rhodochrosite | Reading

instead of doing any of my non-academic homework now that I am free of academic obligations... i chose to regress via watching 4 episodes of the legend of korra, which i gotta get back to, caught up to wha manga, and reread the entirety of the raven cycle, a favourite from childhood. I sort of did this bc it's a recurring conversation between me and H and I was like Okay I can't be saying this shit about adam parrish so definitively without revisiting the materials... and of all the series I was an avid fan of a decade ago, this actually was not on my list to reread but hey! she had the first two annotated, and I very helpfully annotated the last two for her. needless to say it was just a lot of me going 'this guy is a CLOWN' anytime adam thought anything.

here are the things I remembered and expected: ronan lynch [end thought], ... okay so famously ronan lynch is one of the greatest ya characters ever written his impact cannot go unsaid i was like i think i'm going to hate [fanon] pynch because they all think adam is a frail waifish poor little meowmeow and ronan is his daddy dom bad boy boyfriend and anyway, we can talk about that LATER .... gansey 2pick .... i hated adam and thought he was so bullshit and unreal and obviously he was tumblr's most favourite guy .... i liked bluesy! ...... sarchengsey endgame! .... everyone rich and republican and sexist

here are the things I completely forgot and/or never ever clocked: ADAM<>GANSEY IS ONE OF THE CRAZIEST DYNAMICS OF ALL TIME LIKE LET'S ALLLLLL KILL OURSELVES (...) pynch is actually also really good 10 years later (...) Ronan Dog? (...) transmasc blue Is There and In The Text... as is trans man adam but we really don't have to get into that... (....) adam is maggie stiefvater's favourite and it's like.... really funny especially when it involves gansey because adam will be in the wrong in every situation but maggie will be like (...) everyone rich and republican and sexist but that actually does not matter in the text?

the raven boys

this is actually a really really solid self-contained story and lowkey it takes like half the book to even have the two main focal points [300 fox way, the raven boys] interact but it doesn't feel like it drags. it's well-paced, the plot is like blue figures out gansey is going to die, gansey figures out something big is going to happen on the leyline, the current antagonist, whelk, also wants in on the leyline shit. adam and gansey have pt1 of a fight, they find cabeswater, adam defects to have it all to himself, ronan beats up adam's dad, and also somewhere during all this blue and adam don't not date... anyway you get the noah reveal and this is lowkey the only time noah is ever interesting or that plot relevant.

genuinely this book is really good because of the DYNAMICS it sets up. like I will give maggie steifvier one thing and that's that she knows how to write a delicious crunchy dynamic and good conflict [though she is terrible at conflict resolution]... the first two books are the most bisexual polycule the gangsey get, everyone is always calling each other handsome and being in love with each other and so much of it is adam<>gansey<>blue triangulation fuckery dynamics while ronan is himself [unfriendly and unwelcoming on principle] ... also so so funny that adam spends the entire book being like: Man FUCK this guy [ronan] he sucks and I wish he succeeded in killing himself so that I could be gansey's favourite uncomplicatedly... I don't want to share his attention with that fucking dog... and ronan is literally who is going to white knight him at the end. bet you didn't expect that did you parrish...

HIGHLIGHTS: adam defecting and running away to claim cabeswater for himself so he can have something that gansey doesn't. sort of every internal monologue moment where adam and gansey are agonising about each other and it's ostensibly about blue but genuinely not about blue at all... like you guys have problems you genuinely have problems.

