#aurora lynch

[luneillusoire]

To be loved is to be changed ❤️‍🩹

The Lynch family gathered by the Barns

[brokendoor16]

Hey so I’m rereading the raven cycle and the parallels in the ways Adam and Ronan look out for each other?? Fucking INSANE. Like the ACUTE similarities between how Ronan responds to Adam’s grief over Persephone (sitting down next to him on the porch; ‘I don’t want to talk’ ‘the fuck would I talk about?’) and how Adam responds to Ronan’s grief over Aurora’s death (getting into the car with him; ‘are you coming in?’ ‘no’ ‘wake me if you need to’)?? The way they comfort each other just through their presence and comfortable silence?? I am UNWELL about these books.

(I’m sure there’s more examples but this is what we’re getting today)

[littlefoldedpaperstars]

rereading the part of the raven cycle where ronan mentions that aurora’s favorite movie is PYGMALION??? and it’s only sinking in now how sick and twisted it was of maggie to make the woman who was literally dreamt up for the purpose of being a wife and mother love a movie where a sculptor creates his fantasy and she becomes real.

UGH THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF AURORA’S CREATION ACTUALLY DISGUST ME and i feel so sad for her.

i hope that tire iron hurt, niall lynch…

[cables-walter]

It didn't feel important to remember that. It felt important to show it to someone. Ronan tried to understand.

[squash1]

thinking about the lynch’s false mirrors.

declan as a mirror to niall. a son made in his father’s image.

ronan as a mirror to niall. a father choosing to model a son after himself, after his brother.

matthew as a mirror to his brothers, to his father. ronan manifesting a kinder, softer mirror of declan’s face in a brother that would be better than either of them, for both of them.

ronan having to look at declan after niall’s death, seeing his father’s face, not just in the mirror, but in a brother that is not his father, not his idol.

declan having to look at ronan after niall’s death, seeing his father’s face, not just in the mirror, but in a brother all too like his father, dangerous and horrible and lovely.

[friendofcars]

tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum and creature was a good word for him ronan thought what the hell am i and it was like nothing he had dreamt before and instead of one ferocious beak there were two side by side screaming in unison and it was a carcass and ronan’s hand hovered over two parted beaks side by side both rimmed with black and something purple-red that adam didn’t want to consider too deeply and body was a tender word for it and ronan adam warned as dread welled up in him but tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother it is a perfect summer evening the moon rising over the orchard the wind in the grass and there was a brief moment where he was looking just at adam and adam wished that he could keep him in it forever and as he stares into the sky there are twice as many stars as usual and ronan’s gaze dropped. mom?

[karouvas]

Ronan’s view of Niall dreaming Aurora is wayy too sympathetic/generous for my tastes. I understand why but still. Annoying!

[hondayota]

aurora and niall lynch at the barns

[seaemberthesecond]

declan csa parallels haven't left me since I made the connection

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this, because honestly same.

This is one of those things that I won't even say is a headcanon because it's not. It's a reading of the text, plain and simple. The evidence is all there.

Violation of autonomy, familial harm, and secrets are all big themes in tdt. The central problematic of the Lynch family is that the secrets in the underbelly tear them apart and prevent the brothers from connecting to each other in real and meaningful ways. They're deliberately denied the language and vocabulary to articulate their experiences out of fear of the family's secrets being exposed, leaving them unable to communicate with each other.

And in the middle of all of this, we have Declan.

Declan who, unbeknownst to his brothers, is experiencing a radically different childhood riddled with danger and violence and is forced to keep it a secret by his parents for the 'good of the family.' Declan who resents Ronan and Matthew for getting the idyllic childhood he's been deprived of, thus creating rifts in their relationship. Rifts that are further exacerbated because of the secrets he's forced to keep – he can't talk to them about what's actually happening in his life, he can't share anything real with them, so he constructs a fake persona to hide behind, even at home. But his brothers pick up on his artifice and withdraw from him, leaving him even more isolated.

This is…such a painfully obvious allegory for sexual abuse that I'm kind of dumbfounded by the fact that more people don't talk about it.

Both Ronan and Matthew recognize that Declan is treated differently by their parents, but they deliberately don't examine this too deeply because doing so would require that they acknowledge that something sinister lurked in the margins of their childhood and that's just not something they want to face. Declan's grief isn't as clear-cut as Ronan and Matthew's, because he's grappling with the very real harm his parents did to him, but he's demonized for his "sceptical and imperfect love" for Niall and Aurora. His attempts at getting Ronan to see that their parents weren't who he thought they were are met with hostility and scorn (and in Matthew's case, hesitant incredulity). Because again, Ronan doesn't want to hear it. He's actively standing there with his hands over his ears chanting lalalalalala. I mean in CDTH, we can see how very discomfited he gets when faced with Declan at the fairy market because it forces him to re-evaluate his own childhood in light of all this new information about his brother's secret life that was taking place right under his nose. And he does not want to do that.

