Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
Adam away at college studying at his apartment with friends or something when his punk rock boyfriend shows up in biker boots (I imagine Ronan getting a motorcycle while Adam’s away with the bmw) and a leather jacket with a tattoo peaking out around his neck. and he plops down with the group like “‘sup nerds” and they get chatting and someone asks him where he goes to school and he’s like, “no, I’m a farmer” and they all think it’s a joke and he lets them think it’s a joke until the night wears on and at some point he’s showing everyone photos of the new baby goats he adopted and there’s a close up of the scary-looking ugly one that Opal picked out (she gave it a mohawk and named it Kerah) and it turns out he brought Adam a jar of preserves because he grew too many strawberries and later he shows off the bitchin’ scar he got on his elbow while building a new chicken coop. and everyone’s just like where the hell did you find this guy
i’m so yikes at all the people praising @maggie-stiefvater for the lgbt ship being treated ~so well~ in trk just bc…. the lgbt characters weren’t killed off or turned into trees, and that’s just….. so sad.
as if pynch wasn’t completely treated as an afterthought, because they totally were. their scenes were super short and had no dialogue whatsoever, nor did they have any sort of confession of feelings or clear confirmation of their relationship while the hets got clear i love you’s and official declarations of their relationship to literally everyone and unnecessary drama……….. like i’m super happy that they’re both alive and happy and together and have a little hooved daughter that they love but.
that shouldn’t be our standard. it’s mostly just sad that our expectations are that low that we’re praising an author for sidelining the lgbt ship and treating them nowhere near as well as the straight ship. and again so much of pynch was subtext and extremely subtle stuff that you have to read in between the lines, as it has been since the beginning.
and i don’t even blame any lgbt people for being happy about it bc we’re used to being treated so awfully that we’re basically ecstatic about getting just scraps bc well, it could be so much worse. but stief is nowhere near revolutionary and actually giving good and equal representation and we deserve better (and any straight people praising it just need to shut up, thanks).
i mean, if you can say one positive thing about it, it’s that the two lgbt characters got the strongest and most intricate individual arcs, but as a ship they were absolutely sidelined and underwhelming after all the hype and build up.
things that sound like fake spoilers for trk but are actually real
ronan and adam adopt a child
maura sargent at one point in time banged a tree
ronan dreamt up a deer fursona of adam
a set of triplets act like they are one person
someone says the words “eyeball chapstick”
helen asks gansey if he’s sleeping with ronan and/or adam
noah founded a long-lasting school tradition
blue sargent has an enjoyable time at an aglionby party
gansey gets pissed off because ronan keeps calling him dad
the gray man leans on the fourth wall to say that adam’s the male lead
gansey tucks blue into his overcoat
Why The Raven Cycle isn’t getting any diver$ity cookie from me.
This contains mild spoilers, and text from The Raven King.
The way Henry was introduced in BLLB was unforgettable. We saw him making an offhand rape comment. This is pretty common. See All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic where their lone!good!moc could be seen making the same proclamation throughout the series. I am willing to let it slide, maybe, this is not about race.
Moving forward to The Raven King, we get to know Henry Cheng better. He’s half Chinese and half Korean. His mother Seondeok is a Korean dealer of illegal antiquities. White authors can’t seem to write East Asians without associating them with mob, yakuza, and mafia? Another example: All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic
This is the part where it gets nauseating.
“Principles? Henry Cheng’s principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter,” Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry’s voice: “Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics.”
Blue saw Adam both smirk and turn his face away in a hurry so that Gansey wouldn’t see, but it was too late.
“Et tu, Brute?” Gansey asked Adam. “Disappointing.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Adam replied.
It was explicitly stated Henry’s second language is English. I’m going to assume Ronan is mocking the way Henry speaks, the intonation or accent of his voice. Whichever fucking way I look it is racist. Nobody even called Ronan out. The gross thing, the author made it into an “inside joke” for pynch.
This didn’t end right there. We have another pynch scene where they made a punchline out of Henry’s ethnicity.
“Adam made puerile jokes at Henry’s expense (He’s half Chinese? “Which half?”) and sniggered clannishly; Blue called them on it (“Jealous, much?”): Gansey told them to put aside their preconceptions and think about him.
