance payouts by beating people who agreed to help and tucking them into a car: "everything needs to be real, so that no one knows it's fake." i was reminded of felix!!!
in the reality of the story, charlotte doesn't really understand him well - she may even feel apprehension about trying to understand him, as it would be stepping over lines she doesn't think she should cross. she knows that felix is trans, either through izzi mentioning him at some point by name, through some weird crack in his voice as he talks, or because he Literally mentioned binding right in front of her. she can extrapolate that his name is probably self-designated, and that the meaning behind it is intentional. but the fact that she knows what "felix" means isn't because she knows who "felix" is - it was just a lucky coincidence. (also, i wrote it that way--)