#also I MISS TRC SO MUCH

[threefuckencrowsinatrenchcoat]

So are any of you bumfucks on this godforsaken app gonna talk about how Brazil (Declan McKenna) was written By and For Ronan Lynch or am I gonna have to do it myself let’s do this bitches

Fair warning I’m sorta really bad at analysis according to every English teacher I’ve ever had so this is a lot of me freaking out but I think it turned out ok (this took half a year)

Starting off strong with Cars and Animals (Ronan’s favourite) !! Anyway the vibe I’m getting from this is like. The barns and then the He’s got eyes talks like an angel looks like me part is about the like. Greywaren vs Ronan Lynch dream vs human stuff we see in Greywaren (not super spoilery but it kinda doesn’t make sense unless u read the book lmao)

I could write a whole second post as long as this one just about this line but let me unpack this because ohhh my god. First up the use of religion is so perfect for mister Lynch over here and then. IM THE FACE OF GOD IM MY FATHERS SON IS INSANE FOR HIM IM GOING SO FERAL OVER THIS HE LITERALLY IS GOD AND HES HIS FATHERS SON (“and Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war” and also The Scene in TRK where Adam goes into Ronan’s room and thinks Niall is sitting on the bed) THIS IS CANON

He’s Not what u think u see he looks so mean but he just wants his little farm and for his husband to get into heaven when he dies (he’s worried about his agnostic tendencies) jk but this is 100% ab stereotypes and how Ronan doesn’t rly fit into what anyone thinks he is (the whole thing about Adam wanting to be unknowable and realizing Ronan Is Unknowable [poetry chefs kiss])

Can’t eat leather is so self explanatory. The bracelets are RIGHT THERE you can’t fool me Mr mckenna

I’m done. I’m done. I don’t even need to keep explaining this it’s RIGHT THERE AGH

And onto the ecoterrorism

I’m kidding (not really) bc this part always makes me think of literally the Entire Plot of TDT when Ronan is going around destroying capitalism to save dreamers. This IS the servers scene and the underwater pipeline and the Mirrors lady and also the way all of TDT is about self discovery and learning who you are and how to deal with that in a society made to destroy you and how isolating and sad that is (it gets him down 😞) and I can KEEP GOING

And just the way the song is so melancholy and also happy at once hits me so hard cause it feels like what the Barns does when you read the book like it SOUNDS like something Aurora would sing to kid Ronan it’s so homey and sweet but also sad and perfect

And obviously I don’t go through the whole song here but I feel that I’ve made my case sufficiently enough thanks for reading this far I love u mwah

[adamprrishcycle]

Missing Pieces

A series of fics I've posted recently that are intended to be slotted into canon, more or less.

Unknowable - Rated Teen and up. Pynch. Set during The Dream Thieves and inspired by all the times it's eluded to Ronan visiting Adam's apartment.

All He Wanted - Rated Mature (but barely) Pynch. Set post The Raven King during the summer before Adam leaves for college. In Mister Impossible there is the briefest mention of Adam and Ronan digging a pond together (and you thought I wouldn't write 3k+ words about it?) So much angst.

A Quiet Night at the Barns - Rated Mature. Pynch. Set during Call Down the Hawk in those three hours when Adam visits the Barns on his dreamt motorcycle for Ronan's birthday.

I wrote these while feeling inspired during my reread. The reread is now complete (and was as amazing as the first read!) so who knows if there'll be more... but there most likely will be. I hope you enjoy all or any of the above, let me know :)

[soldier-poet-king]

Idk if it was growing up working class or being raised primarily by first gen immigrants or both but I'm listening to shmanners while at work (and enjoying it) but like hot damn I was unaware of 90% of this shit, and the stuff I did know was from reading period lit

[queenofmoons]

Wait. I just realized I’m wearing my aglionby sweatshirt today

[cannibalismpdf]

ok i have to read the dreamer trilogy goddamn

[polichinelle]

the raven cycle timeline

"trc takes place in the mid-2010s" "trc takes place in 2012" no it doesn't! it's pretty common knowledge that mstief isn't the most specific when it comes to timelines (an example is that she had to change ronan's birth date after readers pointed out that it didn't line up with the events of the book; another example is the pre-canon gansey & adam & ronan friendship timeline, which doesn't make sense at all if you think about it longer than a second), and she has said before that her editors are more or less the same.

what that means is that the raven cycle and the dreamer trilogy are kind of nebulously "present-time," and no matter what year you think it takes place in, some details are going to be inaccurate. but since i am a chronic nit-picker and i get very fussy about timelines, that didn't sit right with me! i needed to know the exact year. so on my last reread, i kept a look out for any mention of dates so that i might be able to pinpoint exactly when the raven cycle takes place.

and i think i might have the answer :)

all of my arguments come from the dream thieves.

firstly, adam's birthday. we know that his birthday is july 3rd:

we also know that he was missing for most of the previous day:

what happens then is that he falls asleep for an indeterminate amount of time ("Later he fell asleep sitting up on the end of that same sofa."), he and gansey drive back to henrietta, adam visits blue at fox way, and after scrying with persephone he falls asleep again for twenty-one hours, and during that twenty-one hours is when his birthday takes place.

for a while i assumed the "quietly turned eighteen" referred to midnight, but that actually doesn't make a lot of sense given the context of the previous day being saturday. both of our options (gansey and adam drive back the same evening they found adam; gansey and adam drive back the next morning, on sunday) leaves us with adam falling asleep on sunday. at some point during the next twenty-one hours he "turns eighteen."

the thing is, there is no convenient year where july 3rd falls on a monday (in the scenario where we assume that "quietly turned eighteen" refers to midnight on the day of his birthday). however, if we go with the idea that it is still sunday and it refers simply to his actual time of birth, we're left with a pretty good answer:

adam turns 18 on sunday, july 3rd, 2011.

i have another thing to kind of back this up.

if we assume niall wasn't lying about that, we have two (well... kind of) options:

i searched for earthquakes in northern england since niall was born in cumbria. however, in my opinion, the second one, on december 26th, can't really be counted, since it would mean niall was... 32 in 2011. a little young lol. but if he was born in 1970, he would be 40/41 at his time of death, which makes a lot of sense (it also makes sense he would be a leo). neither earthquakes are a 4.1, but whatever, maybe he just forgot the exact number. maybe he was being humble.

so... all of this to say that the events of the raven cycle probably happen during 2011, and thus the dreamer trilogy would take place in 2013. considering the references to fortnite and all, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but at least i can rest easy knowing that that's just because mstief didn't think about this stuff at all while writing it (hence nebulous "present-day" being the actual correct answer as to when the books are set).

for a while i actually thought trc took place in 2010 since the lynches go to church before kavinsky's party, which i assumed meant july fourth was on a sunday, but it's mentioned that they go for a "special" "holiday mass" and not regular mass. either way, 2011 works better with adam being missing on saturday.

anyway, all this to say that i think about timelines too much. thank you for reading if you've made it this far lol

[ofliterarynature]

JANUARY 2024 WRAP UP

[loved liked ok DNF (reread) bookclub*]

Mammoths at the Gates • An Impossible Imposter • Greywaren • The Hexologists • Mister Impossible • Reclaiming Two Spirits • (Check, Please: #Hockey)* • Thornhedge • Call Down the Hawk • All the Hidden Paths • All the Beauty in the World • (The Raven King) • (A Strange and Stubborn Endurance) • (Blue Lily, Lily Blue) • The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie • The Missing Page • Bird By Bird • Lucky Red • Portrait of a Thief

I suppose I may as well start with the giant pile of Maggie Stiefvater and get that out of the way, lol. According to Goodreads, this was at least my 3rd time through the entire Raven Cycle. Despite that, I had only the vaguest idea of what happened in the last two books, and now having reread them (again), yeah, that tracks! I can hang with book 3 but I have no idea what was really going on in The Raven King, and as a series finale I didn't love it. It felt a lot like the dreamer plotlines drowned out the original Glendower and ley line story that we started with. But, Maggie being Maggie, I love the way she writes so much that I at least still enjoyed the reading experience. And it made an incredibly clear lead-in to the Dreamer Trilogy (which I had not read), it made total sense, I was hopeful! Again, Maggie being Maggie, I had a good time reading them, I liked learning more about the Lynch brothers, I'm always down for some art forgery, but I just didn't really like it and (while I'm glad for Maggie that she was able to write it) I could have lived without it. It completely did not have the vibe or charm of TRC and, criminally, did not include the Gangsey. How!!!!

