#so yeah! anyway! rb this if you want to fight gansey's family too or w/e!!

[gaybluesargent]

i havent read the raven cycle books in a while and ive forgotten.. what is so bad about gansey's parents?

i’m sorry this took so long, anon!! i have… so very many thoughts about this. so. cracks my knuckles. Here We Go. an incomplete analysis of why gansey’s parents suck, under a readmore because it turned into a book report:  

they allowed gansey to travel the world entirely by himself at thirteen years old.

“Of all the places Gansey had attended boarding school — and he’d attended many in his four years of underage wandering…” - trb, ch12

gansey is seventeen, so four years of wandering puts him at thirteen. thirteen!! thirteen is not old enough to travel the world by yourself in even the best circumstances. and gansey was not in the best circumstances. which leads me to my next point:

they allowed gansey to travel the world entirely by himself while he was extremely unwell. 

by the time he met malory, he’d already been traveling for years, and this was the shape he was in:

“Got screaming nightmares over it — he had to get his own place, since I couldn’t sleep with it, as you might well imagine. Sometimes these fits would happen during the day, too. We’d just be toddling through some riding path in Leicestershire and next thing I knew he’d be on the ground clawing his face like a mental patient.” - bllb, ch30

his parents either didn’t notice this behavior or ignored it, because there is no way a boy this debilitated by his trauma and anxiety should be set free to roam the world with no support. and there was no support, because:

there were months (or more) where they had no idea where he was. 

“Just gone,” Malory said. “After that, his family called me sometimes, trying to find out where he’d gone.”

“His family?” She felt like she was being told a story about a different person.

“Yes, I told them what I could, of course. But I didn’t really know. It was Mexico before he came to me, then Iceland after, I think, before the States. I doubt I know the half of it still. He picked himself up and moved so easily, so quickly. He had done it so many times before England, Jane, and it was old hat to him.” - bllb, ch30

that means they kept in touch so little and gave him so much financial freedom that they couldn’t find out where in the whole world he had gone. yeah, like, gansey made the decision to go off the radar, but the fact that he, as a child, was able to go missing on this scale is extremely negligent of his parents. 

i think all of that is enough to find the ganseys shitty, but wait, there’s more! because there’s a whole emotional side to this that plays a big role in Who Gansey Is.

the ganseys are politicians. 

not just in their careers, but as people. they are concerned with Appearance more than anything else. 

there’s a lot in gansey’s introspection that gets into this — like, the entire concept of his President Cell Phone persona and the reoccurring theme of disconnect between how gansey feels and how he’s perceived — but i think this bit from trk is pretty telling: 

He remembered thinking that it would only ruin the party by reappearing covered with hornets. - trk ch53

you don’t think this way as a terrified child unless you’ve had guilt taught into you. unless your family has made it clear that your pain is less important than their convenience. 

and that crops up a lot with gansey. this idea of his feelings being inconvenient to those around him, and of his feelings being less important than everyone else’s. sure, it’s tied up in his privilege, but it’s also a classic symptom of the kind of repression and compartmentalization that comes from growing up in a family that doesn’t value your emotional wellbeing. 

and i think there’s a good example of that, after gansey misses the fundraiser:

I know you have your own life, his mother said to his voicemail. I was just hoping to be part of it for a few hours. 

[Helen’s] only text had come at the end of the night: I suppose the king will always win, won’t he? - trk, ch58

this is.. emotionally manipulative. maybe not intentionally, but it is. and gansey has lived his whole life like this — having things Expected of him and then being guilted when he can’t live up to it. and the running implication under it all is that he is Wrong for prioritizing the thing that matters most to him, which is doubly damaging since that thing is the obsessive pursuit of a resolution to his unbelievable and unacknowledged childhood trauma. trauma for which he has never gotten any help. that is all unforgivably isolating. 

and i think part of what makes this all so insidious is that it’s easy to miss. because it’s never rude, never mean, never outright. the ganseys don’t seem like an emotionally dysfunctional family. they don’t fight, they don’t yell, they don’t cry. they love each other, or they think they do. but that’s because of things like this:

And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will. 

He’d said it nicely, though, over a plate of fettuccine. - trb, ch12

and

Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper)… - trb, ch38

they’re nice. they’re proper. but they’re definitely not good. they want gansey to be Perfect, which means ignoring all the parts of him that they find flawed and inconvenient. which means depriving him of emotional support and limiting their relationship with him to what is Expected and what is Useful. which means that, when he can’t meet those Expectations and Uses, he is a failure. 

and i think that leaves marks all over his character. you can see it in his desperation to mean something, to be worthy of being saved. in how he constantly represents himself in ways that conflict with his Richard Campbell Gansey The Thirdness (like the Pig, Monmouth, and his journal, all things that are broken and chaotic and messy). in his deep desire to be Known and Understood by the people around him. 

i don’t think gansey really understands the way his family has shaped these parts of his personality, so the narrative doesn’t really call explicit attention to it. but there are places where it’s clear how far away he feels from the very idea of his family: 

He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had. - trb, ch33

they never made a spot for him in their home, or at least, not a spot where he was ever actually able to fit. so gansey left and found one for himself, in his friends and in henrietta and in glendower. 

there is So Much More — i could comb through the books and write a 500 page dissertation on this topic, lol — but i’m gonna leave it here. tldr, gansey’s parents are neglectful and emotionally isolating, and that has had a serious negative impact on how gansey conceptualizes himself.

[if you want More on the subject, i know kate @czarrish has lots of good posts like this one! & big thank you to @arielmagicesi​, @pnrrish, & @wishingstardust​ for helping me find various things for this Essay! i rly appreciate it!]