thinking about ghostboo today. especially his characterization and development bc he makes me go insane
back right at the start before the soul/mind stream i said there was something wrong with him past what we knew. i noticed there were a few too many contradictions in the character we saw, because if his memory was perfect like he said, why was aimsey calling him out on being forgetful? if he really didn't care, why was he still acting the same around michael and making sure aimsey didn't find out the one thing they didn't want to know, that he was dead? and if he wanted to be dead and liked it, why was he hiding from sam?
ghostboo on day one was a guy who realized he didn't need to care anymore. but, past that and looking deeper, he was a guy who came to realize that having people care about you is, in fact, a very good thing! he put on a facade of not caring about anything including what they think of him while openly badmouthing his own past self directly to their faces, the past self they called beloved. so why would he do that, unless he doesn't care? or unless he does.
c!ranboo, and by extension ghostboo, has always been a character of duality and contradictions. he contradicts himself endlessly, and while i've seen some call him inconsistent for that, it tends to make more sense with some thought. ghostboo's contradictions on his first day and on the days after were because, especially on day one, it was a facade. he was faking. he wanted them to think he was strange, that something was wrong, so they'd bring him back. or at least so they'd bring him back faster. but it worked too well, because he convinced them all he liked it! that he WANTED to be dead! and they never even tried.
and that brings me to another point: why did he change? why was he so different between his first day and the next time we saw him, when he got michael back? first of all, because there were several months between those streams, and characters can change offstream. second, because in that time period, he has to have started his own memory book! the one that lets him communicate with the part of himself stuck in limbo! there's no way he would have had it from the start, so on day one he wouldn't exactly have KNOWN the full details (unless he had permadied previously, but that's an issue for another post). so in those months between us seeing him, he had time to calm down, time to think, time to figure himself out, and time to realize exactly what he was doing to himself. there's no way the way he was acting didn't cause at least SOME damage to his soul, since he said it's emotions that make him fade!
not only this, but it's directly shown in his memory book that he already knew about it! when he finally makes a connection with his soul through the book, it's him who explains the emotions thing to his soul! he point blank has to explain to his soul that he's DEAD, not only that he "will feel the emotional pain of every experience I have" !
ghostboo, at his core, is sad. not only that, but he's the angry sort of sad. he's the kind of slow dawning sadness that comes with a long lasting realization, in this case slowly coming to realize that nobody's even going to try and bring him back, and he's the anger that comes with realizing he's alone. he lost everything when he died, but on top of that, he lost everyone. his relationship with aimsey was, in his eyes, his last chance at just having someone who acted normal around him, and that was all ruined in an instant by one simple question. and nobody's seen him since then.
on day one, he was trying to send out a distress call. by the time he said anything to aimsey, he had long since realized it wouldn't be answered.
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