( application | lifeaftr )

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AS A WARNING: This application deals with SPOILERS for pretty much all of the stage musical Next to Normal and contains discussion of topics such as suicide, self-harm, mental illness, abuse of medication, and child death. Tread carefully, friends!

Player Information
Name: Zero
Age: Over 18
Contact: arrpee; zero#8942 on discord
Current characters: The Drifter (hyperlit) and Tim Wright (postictal); I can provide adequate activity for both for the past three months if needed!

Character Information
Name: Gabriel "Gabe" Goodman
Series: Next to Normal
Appearance: Honestly his appearance could probably be anything but for the purposes of simplicity I'll be playing him as played by this asshole
Age: Physically, almost 18 years old. Literally? About 18 months.
Canon Point: After "The Break" - roughly...four-fifths into the musical? It's near the end
Canon History: Here is a wiki link but as a warning this is very much a speculative entry. Full disclosure, Gabe has something of an ill-defined role in his canon that's very much up to audience interpretation, so I'll be more or less making a stance in regards to how I interpret him based on canon examples.

Gabriel Goodman is the son of Diana and Dan Goodman, as well as the elder brother of one Natalie Goodman. He's cocky, charming, mischievous, and very, very dead. He died when he was eighteen months old (this varies depending on which version of the musical is being performed; for the purposes of consistency, I'll be sticking with the Original Broadway Soundtrack version, which explicitly lays his death out at eighteen months). His parents were both young, had a baby unplanned, and were thus extremely unsuited to raising any sort of child. Gabe's death singlehandedly jettisoned both Dan and Diana into states of grief that, sixteen years later, they never truly learned to dispel.

This is not helped by the fact that, despite the fact that Gabe never made it to two years of age, Diana Goodman has a perfect visualization of him as he's "grown" throughout the years until we reach the present day in which the musical takes place.

Diana's mental picture of Gabe is incredibly detailed, forming a personality and an entire history where none must have existed. She pours so very much of her mental energy into fabricating this parallel world where she still had a son - a son who playfully torments his younger sister and manages to excel with an overambitious and chaotic school schedule - that she neglects the living daughter that she still has. Gabe's death was the traumatic event that led Diana to be diagnosed with a cocktail of mental illnesses, including bipolar/manic depression and hallucinations. And from the picture we get, it seems she's been grappling with this all the while.

It would be too easy to call Gabe a figment of Diana's imagination or a manifestation of her mental illness, in part because he so plainly has a presence that extends beyond her, paired with a personality that falls very far from any easily discernible aspect of Diana's own. No single character in the musical can seem to pin down what Gabe is, exactly, though he's certain to tell us plain in his defining song: "I'm Alive." He claims to be "more than memory" and "what might be," and that is precisely what he is; he is the potential life that Gabe Goodman could have had, desperately clinging to a family he was torn from too early. This is further exacerbated by his ability to interact with various other characters in the show and even the set itself - he handles Diana's medication twice, once to flush it down the toilet and again to set it in front of his sister Natalie, enabling her to sample her mother's pills. Throughout much of the show, Gabe can be seen clinging to the walls and banisters of the set, as though tethering himself to the house itself (a house that, it should be noted, he never actually lived in; that house burned down shortly after his death). He is, for all intents and purposes, solid in a sense. He is an active presence, and a driving force in his own right rather than merely an extension of Diana's own psyche. As an interesting side note, the color of Gabe's shirt tends to correspond with the clothing colors of whichever member of his family he's interacting with - and this does not always pertain to Diana.

"I'm Alive" does a great deal to expand on Gabe's character, especially as he lays it out to the audience in addition to all the members of his family - not just Diana. In particular, he pronounces that "though you made me, you can't change me," making him "the perfect stranger that knows you too well," which more or less confirms that it's his family's discontent and dysfunction that generated his existence. The song simultaneously reinforces his desire to simply be acknowledged: "if you won't you grieve me, you won't leave me behind," claims Gabe, the words both a plea and a challenge. In his words, he "needs" his family to need him - if they try to deny him, he'll never die. The reprise cements this further, as he specifies it to "until you name me, you can't tame me."

He lingers always at the periphery of characters who cannot explicitly see him. When Natalie laments the fact that she always feels second best to a son that doesn't exist ("Superboy and the Invisible Girl"), Gabe bursts in on her song in the last verse and more or less forces her to sing the harmony while he takes the melody, all the while shadowing her across the stage. Whenever Dan tries to confront Diana about her perception of Gabe, Gabe himself is never far behind, seen addressing both Diana and Dan at certain points, particularly as Dan asks Diana what he's meant to do to help her - to which Gabe responds "look at me" ("I Am The One").

Perhaps most damningly, by the musical's midpoint, Diana has willingly undergone electroconvulsive therapy as treatment, and in the process has lost her memories of both her children. And yet...Gabe remains at the edges of the set and even in his own shadowed space as he expresses a bitter sort of remorse about how easily he was forgotten, and nonetheless maintaining that he won't be gone for good ("Aftershocks"). He obviously grows in force and strength when Diana remembers him in full - both the baby that died crying when she was a child raising a child and the imagined person she saw him growing up to be - but even without the mental force of Diana's imagination, he endures.

By the musical's penultimate number, Diana finally takes matters into her own hands and tries to strike out on her own without Dan's constant micromanaging and anxious desperation to restore their life to a picture-perfect ideal it simply never achieved. And once Diana leaves...

