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flirting 🤭

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ronan took adam to the barns.

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In the name of karmic balance and reparations I think the graphic novel writers should make Kavinsky Worse. Let him call Ronan a faggot

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wishing you a happy pride month with my favorite gay ppl <3

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Alas, work got in the way for a bit there and for several days besides but! I am back and I have my Thoughts. The joke Thought is that Blue and Tina Belcher might have a common interest in zombie boys. The serious one ultimately ties into my pet theory that the story plays out in a much more interesting way if Blue's true love is Noah, rather than Gansey, but that's for another day. I'm focusing on Blue being dead-sexual right now.

Being a horny teenager having both conscious and unconscious horny thoughts, I think it perfectly tracks that Blue's desire is sort of tangled up in death, as you said. Unless she knows with absolute certainty a given boy isn't her true love, her kiss is likely to kill anyone her lips come in contact with, so it's best to avoid that altogether. Prior to Chapter 39 when Noah tells Blue why Adam is moving into Monmouth, she's very clearly attracted to Adam, and crucially for the point I'm trying to make here: in TRB, she never sees him without bruises after the night they meet at Nino's, and I'd bet she had some Weird Feelings about those bruises before she understood their origin:

"[...] elegant. It was not the right word for him, but it was close. He was fine boned and a little fragile looking" (chapter 6)

[...] gaunter and older in the distant streetlight" (chapter 8)

"His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it." (chapter 8)

[Regarding the obvious bruising on his face] "What it did was make him look more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from soil [...]" (chapter 15)

"His bruise was older and more dreadful looking." (chapter 21)

[Responding to Adam telling her he thinks she's pretty] "I think you're pretty, too." (chapter 21)

"Beside her, Adam [...] looked at home here, his hair the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass, and he looked more handsome than Blue remembered." (chapter 23)

She's sort of preoccupied with those bruises, no? The structure of his face under them? In other instances in the text, Blue's also very clearly attracted to Adam and enjoys the attention he gives her throughout TRB. Having once been a teenage girl... she probably spent some time dwelling on that attraction more than is on the page in the inarticulate way of a virgin who's never been kissed. She probably sees Adam as the corpse in her wet dreams initially. He's the first boy she's ever allowed in and the first she's ever entertained, and he's walking around most of the book with his fine-boned face marked by violence, leaning in close enough for her to see the broken blood vessels and yellow-green healing around the edges. On his nose and cheekbone. Noah's smudge is the echo of the injury that killed him: his crushed cheekbone. She notes in TRB Chapter 32 that the "smudge" is simultaneously the skeleton and the boy, overlapping in her mind. Obviously I'm pointing at the bruise and the smudge as a physical resemblance between them in TRB, but Blue notes that they're both quiet, though for different reasons, and she welcomes Noah's affection alongside Adam's. The boy she doesn't know is dead and the living one she's been having dreams about killing, the one whose affection she welcomes freely and the one she's afraid to encourage, one cold ("It was not merely cold, but somehow empty as well, skin without a pulse," Ch32) and one warm ("It was not his fingers twined with hers that affected Blue strongest, it was where his warm wrist pressed against hers," Ch23). Imagine her being doubly horrified when they find out Noah's been dead all along. He's not just the face she can put on the corpses she's dreaming about, he is one already. She doesn't need to be afraid of hurting him. He was already a safe, fairly inert target for her subconscious desires if she was offloading any of them onto him rather than letting them fall on Adam. It says a lot, I think, that Blue is so game to kiss Noah. Between "oh, so this is what I can't have" and "nothing was fair," if she's also battling how her subconscious has conflated lust with death, how do we think it handles being freely allowed to lust after someone who is dead, who she can't hurt, who can actively participate in what she wants rather than just... being there? As a object, rendered as such by her kiss? Can you imagine how freeing it is for her to not have to try to imagine sex without kissing? Because she can kiss Noah, and "there was nothing terrible about kissing Noah Czerny, apart from him being cold." She invites him to hold her hand, despite the cold. She thinks it's "super nice" kissing him, despite the cold. He'd ask her out, if he was alive? It certainly seems like she'd say okay even though he isn't.

maggie's livetweet reread has been going around again, and it got me thinking about Blue being dead-sexual aldkfjgh

it was a joke, obviously, but it got me thinking about how much it could've genuinely fucked Blue up to have love/kissing/intimacy/death all twisted together from such an early age. like, she couldn't even THINK about something like sex without the prerequisite of "your partner is dead before you get that far", can you imagine??