The Missing Page - liked it! It felt a lot more solid as a mystery than the first book, which I greatly appreciated, though the villagers in the first book were maybe a bit more fun. I'm not feeling particularly inspired to go look up more Cat Sebastian after this, but if she writes another one of these I'd read it.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - I've had this one on my mystery tbr for a while, and for some reason I'd thought it was set in a much earlier time period than the 1950's? lol. Our protagonist is the youngest of 3 sisters growing up in genteel poverty with an absent father, and she has the run of the village, the house, and an incredibly well stocked chemistry lab left by an ancestor. She is both incredibly clever and terribly naive, and absolutely terrifying because of it. Flavia is fascinating as a detective, because she's not written as the protagonist of a middle grade mystery novel - she's a child. This was an interesting read, but I'm not sure it's what I'm looking for in a mystery novel and I don't think I'll continue the series.

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance - reread this in advance of the sequel - it was a bit easier to see some flaws this time around, but had a good time! This *was* my first time listening to it on audio though, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It had a different person reading for each of the main characters and their voices just didn't pair well for me - not to mention one of them also read Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House and boy does he do some distinctive character voices.

All the Hidden Paths - didn't go quite so well. I think primarily my mental space was not pairing well with the tensions of reading this for the first time, I do think on a reread I might like it better. Somehow the spy/saboteur was my favorite character? He was soo bad at his job, I found it very funny. But overall, I think it was just a little too close to a rehash of the plot from the first book, leaving me to think Meadows might not be the best at writing mysteries. Luckily it does at least score high on my romance scale.

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me - first nonfic of the year! I've been eagerly anticipating my library getting an audio copy ever since I first heard about this last year, it sounded cool, I'm fascinated by art museums and behind-the-scenes! Unfortunately I was not into it, and almost 2 months on I can't remember enough to even try to tell you why. It did pair interestingly with another recent read, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, but I'm still learning how far into memoir territory I can go. Someone stop me from trying the other Met nonfic book I found recently lol.

Thornhedge - wonderful! No notes! I love fairy tales and this was a delight to read.

Check, Please! #Hockey - loved getting to revisit this for book club! I've been meaning to for a few years, because y'all. I've read so much fanfic, and I have no idea what is in the comic, what Ngozi posted as extras, and what is fanon. The comic had less than I was expecting! Still fun, my fellow book-clubber liked it, but my real love was the tweets! I'll definitely try to read Vol 2 this year so I can then browse the larger collection of them compiled in the Chirpbook.

Reclaiming Two Spirits: I saw this one on tumblr and fortunately was able to get access to the audiobook! It's a topic I was very interested in learning more about, and I did! But - this is a research project, more than anything, it could be very repetitive (which, fair. colonizers suck), and it felt distanced from its subject. I feel it's a book that definitely has its place, but it's not objectively a 'good read,' and I'd rather have had something from someone who is indigenous and two-spirit themselves.

The Hexologists - it has its quirks, but this was unapologetically a delight to read and I had a fun time! I'm a sucker for a world with a magic vs industrial revolution, not to mention a married pair of established investigators, and I always appreciate an author who's willing to get a bit silly. If there's ever more books I'd love to read them!

An Impossible Imposter - she is what she is, I had a good time! This one felt like it might have taken some inspo from The Moonstone 👀

Mammoths at the Gate - had a good time with this, as I always do with the Singing Hills books. Stories about stories are like catnip, I should reread them all sometime!

Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott (DNF) - I have only the vaguest memories of reading parts of this for a creative writing class in college, and now that I'm getting more into nonfiction thought why not? Unfortunately the audiobook version I got was read by the author, who absolutely does not have an audiobook voice/cadence. I considered trying again with the version read by someone else, but decided I wasn't actually interested enough to continue.

Lucky Red By Claudia Cravens (DNF) - the host of one of the podcasts I listen to was gushing about this one and I was like, sapphic western? Sign me up! I read about 25% of it, and it all seemed fine, it just wasn't feeling particularly interesting to me. Absolutely give it a shot if you'd like!

Portrait of a Thief by Grace D Li (DNF) - I knew going in this had been getting mixed reviews. I really like the idea of it - I enjoy a heist, am always interested in fine arts/art history drama, and vigilante art repatriation hell yeah! But this felt very much like it was trying to emulate a heist *movie*, and it just wasn’t working for me as a book. If this ever gets adapted I’d love to see it.

[clotpolesonly]

As Hazy Heaven Trembles

my first TRC fic!! 🥺 only took me several months to finally manage that, lol. why is writing for book fandoms so much more intimidating than writing for tv andoms?? | Pynch | Gen | 3.5k | Pre-Canon | Referenced Child Abuse | Hurt/Comfort | First Kiss | (also on AO3)

.

Adam really should talk to Gansey about Monmouth’s front door. Namely, how easy it was to jimmy open even when it was, supposedly, locked. All it took was some aggressive jiggling of the heavy metal, not unlike shaking a vending machine to loosen a stubborn bag of chips, and the locking mechanism cheerfully gave up the ghost. It was horribly unsafe and Adam had been meaning to say something about it for months.

As he jiggled the door open, though, he acknowledged to himself that he wouldn’t. That would require admitting why he knew. It would require admitting that he let himself in sometimes when no one was home. It would require admitting why.

He closed the door behind him, sliding the faulty lock back into place. The clunk of it echoed in the cluttered emptiness of the main room, Gansey’s miniature Henrietta a harsh but silent judge sprawled out across the stained concrete behind him. Adam gave it a quelling look. It continued to judge him, like it always did, as he picked his way toward the bathroom.

He could only bring himself to care so much when his head hurt as much as it hurt right now. He was pretty sure the bleeding had stopped, and the dizziness had only lasted a minute or two, so he wasn’t worried about concussion. At least it hadn’t been the face this time. Black eyes were a lot harder to hide or explain away. He’d have to wear long sleeves for a while, though, for the handprint blooming dark and ugly around his forearm. Keep his coveralls fully on and zipped up at the garage. Hope he didn’t get heat stroke for it.

He’d be fine. He always was. Unless Mr. Lockwood docked his grade for missing first period again. He was usually pretty chill about it, so he probably wouldn’t. It was Mr. Traynor that Adam had to watch out for, but if he showered quick and pedaled fast and luck was on his side, he could still make it to second period on time.

Luck was not on his side.

“What the fuck?”

Adam swung around, his overfull backpack slipping from its careful perch on the only part of his right shoulder that didn’t hurt. The sharp stab of pain caught him off guard almost as much as the sight of Ronan, shirtless and bleary-eyed, leaning out of the bedroom he was not supposed to be in right now.

“What are you—” Adam cut off the stupid question, the answer to which was guaranteed to be a caustic ‘I live here, dumbass, what are you doing here?’, and tried again. “Your car’s not here.”

“Left it at the fairgrounds,” Ronan said, flat with the uncomprehension of being not fully awake yet and, probably, a little hungover. “Got a ride home from Jiang. Gansey’s driving me back out for it later.”

Ronan’s sleepiness was disappearing fast, blue eyes sharpening into shards of ice as they took him in. Adam was acutely aware of the blood in his hair, the hunch to his shoulders that he couldn’t straighten out and still be able to breathe properly, the bruises on his arm hidden under one measly layer of thin cotton blend, the blank fear no doubt on his face.

He expected Ronan to say something. To yell, maybe. About the blood and the bruises and the fear, or about Adam breaking into their home, or a million other things because Ronan liked yelling and was never short on excuses for it. But he didn’t. He just stood there, ramrod straight in his bedroom doorway, so tense that Adam could see the clench of his stomach muscles.

Adam swallowed. “I was just gonna borrow y’all’s shower before second. If you don’t mind.”

Ronan looked like he minded every single aspect of the situation, but he shook his head sharply, once, and Adam took that as the most permission he was likely to get. He had his hand on the door, calculating how much time he could spend on washing up and still account for the traffic around Aglionby, when Ronan found his voice again.

“You’re bleeding.”

Adam ducked his head. His hand found where the hair was damp and sticky before he could stop himself. Face burning, he said, “It’s fine, it looks worse than it—”

“Not there, dumbass.”

Adam’s backpack was yanked off his shoulder. It brought with it another flare of pain, sharper than expected. Ronan’s hand was on his back then, his palm wide and hot through the fabric of Adam’s shirt, and when he brought it around to Adam’s line of sight, there was a smear of fresh blood on it.

Adam didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, not least because he didn’t remember receiving that particular injury. Logically, he could deduce that it was the same impact with the open refrigerator door that had cut his head open, or maybe the edge of the kitchen counter he’d staggered into in the subsequent dizziness, but there was something disquieting, on a level deeper than logic could touch, about seeing blood he hadn’t known he’d spilled.

When Ronan opened the bathroom door, Adam didn’t resist being pushed inside. Ronan didn’t offer him much choice in the matter and fighting wasn’t worth the effort. He’d wiped Adam’s blood off on the thigh of his sweatpants, red-brown on gray. It would stain if he didn’t wash it soon. He didn’t seem fussed about it.