Well, actually, once Diana leaves, Gabe stays. He stays and, not for the first time, he addresses Dan. He calls his father out for ignoring him, for trying to forget everything he was, for denying his own grief and his own mental health for far too long. And by the time Gabe insists that Dan knows who he is, Dan starts to plead, wondering why it is that Gabe didn't go with her. Gabe responds that he's "holding on" and "won't let go," physically clutching at his father in apparent grief and desperation until finally, finally, Dan looks his son square in the eye and calls him by his first name, which the audience has, up until now, never heard:

"Gabe. Gabriel."

Gabe's voice breaks in relief as he whispers, "hi, Dad" ("I Am The One, Reprise").

It is, after all, as he said. Once Diana acknowledges grief to herself and apologizes to Natalie, once Dan finally confronts the specter of his dead son who he's been ignoring, Gabe finally gets his wish. He finally gets to exist in some capacity, even if it's sixteen years too late. The musical's final number includes Gabe as well, watching the Goodmans as they slowly start to piece together something approaching a normal life - or a life that's next to normal, as it were - implying that he, too, has found some measure of peace.

So what does that make him? From my perspective, it makes him something of a lingering memory, something that isn't shaped from Diana so much as he is from the swelling emotions of the family he continues to live with long after death. He is memory, yes, but he is also more than that. He's what never came to be, and by the show's end has only begun to claw himself out of his resentment in regards to his death as his family, at long last, decides to acknowledge him in an actual healthy manner.

In LifeAftr, he'll finally get what he always wanted: the ability to be flesh and blood.

Canon Personality:

Cocksure and manipulative while nonetheless charming, Gabe has a consistent personality no matter who it is he's interacting with or what he's doing, implying that he is something of the sum of everyone else's parts. Above all else, he takes advantage - of his mother's illness and delusions, of his father's denial, of his sister's frustrations and directionless longing for some sense of escape from this life she loathes. He inserts himself into the narrative as frequently as he can, laying down stumbling blocks in the road to his family's collective recovery: he facilitates Diana's rejection of her medication, sets Natalie up to trip on her mother's drugs, and even incites his mother to commit suicide ("There's A World") if it means she'll stay with him. The fact that he appropriates one of Natalie's songs, "Superboy and the Invisible Girl," explicitly to mock her for feeling invisible and neglected and lording his position as their mother's clear favorite despite being dead for sixteen years, says a little something about how petty and cruel he can be.

Rooted in a great deal of his behavior is a sense of normalcy, as is the case with many of the characters in the show: it would be normal for a boy on the cusp of adulthood to begin picking fights with his father, to tease his little sister, to mess with his mother and even be afraid to let go of her. It does seem that he's fond of her, even protective of her, and there is no doubt a comfort in the familiarity of that line of thought for both of them, no matter how damaging. Yet like so many other aspects of the show, there are subtle twists and turns to this that place it slightly off that track - in this case, it is the fact that Gabe himself died a long time ago, and it's the deceased remnant of his unlived life that craves validation from a family that just wants to move on.


In many ways, it would be simple to call Gabe's behavior straightforwardly manipulative and sinister. It would be - but when one considers who Gabe is and the context of his life, it makes a startling amount of sense. He is, after all, a child, first and foremost; a child full of bitterness and resentment and anger that his life was torn from him, that the family he never really got to have is so eager to forget him without truly ever grieving him. He never got to be a two-year-old, much less older than that, and thus never was allowed the chance to grow past the instincts that would suit one. He acts in the way that a child would be expected to act: hoarding his mother's attention, constantly pitching fits that indicate that something is wrong without ever explaining what, and wholly unable to provide solutions to his own problems.

He's aware, also, that it's the dysfunction of his family that allows him to exist the way he does, and he's afraid of being let go in earnest without ever being acknowledged outside of his mother's fantasies. While "I'm Alive" is probably the closest thing the show gets to a villain song, and Gabe himself the most direct product of the family's interpersonal conflict, the stage direction ends in a strangely poignant and, potentially, intentionally childish matter - with Gabe plunging one hand down to reach for his mother in a gesture that will never connect as she reaches hopelessly back in turn.

Despite Gabe's petulant and downright manipulative behaviors to keep his family fractured, there are certain contradictions in this baseline - moments where he seems to want some sort of shift, where he seems to encourage his family to change for the better. Gabe is, after all, something of the mental health elephant in the room, and while he might be "stronger" in a sense as he goes unacknowledged, he seems to understand that while this is the case, no one in his family will ever grow out of their perpetually unhappy state - including himself. There are several moments throughout the show where Gabe attempts to point out to characters other than Diana where they might start when it comes to rebuilding their shattered lives, but since no one will so much as look at him, these efforts are for naught. Most pertinently, Gabe addresses Dan at several points - demanding that Dan "look at [him]" when Dan questions where Diana is hurting and what Dan could possibly do to help her ("I Am The One"), as well as calling Dan out for assuming that erasure of the memories of grief would be the simple solution he was apparently craving ("I'm Alive, Reprise"). The show's ending sees him expressing contentment and relief that each of the members of his family manage to reach some sort of emotional closure ("Light").

Ultimately, Gabe's personality is best reflected in the fact that he died when he was a baby. His emotional maturity simply never developed past that point, but combined with his penchant for lashing out and hampering others when placed in a situation of distress or duress, this translates into something sincerely and darkly destructive for everyone. He's emotionally needy, desperate for attention of the positive or negative sort, and willing to do whatever it takes to get it. He harbors genuine affection for his family, but he's not above taking advantage of that if he feels it will suit his needs.

Most of all, he doesn't want to be forgotten. Spiteful as he is that his life was taken from him so young, he's plagued with an unwillingness to let go; even an imperfect existence augmented by an entire family's worth of pent-up frustration and unspent grief is apparently better than nothing.

Abilities: None! "Being alive" will have to be enough for Gabe to start with.

Inventory: Nothing except the clothes on his back, white t-shirt and jeans.

Sample

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