the dream thieves

RONAN LYNCH WHEN I FUCKING GET YOUUU. okay this book has genuinely some serious awful pacing issues and no doubt about it it's ronan's fault for being so repressed and also maggie steifvier's fault for like wanting kavinsky to be gay and on screen and erotic with ronan but literally being unable to commit... so like the entrance of kavinsky and their racing escapades and homoeroticism is so so underbaked. anyway in book2, the gray man waltzes into town beats up declan lynch, fucks blue's mom, ronan has some fucked up dreams where he keeps trying to kill himself or hurt himself or both, we get the lynch family backstory, gansey makes them go out to a lake and then he and adam exchange glances about how hot both orla and blue are... which to me are genuinely some of the best moments throughout the books like they function so well to convey that these are teenage boys, immediately exclude blue because she's the thing they find sexy, and less immediately exclude ronan, who is gay. and noah was never one of them for real so. anyway SO GOOD. kavinsky thinks ronan is the mom and gansey is the dad, and adam is going 'if ronan had just DIED that one time he tried to we wouldn't have to deal with this bullshit', gansey chews kavinsky out and then is like Me and Adam will be taking a break to go Network Young Republicanly... where he and adam fight again and then adam is like wow I want to fuck his sister a little bit... and then wanders off onto the highway ... anyway back in henrietta, ronan is like Perfect I have No supervision and No leash and No chain and am going to wreck your car and then do 10 million drugs and get sexually assaulted by this guy who I kinda wanna fuck ... and gansey comes back but his car isn't crashed so he's like 'what? see you don't even need a leash' and ronan is like 'okay remember that time i tried to kill myself? so that was just the manifestation of my fear and self-hatred trying to kill me. #NotSuicidal' ... which.... Is not how that works but let's all laugh and nod as the book ends on a note self-acceptance and self-love... and maura disappearing to go cave spelunking.

HIGHLIGHTS: THE HOMECOMING TO THE BARNS. RONAN WITH THE MOUSE HEARTBEAT!!!! ronan's sex dream. adamsey at the gansey family house fuck everything episode. blue telling adam other girls might let him speak to them like that but she won't. adam speaking to gansey like that [worse even, possibly] and then not only does gansey gear up to apologise but then spends his next not-date with blue saying that adam was fundamentally unloved and that's why he's like that and that's why they should let him get away with speaking to them like that.

blue lily, lily blue

so now there's an old man here. and there is piper and greenmantle, and they're both really funny caricatures but i think greenmantle is funnier because it's very confusing as to whether piper is a misogynistic caricature or a self-aware misogynistic caricature.... adam is like Oh so ronan has a crush on me, I don't really gaf either way but Iet me encourage it... blue and gansey have committed to being straight while doing tortured secret romance no we can't its illegal gay romance appropriation... so RIP to bisexual gansey.... the thing that bothered me about this book is that while the last two books were so good about everyone's relationships with each other affecting everyone else's relationships with each other, but now that the main couples have been decided everyone's interactions and problems are cordoned off to being about only that couple, so there's a really abrupt end to the adam and gansey beef [which was never ever resolved but whatever] ... anyway every adult figure clocks adam as a sociopath, for some reason ronan is Totally Cool with the grey man being one of their adult figures even though he killed his dad and all ronan got to do was hit him 1 time... which I guess is that line about the weapon being about the wielder and not the weapon itself but ... Okay So No... so there's this woman called Gwellian who's mostly here to be crazyyy, there's jesse dittley who's here to bond with blue a little bit then DIE unjustly, they end up in a cave at the end and gansey learns that his magical power is charmspeak Yep Yeppp, and the singular scene we have of blue and ronan bonding is him hugging her back from the scary lake and then blue is like I can just be a mirror about this... there's a really funny line in the book about how three is the best number and you're like 'right... and this book, as the third book should've been the awesome and epic conclusion and is just bad and resolves nothing and now maggie s has to write a fourth book... Is she stupid?' but whatever. persephone dies even though her adam mentorship was so awesome. henry cheng gets introduced. just so he can be introduced. ronan, in one of the only explicit political statements/stances we get in the books, writes ANARCHY on his voter form. and I am choosing to interpret this both as a shithead manuveur and his real political alignment. when blue gets out of her post secondary education they can discuss the possibility for anarchist communes.

HIGHLIGHTS: maggie s breaking down why ronan is so mad post killing his own dream corpse. ok that doesn't count and i don't even like that scene. piper greenmantle being a crazy bitch is so funny, like genuinely sorry the greenmantles were lowkey deeply hilarious. i also loved the gray man and blue bonding scenes. 300 fox way trying to re-orient themselves after maura's disappearance.

the raven king

okay this one is the one i think is A Good Book. and I don't mean it in a high/low/classic lit way, I just mean just how it functions as a book that makes you want to keep turning the page and doing the thing a good story does where all you want is to find out what's next. i think this is paced sooo well and every chapter is not only [something happens] but that [something is about to happen, something will happen]... like it just does a really good job of keeping up the tension and the converging plot up until the very last page...