There was a first aid kit stacked between the microwave and the toilet tank, such that Ronan had to unplug and relocate the microwave to get at it. It wasn’t really a kit, honestly, just a shoebox full of stuff that the factory’s inhabitants had thought might come in handy in case of minor injury. A plethora of loose band-aids of various shapes and sizes, peroxide, gauze, a few half-empty OTC pill bottles, some disinfectant spray, a tub of arnica, a wrist brace that looked like it had been through a war zone and wished it hadn’t made it out alive.

Ronan grabbed the peroxide and a wad of toilet paper.

“Shirt off.” He kicked the toilet lid shut. “Sit down.”

“I don’t need—”

“Off.”

Adam gritted his teeth against a rising tide of words. Biting words. Cruel words. Words that would make Ronan drop the nursemaid bullshit and leave Adam the hell alone to handle his own fucking problems like he wanted to. Like he’d been handling them his entire life just fine.

The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue. They would work. They would probably even feel good to say, in the moment.

He didn’t say them.

Getting his shirt off proved difficult, between the cramped quarters and the way his shoulder protested at being forced to rotate. He didn’t think anything was torn or broken—he knew how that felt—but it was sure sore as all hell. Might be a strain.

Ronan didn’t offer to help, thank god, and he didn’t comment on the moment of struggle. He just waited expectantly until Adam slid around to straddle the lidded toilet in front of him. The peroxide stung like a bitch. Adam swallowed down the hiss he wanted to make. It didn’t feel like too big of a wound, judging by the track Ronan followed along his right shoulder blade. Too big for a band-aid, but nothing he needed to be really concerned about. He’d had worse.

The toilet paper wad disappeared, replaced a moment later by something softer and less astringent; Ronan must have found a reasonably clean washcloth somewhere. He was rinsing away the blood. The cool water felt good. Adam let his head fall forward to meet his forearms, folded across the newly exposed porcelain tank. He did hiss then and shifted his right arm out of the way. The bruises there, tellingly arrayed, stood out plainly even in the dim light from the tiny, grimy window set high in the wall.

“I could kill him.”

Ronan’s words fell into the silence between them like a pebble in a lake. The ripples of it caught in Adam’s throat.

“For what he does to you,” Ronan added, as if either of them needed clarification. “I would kill him with my bare hands if I could get away with it. If it would keep you safe.”

The ripples took hold of his lungs. Something in Adam shook.

This wasn’t a thing they talked about. Gansey talked about it sometimes, because he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t keep his nose out of where it wasn’t welcome. Noah didn't bring it up often, but he had a bad habit of doing so when Adam wanted him to the least. Ronan had never said a word, though. Adam knew he knew, but he’d always known it quietly. Ronan knew it in the way he showed up sometimes to drive Adam home from late shifts to make sure he got there on time, in the way he sometimes did stupid shit on purpose to get Gansey’s attention when Adam didn’t want to deal with him, in the way he never asked a question Adam didn’t want to answer.

He still wasn’t asking. It didn’t feel like an offer either, or like the threat it could’ve been. It felt like something wholly different. Something loud and something quiet and something altogether more honest than Adam had ever known how to be.

“You know murder is a sin, right?” he murmured against his own skin. Ronan was still dragging the cloth over his back, though surely there was no blood there left to wash away. It had warmed in his hand.

It stilled, a light pressure between his shoulder blades.

“Some sins are worth eternal damnation.”

Adam turned, Ronan’s hand following the motion until it couldn’t anymore and his back was left cold and bare with its absence. He kept his head down when he said, “Don’t say that.”

He couldn’t see Ronan’s face, but he could see the way his fingers tightened around the cloth, the way his knuckles whitened. He could see the smear of blood now well-dried on the thigh of his sweatpants and the traces that remained in the creases of his palm. He could see Ronan’s bare feet against the dull, grimy tile and, from the corner of his downturned eye, the heave of Ronan’s chest as he breathed and spoke.

“I mean it, Parrish.”

Adam raised his head then, drawn by the force of Ronan’s tone.

“I know you do,” he said. “That’s what scares me.”

Ronan didn’t flinch to meet his eyes, but he did frown. The furrow of his brow was something new, at odds with his declaration of surety. In the small bathroom, with Adam turned around to face him properly, there was very little space between them, but Ronan made no move to step back. At his side, his hand twitched forward, then fell.

“You’re not the one who should be scared,” he said. “I don’t want you to—”

“I’m not scared of you.”

The words fell like another pebble in the lake, bringing ripples of silence in their wake. They were as honest as Adam knew how to be.

Ronan looked at him for a long time, brow smoothing and then furrowing again. His lips parted, but no words emerged from them. This was new too. Adam had never known Ronan to be lost for words. Even in his silences, he had always been deliberate.

Now, Ronan closed his mouth and, deliberately, he lifted the washcloth again. It found a spot just under Adam’s left eye. There was no blood there, but there was a scar. A small one, old and long-healed, from the sharp-edged tab of a thrown beer can. Ronan pressed his cloth against the mark like he could wash it off too, like he could make Adam new again.

Adam took hold of his wrist.

“I don’t want you risking your soul for me.”

Ronan stilled but did not take his hand away. He could have, if he’d wanted to. Adam’s grip on him was loose, unrestraining, but he let Adam hold him in place anyway. He was stood, now, between Adam’s knees.

“Do you even believe in the soul?” he asked, somewhere between sardonic and genuine. His eyes were on Adam’s fingers against his skin.

“I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “But you do.”

“It’s my soul,” Ronan said, a stubborn, petulant twist to his mouth. “I can do what I want with it.”

“Ronan.”

He looked away then, blue eyes downcast. The cloth fell away too and left Adam’s fingers with nothing but cool, empty air between them. His feet shuffled, carrying him out of the cradle of Adam’s knees, and Adam was struck by how bare they were, paler than the rest of him with how seldom they were exposed. The open expanse of his chest didn’t hold half the vulnerability of the way his toes curled against the tile. Adam was struck with the urge to kick his own shoes off to match. To meet Ronan where he was.

He stood. There wasn’t room for it. The bathroom, crowded as it was with a laundromat and a kitchen and two mostly-grown young men in it, often felt too small for even one of them. The motion brought Adam into Ronan’s space, almost chest to chest. He said Ronan’s name again and he didn’t recognize his own voice. It was doing something he’d never heard it do before. Something new. Something that his dad would have a lot of unkind things to say about, if he could hear.

Those unkind things were there, stinging, in the back of Adam’s mind. He’d heard them all before, launched at him alongside beer cans, thrown Gansey’s way for daring to wear color, lobbied at the TV and the guy on the sidewalk and anyone else determined to be a worthy target of his father’s rage and derision. They were there, and they stung, and they didn’t matter because Ronan’s eyes were on his again and the silence felt like a holy thing. He could feel Ronan’s breath on his cheek.

It wouldn’t do him any good to tell Ronan that he wasn’t worth sacrificing for, no matter how true the words felt where they sat on his tongue. Telling Ronan what to do was a fruitless endeavor at the best of times and an outright challenge to do the exact opposite at the worst. No, he couldn’t tell Ronan not to care about him. But he could sway forward to close the distance between them. He could let his body, at least, be honest in the way it pressed against Ronan’s, skin to skin in the dim mid-morning light, and turn his head just so until he found Ronan’s parted lips with his own.

He felt the sharpness of Ronan’s indrawn breath, the way Ronan’s chest rose against his, the way the air he took in was taken from Adam’s own lungs. His lips, though, were wonderingly soft, moving gently, questioningly. His eyes stayed closed long after they parted. Adam was sure he’d never seen anything as delicate as the way Ronan’s eyelashes lay against his cheeks. They fluttered there like butterfly wings until his eyes finally opened.

“Why did you do that?”

Maybe Ronan felt the sanctity of the moment too, because his words were hardly more than a whisper.

“Did you not want me to?”

It wasn’t really a question, but Ronan frowned as if it was. His hand rose like he wanted to reach out, to touch, and Adam found that he wanted him to. He wanted the warm weight of Ronan’s palm on his bruised back. He wanted Ronan’s callused fingers on his cheek. He wanted to step forward again until he could feel Ronan’s heartbeat in his own chest. He wanted a lot of things, with a sudden and immediate desperation, that he had never allowed himself to want before.

But Ronan’s hand still held the washcloth, damp and bunched up and turning his fingertips pruny from how long he had been holding onto it. Ronan looked down at it, his frown a living thing, and said, “That’s not why I—”

Adam laid his fingers over Ronan’s. “I know.” Gently, he pried the cloth from Ronan’s grasp and dropped it, not caring where it landed. “I wouldn’t have, if I’d thought so.”

