Can We Rest Now?

Are you hoping for a life to live? / Well, so am I (I Am the One)

Look, I love literary analysis as much as the next person, and Gabe Goodman as a personification of grief is an excellent reading of Next to Normal, and one that I personally subscribe to.

But, what if Gabe was a ghost, trapped with his family because of their grief?

I'm sure there's a shit ton of holes in this theory, but I was listening to the soundtrack and there were a couple of lines that stood out to me. In Just Another Day, Gabe talks about how he wishes that he could go, but instead, he just stays forever. And this is after he tells his mom that she has to let him go, he's almost eighteen, but she won't. And what he's doing, how he's existing, it isn't a life. He has an imagined schedule, and a family who won't see him, and a mother who clings to him so tight that he has no choice but to cling to her in return. She's like an anchor made of glass, fragile and bound to shatter, but the only thing he can hold on to.

The Goodmans won't deal with their grief, so Gabe lingers, unable to move on. He just watches as his family crumbles around him; his mother refusing to accept he's gone, his father refusing to accept that he was ever there, and his sister hating the ghost of someone who died before she was born.

(BtVS comics, 10x09, “Return to Sunnydale”)

Ok, the parallels in my montages are not the exact right fit, but they (or at least, Buffy) were definitely thinking about what happened the last time Sunnydale collapsed. 💔

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | S6E8: Tabula Rasa 

AtS 2.22 | BtVS 5.22

Spike + Headlines

I can’t tell where your hair ends and mine begins

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5.22 “The Gift” | 7.22 “Chosen”

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