blue has real problems and issues and is understandably extremely frustrated about them!!!! gansey becomes bisexual again! and blue is like actually I do fuck with the worst teenage shithead offender we have seen on page yet, even if he does make incessant rape and pedophile jokes. I, like blue and gansey, am choosing to believe that henry cheng grows out of this shit postcanon. he has a robo bee exmachina and gansey, who isn't going 'i am unknowable' like a good friend of his every 3 chapters is still being like Omg... Someone who gets meeeeeee, ronan becomes a virginal teen mom and adam is immediately like 'oh okay so that child is another manifestation of ronan' and not only does she like adam so much but he's like Watch me be the father who stepped up, uh there's a gwellian artemus side plot that does not resolve until 300 pages later and is pretty nothing until then, adam is like I am going to hang out in ronan's childhood bedroom then acts surprised when ronan kisses him about it, and then gansey is like 'me and blue are asking for your permission to date' and adam, instead of being like you don't need my permission to date, is like This is what #Respect feels like and is like Thank you for telling ME specifically, bc ronan is just a dog, and then adam is like Oh btw ronan kissed me and gansey is like I have spent 30k and the last two years of my life trying to make sure that dog doesn't kill himself adam you better get a fucking grip, but really really nicely, and adam is like Hm, so I'm going to kiss ronan now and then tells ronan to take his shirt off so he can look at his tattoo and ronan is like put your fingers in my mouth. ok I have Embellished A Lot. gansey's senator mom wants to do senatorial activities. gansey is like let me bring my girlfriend and my boyfriend to hang out. and we get a glimpse into helen's life as the gripful eldest daughter vs the youngest child who has been allowed to do whatever they want since they died that one time. piper greenmantle is being nefariously and misogynist caricaturally evil in the background while getting some of the funniest lines ever written. neeve is also there. declan lynch is an underworld art dealer whiteknighting as a dc hopeful. he and ronan successfully have one civil interaction that leads to ronan kissing adam. there's a Demon, who is extremely conveniently wasp shaped. ronan's mom dies and gansey has a really justified non crash out crash out and defects for the first time in his life and Guess who's there to save him when his dream car breaks down? Yep. Henry cheng. he's in a cave alone and then he's in a cave with his friends and then he finds out actually glendower is dead and he's going to have to die for real. gansey, a character who struggles with being his most authentic self and doing what he wants for the sake of himself and who is he beyond this glendower/leyline, because he's constantly playing up a version of himself for other people or his parent's reputation or doing what he thinks would be most appreciable and helpful for the person next to him [not that he has to be Good at this necessarily] is then remade in the image of what all of his closest friends Think he's like out of the Leyline. let's just not get into any of those implications.

HIGHLIGHTS: henry giving gansey his aglionby sweater just before gansey descends. that entire sequence of the drive [henry telling gansey to drive his car, KNOWING WHAT CARS MEAN IN TRC!!!, him being like 'we're inyun' (ok so he says jeong but he means inyun) and gansey being like omfgggg someone else with extremely quick lesbian attachment style as meeee<33333, gansey calling him a prince among men then being like 'exclesior' ironically and seriously], BLUE AND ADAM NINO'S SCENE WHERE THEY'RE BOTH MAD AS FUCK... like i'm sorry you cannot convince me they are actually friends... and blue is like im mad as fuck but adam has problems and issues and i have to be civil to him so let me try my best and then she really really does :) ... henry making the only other explicit political statement we see in these books when he says to the crowd of mountain view students that he will raise minimum wage for all of them. go my little socialist!

characters
ok yeah obviously ronan is still my favourite character. ten years and I will never improve and I will never change. he changed my brain chemistry forever and shoutout to him for that YAYYYY YIPPEEEE.