Ronan looked like he wanted to repeat his question, to demand that Adam justify what he had done, but the words were swallowed when Adam did it again. He kissed Ronan simply, because that’s what it felt like: simple. It wasn’t, he knew, not really. But in this moment, in this nonsensical space, at a time neither of them should’ve been there, with bare skin and blood in his hair, kissing Ronan felt like the simplest thing in the world.

Ronan’s hands found his waist, then his ribs, then the curve of his neck. They were softer than Adam would’ve expected, if he’d ever given himself leave to speculate on how Ronan Lynch would touch him. Not like he was broken or breakable, but like he was precious. The tenderness of Ronan’s thumb on the hinge of Adam’s jaw, feeling the motion of their mouths together, brought with it a dangerous wave of emotion in him, something hot and cold and complicated that lodged in his stomach and would not be moved.

Those roving hands slid up into his hair next and a hiss of pain caught them both off guard. The blood had dried, but the wound remained, and the back of Adam’s head still ached something fierce.

“Fuck,” Ronan muttered against his lips. “Sorry.”

“S’alright.” Adam let him retreat, not that there was far to go. He reached up to poke at the wound himself, wincing double as his shoulder reminded him of its own damage. The hair there was molded into sticky-crunchy spikes. Flecks of dried blood flaked off between his fingers. “I really do need a shower.”

Ronan nodded. His cheeks were pink. So were his lips, flushed and wet and familiar now in a way they’d never been before. Eyes averted, he cleared his throat.

“Right. I should, uh…” He thumbed over his shoulder.

Adam had never thought he would be able to smile with his own blood on his hands, but he’d also never thought he would bear witness to Ronan Lynch looking shy. Whatever holy stillness had surrounded them a moment ago was gone, leaving just a boy in its wake. A boy who cared about Adam more than himself. A boy who didn’t make demands of him. A boy with a sharp smile and soft hands. A boy who Adam had kissed, and kissed, and already wanted to kiss again.

A boy who lingered in the bathroom doorway to say, “You’re probably not gonna make it to second period.” He even had the good grace to sound sorry about it.

Adam shrugged his good shoulder, though. “Traynor’s a jackass anyway.”

Ronan’s bark of laughter took even him by surprise. “Yeah, fuck that guy. You should skip the whole day and hang out with me instead. Save me from my lonely, hungover house arrest. You know, I always feel like Gansey’s little diorama is judging me on his behalf?”

Adam ducked his head to hide the flush that stole across his cheeks, somehow both embarrassed and pleased to have had the same thought. “We can add a few buildings ourselves,” he said around a stubborn smile. “Put an X-Mart downtown, see how long it takes Gansey to notice.”

Ronan’s answering grin was all mischief. He knocked his knuckles against the door before closing it behind him. Adam could hear him whistling something lively as he moved about the main room, probably gathering building supplies.

He should go to class. He should rinse the blood off quick as he could, get on his bike, and pedal hard to salvage as much of the school day as he could manage. But the urgency from earlier was hard to keep hold of. So he would miss a few class periods, get docked a few points, have to borrow Gansey’s history notes and ask Tad Carruthers what the homework was in English Lit. It had all happened before and likely would again. So he would have to go home tonight and keep his head down until his father’s mood had passed. That had happened before too, and would again.

For now, he had a warm shower, and hazy mid-morning light through grimy windows, and a wonderful, messy, contradiction of a boy waiting for him in the other room. As Adam finally turned the water on, he thought that maybe luck had been on his side after all.

[stay-because-now-you-have-a-home]

I love you. Goodbye.

Tumblr will always be my favourite place on the internet but I think it's time for me to finally suck it up and move on. I feel a little bit silly writing this because I'm getting a little bit emotional over my assignment. This community has given me so much and I feel like haven't given nearly enough in return but unfortunately, I have nothing left to give. I'll forever be grateful for the escape this hellsite provided me with while I was struggling with my mental health because I never would have made it this far without the home I made for myself on here. The friends and memories I made here were some of the best moments in my life and I'll always miss staying up until 4am just so I could be awake with everyone else. Life caught up with me and although the stress is one of the reasons I'm no longer active it's also partly because I lost interest. AFTG was something I held really close to my heart but I've slowly drifted away from the fandom. I dont recognise most of the usernames in the tag anymore because the fandom just keeps growing even after Nora kind of sort of abandoned us and left us to our own devices. I made my fair share of contributions to the aftg tag and I hope the people to come dont let such a talented, diverse fandom die. Although I've moved on to a different fandom, I still love this one too. I found out recently that one of my comfort fics were deleted and I respect the authors reasoning and I'm not holding anything against them. Seeing them take it down because they lost interest and felt as though they needed to finish it while it was sitting there--it made me realise that I should move on too.

I'd like to thank @the-court-of-chaos for everything, I made some really good memories with y'all and I miss what we were. I'm very tired, and I think that Tumblr just isn't for me anymore but I'd like to say goodbye to everyone before I go. I'll still be alive, my discord dms are always open if anyone would like to catch up and who knows? Maybe I'll show my face around here every now and again. So thank you, I'll see you around. - ash moots under the cut?

@ashisdeadanddying @jeanmoreauslefttit @ihavebecomeaproblem

@drunk-on-inejs-laughter @wafflesandschemingfaces @fallen-from-olympus @im-someone-i-guess @aimless-twig @alonetogethermp3

@winchesterwitch07 @fierreth-who @thejostenator @renjuunsz @roseberrylight @iambecomeyourvillain @gondolin-but-not-forgottenlin @neil-puppy-josten @otsu09 @pjo-tsc-trc-otherthingstoo @theburningocean @saltyfortunes @unlabelled-tumbler-junkie @ozymandayus @nee-naw-nee-naw-beepbeep @kazzyboy @dolce-far-niente-is-a-vibe @biblophilic-psycho @fcknhomos @ddepressedbookworm @theravenkin @andrewsleftknee @thankyouforstoppingby @ezrul-00 @minyardmoon @letterstosaturn @anaestheticoatmeal @hologramsaredead @dude-its-riley @100-years-too-early @vigilantexxshit @finnchinc @that-intp-vampire @olli-olli-ox3nfr33

@woevembur @indubitably-eternally-confused @thomastaircompassrose @pinksortof

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

hoping this isn't a ~weird request but i would love to read your takedown/opinions of the failures of TRC as someone who was also reaaaally underwhelmed with how it handled an interesting setup/cast of characters and was left feeling very blah about the whole experience, and i'm having no luck poking thru your tumblr archives if it already exists :) no pressure ofc, enjoying your opinions on the new series regardless! (i personally deleted the ebook after struggling thru the first chapter oops!)

i was going to say "you have caught me on a day when i am crazy exhausted even after sleeping 12 hours so sure why not" but tbh i think that's giving myself too much credit re: my ability to resist this particular flavor of haterade, although it provides a nice justification. disclaimer that i haven't read anything from the original series since right after the raven king came out so i don't remember it super well. but like basically the problems with the raven cycle are two-fold: (1) the first three books are not very good (2) the raven king is the dumbest and most hateful piece of shit masquerading as a novel i have had the misfortune to encounter in my life. like you have to understand i went into this series having had it pitched to me but Dumb But Fun and for the first three books i was having a good time. i was often like "lol this is stupid" but i would say equally often i was like "aw my kids :')" in particular i remember that something clicked for me with BLLB where the books didn't get better but i suddenly like legit loved and cared about the characters and was invested in their relationships in a way where the flaws jumped out a lot less and i appreciated a lot of things stief had done and i made a pynch playlist and started drafting some fic and blah blah blah. and then the raven king came out and it was just, i can't emphasize enough, the worst book in the history of the printed word.

on point the first: the books are not great. stief comes up with some decent lines (funny similes, the occasional spurt of something pretty), and one of the things i will give her is that she can definitely set an Atmosphere (although this skill seems to have gone missing for CDTH) - monmouth manufacturing and fox way both feel like places that are just a bit too interesting to be real but in a nice way. overall though i find her prose weirdly stilted and artificial and tryhard. i think at some point i called her what taylor swift would be as a novelist, back when our most recent taylor albums were red & 1989, and i more or less stand by that - "losing him was like driving a new maserati down a dead-end street" feels like something stief could write, but instead of a 3-minute country-pop song, it's 350 pages of that. also i have genuinely never encountered an author worse at plotting. there's a weird and almost baffling shapelessness to the books that is truly like nothing else i've read in a bad way. like i said this a couple days ago but i felt like it gave me a new respect for every other bad to mediocre novel i had read in my life, because apparently those authors did all have some kind of basic skillset so fundamental i hadn't appreciated it until i read one who absolutely does not. and also the thing i have said before of, every book has a million chapters about the villain who has nothing to do with anything, and every single one of those chapters is boring as absolute fuck. the whelk chapters in TRB are sort of retroactively justified by the noah reveal, which on reflection i think remains the most successful thing she's pulled off, but the others are interminable and completely without reward for the reader.

