#tfw you're horror loving bffs coincidentally caught right in the middle of both a faked haunting & actual one; coincidentally

[unproduciblesmackdown]

i really enjoy too how there’s apparently just some Big Coincidences in goosebumps the musical phantom of the auditorium (and i suppose the original book plot too, afaik there’s not major enough differences to change this) wherein like there’s two separate hauntings by two separate parties who are not at all in cahoots, and the fact that brooke and zeke are in the middle of it adds some coincidences, like the fact that presumably all the Threatening Events that go down once rehearsals are underway were by emile, but surely he can’t have anticipated that brooke was going to shrug off the “who threatened me via my locker” event because her bestie is a known prankster who’s also in the play. did emile immediately embrace this & say, next pull a stunt while he Knew zeke was gonna be away going to the dentist & back (crentist...) b/c it really requires a pivot in strategy; surely at the start he was just hoping to Actually threaten people / make them think there might be an actual haunted play curse, rather than them all just being momentarily freaked out & then mad at zeke who keeps coincidentally being elsewhere with flimsy alibis. like, maybe that’s one of the coincidences, emile’s like “well idk i’ll get em next time” and then zeke is Again unaccounted for & everyone blames him Again & emile is like nooooo you’re supposed to think i’m an angry ghooooost.....while, Coincidence, brian is a chilling & hanging out ghost, who is aware of it, (unlike a goosebumps book i particularly remember wherein the protagonist dies partway through & is, unbeknownst to her & the reader, a ghost from that point on) & is like sweating over there like “alright so i’m literally a ghost of a guy who played the phantom who’s haunting the theater but this apparent The Phantom ghost haunting the theater is Not me”

coincidence from both directions that a) zeke is cast as the phantom so brian has to like, take him out if he wants to get onstage Instead, and b) zeke has a penchant for pranking people, even while larping as the phantom, & his reputation implicates him & c) brooke is his best friend, coincidentally, relevant to her getting haunted/pranked as the other lead, & d) idk they’re just coincidentally partners in crime out here who’d go “let’s check out the trapdoor thing” and then specifically, coincidentally, run into emile about it & then be the priorities re: emile’s scooby doo [scare kids away from the theater; stop this particular production which is even using the trapdoor again] efforts....and like, surely emile must Pivot his approach & just go for quantity of backstage misfortune pranks/haunts vs “convincing people this is a genuine ghost or something & not zeke pranking them really determinedly” quality, to the point of like, surely it was emile who then specifically tried to frame zeke about it lol, what was the reason....just embracing the new plotline ascribed to his efforts maybe, or maybe just b/c zeke specifically (along with brooke of course) is too wont to wander around, and probably having to do with the fact that now it’s just a matter of “idk we might just cancel the production anyway” the more Problems emile can create here lol, i mean, zeke surely has an understudy too (besides brian, secretly. also i guess brian (in the musical at least? in the book he might get just more spontaneously roped into it, & i think they hang out fewer times in general. & there’s no indication the gh gh ghost went “a g g girl!” in the book lol. very funny of him) is out here like, Knowing he wants to go on as the phantom, and Knowing zeke will be back on as the primary person in the chain of [who gets to play the phantom] if zeke can clear his name here, but helps out anyways lmfao, at least by going along with them and giving general moral support, and with the whole specific “he doesn’t want to go down the trapdoor b/c it’s like uhhh cough i died by falling down there” hurdle not making him attempt to stop them or anything either lol, like, well as a friend i Will ghostlily knock you out on opening night but i will Not not help you out when you need to solve a mystery of who’s framing you for the play. which isn’t actually me! even though i want your part!)

got on a tangent there but it’s appropriate b/c it’s more coincidental alignments i’m discussing lol. anyways i guess emile is just improvising & willing to roll with the “idk i guess people think zeke did it” thing, maybe he thinks that’ll get to brooke too, and i suppose they’re the priority, they’re the ones who he ran into under the stage, so. it’s not crystal clear & doesn’t need to be, i guess, just funny that the Coincidences here made emile’s efforts of “well i’ll pretend to be the phantom that haunts the theater and maybe specifically this production & everyone will be like ‘yes it’s cursed, play’s canceled’ & not use the trapdoor for anything else either. i guess” Not actually land as what anyone presumes is a genuine cursed play haunting

meanwhile, again, brian’s even more hilarious for being the actual Play Haunter around here while the Alleged, but also not even believed to be, play haunting is going on literally just offstage, & he has to be like, “no really, i don’t know what’s going on with that, that’s a wholly separate endeavor i am unaffiliated with.....i’m just hanging out until the play actually goes on” but only to himself, since nobody else is catching on that he’s a ghost, which can happen around here (the goosebumps mythos)......and brian’s death being Apparently coincidental too, just a genuine accident, and surely before emile’s time, so the musical giving him a whole number about “no you could die via this trapdoor and like, via any other mishaps in general" with the emphasized titular One Wrong Step being entirely relevant to brian dying via a wrong step, but emile is unaware of this lore, it is a coincidence that he’s right about the lack of safety & maybe these kids lacking the perspective about that, even if he also has the agenda of wanting to scare them away scooby doo style.......and it is yet Another coincidence that emile living under the school in secret is thematically relevant to The Phantom as per the “the story of the phantom” / the actual content of the play. sometimes you do just live underground, secretly

