#tgocm

as I said, the horror of TGOCM is that he's the ghost of a suicidal teen, and now he's being forced to watch another version of himself Not Die and struggle and begin getting better. he's bitter and jealous and grieving and decaying.

his suicide-baiting Evan, then, is not about loneliness or trying to help him. TGOCM believes--has to believe--that nothing will ever get better, bc if things can get better, that means he didn't have to die. that means he died for nothing. he's using Evan to prove that to himself. he's trying to hurt Evan bc it hurts too much to imagine a life in which things Get Better--a life he doesn't get to have. at this point, he's so decayed that he's nothing but that belief

so when Evan tells TGOCM 'I'm so sorry you died and that I couldn't help you, but that doesn't mean I have to die' TGOCM disappears or is released, maybe. bc Evan no longer believes in him--no longer believes that dying is his only option. without that, TGOCM is nothing.

I don't think TGOCM exists post-c&g. He's mostly gone by the orchard. He's there for a minute, I think, in the last chapter when Connor tells Evan about seeing his own ghost as he died. there's a line about feeling pressure in the car, and then that pressure going away. that's the last bit of TGOCM being released, I think. then he's gone. that's the best, most peaceful outcome for him

I don't rlly think of TGOCM as an antagonist. I feel huge tenderness and sadness and compassion for him. I think of him as a condensed embodiment of my own teenaged unhappiness--and how hard and tragic it feels to realize you're going to keep living and your misery can't keep you company forever

I don't think c&g ever comes down with a super hard, fixed answer about what TGOCM is, because I like the idea that you can read it a couple ways. if you wanna read metaphorically, he's the embodiment of Evan's suicidal ideation. more literally, he's the actual ghost of Connor from the og timeline. I think these two things can co-exist.

But I didn't write c&g as an allegory, so in my mind, all that shit Really Happens and Evan is literally being haunted and TGOCM is real. he's super changeable because he's not experiencing time linearly, and he's decaying as they move farther from the point when TGOCM and Connor diverge. he's becoming less and less like Connor, over time, becoming less of anything. but time is funny so the decay is not linear