even fans of the series seem to concede that plotting is not her strong suit, and the things people tend to like her for are (1) her writing, which... sure. i don't think it is good but you do you. and if i am forcing myself to be fair i will say that at the very least she does have a distinct voice and doesn't have that horrible flat YA Novelist Affect that has taken over what i sometimes feel insane swearing used to be a much more vibrant and stylistically diverse genre at least in terms of the things that made their way to my sphere of awareness. so. fine. and then (2) her characters. and like yeah the TRC crew is cute. they're fun. i liked that gansey was kind of insufferable and the books made no attempt to pretend otherwise. i did love classic scorpio depresso bean trauma freak ronan lynch, and i loved how as the series went on he was both a snarling anger machine and an idiot teenage boy with the most embarrassing crush in the world. i liked blue's ambition and her imperfect but passionate feminism. i loved adam parrish's teeth-gritted determination.

and i did absolutely fall for the pynch of it all. ronan lynch, who could have anything he wanted, desperate for the affection of the one guy who had no patience for his bullshit! adam parrish, who saw himself as so lowly, falling for this almost ethereal creature who dreamed beautiful things! the way ronan's main hobby was wallowing in self-pity but the person he was attracted to was the guy who refused to act like it wasn't time for ronan to grow the fuck up. the way adam had such a fraught relationship with anger, his own anger and that of other people, but he saw so keenly through to who ronan really was that while ronan's anger exasperated him, it never scared him or made him feel like he had any obligation but to be his honest self. the way hard-edged ronan dreamed adam lotion for his hands and labeled it in freaking LATIN, the way tense adam started finding a new respect for ronan without ever feeling a need to become more deferential or apologetic. i mean it was good shit. it was such good shit that i really and truly believed that while she was not the greatest writer in the world, stief must have built this particular dynamic between these two people on purpose. she must have deliberately planned for their slow-burning mutual attraction and deepening care to communicate these exact things about what their value was to each other - ronan giving adam space to dream, adam tugging ronan into reality - and while i was pretty sure the last book would be dumb, because all the books were dumb and she'd thrown a lot of balls into the air that she was not gonna catch, and especially because i had the sense she was going to want a neat happy ending which meant either gansey wasn't going to die (boring) or gansey was going to die but everyone was somehow going to be okay by the end anyway (stupid), i was also like, well at least pynch are gonna get together and it's going to be this really nice culmination of both their arcs.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

the short version of why TRK made me feel so wild with rage was that it made extremely clear that everything i had enjoyed about the books up till that point had happened 10000% by accident. pynch is a good example of this. all that stuff i talked about above, all the push-pull dynamics of them, all the stuff that made them a good ship - it turned out that none of it mattered. none of it was relevant. none of it was even worth mentioning. because none of it, actually, was on purpose. adam and ronan get together by making out, which i respect. they do not have a conversation after that happens. not like, they hook up and don't took about it right away. i mean they don't have a post-makeout conversation IN THE ENTIRE BOOK. there is no moment where either of them says or even thinks, like - why this person. which is dumb for ronan because he has been so horny about adam, but hateful for adam because he is out of ronan's league unless we're being very clear about why this is a good fit! the stuff about ronan helping adam normalize his relationship to anger, lmao. nowhere to be found. instead we get gansey telling adam, "don't hurt him." repeat: we get gansey telling adam, who tries the hardest all the time of all people ever and who is half convinced he should be in jail for having feelings, to make sure he is nice to ronan, whose ENTIRE BRAND is "huge fucking asshole all the time for no reason." because ronan is "fragile." which like, sure. he's a half-orphan [at that point] with a fucked up life whose brain tried to kill him two years ago. but adam is an 18 year old paying all his own bills who moved out of his parents' house the day his dad DEAFENED HIM IN ONE EAR, and somehow this does not grant him any kind of special dispensation for care in the ganseyverse. and this is not ever in any way contradicted or challenged or complicated or even referred to later by the text. crime!

meanwhile, ronan... [pinches nose, sighs heavily]. again i said recently that the dream thieves should have told me her hand was not steady on the steering well. because what happens in the dream thieves is ronan meets someone who is like him but bad, and learns from him, and then figures out how to be himself but good. which is a fun sexy idea for a story, but the book fucks it up because ronan is too aware at all times of what a dirtbag kavinsky is and too untempted by his wild ways. there's no real fall, so there can't be a real rise. he fucks up his best friend's car, which he knows is also his best friend's number one most prized possession on earth, and the resolution to that is: hey dude my bad i killed your car but it's okay i dreamed you a copy of it. ???????? that's like parent who runs over your cat and says it's okay because they'll take you to the pet store tomorrow logic [realized in the middle of that i stole that image from sandman sorry]. i mean, in a vacuum, i guess it's not exactly. but like: ronan doesn't address the situation by learning anything about how not to be the kind of person who destroys something of great emotional value to someone he cares about. he addresses the situation by learning how to do his superpower good. this is not emotionally satisfying fantasy writing. it's hollow and stupid. and it's extra stupid because the book's attempt at an emotional resolution later down the line is that ronan needs to... hate himself less. which he can do by... realizing he doesn't hate himself. ??????? once again: empty. unbelievable. stupid. there's no connection there to, like, "now that i hate myself less, i can and should be less of a dick to everyone all the time," much less "one way of hating myself less might be to stop doing things that make me extremely unlikable." just: he hates himself less, he's no longer alone, he can dream whatever he wants, he's cool with his big gay crush now. weak. and like it was weak for me at the time, but reading BLLB i did think: well, the hand lotion. well, the trying to dream up a soul for the dream people. well, the big hug with blue at the end. ronan is growing and changing following his experience. it's kind of a shame we don't get his POV on any of this. but we'll probably catch up with him in the next book.

and again: no. i mean, we get ronan's POV, yeah. but none of it is reflective of someone like consciously trying to break the destructive and harmful (to self and others) habits he had forged in his grief. none of it conveys any awareness on the part of character or text that, like, deciding on purpose to be a decent human being matters. that maybe it's the kind of thing you should commit to before falling into a long distance relationship with someone who probably has PTSD from their abusive parents. that it can be hard, that it's rewarding. none of that. instead - i don't even fucking remember what. at one point he feels guilty about holding adam back and then he thinks, i'm not asking him to stay, just to come back, like ok that makes it so much better. you're just asking adam parrish, a steel whirlwind of ambition, to go to the ivy league college he has just about killed himself getting to because of how desperately he wants to escape the shithole town where he had his traumatic childhood, and then move back in four years' time. which again is not discussed. it's just taken for granted that ronan wants to stay at the barns forever. he tells declan he wants to drop out of high school [a choice being made by an eighteen year old two years after the traumatic experience of finding his dad's murdered corpse] and be a farmer and drive a tractor in circles on the property, which would be kind of funny given that his family farm is populated by dream creatures, except that like the book takes him weirdly seriously and also this is not intended as a metaphor. like his endgame in that series is that this traumatized teenager is living by himself on the barns fucking around and dreaming forever with like 3 friends all of whom are leaving town and zero ties to human reality or goals or desires of any kind and this is treated as a happy ending. even though by the way his mom got brutally murdered eight months before the stupid epilogue. but he's doing fine [stief hates women so bad]. [again it's SO funny that the first dreamer book opens with "ronan realized that his life was totally pathetic and depressing so he decided to move." like there was not this level of complexity present when you wrote the dumb epilogue!]

i keep forgetting about how ronan dreams into existence a weird little feral fawn creature/person and is bizarrely chill about it. also how his mom is his dad's dream and his little brother is his own dream and it's really explicit that his mom in particular does not have a personality of her own but just responds by giving whoever she's talking to whatever kind of person they want to interact with, which is the moooooost fuuuuuucked uuuup thiiiiiing eeeeeeverrrrrrrrrrr, and the books are just like. yeah this is normal and fine. [again sooo funny that in the dreamer trilogy declan is like "unbelievably fucked up that my little brother and mom are dreams." like yeah it is! where did you get that idea maggie. was it in the tumblr tags.]