(also the Possibility that the play itself Is sort of a peripheral additional Independent Mystery Element in all these goings on, re: how a) it did apparently just Manifest with unknown authorship, with the implication that there could’ve been some Real [the phantom] person who wrote it & left it to be discovered, in a middle school i guess b/c this is a goosebumps book, & b) the Lore in [the phantom] as a play is apparently that if you die but your ghost has One Last Goal then your body just vanishes which i guess must be what happened to brian or surely he wouldn’t’ve have only apparently Disappeared)

(and when i was trying to Guess the plot before learning it, i was like, uh okay so are we going to like, recreate the story of the phantom in a So Meta way, just kind of organically, if brooke is esmerelda & zeke is the phantom then is brian showing up to Like brooke his being the raoul of this situation, how does “ugh, always a triangle” work when zeke has just expressly expressed he doesn’t wanna kiss brooke / be her boyfriend....but no lol, also a coincidence! for drama. and for the fact that ig in the musical it helps brian have that kind of graceful bittersweet resolution & just peace out, rather than the book’s version where it’s apparently more sinister / threatening somehow & brooke has to like, defeat him about it. although there’s still no alternate version of events re: zeke getting ghost attacked lol, i Guess we could suppose he just again totally coincidentally passed out, but i doubt it lol. it would’ve been funny if he was like “yeah sorry i was in the bathroom again. what did i miss” lmfao)

oh and also the coincidence that not only were brooke & zeke the kids who’d go explore a trapdoor, but also to take the initiative of exploring it again for the purposes of solving a mystery themselves, presumably in part because of their affinity for / familiarity with horror as a genre & the sort of Mystery Genre adjacency / overlap that’s possible there lol, which i feel is emphasized by the fact that zeke again gets meta about it all in the “whodunit?” number with the “it’s always the person you least suspect” element. although of course he also has some motivation anyways, as he doesn’t want to be suspended or worse, so you may as well try to solve a mystery again, and then emile just accidentally acts like he’s gonna murder them

well anyways the point here is i like how [guy pretending to be a ghost, basically] and [ghost pretending to be a guy (but who is also for all intents & purposes, mostly just a guy)] are here operating completely independently & parallel to each other, & brooke & zeke are caught up in it mostly by coincidence, where their specific characteristics & dynamic coincidentally thwart the first guy’s efforts to make people think the play’s haunted for real, but also it Is haunted for real, but that haunting entails a guy just hanging out being a middle schooler & minding his own business save while working on the play & befriending the protagonists. and the ways zeke & brooke are caught between both the [their being directly relevant to emile’s efforts] and [their being directly relevant to brian’s efforts] is Just Their Luck, basically lol. both of them are just trying to be in this play lmao, and they explored backstage stuff One time....Isn’t That Just The Way

(and as coincidence of all coincidences, their principal is goosebumps author r.l. stine!!!)

as a final note lmfao this isn’t like “”critical analysis”” in the sense that i have any complaints about these two hauntings being totally parallel / one effectively being a red herring for the Real haunting that was mostly unremarkable (and benign in the musical, save for zeke maybe getting concussed or something. listen to emile for this one, That’s Not Very Safe. but maybe we can infer a safer magical realism handwave explanation for it) and basically just a guy hanging out, until he was doing a performance as his One Last Goal. seems like everything has Enough of an explanation, or ones that can be guessed at / reasoning invented, like, e.g. going “idk i guess emile could’ve known where their lockers were & how to get into them b/c maybe you can just walk right into the office & access a printed out Name / Locker / Combination list hanging on a bulletin board” about things, and i feel that the purpose / priority of Things Happening in a goosebumps story (and even in other stories for older readers / in other genres) is simply the Effect it creates along the way, & of course that it drives the story / allows it to proceed, rather than it being more important that if you reconsider the story as a whole everything is as streamlined as possible and the motivations that the red herring side character had every step of the way are completely textually established. Is It Fun &/or Scary, if yes, proceed. and i think in retrospect all the coincidences are fun, and hence, this post