Cracks

i’m so yikes at all the people praising @maggie-stiefvater for the lgbt ship being treated ~so well~ in trk just bc…. the lgbt characters weren’t killed off or turned into trees, and that’s just….. so sad.

as if pynch wasn’t completely treated as an afterthought, because they totally were. their scenes were super short and had no dialogue whatsoever, nor did they have any sort of confession of feelings or clear confirmation of their relationship while the hets got clear i love you’s and official declarations of their relationship to literally everyone and unnecessary drama……….. like i’m super happy that they’re both alive and happy and together and have a little hooved daughter that they love but. 

that shouldn’t be our standard. it’s mostly just sad that our expectations are that low that we’re praising an author for sidelining the lgbt ship and treating them nowhere near as well as the straight ship. and again so much of pynch was subtext and extremely subtle stuff that you have to read in between the lines, as it has been since the beginning. 

and i don’t even blame any lgbt people for being happy about it bc we’re used to being treated so awfully that we’re basically ecstatic about getting just scraps bc well, it could be so much worse. but stief is nowhere near revolutionary and actually giving good and equal representation and we deserve better (and any straight people praising it just need to shut up, thanks). 

i mean, if you can say one positive thing about it, it’s that the two lgbt characters got the strongest and most intricate individual arcs, but as a ship they were absolutely sidelined and underwhelming after all the hype and build up. 

tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them

jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it

piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients

and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know

and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need

they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other

and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.

The foxhole court coffeeshop AU where the entire team works at the same shop.

Dan and Matt are constantly making out in the break room. 

Kevin takes coffee way too seriously and lectures customers who dont acknowledge the difference between different roasts. 

Nicky is boisterous and somehow always gets control of the stereo. 

Wymack is the owner/manager. 

Abby is the accountant. 

Betsy owns the cafe next door. 

Allison specializes in frou frou drinks. Seth doesnt work there but he visits her but wont drink her girly coffees. 

Neil just needs a job. Andrew is weirdly protective of him and wont let anyone ask about his shady past. 

Renee is Renee. 

Aaron is openly hostile to customers and for some reason girls love it??? 

Bonus:  Everytime Kevins abusive ex Riko walks in Nicky plays we are never ever getting back together by tswift and riko gets so furious he knocks over the display of seasonal coffees.

Jay Wright By Dennis Tejero For Harper’s Bazaar Kazakhstan September 2018

dreams on sale, today only

Hi, just wanted to say your adam parrish meta is fantastic and i love reading it. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the difference between Adam's reaction to when he thought Gansey paid his rent vs. his reaction (or lack thereof) to Ronan paying it. I feel like it maybe says a lot about his relationship with both of them and how he maybe views their richness differently but idk. I'd like to know what your views on it are though

I think there is no point at which Adam assumes that Ronan Lynch is trying to control him, which is really the difference. 

Adam outright links his father’s control to potential control by Gansey in the first book. He clearly sees how Gansey is different from him socially and what others might take from Gansey offering him assistance: not love, but charity, and charity of a kind that makes Adam one of Gansey’s things. And he seemes to read Gansey’s love in that way too. He doesn’t really give Gansey credit for trying to be a friend until BLLB’s courtroom scene. And I don’t think Adam is 100% wrong? He’s like 75% wrong, but I will give him partial credit because, honestly, Gansey and Control is a thing. every time I’ve suggested that Gansey likes to control his situation and that of those around him, I’ve had people violently react with Gansey is not controlling!!! which, like, okay. He’s not controlling in the way Robert Parrish is controlling. He’s not controlling in the sense of being deliberately manipulative or cruel or getting high off of having power over people’s lives. 

but Gansey absolutely – absolutely and understandably when you think about his background and his upbringing and his trauma – does not want situations to spiral out of his control. To misquote Ronan Lynch in TDT, because he is Gansey, he usually wants all of them there and he wants to be in charge. It’s not malevolent control but it is a desire to make sure his people are safe, to know they are all handling each other appropriately, to trot out logic and rationality and wisdom and all those clear-headed Glendower qualities and use them to make everything right for everyone. Because he loves these people! He loves them and he wants to make the world right for them. Control. you can’t really be a king without it, though maybe he’d like to think he’s a king like the best myths about Glendower and can rule people out of sheer love, idk. 

My point is: I wouldn’t really be surprised if Adam has a hard time telling love and control apart, and I wouldn’t really be surprised if Gansey theoretically can tell the two apart but in practice expresses his love by, like, trying to talk at Adam about what Adam’s experiences are like and very logically delineating the boundaries of Adam’s life in a way you really shouldn’t do with abuse survivors because their right to trust their own impressions >>> your right to love them so hard that you get to be annoyed when they don’t let you dictate how they should be reacting to you.

Gansey clearly never means to come across as controlling to Adam, but he does, and part of that is Adam’s own issues and inability to see genuine friendship, and part of that is that Gansey really does want to control Adam’s life for the better. 

so I don’t even think Adam is kinder to Ronan about it because he loves Ronan more or because Ronan is so super clever about the way he offers help or w/e. I think it’s mostly because Adam hardly sees Ronan as likely to control his life. mind you, this isn’t totally fair to Gansey. Ronan isn’t immune to telling Adam what Adam’s needs are or what Adam should be doing. in BLLB, Ronan tells him to forget Aglionby and college because Adam has a bond with Cabeswater. Adam just dismisses him outright. There’s no agonizing over it; there’s no internal pain over Ronan setting out what Adam should do or Adam becoming one of his things. Adam pretty clearly doesn’t perceive any danger of that with Ronan. Ronan’s not going to try to control the universe to make things better for people. and tbh at several points in the books Adam’s (and a lot of other people’s) perception of Ronan is that Ronan barely makes any effort to control himself. 

Every angel is terrifying.

»we change each other« by shilpa gupta (+)

Judge magazine, 1921

the carbon in your body was once in a star. a celestial being died so that you could be here today. the universe believes in you and so do i