what else. she ruined blue liking space, which didn't seem possible. blue doesn't like space and want big things because she's a smart spunky girl in nowheresville virginia feisty enough to dare to believe she can make her own life. no. it's because her dad is a tree person and trees like the sky because they grow upwards. whenever i tell people this i have to emphasize how much i'm not exaggerating or making it up. this is what it says in the text. she's like "oh that makes sense." ???????? i dwell on this one a lot because it's soooooo so so so stupid, but also because i think it really encapsulates the thing that makes TRK not just stupid but actively repellant to me, which is that you get the sense reading it that stief thinks it's better when things come from weird magic shit instead of from like real human characteristics and psychology. like for a series about friendship it winds up feeling to me weirdly and grossly misanthropic - none of these people are special or worth caring about because they are human people, it's all because of their magic Stuff. it's all because oh they actually WERE more special than everyone all along, not because of the choices they made but because they were born to it (why is ronan the only one who can take from the ley line without stealing? is it because of the kind of person he is? no. it's bc he's Special). ronan's dreaming, blue's treeness, and then gansey being actually all along a time-shifted resurrected friendship amalgamation creature who felt an instant kinship with his friends, again, not because he was a lonely teenage boy seeking out fellow weirdos to care about, but because they literally had met him before. adam, the only genuinely human character left by the end, meanwhile still is constantly asked by the text to apologize for his existence, not just in the "don't hurt him" scene but in the absolute nightmare section in the end where he goes back to his abusive parents' house for closure(????) and reflects primarily on how ugly and small his trailer was (?????????) and feels startled to discover an instinct in himself to help other adams who might be stuck like he once was, and then immediately conceptualizes this as something blue or gansey would think, which is so hateful i can't even process it. like adam at no point in this last book is acknowledged to have had a positive influence on anyone else even though he's better than the lot of them put together, but he has to kowtow to blue and gansey in his own brain for teaching him (a poor abused kid) that he might empathize with poor abused kids???? when to my sincere recollection NEITHER of them has ever like on the page demonstrated any kind of do-gooding impulse? their hobbies are myth-hunting and unskilled clothing manufacture? perfectly acceptable hobbies for a pair of teens but like? why does she hate poor people and victims of abuse so bad...

the big bad demon that is destroying the town is shaped like a wasp. gansey has a bee/wasp allergy and one time died from bees. these two things are never connected. henry cheng is upgraded to a main character because maggie heard you like diversity and now has a completely different personality than when he was an amiable preppy dbag who happened to be asian. now he has a mother in the mob and a tragic backstory about being kidnapped that taught him that you can't let fear rule your life and if you're scared you should be scared and then do it and be happy anyway, which is pretty good advice for things like an irrational fear of closed spaces that can't actually hurt you but really not applicable to someone who both does literally have a deadly allergy to bees and also has spent the past four years traipsing willy nilly all over the place not even bothering to keep his epipen with him. it turns out gansey's big moral lesson has nothing to do with for example his obsessive desire to control his friends but actually like ronan he just needs to love himself better and realize that his friends care about him after all. please notice again that ronan and gansey, rich boys acting out, need to love themselves more. this is dumb but if this was like the thesis of the whole series i would be like, that was stupid but whatever. but what of adam parrish, a poor abused kid who was abused so hard he is now a poor abused disabled kid? does he get self-love? no. he gets to realize that his rich friends have made him a better person, and be relieved that he's escaped from poverty because of how the aesthetics were bad. I MEAN IT'S SOOOOOO CRAZY AUGHHHHHHH

i forgot when i was talking about henry cheng the scene where blue and gansey go to the asian kids' house and are like "wow such diversity so culture," which is like a nightmare edward said had once. like they're just so excited to have discovered this exotic exciting new world and to learn about things like how henry cheng makes asian jokes because if he says all the bad things about himself first then other people won't say them. and i shit you not, the entire sequence is done in narration, with spoken lines appearing in italics in the middle of descriptive paragraphs, not rendered with dialogue as an actual scene, a technique she doesn't use anywhere else that i can recall and which really serves to just be like... here is this Mass of Asianness, as opposed to being normal about it and being like "here's some asian kids having a party." i haven't seen anyone comment on this technical feature but i think about it all the time because it makes me feel insane. it's one of the few things i've read in the past however many years where i read it and was like "i guess i was naive before about racism." like it's not that i didn't know but i was like, wow in 2016 you can still just transparently have your entire ability to conceptualize scene and narrative totally warped by an attempt to feature non-white people and no one will be like, hey we're all unlearning a lot of stuff but maybe let's rethink this before we go to print. there's a scene where ronan jokes about henry's mixed-raceness by saying "which half" which i do think is stief being unaware of the optics bc she's dumb but still comes across real bad and then there's also a scene where ronan does a "vaguely offensive" imitation of henry's voice which i truly have no fucking idea what the hell that is supposed to mean on a literal concrete basis other than making fun of an asian kid's accent. in both of these cases gansey and blue are disapproving and adam snickers and it's like, ok so pynch is racist now. cool. who asked for this, maggie. and also see above re: i really gaslit myself into thinking that one of the points of this series was that ronan learns to be a better person. my bad! (he sort of attempts at one point to make up with declan about how ronan has treated him so bad and also ronan was obviously his dad's favorite. but like his way of doing this is he gives him a toy he dreamed called a Orb. if i were declan i would throw his Orb back in his face. but like that's how broken the ethos of these books is. a heartwarming reunion between two brothers torn apart by the death of the father that they both equally lost hello declan is also a teenage orphan - and it's just. here's some garbage i got you. i didn't even spend money on it. it just happened.)

in addition to ronan's mom the lady bad guy also dies a horrible bloody death that feels a lot more gratuitously fucked up than any of the man deaths in the series. oh i forgot about how blue's mom is dating a hitman who killed ronan's dad and ronan just like doesn't care about this after the first five minutes at all. and neither does anyone else. and then he wanders offscreen... i forget why. we never get any intel on why blue is destined to kill her first love if they kiss or if that would have happened with anyone but gansey or if she and gansey can kiss after he's resurrected or what. like the prophecy that kicks off the series, and just: nada. gansey sells his beloved home to bribe aglionby into letting ronan graduate and the two of them never talk about this and the text never clarifies whether ronan bothered to graduate or not (and in CDTH it turns out he didn't). like another way this alleged series about friendship is weirdly misanthropic is i really was not convinced by the end of it that these people were friends. none of them are seen ever enjoying each other's company or thinking well of each other outside of the two romantic pairings and gansey going apeshit about how awesome henry cheng is. also gansey's whole big quest for meaning blah blah, like i don't super care that glendower is dead, i think you could write a good book with that moment working thematically even though it does fuck with your continuity because who the fuck were the three sleepers. what was with those birds. (there's a lot of mysterious/spooky shit that never gets addressed and like... again i think you could write a book where that works, i don't like to be prescriptive about this stuff, but again: play stupid games win stupid prizes. write a dumbass book that invests a lot of time in the importance of its magic and worldbuilding, and i will get annoyed when your magic and worldbuilding is dumb as fuck and/or totally pointless.) but it's like ok so then the idea should be that the whole point of gansey's glendower quest was actually an internal one, that the payoff of SIXTEEN HUNDRED PAGES of this is some kind of life lesson or emotional shift or whatever. and the payoff is that gansey realizes his friends love him (which again: but do they though? like do they really?), and that he and blue and henry take a gap year. that's the big exciting finale. a year off before gansey goes to college, with his true love and a guy he first hung out with eight months ago. HELLO? like who gives any kind of a shit about that. about any of this. what the fuck was all this for. this all happened so that two rich teenagers could like themselves better. are you fucking kidding me maggie? hateful!

anyway. i'm sure at the time there was more i was forgetting because this book was sooooo boring and every single thing that happened in it was stupid. i feel like this was very incoherent but in my defense these books are hard to critique coherently because they are, again, so stupid. CDTH from what i remember reading it through the first time and continue to pick up now like hangs together as a book better certainly than TRK did but my experience is such that every time she does something passably right i truly can only be like, wonder how she's gonna fuck this one up to kingdom come.

