catharsis, page 12

okay. my hand hurts less, but i'd like to still not push it. it doesn't hurt after an hour of drawing, but it can feel very tense after like. four. which is not ideal. just assume the rest of december will be only wednesday updates.

onto this page - first panel. it became much more obvious to me, a wildly "doesn't think about attraction as a thing that exists" aroace person, that it comes off as a romcom meetcute, like a LOT. it was originally MEANT to be a romcom, so this isn't the most shocking thing in the world, but it's not that.
so for the first panel here, i really wanted felix to make a face that could absolutely not be interpreted as feeling nervous because you're talking to someone you're head over heels for. the resulting face i'm pretty happy with because of how absurd it is, and how much disgust seems to be in his expression.

but let me talk a little bit about what i thought were elements going on in both characters' thought processes. 

the first thing is that charlotte noticed felix in the group, and felix didn't notice charlotte.
in the dialogue, this is implied when felix points out "that group over there" like charlotte isn't part of it, and doesn't know about it. charlotte interrupts him, maybe a rarity for her, because this was particularly jarring - she'd initially assumed since she noticed felix and remembered him, that would be a mutual observation.
from there, her initial impression of felix is that she's not very important to this guy - but she also has to juggle the possibility that it's kind of her own fault for just slipping away and hiding instead of socializing for MOST of this social event she chose to go to. more on charlotte and her anxiety later in the comic. in this scene specifically, and this interaction with felix now, she's influenced by feeling inadequate AND feeling guilt about giving into her social anxiety and running away.
but equally noteworthy in that regard is she's not that fearful of felix altogether because she's aware that he's a friend of a friend.

on felix's end-- i don't think he even thought to be embarrassed about not noticing charlotte was part of the group. when she said she was getting away from that group, his only thought was probably that she definitely 100% saw him in his work shirt, and he's wearing a sweater he's extremely uncomfortable in over it, for some reason. she doesn't know that he lied about not having work, but to him, it's a big deal that she COULD mention it to izzi, at some point. it might even feel Literally Inevitable if he just lets her go.
he DOES definitely also feel bad about getting in space she was occupying and scaring her off, though; he's transmasc after all, it's pretty common to feel some kind of guilt when you make a woman feel threatened just by being Some Guy near them.
mostly, what i kept in mind was felix is operating at like, 100% RAM at this point. he's overheating, just drank a lot of eggnog, he has a horrible clopen for the next 2 days after this, and there's 2 guys dancing around in his head at the same time, but one guy only memorized the first half of the dance and the other guy only memorized the last half, so they're synchronized sometimes, but mostly colliding. when he looks at charlotte in that first panel, he's not even LOOKING at her to me - he's bluescreening.
from a more external perspective, i wanted felix to come across as self-absorbed in this part of the scene. he is a rather self-absorbed person, often preoccupied by his own inner life to such a degree that he rarely notices the subtlety of others' inner lives, and this really comes across over the course of the story. i wanted him, in particular, to come across as more preoccupied with himself when talking to charlotte.

in the last three panels, charlotte just glances what's going on with the group, and there's like, 2 things:
1) in my head she would think about how she really would not be having a better time over there, and about how felix is excluded from this activity, too - for lack of a less emo way to put it, she notices both of them don't particularly fit in with the group, pretty much simultaneously.
she'd feel a sense of obligation to keep him company, but also more open, like they have some experiences in common. the openness in particular is more obvious from her body language, and she tries to communicate that she feels something similar to him in the same panel.
2) she glances ONLY with her eyes. charlotte is much subtler than felix about things (spoiler, but, as felix is talking on the next page, in the first panel, you see him turn his whole head instinctively to try to look at what charlotte just glanced at), and quick glances at things are an important part of her character; she observes a lot of things, but says nothing about those things.
why i bring it up though is because i definitely have learned that these common but fleeting forms of body language are difficult if not impossible to do subtly in comics. i have a few ideas about how else i can try to get a subtler glance across in comics, but these ones i felt were made way too heavy-handed by how "slow" the beats feel in comparison. it was hard to even make it seem like she wasn't turning her head!!! i want to keep trying, though. problematically, the glances usually need to be more pronounced than they usually are, or a reader will assume i just drew the eyes poorly for this one panel rather than intentionally aimed in a different direction.

ALSO THIS IS LIKE, TANGENTIAL, BUT ONE OF THE PROBLEMS WITH WRITING MORE FEMININE CHARACTERS LIKE CHARLOTTE IS I FORGET THINGS SUCH AS "THEY DON'T USUALLY HAVE POCKETS" LMFAO. literally had to think about what to do with charlotte's phone in this scenario and ended up having sewn on cat paws which constituted (in my opinion, relatively shallow) pockets on this skirt, to go with her hat. the characters' bags are sitting by sandra, so charlotte does technically have a bag, and i could have drawn it on her as an edit, but i just felt like it wasn't super accurate, since i don't believe she thought she'd spend the entire afternoon hiding. taking her whole purse makes it seem like she definitely knew she was essentially Leaving The Social Function.