blue

so there's no real ranking after ronan, though blue is lowish because she is not actually a real character because maggie s. like genuinely really neglected her by making her character premise be implicit on being a plucky and highly moral or code-driven character and then she actually has no real moral/internal code... which is so crazy because the whole point of blue being positioned as on the outside to the raven boys both through class and sex was to offer some commentary on both of those things, because she's also isolated by her peers who care about things she doesn't and her family of psychics where she isn't. like this sort of lonely outsider/misfit/unbelonging that her character centers around is always discarded or offered much more richly to adam or ronan. and really central to this eclipsing of her character/story/arc is because maggie stiefvater is unwilling to actually racialise her!!! like clearly blue is native and black but that's never said!!! it's just the only way to read her character!!! but never made clear about her!!! [or any of the 300 fox way psychics other than jimi and orla who are both fat and big nosed respectively, which, LOL, LMFAO]. which... the most obvious reason that blue ends up with the unattainable perfect golden boy prince of the american south gansey is because he is the final and total signifier of her being Let In. because he is positioned as the unquestionable king who's literal power is to say things and have them come true. my other problem is that blue sargent is supposed to be a weird girl but actually she isn't even offputting or strange or anything [the way ronan and adam AND noah get to be] she's just hot and nice when you're nice to her and dresses bad. like.... okay.... let's go palatable girl. so much of this book series is maggie s describing blue in a way and then like nothing in the text doing anything to back that up BECAUSE SHE WILL NEVER GET THE ACTUALISATION AND INTERNAL REFLECTION AND ARC SHE SHOULD!!!

like the entire book series she's working at nino's!!! in the last book we see adam, the other poor character, come to be served by her at her restaurant and then YELL at her about it despite her offering him food and service and it's like this microsm of how adam does have a real way of escaping the social class they share and does have a level of power/status over blue that he doesn't over anyone else and that's still NOTHINGGGG. HELL even [ blue will kill her true love ] isolates her from finding or pursuing true love!!! basically this total failure to do anything with blue and her character, until the very last book where she feels the walls encroaching around her as more people die and their welsh adventures are about to end, and she's finally so so frustrated and mad and upset and it makes for a very sympathetic and coming-of-age read then it still isn't even that resolved. whatever. i'm mad just thinking about it. fuck adam and his unknowable shit. like obviously she is the most like ronan, but the refusal to let them interact or understand each other without other people making that connection for them also lets her get no actualisation! WHATEVER. like blue is never a real feminist and blue is never a real eat-the-rich kind or a real republican hater, which is so crazy because there are endless mentions of red ties and how gansey is theee republican prince like why bother making your characters/story/conflicts be backgrounded by these things when they ultimately mean nothing at all! whatever. whateverrrr.

RONAN LYNCH

there are actually these really good posts/analysis about gothic readings of the lynch family + reading ronan's story with CSA in mind (2), and I'll integrate those into my belief system for free yeah. also surprised that no one mentions that the phrase niall uses to subdue Ronan is 'are you going to be quiet?'

anyway, so ronan lynch falls into my favourite kind of character because he is a guy who has 10393020 things wrong with him and he doesn't know/care or think that that's necessarily true even. as in litr his entire arc in tdt is him being like 'ok so my dream manifestations that try to kill me and hurt me and are a product of my subconscious and very recent trauma have nothing to do with Me' and like that is the conclusion they come to in the end. i cannot believe he has canonical self-harm scars and is on record as having attempted suicide and the book is like 'oh but he wasn't Actually trying to kill himself' also then makes it crazier that kavinsky's first act of flirtation is to recreate the leather bands ronan uses to cover up his self-harm scars. like bruh. also crazy that in his own book he gets sexually assaulted. like Oh! Okay! and again. none of that is being resolved or coming to terms with or being dealt with. like Incredible. Flawless. Perfect character no notes. like genuinely adam has things wrong with him and similar traumas and the entire time he's like im unloveable im nothing everyone hates me and no one wants me and they all think i should kill myself because im so dirty and pathetic and lesser. and in ronan's pov he's also dealing with all of that but it's like 'so My Dreamscape says im unloveable and pathetic and wrong and dirty. but since it's only in my dreams None of that matters once i wake up.' but genuinely crazy that kavinsky date rape drugs him and then sends his nudes to gansey to humiliate him and then. what? nothing?