she tries to just put the entire thing from her mind, she resolves to just never kiss anyone, never get close, never have physical intimacy of any kind, in the hopes of avoiding this fated fucking murder of her hypothetical true love.

but that's easier said than done. you're not exactly in control of your thoughts, esp during fucking puberty, and the subconscious finds ways to process shit no matter how hard you try to repress it. dreams are where you face your greatest desires and your darkest fears, and for Blue those are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

she's had more sex nightmares than Ronan has, lmao. she's got a libido, no matter how hard she tries to suppress and ignore it, and it bubbles up inside her the way it does all so-inclined teenagers (and many who aren't so inclined, hell, i've had plenty of bizarre sex dreams for someone with no irl desire for sex). there's no controlling the fantasy when she craves it so bad, but there's no denying the reality either, the fear and horror living in the back of her mind, inescapable. so many dreams of touching and being touched and pulling back to find a faceless corpse.

then she meets Gansey, her confirmed true love, the boy who WILL DIE if she ever kisses him. and the problem is that she wants to!!! she wants him, and the corpses in her wet dreams have a face now, and she doesn't want that but also she does and there so many wires crossed and she shouldn't be waking up from these dreams wet and shaking and on the verge, but she is and she can't stop it.

the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that the only times Blue has ever come, she's been thinking of a dead man.

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maggie's livetweet reread has been going around again, and it got me thinking about Blue being dead-sexual aldkfjgh

it was a joke, obviously, but it got me thinking about how much it could've genuinely fucked Blue up to have love/kissing/intimacy/death all twisted together from such an early age. like, she couldn't even THINK about something like sex without the prerequisite of "your partner is dead before you get that far", can you imagine??

she tries to just put the entire thing from her mind, she resolves to just never kiss anyone, never get close, never have physical intimacy of any kind, in the hopes of avoiding this fated fucking murder of her hypothetical true love.

but that's easier said than done. you're not exactly in control of your thoughts, esp during fucking puberty, and the subconscious finds ways to process shit no matter how hard you try to repress it. dreams are where you face your greatest desires and your darkest fears, and for Blue those are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

she's had more sex nightmares than Ronan has, lmao. she's got a libido, no matter how hard she tries to suppress and ignore it, and it bubbles up inside her the way it does all so-inclined teenagers (and many who aren't so inclined, hell, i've had plenty of bizarre sex dreams for someone with no irl desire for sex). there's no controlling the fantasy when she craves it so bad, but there's no denying the reality either, the fear and horror living in the back of her mind, inescapable. so many dreams of touching and being touched and pulling back to find a faceless corpse.

then she meets Gansey, her confirmed true love, the boy who WILL DIE if she ever kisses him. and the problem is that she wants to!!! she wants him, and the corpses in her wet dreams have a face now, and she doesn't want that but also she does and there so many wires crossed and she shouldn't be waking up from these dreams wet and shaking and on the verge, but she is and she can't stop it.

the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that the only times Blue has ever come, she's been thinking of a dead man.

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Adam going with Ronan to play Tennis and just lying on the sidelines like the hot tennis wife he is please.

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✨ peace and love on planet earth 🫶✨

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Lowkey think the fandom slowly forgetting about noah and not posting about him as much as we used to is the nature of the narrative slowly leaking into reality. I fear Maggie Stiefvater made it like this on purpose.

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ronan's crush on adam is so real because i, too, would catch feelings for a guy with pretty blue eyes and boyish hands who is also incredibly intelligent and hardworking and likes to do fun things in his spare time like rearranging rocks, framing latin teachers for murder, or staring into car headlights so he can access The Void™

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I love being reminded that to know adam parrish is to have a crush on him. he is like the bella swan of the raven cycle. men have scuttled their ships on his elegant features. women have started wars over his self-deprecation.

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trc graphic novel adaptation actively removing all traces of queer identity or subtext from the characters is crazy. what do you mean you’ve scraped all of ronan’s gay jokes from the first book. at this rate when kavinsky shows up in book 2 he’s going to be an honor roll student and everyone’s going to call him Joseph and the hardest drug he’s going to do is Excedrin Migraine

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GN!Adam getting mid-aughts summer blockbuster Hot Girl treatment is everything to me

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let's all say thank you sas milledge

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they can never take hey tiger away from us!!

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i too will bite the hand that feeds me maybe even kiss it n lick it n suck on it a lil idk