[olreid]

bouncing off alfie's tags from yesterday and subsequent conversation in chat but as long as we're talking about things that are horrifying but ultimately weren't really treated as horror, i want to talk about copies. one of the most unsettling parts of greywaren to me was spending time with mór and feniall and realizing that for her, dreaming a copy of niall to replace him honestly ended up working pretty well. the same can be said for niall with aurora, in retrospect; he wanted a wife to raise his children and he got what he wanted. there doesn't have to be any acknowledgement of their failed first attempt, because the second generation were dreamt expressly to succeed in the wake of failure and slotted into their roles so well that niall and mór were able to bury their respective pasts almost totally. they can even unload their memories, which are the real evidence that there was something to copy in the first place, something about the original conditions that somehow wasn't enough or wasn't quite right.

it reminds me of some of the paul discussion we had after nona [ntn spoilers at the links], which is to say there is something troubling about copying because it obscures or erases the particular conditions of production that gave rise to the original. imo feniall in greywaren is a particularly unsubtle and unsettling example cause he just. carries around a memory erasure bag lol. patron saint of not having to accept the consequences of your actions; for the low low price of absolutely nothing he can not only take your place in your failmarriage but also get rid of your failmarriage memories so you can go do something else without having to feel guilty about your failure. this seems to work incredibly well and would work totally if not for the children, which are the real evidence of a marriage you can't erase (not that niall and mór didn't have that conversation; "we should kill it before it's too late.")

so much of the novels' events are set in motion by trying to erase the unerasable; a relationship you already had, a life you already lived. from aurora and feniall's point of view, what does it mean to be made to replace someone who is still living? what does it mean to be in a relationship with the person who dreamt you to replace their ex?? i want the aurora gothic horror bluebeardesque realization that she is not the first, that her schematics were drafted based on an original. i want feniall mutiny rather than cheerful obedience. i want FULL god emperor of dune where duncan idaho keeps getting cloned, discovering he's a clone, trying to rebel, and getting put down only to be cloned again, his memories erased.

another really interesting tension that was ultimately never more than glanced at is the absolute reality of dreams as fully agentic people vs. the fact that in the process of their creation, their personalities can be shaped by those who dream them; thinking of matthew saying he felt conflicted about being made to be likable but that it came in handy and also the confirmation we get in greywaren that aurora was explicitly created to be mór "but softer." i want full westworld-style grappling with the extent to which personality is destiny; i want to see characters try to figure out how much one can rebel against their original design, or whether they even want to.

anyway. i miss when trc was at least nominally interested in the consequences of copying; see a parking lot full of mitsubishis and camaros draining the ley line in dream thieves. but on the other hand, ronan was able to dream a copy that absorbed his death in bllb, and gansey was recopied so accurately he is taken to have been resurrected rather than cloned in trk. idk. something something copies only ever distracting from the root issue at hand; ronan couldn't avoid passing through death. gansey couldn't be brought back. niall and mór's relationship couldn't ever be saved. you can cover up those things but you can't undo them. can we talk about it i want to talk about it

[pygmypyncher]

Hello, hope this is ok. Just to say how much I have enjoyed your writing for Bodies. Your writing is so beautifully detailed, and the internal nuances are delightful to wander amongst. I have read all TRC books, not my favourite, but I really like your fics, but Oh boy, I can see how your writing has developed since then. So, just a big thank you for writing all these pieces. (Do you have any recs for queer media that you have enjoyed?)

Thank you so much for messaging! It's really lovely of you to say!

Also very glad to hear my writing has come on since the TRC days! I was very proud of those fics at the time, and really do still think of them fondly, but I am aware of how much I've grown as a writer since then (hence the slight jumpscare this morning, for which I can only apologise!).

Queer media! Let me dredge my memories for a bit, and I will no doubt mention stuff you've heard of or watched/read already. There are doubtless SEVERAL things I've forgotten, as it is well past my bedtime, but if any glaring omissions occur to me I'll send them on! Shows: Recently I've really enjoyed Our Flag Means Death - you've probably at least heard of it (and as you've been looking at my AO3 you'll have seen I've written for it), and it's completely different from either TRC or Bodies tonally bc it is, in essence, a pirate sitcom, but there is honestly nothing so unashamedly and joyously queer out there at the moment. The fandom is a bit of a terrifying juggernaut, so I suggest treading neatly round the edges and delving into some absolutely top-tier fic (of which there is no shortage) if the whim takes you. On the other side of the pirate scale is Black Sails (DO NOT compare these directly they are very different beasts). Excellent story, very dark and gritty, great pay-off. Deadloch is another great show - Australian detective black comedy, filled to the brim with lesbians! The Haunting of Bly Manor is just a gorgeous ghost/love story with some brilliant characters. Feel Good is one of these unexpectedly heart-breaking sitcoms that I can't recommend enough even though it took me a year to build up the courage for a rewatch A League of Their Own (TV) is just brilliant, and i am GUTTED we're not getting a s2 I'm gonna stick Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries here too, bc even though it isn't actually all that queer (but it DOES have Miriam Margolyes, which definitely qualifies it), it's super camp and has what is possibly the only straight mc romance i've ever been invested in which is saying something Books: KJ Charles is a favourite of mine. She writes really great, quick-to-read queer historical romances that always have a great mystery and body count. The Will Darling Adventures (1920s pulp action-mystery with a romance between an ex-soldier who now runs a second-hand bookshop and a disgraced aristo) are my absolute favourites of hers, but everything she writes is very solid. I've also really enjoyed The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir series so far - very complicated Space Opera, again chock-full of lesbians. Sex: Lessons From History by Fern Riddell is a really interesting non-fiction book about, shockingly, attitudes to sex through history, and takes a delightfully non-heteronormative approach to it that I wasn't expecting going in. As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann is an all-time favourite read of mine, but is quite challenging as the main character is Not The Greatest Guy and it does carry some hefty stuff and warnings. Girl Meets Boy and How to Be Both by Ali Smith are both just brilliant stories with some great Gender Stuff going on.

Like i say, I'm sure I've missed stuff! And it's a bit all over the place because, as well as replying to your AO3 comments too early this morning, I am now answering this too late at night. I am sorry, but can do nothing about it :P I hope this is a little bit helpful at least! <3

[cuoredimuschio]

15 people, 15 questions

tagged by @patchworkgargoyle!! 💚💚

1. are you named after anyone?

my dead name was possibly in honor of my grandmother and great-grandmother, but i 100% named myself after noah czerny (trc) when i was 17 👻

2. when was the last time you cried?

probably yesterday? idk, it happens a lot and my memory's terrible

3. do you have kids?

no. probably never will, whether i want them or not. i'm a little too scared of how easy it is screw up in parenthood

4. what sports do you play/have played?

i played softball from kindergarten through eighth grade, but that last year, i had a coach who benched me for over half of our games and screamed at me during practice in front of the whole team and made me sick to my stomach at just the thought of playing, so i decided i was done with the sport and didn't try out in high school lol

5. do you use sarcasm?

constantly. too much probably. but like, not with strangers usually, and i try to make it pretty obvious if i am being sarcastic

6. what's the first thing you notice about people?

the way they look at me/their expression, maybe? i'm just like. constantly on edge in public and i don't pass super well and also i'm just like. wildly self-conscious, so i'm always like 'okay, let's see, does this random stranger already hate me? 🤔'

7. what's your eye color?

i guess hazel would be most accurate answer. i've always said brown (dishwater brown to quote the midwife who helped deliver me), but it turns out there's actually green in there too and it's just brown around my pupil (a fact i genuinely did not realize until i was like. 17) so....yeah, hazel

8. scary movies or happy endings?

you know i always say i don't like scary movies because i'm very easily spooked, but i'm currently back on my chucky shit (sorry followers, but tis the season) and honestly, i wanna cop out and say both, scary movie with a happy ending.

9. any talents?

the sad thing is, no, i genuinely can't think of a single one. like, all i've got is that i can make a star with a rubber band, but i don't think that's a talent lol

10. where were you born?

ohio, unfortunately :/

11. what are your hobbies?

writing, reading, playing way too much zelda/stardew valley, occasionally knitting, taking walks, crosswords, making niche playlists, listening to the same song on repeat for hours

12. do you have any pets?

i am the proud proprietor of the cutest dog this side of the mississippi, miss ellie rose. (seasonally-appropriate evidence of said cuteness below)

13. how tall are you?

5'4" (and three quarters) #shortkingnation 😔✊

14. favorite subject in school?

english and math!!

15. dream job?

honestly, i have no idea. i've never had very lofty ambitions; when i was a kid, i wanted to be a bus driver or a mail man, and i never really found anything that stoked my soul in the past two decades. trite english major answer here, but i guess maybe working in a library or a bookstore would be nice (i'd say author but girlie, i could never) 🤷‍♂️

no-pressure, zero-obligation tags: @hellfiredemon, @starryeyedjanai, @pizzaqueen, @thefreakandthehair, @cheatghost, @vecnuthy andddd that's about everyone i know, sorry if i double-tagged anyone!!

[soldier-poet-king]

hello!! no pressure to answer this but i was wondering do you have any recommendations for books, specifically books that made you feel things very deeply? i know that's vague and weird but like i also love the goblin emperor/baru cormorant/similar books as you and i was wondering if you had any faves you'd like to share :) i am looking for a book that will put me in agony in a good way lol

HELLO FRIEND

okay so I am a Big Emotional Dummy so everything makes me feel very deeply, whether or not it's actually any good. So I'll try to keep it to recs that I felt alot while reading, after reading, and I think are actually good.

Also idk if you want specific genres or sticking to fiction, so I'm just gonna throw a whole whack of things at you, hope that's ok!!! I'll also try to avoid super popular recs (like trc or ursula k le guin) not because i love them less, just because you've probably already heard of them?