ok also on a nothing note i do not understand the discussion about pynch top/bottom dom/sub dynamics because literally half of all of ronan's interactions are him either responding to direct orders or asking for direct orders. like that's just The Text. there's nothing more nothing less ronan lynch is a bottom and a sub and the horniest written character in trc because he gets half of an implied sex scene. is implied to have [non consensual] sex. is also fixated with having adam's fingers in his mouth which is also a penetration thing but we don't have to get into it. whatever i don't care let's all just accept that he is omega sub bottom...

my other favourite thing about ronan lynch is that he is a stubborn lover... like truly i love a guy who loves deeply and unconditionally and then goes out of his way to never ever show it as much as possible. also that he's a dog. also that he has an attitude problem and loves to aggressively peacock but only so he can be told to stop andor masochistically suffer the consequences. i love that he's like the dark tall handsome bad boy with a huge tattoo. his epithets are sooo gratuitous and ngl my biggest problem with so much fic is that he's never as mean or assholeish or cold or terrible as he's supposed to be. like yes he does have a heart of gold and innate goodness and submission but the fun of him is forcing that out of him!!! and the whole point of ronan is that he's always challenging people to do that!!! like yes I agree ronan is a sub and he's never topping but like, also, he is BRAT. in the charli xcx way and the sex archetype way. which is the charli xcx way. like cmonnnnn. the whole reason he does all that posturing is because he wants to be put in his place that's all that issss. whatever. WHATEVER!!!! anyway imagine you're gay and catholic and irish and an exile and a bad boy and a brat and you like electronica and are tatted the fuck up like i can't. he was made to pander to ME. like can I even get into everything that I think ronan is? Well for one, Palestinian. we're going to make him two of the greatest heritages on earth: Irish and Palestinian. his inheritance is exile. his inheritance is an existence that's continually erased and suppressed and trying to resist and survive. his inheritance is also of course, the endless cache of rich lush historical and cultural heritage that comes along with those things. EVERYONE LET'S SMILEEEE.

adam

okay we gotta get this man out of the way. neurotic mentally fragile k1ller topseme alpha dom of all time. he has control issues. he's weird and offputting and loves to fake it by being an unassuming unharming handsome preppy kid. he is extremelyyyy manipulative. insane tragic backstory and insecurity issues about being unloveable that he needs to exorcise via ronan's hole. is SO prideful and SO selfish that he somehow is worming himself to always be victimized by. H was literally like 'i should've expected that you would have a kaveh-like complex about adam' well yes. he's a fucking. he's a kaveh variant. or kaveh is an adam variant. i do not believe he is doing anything even remotely good in working for the government. I think he is trying to become the cabinet/director some higher up that was in gansey's inheritance but gansey will never do. i think he is literally the friend that blue gets cognitive dissonance in trying to hang out with because everything he does is so opposed to her morals and that's why they are Not Friends. I think he has innumerable problems and issues and is crazy toxic and controlling in some ways but it really works for his mentally ill boyfriend and i think Actually, it is literally gansey hearing from down the declan?grapevine that adam is behaving in a way that is probably bad for ronan and gansey is the one calling ronan and being like Well Actually The Thing You Need to Understand About Adam Is That.... like it's genuinely crazy to me that gansey is the character that adam behaves the worst towards that is not blue and gansey comes out of it as adam's No.1 Apologist and Defender.

like maybe I am being unsympathetic to adam but for a guy who is like [do not perceive me with any of my tragic backstory in mind] all he does is think about himself ONLY in terms of his tragic backstory. and then he gets mad at gansey for trying to engage with him within the context of adam's tragic backstory. like i understand that gansey is often thoughtless and the way he flaunts his privilege and how easy it is for him to give up or do things that adam needs to agonise about is the crux of all their conflict and love and affection will never come easily to adam the way it comes to gansey but genuinely like HOLY SHIT. it's incredible to read their dynamic on page. especially because adam wants to fuck gansey's girlfriend and he wants to fuck gansey's dog and he wants to fuck gansey's sister and gansey would forgive him for all of that. it's also crazy that the pity that adam thinks gansey regards him with that underlines all of their interactions is 90% projection and adam making this shit up because he is Insistent on interpreting gansey in the most bad-faith way possible. bc also so much of gansey's internal monologue is not knowing how to treat or what to think of people!!! because he understands that his way of approaching the world with all the american royalty privilege and connotation and implication of that Does Not Work and is not how he should engage with the world!!! he doesn't know how he should act with adam because adam doesn't like anything he does!!! and never will!!! because he's sick off his own envy!!! they're so fucking cursed it's unreal.

