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I think what trips people up about Cyrano is that the main character isn’t supposed to be aspirational.  He’s highly relatable, of course, and he has a lot of noble qualities.  But anybody trying to actually imitate Cyrano would end up embittered and burned out at best or dead at worst, and several characters–among them his best friend who’s known him for years–point this out throughout the play.

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character who;s doomed form the start but not because of tragedy or anything but because they're a woman and their writer is a misogynist

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I personally think he's a metaphor/hallucination and not a ghost at all, but he is a ghost in this next fanfiction I'm writing solely because the ghostbusters in this fandom get so obnoxious. When I kill God, every production of Next To Normal will have Gabe draped in a bedsheet that's got two eyeholes cut out and he's gonna be harmonizing eerie "woooooo" sounds with all the other cast members all the time.

yes, gabe goodman is simultaneously a hallucination, a ghost, and a '''living''' metaphor for grief. i don't care if it's contradictory. yes he is not real. yes next to normal is a supernatural horror where the real horror is the concept of the family. yes gabe's ghost has been present for eleanor's entire life.

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Six months wasn't nearly long enough to grieve her dead son, but 18 years is positively Dickensian and I think part of Diane knows that which is why Gabe says it. He would've been almost an adult now, in her fantasies he's in all these extracurriculars so he's definitely moving away for university, so I think her fantasy world is preparing her for the Empty Nest angst that the parents of fledgling adults go through.

Sometimes even fantasy escapism will still include things that are too real to want: oversized scary fire-breathing carnivorous dragons in fantasy, capitalism in the cozy coffee shop or farm, and conflicts in the fantasy of a lost loved one ("My teenaged son is out of control! He's sneaking out until 3AM doing who knows what! He promised me that he'd be back early!!")

Next to Normal the show begins at the moment before nothing is the same again, so I think Gabe saying "you gotta let go" is an indicator that one way or another or in the secret third thing way, whether the person hallucinating him wanted it or not, there was going to be a big change.

What major, genuine change doesn't come from is repression (ahem ahem, Dan.) I think that's why Gabe is so sinister about something that was seemingly his suggestion. When the growth is natural, he welcomes it. When it's imposed, he rebels: Compare Dan's "lalalalala I can't hearrr you over the sound of my wife being the only one in this family with any craziness shut up she is" and Gabe's reaction to that attitude in I Am The One—versus after Dan's pride is broken and he's at rock-bottom in I Am The One (he gets a real conversation and a hug, because his attitude towards grief is not so lousy and repressed, now that he can admit he's been going about it all wrong.)

can we talk about how Gabe in the prologue is so much different than Gabe in like... the entire rest of the show?

"you have to let go, im almost 18" vs "theyve driven out the demons and theyve earned you this reprieve"

like i understand not wanting to give away the twist of gabe being dead at the beginning but.... its such a drastic character change and maybe its something something dianna's mental state becoming more unstable etc but anyway

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reaching maybe but the way natalie sings about playing the piano at the end of everything else is soooo me coping with The Voices by smoking copious amounts of weed and i rlly do feel like the ''everything else goes away'' line is kind of foreshadowing her spiral in act 2 with substance abuse and the desire to not exist in the world anymore (''i'm robotripping, i can't feel my legs~")

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i love to put on a musical album and then clean the apartment. it's the only thing that drives me anymore. vacuuming while pretending i'm diana goodman missing those fuckass mountains or whatever

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something about knowing that gabe was truly the only one to ever really know natalie out of the goodman family and he's been dead before she was even born breaks my heart

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give yourself a sense of place and time. rotate your wardrobe when the weather changes. update your playlists every month. write down three things you did today. do it everyday. message your friends good morning. buy yourself different flavours of tea based on your mood, the packaging, the weather, your heart. save the little paper labels; stick them in your notebook until the inside cover is full of little colored tags. have it hot in the winter. have it cold in the summer. learn to make apple cider, raspberry cordial. spend the summer knitting a scarf for the colder months. spend the winter sewing loose flowy blouses for the summer. open the windows, five minutes a day if it's cold, all day if it's warm. give yourself a sense of place and time and weather.

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Okay and I’m gonna totally sound like my mom for a second here but it’s interesting that soooooooo many women in entertainment have careers based on “embracing their sexuality” but the vast majority of men in entertainment base their careers on like … being people…. and like maybe there’s a reason most men don’t seem to find going on stage in underwear “empowering”…? Bc it’s not…?

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you cant employ me in a way that matters

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unfortunately i actually AM impossible to love and its not just all in my head

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youre not “bad at art” you just need to find a character to latch onto to where you draw them 1 million times and you improve dramatically

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doing it scared, doing it alone, and doing it bad

Write that on my grave marker.

Hypothetical scenario: The woods are haunted, but you must traverse them. The monsters are real, and might get you if you’re by yourself, but if you’re with someone else, they’ll leave you alone. The only person you can go with is an unstable serial killer.

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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blorbo (affectionate), The Character (ambiguous to derogatory)

observation: among a certain subset of tumblr users, the term “blorbo” has become unchic, but the concept it describes is still important; and so it has been replaced with “The Character”