I mean does that not drive you insane?? The subtext is THERE. Everything about how the Lynch Brothers' dynamic is set up allows for the reading that Declan has suffered some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one/both of their parents.

And this is purely at a thematic level. It gets crazier when you consider Declan displays many of the characteristics and behaviours of sexual assault survivors.

His issues with intimacy

"It wasn’t that he hadn’t gone on dates or hooked up, that unlovely euphemism for what was sometimes a perfectly nice time. It was that he didn’t get too close. Intimacy was allowed as long as it revealed nothing truthful." (ch 69, cdth)

His 'hypersexuality'

“So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem,” Gansey said. (ch 4, trb)

His troubled relationship with physical touch

(He never initiates anything physical with Jordan, it's always her making the first move; his discomfort with Aurora's hug in the Dauntless Declan scene; his discomfort with Feniall's hug in CDTH; he avoids touching his brothers even and is surprised whenever Matthew reaches out to him.)

His disassociation from his own emotions

Declan Lynch had a complicated relationship with his family. It wasn’t that he hated them. Hate was such a slick, neat, simple emotion. Declan envied people who felt proper hate. (ch 10, MI)

So even if you choose to believe Declan wasn't assaulted by Niall or Aurora, there is still enough evidence in the text itself to suggest he's suffered from some kind of sexual violence during his childhood. Fairy Markets aren't exactly child-friendly places (the woman getting strangled in one of the rooms in CDTH anyone?) and it's not really a stretch to assume Declan had to put up with some fucky shit as a uhh* checks notes* 10-year-old in the uhhhh *checks notes again* black market for the rich and powerful.

And then there's the declan-adam-hennessy and the declan-adam-mor triangles which exist independent of whether you consider Declan a victim of sexual violence but certainly get reinforced if you subscribe to it. But I won't get into that.

All this to say, CSA survivor Declan you will always be real to me.

[forgetriestowrite]

hi continuing my reread of trc and I just got to the point in the dream thieves where Ronan talks about the stories of his childhood and

Aurora’s favorite story is the movie Pygmalion and Niall’s favorite story is Alice in Wonderland and uh

that’s fucked up

hey Maggie

what the fuck

wHAT THE FUCK

W H A T T H E F U—

[lizpaige]

if ronan dreamt up the nightmare shield around the barns before he even knew about the wealth of dangerous shit his dad had been up to, what do you think niall dreamt to protect his family? nothing?

[seavoice]

kind of obsessed with the fact that declan was clearly the problem child pre-niall's death. and you know what! good for him

[iiowaw]

The brothers Lynch and their dreamt mother.

[ahomeganeyatsu]

Just woke up and remembered that Adam and Ronan kissed and Ronan saw his mom dead.

These events are only hours apart.

[clotpolesonly]

Mister Impossible ch 29 // Mister Impossible ch 31

[squash1]

reading extremely loud and incredibly close (absolutely devastating, highly recommend) and i can’t stop thinking about this passage in connection to the dreamer trilogy/maggie stiefvater lore:

i don’t know how i know this (i know it is in some respect true although i may be misremembering details) but i remember maggie talking about how one day she was driving to some mundane place — the sort of place you go everyday, the sort of drive you don’t even think about because it’s become second nature — in one of her unusual, maggie-like cars and coming toward her on the other side of the road is her same exact car, and driving that car is a person that looks, from a distance, an awful lot like her. and in my recollection she was so shaken in this moment — essentially having this intense feeling of seeing herself duplicated, another version of her driving around her life — that she turned around and went home. and that this experience is what inspired the dreamer trilogy.

the idea of a doppelgänger, or a twinned self, is so embedded in the dreamer trilogy so knowing this origin story makes it all the more interesting to me. in mythology a doppelgänger is often a bad omen, a bringer of bad luck, like an evil twin, but that’s not really the case in real life or tdt. in the case of hennessy and jordan, niall and the new fenian, mór and aurora, they are all literal copies of one another — a face, a body copy and pasted. the pairs are mirrors of each other living parallel lives — in many ways more different from one another than similar. at least one of them is constantly wondering, am i the imposter? have you gotten it more right than i have?

declan and ronan are mirrors — constantly forced to recognize their father in one another and themselves. and this — the moment when ronan first sees the new fenian and thinks is that me? — feels more the like universal human experience than the true, exact copies do. that moment is the experience of maggie seeing someone with her car and changing course, turning the mundane to the extraordinary. it’s a wake up call. it’s a nudge from the universe.

it’s the moments of recognizing ourselves in others, others recognizing themselves in us. of walking around the world looking like your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, and every stranger you’ve never met.