sorry I just think understanding adam's rs and dynamic with gansey is integral to understanding the worst of his flaws and thought patterns and all that's wrong with him. and i think genuinely blue and the gray man are the only two people who have a 'good' approach to adam where in trk blue holds both truths to be self-evident: adam is being an asshole. adam has reasons in his life to act like an asshole. and she's like Okay so I'm going to react to Both of these things instead of just the second. the gray man is a much nicer guy who likes to push forth an adam-centric narrative in the funniest way possible by appealing to his sense of ego... Adam Parrish and his merry men. Adam you would be So good at being a hitman. Adam, you are scary and unsettling and that's really good actually. i also think it's just not cogent to have ronan fall in love at first sight ?presumably with adam as tumblr is telling me td3 implies because ronan really only starts to fuck with adam [the idea of] in tdt Once adam Defects and is shown to be an edgy weird rebel and entangled with Cabeswater by Choice BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE THINGS RONAN LYNCH LIKES AND RESPECTS!!! like im sorry but it's simply more accurate to ronan's code of honour that he respects and acknowledges people only when they pass his edginess tests like THAT'S WHAT GOOD. adam has to show him the extent of his mettle and how much he also will violently and aggressively discard the rules and codes of honour and also THATS WHAT MAKES THE LEASH SWITCH. ADAM USURPS CABESWATER [RONAN'S DREAMED REALM] FROM GANSEY. THAT'S THE TEXT. THAT'S WHAT MAKES RONAN ADAM'S AND NOT GANSEY'S. whatever. the fucking 'they're soulmates' guys wouldn't get it. the whole point of it is that adam is a crazy idiot who along with inheriting the weird fucky magic leyline forest also inherits the large aggressive bloodhound that comes with it. and takes two whole books deciding what to do about it. adam is that guy they made that textpost of like soulmates but i am aggressively cutting up our red thread of fate and tying you to me together in that kind of way.

okay also and by far the funniest fucking thing about adam is he is literally the 'i pulled myself up by my bootstraps' red blooded capitalist subject that america and it's ideal success stories wants him to be. which is why it is literally so important for him to stay at harvard and continue the neoliberal/neoconservative ideologic order. you wouldn't even get it. IMO adam is some kind of evil lawyer but whatever. like a lina khan if she was evil and if i knew what her evil equivalent was. well lina khan is a neoliberal so. ANYWAY DONT WORRY ABOUT IT.

gansey

he is a #woman. because he spends the first two books micromanaging all his friends relationships and interactions and reactions to one another. and then in the last two books you find out he's actually really insecure and a shell of a person and filled with anxiety and restlessness and unsure of what he could do with his life if not this one thing or he really wants the rest of his life to happen so he could dedicate his time to his mans [blue]... i don't know. there are some parts where what maggie s wants do with gansey shines so clearly and there are some parts that are just so incongruent with the grain of the story. like so he's the raven king. but actually he's not because it's everyone who's the king of their own specific realms. like gansey is for sure the emotional glue of the group and the heart of it, but all the same... like the reason he is allowed to command cabeswater to do Anything is because all of his magicians want to listen to him and are willing cabeswater to do such. the whole thing is that he's not really a king at all, he has nothing innate to him rather than leadership but also no? i don't even know. it's all a facade. glendower is dead. and now gansey, who has spent his whole life putting up a reflection that will best suit the person speaking to him, is nothing But that reflection. it's killing meeee... i think being transgender could fix him. trans girl gansey is REAL to ME. you wouldn't even get the politics of his loving republican GOP family letting her transition at an early age but also signing off on every transphobic bill there is. that's litr the cognitive dissonance that these novels never get at but it should be thereee.

