Folie a Dupe: serious misunderstanding

this was scheduled to go live tomorrow, but since i'm not doing the stream today, i'm just pushing it out now... Because I Can.

pretext: a few weeks ago i had an internal dialogue with dupe about depersonalization, and started to understand their preferences for coping -- intellectualizing, humor, fantasizing (usually about suicide...), etc.
there's a lot of... bad mental health advice, on the internet, and in the psychiatric industry. some of it's uniformly destructive, and some of it's just not for everybody. obviously i saw a lot of people say that joking about your pain means you're just feeding your suffering instead of dealing with it, and similar things about intellectualization making you evil if you ever do it at all.
a lot of the this animosity was then directed at dupe. the idea that successfully coping with stress meant i was running from it felt "correct" at the time. many of the 30-minute sessions feature conversations i tend to steer towards figuring out what kind of hostility and repressive mindsets i've adopted myself to drive this part of my brain to the last and most dire of coping mechanisms -- the ideation.
anyway, this is a preface to say, when dupe explains the humor thing, that was in close proximity to that initial connection where i started understanding it, and noticing i would remind myself and point it out a lot to try to normalize the understanding as fast as possible.

i think this strip could be interpreted as delayed laughter at the joke, but i was laughing at how dupe interpreted "are you serious" as a literal question.
i think i'll wanna try focusing on dim indigo blues for this one to indicate it's nighttime... it's gonna be challenging.
i'm also trying to think of a way to edit out the mention of the brand name without losing the meaning. the third panel was a reference to this meme:

EDIT: finished lining, coloring. this one focused on predominantly blue hues because i'm getting more comfortable with having one color dominate if the corresponding individual is the focus of the comic.  it makes palettes a lot more flexible. i don't think the lime green would have popped so much if there was other green around.  
in retrospect i wish i'd tested out a palette using the dark blue with dupe, but it was added as the last color when i was working over the first panel. i tend to stay away from having their main color very dark but vivid deeper shades like indigo, violet, and crimson are generally okay -- indigo/dark blue dominating some of the first recurring palettes in my early art of them in particular because of my fresh association of the color with geodon capsules.
i also want to challenge myself to start working with more palettes that don't feature pure white... so this one turned out alright. it's no night scene but a good stop-gap.
also changed the word ford to fork because... i could. there's plausible deniability that i could just be talking about a forklift.