Stopped In My Tracks And Almost Fell To My Knees When I Remembered That The Only Time The Font Changed

TRC gangsey halloween costumes! 🎃🦇

I just love them all so so much

I think if we ever got bi declan real it would have been done in like a one paragraph anecdote in his internal monologue about the most boring gay experience in the world and never brought up again. like at some point he would've been like 'once declan had slept with a senator's son, a man with the false american charm and loud presence of one used to getting what they wanted, for the political advantage. he had left promptly the next morning as if merely returning from a meeting, and had spent almost a whole hour staring at guido reni's st sebastian which he had stolen from the dulwich gallery without anyone noticing. the twisting, erotic form of the man seemed untouchably alien to anything declan could reach. what declan had felt the night before was merely a polite transaction - nothing like the passion this saint achieved just by dying' and it would leave us still kinda uncertain as whether or not that means he's actually into men or not

yeah fuck it i'm making this its own post. basically very long winded (but still not as extensively detailed as i'd like) thoughts on adam & ronan (sort of) & whelk & noah

i remember reading the raven boys back in 2014 (ten years of rot in my brain!) and being sooo disappointed that there was basically zero fandom interest in whelk & noah beyond "omg whelk is evil and awful and terrible, poor baby noah!" when that is not the narrative surrounding them, not really. i feel it's a disservice to both of their characters to do that, especially noah's:

there is nuance there. there are implications. like... it's ALL about the implications!!! we basically see nothing of whelk and noah beyond what's left after the carnage. and it's a theme in trc for characters to have irreparably changed before we ever meet them (gansey, ronan, whelk, noah). we don't know what they were actually like when noah was alive, when they were best friends. when they were tight as ticks. whelk was noah's gansey. what we do know is this: whelk was cheating on his own girlfriend with noah's, which is a shitty thing to do for sure, but we have zero context for that. we also don't know how true it is, because whelk has such a self-inflicted warped view of his past. he keeps rewriting his own memories to think lesser of noah, because his absence hurts that much! we know they were best friends, the same way adam & ronan are best friends with gansey. we know they did everything together.

i'll paste the part where adam is possessed, sorry for the amount of screenshots:

and this line from a bit further along the chapter:

then, from noah's possession scene:

compare this to whelk's recollection of killing noah, and the effects it had on him:

"red lines streaked in the corners of his vision" "in whelk's head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together" "dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself" "somehow invited into his body through czerny's death" yes i am going there, yes i am making that point. i think, to some extent, barrington was possessed when he murdered his best friend. neither noah nor adam get their own pov while possessed, so...

i mean, time is a circle. noah needed to die so that gansey would live. noah had already died, gansey had already lived. it needed to happen, and so it would.

where the difference lies, i think, is in barrington's reaction to being possessed, versus adam/noah. for all that i'm arguing possession, i don't think barry's a stand up guy, he's a kid who's never had good role models (need i pull out the quotes about his shit parents) and who was raised by money and objects and reputation, which is why i think the possession worked. the idea to kill noah might've seemed like his own in the moment, an escalation of the situation he was already in, but unlike adam there was no one to hold him back. in that moment, whelk did truly lost it. he did the unforgivable. but there is no universe in which he doesn't.

for every time we see noah reenacting his death, we also need to imagine barrington whelk, seventeen and shivering. realizing as he's committing the act that he can't go back. perhaps realizing too that he couldn't stop his hands from gripping onto that skateboard, no matter how much he wanted to after that first hit. ("[...] something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.")

there's also adam in this. both him as a parallel to barrington, and as a strange sort of part of noah in a way. adam and noah interact the least out of the main group, arguably, but they too are a two-headed creature; they started out as one singular character and you can sort of tell. something something hands and eyes, something something sacrifice. ronan sort of parallels noah, in that he is not the same lively person we hear about, and he never will be that person again. both are cabeswater personified (although in different ways).

some more things:

"he once had been tight as ticks with his roommate czerny" "only whelk and czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers" "it was possible that czerny's death wasn't for nothing after all" "[...] his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water" (in relation to: "he had been a swimmer himself, once") "czerny, you're in a better place than me, i think" "whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn't laugh this time" "the dry, half-eaten burger on the passenger seat / the first fast-food burger he'd had in seven years" "these days, when whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead" "we were friends"

whelk dying in the same place noah did. these lines:

both noah and barrington look the same in the end. broken, rumpled, forgotten. noah's family will never know his bones were reburied outside of their family plot. whelk's mother, however distant they are, will never be notified that her son has died. i think in a way barrington died at the exact same time noah did; something something invited into his body through czerny's death. basically what i'm getting at is, noah and barry could've been ronan and adam i think, had the circumstances been different. they never will be, but i think about it sometimes.

