Vote over at TWC and you can see Mal's very rational description of her brother's weird issues. I think 90% of the purpose of this page was to give myself an excuse to draw a background that wasn't exclusively coffee shop, if only for one panel. Then I had to adjust the whole color scheme enough to get green in there, but that's cool. I enjoy drawing frogs. The other 10% of the reason for this page is that I wanted to get Elias out of creep!zone, which is where you pursue the hell out of your crush despite having no signals that that person is into you whatsoever. I feel like pining from afar is really charming in romance novels, but in real life, it comes off as really uncomfortable. Elias has some understanding of boundaries! I think it's fairly normal for queer people to get crushes on straight people, so you usually have to lock down whether the other person would even be interested pretty early. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and kind of breaking your heart. Also, I don't know if it's typical that a lesbian couple takes a dude along to prom, because I went to prom half a lifetime ago, but I do know that at my high school, if two girls went together, they usually got picked on. (We had a lot more girls than boys in my class.) So, it was pretty typical to have a dude escorting multiple girls, usually all platonically, if you didn't have a date and sort of attached yourself to another couple so you wouldn't have to do the initial walk through the gym and picture taking alone. Vincent seems like the kind of guy who wouldn't go to prom unless he was doing it as a favor for someone else. But "who'd they date in high school" is about the only other metric Elias has to choose from, soooo. Anyway, we're covering the "not everyone knows they're queer right away" thing, because I don't think people realize how normal it is to not have your sexuality on lock until later on. Hell, I didn't really give it a hard think until I was in my late 20s. I have shit to do! And that was the first time life slowed down enough that I could figure things out better. Vincent's had his head into school and his sister's werewolf issues for so long that he's not bothered to worry about dating. Poor awkward, quiet guy. He'll get around to it.