sorry did I have anything else to say about gansey? he's a brahmin WASP. he 100% is of the usha vance upper caste hindus making it in america clan progeny who align themselves with whiteness but never are... we know this is true. we can make trc a better text Together as we racewash it and actually interrogate some of things it pretends it observes or doesn't. like the fact that this series takes place in the early 2010s just before the turn of woke like the terrorist jokes go crazy. and gansey is uppitly internal monologuing about how he's definitely not muslim and someone like him would never be but being super polite about it outwardly... idk. i think genuinely we get such an interesting dynamic by the end of trk where instead of him being the courageous figure of stability for everyone, henry is coming to his rescue [as opposed to vowing his service, which he also does but also it's much more about being Equals than it was with everyone else] ... i also think his rs with blue is left so unbaked outside of [adam is making us have tortured forbidden romance] which is literally the least of all conflicts they could've had. but this is literally because BLUE DOES NOT HAVE HER SO CALLED MORALS OR PRINCIPLES. like yeah blue would go to the gansey clan young republicans meet up to interrogate everyone about their principles? she would? does she ... interrogate those principles when it comes to hanging out with him and the others or falling in love with him or thinking about... whatever whatever WHATEVER.

like okay, so gansey's greatest flaw is that he's super privileged and super reliant and ignorant of his intense privilege. and so everyone is always attacking the result of his privilege [his behaviour, the things he takes for granted] but other than 'ganseys do unto others what they wish would be done unto them' and Nepotism. there is no actual interrogation of what this privilege is based upon or where it comes from and who it hurts or places in unfair positions [BLUE, ADAM, ALL OF 300 FOX WAY] by having it be so grand and immense. and you're like Okay well the main point of these books are the fantasy adventure. to find an old king who's story is steeped in tradition and ideas of the Divine Right of Kings and this idea of king<>magicians a relationship that is fully grounded in one's subservience/undying loyalty to the other. this is why it's also so important TO ACTUALLY RACIALISE BLUE. and she is black! she is native! because gansey's family money is generational wealth and in America, that means he has great grandparents who were making bank off the transatlantic slave trade and plantations. by exploiting and killing natives americans off their land. like cmon man. and you have to understand these things are not One-offs, this is literally a thing that the story keeps coming back to and circling around and being like 'so this is why gansey is always Kind of wrong' but it's never saying it. it never gets muddy with it. whatever. whateverrrr. i don't even care.

CARS

genuinely to me more important than kings in this story is the cars because every story about america is either about sports [which is what war is about] or cars. and that is because cars, in america, are about freedom. which in the american cultural understanding is about self-expression and independence. every car in this story represents their driver in some way. adam's car is called the shitbox and is clearly unmatched and ill-fitting and it reveals all of adam's worst fears and insecurities about himself but it's the only time he takes pride in those qualities and that inheritance of trailer park trash because it's his alone and it's his ticket somewhere, anywhere, his car endures and it is Him and he will fix it. letting someone else drive your car in the story is also a huge thing. adam drives ronan's bmw at the end of the trk to mark the turn of their rs and also that adam can be independent but still accept gifts or whatever. and also that ronan has relinquished control to him. bruh. gansey watches blue drive his car and subsequently is so turned on by it that he forgets to be anxious about anything. some time after this actually, henry lets gansey drive his electric vehicle and is the most active passenger we have ever seen in that they work as a well-oiled machine to make sure they get to their destination and skip cops. the gray man drives a car left behind by a piece of shit who wanted to exploit ronan. because he is a piece of shit who wanted to exploit ronan. ronan will not leave his bmw after his mom dies because he has no refuge outside of his last home left by his father. adam can't get him out so he sleeps in the passenger seat next to him. ronan has his most important dreams in that fucking car! [or just a car!] and the other most important dream happens where, In the fucking Church. yes the car is a sacred place. there is no way to get around henrietta [or any of america] without a car. blue Does not have a car because she is the most stuck here. blue shares her family's car and the single time she drives it, it causes an Entire Episode and she ends up with her access revoked! LIKE YOU WOULDN'T FUCKING GET ITTT. gansey loves his camaro and hates the second fancy car because the pig is a way truer expression of himself, in it being a historical relic and needing care and love and work and obnoxiously orange and down to being more obviously 'old money' BRUH. whatever. whatever. allegedly ronan's car looks like a funeral hearse so. make of that what you will. like you wouldn't even get it, the car is the most romantic and symbolically imbued and meaningful object in trc and it is better for it actually.

this story ends in light

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