Hands of the Emperor - Victoria Goddard - probably my current fave book and protag, read it twice in less than a year despite it being like 1200 pages, if i loved it less i could talk about it more, and without crying. maybe it's niche and imperfect, but to ME? book of all time

The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner - fave book series for more than a decade, makes me experience shrimp emotions that nothing else will ever be able to replicate

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke - how did a portal fantasy meets psychological horror become actually the most existentially comforting book in the world

Tuyo - Rachel Neumeier - technically a series, with 3 main novels and other novels and novellas about other characters (which i enjoyed less but still), but def start with tuyo. I fully went in expecting to not like it At All and was blown away???? I wept. I still weep. I can't explain why I love it without spoilers but it's technically a fantasy war story and yet is almost entirely character driven

Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antione de Saint-Exupery -reading this rn and technically it's billed as a memoir and adventure novel but actually its an existential meditation on the nature of human interaction and the soul and definitely comes from the same core as The Little Prince

If you HAVENT read the cemeteries of amalo/thara celehar spinoff of the goblin emperor PLEASE do, in many ways i love them even more than tge bc thara is up there with kip mdang in terms of characters i cant talk about without crying because it's too personal

The Sparrow Duology - Mary Doria Russell - PLEASE check the trigger warnings, unlike most of the recs on this list, this falls way more to the side of Baru in terms of dark content, but also it's maybe the closest I've ever come to being at peace

I'm definitely missing things, but these are all the books that have made me want to chew drywall in the last 2 years. I've also linked my goodreads here with the caveat that my ratings skew high because i am very much a 'i didnt say it was good, i said i enjoyed it/was entertained' type person. also i have read a lot of trash YA. oops. like yes some of it is real bad but also some of it makes me Feel Some Things even (or especially??) when it's real bad.

Friends pls chime in with your recs, and also please rec things to me!! Am seeking new and interesting emotions previously unknown to humankind.

[litrallymadlad]

you mentioned you were reading trc at some point—what are your thoughts on it so far? :0

HAHAH IT MADE ME SO MAD I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO CONTINUE IT. I got like two chapters into the second book and haven't picked it up in a couple weeks.

I've been wrangling in my rants about trc so if you're interested to know em I'll put em under the fold below. BUT FAIR WARNING: I think I missed the opportunity to read them in middle/high school because I think I really would have enjoyed them then and been able to read them later in life for the nostalgia factor because THE VIBES WERE IMMACULATE.

BLUE PISSES ME OFF. FUCK HER HONESTLY. She's so unnecessarily mean to the lads (specifically Gansey AND I'M A GANSEY APOLOGIST. I LOVE THAT MAN I WOULD DIE FOR HIM.) It's giving 2012 not like other girlies PICK ME VIBES. I ENDED UP SKIPPING BLUE'S POVS CUZ SHE'D ALWAYS SAY THE FOULEST THINGS ON THE PLANET and I'd have to put the book down. I just don't respect her as a person LMAO

AND ADAM PISSED ME OFF for similar reasons but his beef with Gansey was a lot more personal so the justification was there. BLUE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW THESE GUYS. TALK ABOUT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE MY GOD. Adam's angst was like, a deep character and circumstantial flaw that I can get behind. BLUE???? I get the impression that she's supposed to be a y/n character which is very 2012 tumblr girlie of her so I'm supposed to insert my grievances with rich boys and wanting to kiss em onto her BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY OF THAT TO BACK HER UP. SHE'S ON HER OWN.

ALSO I'm convinced the kissing scheme is BS because theoretically she can kiss the love of her life AFTER he dies. What's stopping her from kissing a corpse. Necrophilia?? NO!!!!!!!!!!! That doesn't have to stop her. Why aren't we considering the possibility that the person she kisses could die before she even kisses them and then in a fit of grief she kisses them or gives them mouth-to-mouth trying to resuscitate them. YOU KNOW WOT OIM SAYIN BRUV??? ALSO Istg the logistics of the kissing scheme CHANGE. IT CHANGED LIKE THREE TIMES. I think it was just a matter of rephrasing it but with something like that THAT'S LIKE A PROPHECY. YOU CAN'T BE MIXING UP THE LANGUAGE. THAT DEFEATS THE PURPOSE. It added to the unreliability of the narrator misinterpreting it and it made me want to wring someone's NECK. Cuz by the end of the book I was like "I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT THE ORIGINAL VERBIAGE WAS."

Also, what if she has MULTIPLE LOVES?? I'm of the belief you can love someone the same amount in various parts of your life like??? Do widows just never love the same way again? What if the love of her life was a childhood friend who died tragically? LOVE IS DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE AND EVERY RELATIONSHIP. IT'S NOT ALWAYS A HIERARCHY WHERE THE END-ALL-BE-ALL IS YOUR PARTNER. She loves her family! What if she kisses her mom on the cheek and she knocks out DEAD. WHAT THEN. DOES IT HAVE TO BE ON THE MOUTH?? I don't trust anyone relaying this prophecy. FUCK THEM, HONESTLY. I'm sure I'm just reading into it too much and am bitter about the verbiage constantly changing. It's probably more like a fairy tale Disney vibe of True Love HAHAH IF SO IGNORE ME.

Honestly I think if I'd just read this in middle school/high school I'd like it a lot and the nostalgia would be unreal. It'd be so iconic. But at this point I think I'm too old to vibe with it HAHAHA I FUCKING LOVE GANSEY AND ADAM THOUGH. THERE'S LIKE NO FICS OF THEM (and them alone, no Ronan). I'VE READ THEM ALL. THEY'RE SO GOOD. THE GANSEY X ADAMS OF THE WORLD KNOW WHAT THEY'RE FFFFFUCKING DOING.

[haro-hawayu]

CCS: Clear Card Ch. 74

How is it June already??? Glad I had a bit of down time to check out the latest chapter, which can be found on CLAMP-net’s YouTube Channel. As always, do check out @meimi-haneoka's post on the latest chapter for any EN-JPN translation differences.

Links for previous chapter reactions can be found here.

Reactions

MAGICIAN SAKURA COVER!!!

Sakura looks SOOOOO COOL WAHHH!!!

If this outfit ever becomes Sakura’s “official” magician robes (like how all the other magicians just happen to have 1 set/design of “magician” robes), I would 100% not be mad about it (except there’s no way she would only have one design/set of such robes with Tomoyo around LOL) cuz it looks so so good

Oh! We’re finally seeing things from Touya’s POV!

Cute Yuki & Nakuru bonding time, loving the vibe!

With how Akiho was mentioned first... makes me feel the “rewrite” did in fact involve everyone...? Except Touya’s expression seems to indicate otherwise.

Omgsh Kero-chan XD

Whoaaa it’s truly the whole gang now!

Sakura 1000% best protagonist ever. I love her so much with how she’s reassuring Akiho that Akiho is important to her regardless of the fact that they’re “twins” as a result of the rewriting

Totally getting that “because this person is important you [Akiho], then they are important to me as well” vibe from Sakura as she’s explaining all this, major big sister vibes from her Kinomoto family please adopt Akiho and her fam (Kaito + Momo) after this series ends please

Wahhh it’s painful to see how Akiho is admitting her pain that void in her, of searching for someone except not really knowing who it is... I’m glad she’s admiting and sharing this too TuT

Tomoyo best girl. I love her so much for just being the biggest and best support for Sakura & others even tho she has no magic

Also 100% glee over Sakura declaring before everyone that Syaoran is her number one person!! Wooo!

Big brother Touyaaaa! So sweet!!

THE COSTUMES OMGSSHHHH!! They look amazing!!

~

Okay so it seems like the rewriting really did affect everyone, but it didn’t stop people from feeling that things were “off” (i.e. Touya, Akiho, Tomoyo even). I think that says a lot about how memories are just a very tricky thing, and in the end, some part of you will “remember” or “recall” even if you personally don’t have that memory (huhuuu so much TRC trauma thoughts)... like with Akiho knowing that there’s someone that she missing in her life, or Tomoyo remembering making that outfit somewhere before... because these things relate to that strong bond they have with another person (Akiho with Kaito, Tomoyo whenever she puts in her all with making costumes for Sakura). With Touya’s case, he’s just that very kind and protective person who puts his family and close ones above all, and I love that he also includes Akiho in all that even though she’s not his actual sister (hi again Kinomoto family, please adopt her).

It seems like Sakura and Syaoran will be the only two trying to find Kaito (or clues to lead to him) so far. I guess it would make sense given that because of the rewriting, they’re really going in kinda blind--they have no idea what kind of troubles or dangers may show up. I hope that we do get to the point where Akiho can come in and do the thing that only she can do, which is bringing Kaito back. Like sure, Sakura and Syaoran have the magic power to do all the other heavy lifting, but only Akiho will truly reach Kaito and make him actually desire to return.

Looking forward to the next chapter!! We’re really heading towards the end here!