and there's so many more things i'm not even gonna TRY going into, like noah and whelk both being parallels to gansey (the three of them kings in their own right), or the disparity between whelk talking about czerny vs adele talking about noah, or whatever the fuck is going on with whelk's backstory in general (what's the deal with his mother? how the hell did he get the aglionby job? a random headcanon of mine is that his and noah's search for the ley line lead them to fox way, seven years before the events of the book, and that's partly why whelk refuses to give out his name to maura, because barrington is hard to forget, and easy to trace back)

there is so much to talk about here and i'm so peeved no one is doing it properly... why are we still talking about declan bringing his weekly girlfriend over to monmouth for no reason when we could be talking about whatever the fuck kinda soul-fate-destiny bullshit noah and whelk have!

y'all remember when chainsaw man said "capitalism and abuse makes people so lonely and isolated that they risk their own integrity and well being just to have an normal life and be loved" and now it's saying "to meet someone who understands you and you relate to is disturbing and disgusting and so annoying but now you'll never be alone again and you would give everything to keep them" yea that fucks me up a little

raven cycle this raven cycle that BLUE KISSED NOAH AS A SYMBOLIC PARALLELISM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HER KISS AND DEATH. HER FIRST KISS WAS DEATH. DONT TALK TO ME DONT LOOK AT ME DONT GO NEAR ME I CANT I REALLY CANT OH MY GOD

sometimes i’m normal but then sometimes i think about the endless religious symbolism and parallels in the raven cycle and i want to chew on glass. like something something cabeswater and eden. adam’s name, his being made ‘from dust’, his pursuit of knowledge beyond the circumstances of his birth. ronan being referred to as ‘the snake’: the one who always tempts adam into recklessness. ronan and declan and cain and abel (i wash my hands of him) (i am not my brother’s keeper). gansey’s resurrection, his third birth. ‘important things come in threes?’ ‘or sevens’. ronan and joseph kavinsky and joseph the prophet with their strange dreams that overlap into the real world. dreaming as a form of blasphemous creation. the three fox way women and the holy trinity. aurora lynch and the virgin mary and matthew lynch and the infant jesus - immaculate conception, pure souls without sin. absent yet overly mythologized fathers. i am going to throw up

HAPPY MANWHORE MONDAY

continuing on my "Lup and Barry get married every cycle and the ensuing weddings encompass a very wide range of tones" bullshit: consider, if you will, a cycle where they mean to get married early on, they really do. but the hunt for the Light is just so intense, and the time flies by so fast, that they still haven't done it by the time the end is closing in...

and in the final fight for the Light, a little under a month out from the Hunger's arrival, Lup is grievously wounded. she lies in Barry's arms, bleeding out, and with her dying breath, she whispers her final wish:

"reanimate my corpse and put her in a nice dress for the wedding"

and who is Barry to turn down a dying wish from his wife, let alone a dying wish that's that fucking funny, so Barry loyally throws some wedding plans and some necromancy spells together so that Zombie Lup can attend the ceremony. her soul doesn't reside in her body anymore because no one was willing to burn the spell slots on True Resurrection (it's only a month out from resets, come on), but she's very well-behaved as Barry very sincerely declares his eternal love and wiggles this cycle's ring onto her finger.

Taako hates it so much. the energy in the studio is incredibly uncomfortable. Lucretia takes a bunch of photographs of every moment so that Lup can enjoy it later upon respawn. most of the crew eventually looks back and recognizes this instance as the start of the slippery slope that lead to lichdom, but Lup and Barry refuse to acknowledge how fucking weird it was. they will treasure those pictures forever

was thinking about the dreaming tree in trb that shows you your worst nightmares and. ronan doesn’t go in—later revealed that this is because he not only knows what it does but also what he’ll see—but his worst nightmare is bringing back wasps. killing gansey. blue sees herself dangerously close to kissing gansey, fulfilling her curse, also killing gansey. richard “he imagined [finding glendower] might feel a lot like dying” gansey sees himself finding glendower. but adam. we’re never expressly told what he sees, only that gansey’s dead and it’s his fault and ronan hates him for it and he hates himself for it too. the difference is subtle but important. the others see the action. adam sees the end result. the others are afraid of killing gansey. adam is too, but that’s not his worst fear. adam’s worst fear is becoming like his father

i dont think we can raven cycle quote ourselves out of this one girls