How the team uses animation, though, evolves throughout the show. “It elevates the emotion and the intensity of those moments, and gives them another quality and narrates something that’s happening within the minds of the characters.” “When everybody read the scripts with these doodles in the side, it was so magical that we went, ‘Well, this has to appear on the screen,’” Lyn said. “So I had all these images in my head, and then I went to the graphic novel and realized they were the same.” “As a director, that’s my job: I imagine what it’s going to look like,” Euros Lyn, who directed the entire series, said in a video interview from Wales. It felt as if someone had plucked it out of her head and dropped it into the real world. Her favorite scene from the webcomic is Nick and Charlie’s first kiss, which was surreal to see turned into television, she said. They signaled the beginning of her journey in writing queer fiction. Nick and Charlie, side characters in “Solitaire,” were Oseman’s first queer characters - she wrote them at a point, she said, when she didn’t yet know she was queer herself. “Because teenagers don’t feel like teenagers teenagers are the oldest that they’ve ever been.”
“Now, as an adult writing teenagers, for me, the main thing is to always treat teenage characters as mature human beings and never try to write down, to pretend you’re being a teenager,” Oseman said. Now 27, Oseman started writing Nick and Charlie as characters when she was 17, in her first novel, “ Solitaire.” Her writing style, she said, is deeply influenced by the fact that she started writing when she was the same age as her characters. “It’s all about those little moments in a relationship where your heart is beating and your feelings are so big.”
“We just thought it would add something, like a little bit of magic to the show - because it’s called ‘Heartstopper’ for a reason,’” Oseman said in a video interview from Kent, England, where she grew up. (Netflix declined to say whether it planned to renew the show for another season.) But based on the abundant feedback online, viewers noticed and approved. The moments are spare and subtle - snow falling around Nick and Charlie or leaves swirling around friends, a recurring visual in the comic. The most conspicuous element is the incorporation of 2-D animation. But what is particularly striking about the Netflix series, which was created and written by Oseman, is the degree to which it faithfully recreates the comic onscreen, with actors who closely resemble the main characters and many shots that match the images from the source material.