Really? This made into the final publication? Minority’s ethnical identity isn’t a subject for crass puns. Blue and Gansey’s meek intervention is not going to pacify me. I’m not here for this. Once again, this become a “cutesy” pynch scene.
These vile ~scenes~ about Henry’s otherization serves no purpose. It doesn’t contribute anything to the plot. You can reason out the narrative is implying Adam and Ronan are jealous (of Gansey’s new attachment to Henry,) but the author could’ve made a different approach of executing that. This is deliberate.
Another troubling scene with Henry and Blue
It was this: Blue, teetering on the edge of offence, saying, I don’t understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself. And Henry saying. I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time.
Great another Korean character written by white author who might or might not be experiencing internalized racism. Sounds familiar? See Ellen Oh’s intake of Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.
I see a lot of bloggers here are now clamoring for Henry, maybe it’s because he’s greatly sculpted, or because he’s Asian and his characterization speaks to you. If your reason is the latter, I have news for you. There are plenty of Asian authors specifically Chinese, and Korean, who are out there doing a spectacular job at it. Here are some of them; Jenny Han, Renee Ahdieh, Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Ellen Oh, Maureen Goo, Marie Lu, Lydia Kang, Amy Zhang, Celeste Ng, S. Jae-Jones, and more.
POSITIVE THOUGHTS ON THE RAVEN KING
ok ok i feel like starting with the negatives is mean so lets put in some good stuff too even though i already said what i didn’t like
orphan girl eating things she shouldnt be eating
loose quote:
“what r u doin w/ ur future ronan?”
“i was thinkin of becomin a farmer c:”
BARN TIME WITH THE LYNCH FAN OMG i loved it
the KISs. THE KISS. i know i said something about the pynch was bothering me but over all i loved the kiSSES.
what we saw of the whole henry/gansey/blue dynamic. i want them to travel the world together my adorable bebs.
artemus hiding in the tree. sensitive tree man.
neeve advising piper to not do things and piper being all ‘ok but i literally do what i want c:’
henry in general, i love his character, i like that his native language is thought.
GROCERY STORE WORKER BLUE COMIN TO THE RESCUE * U * MY HERO.
any interactions between blue and ronan tbh. i love them. they are my babies.
i was going to move on but honestly blue and ronan are so pure and honest, i love it. i love the scene of ronan and blue in the kitchen while the boyfriends were sharing secrets, pondering the meaning of love and whatnot.
what i wanted out of that was a big sleep over with the gang at the barns but.... fanfiction will happen. im counting on y’all... or me. depending on how i feel.
oooo whatelelsslelselse.
CABESWATER LOVES THEm
like i already knew that quote before but it’s still my favourite thing? cabeswater loves them cabeswater will do anything for them cabeswater will give life back to one of them in the best way it can since they all wished for it. i love you too cabeswater.
ronan ‘i dreamt up cabeswater’ lynch
ronan ‘i dreamt up my lil brother too’ lynch
sir richard campbell ‘for gods’ sake’ gansey III in response to the above mentioned ronan lynch.
“THE HEAD IS TOO WISE. THE HEART IS ALL FIRE” im putting that on my body one day.
thats all i can think of right now. there will be a second wave that comes with the reread.
MmmMMmm thoughts on the raven king,
it could have stayed in the oven a little longer tbh.
like i loved some parts, some chapters, buttttt gosh it was missing so much.
im going to have to reread to really get into the parts and aspects that are really bothering me but this is really just the first batch of complaining from me.
i didn’t care about piper when i feel like i should have. i loved her in the last book but this time i was like ‘yawn ok piper’ it was boring, her death was anticlimactic too. that entire “auction scene” was boring to me like.... i could have done without it.
i wanted to care more for henry and i think i was supposed to but he was still gooey in the center. more oven time. fics are probably going to make me love henry more. but yeah, boring. not him as a character per se but his entire story. (i do secretly ship ganseyxbluexhenry now wow let me have that.)
i didn’t enjoy the pynch scenes really but i have to reread to get into that since i cant pinpoint what about that was bleh to me.
but on to something that really pissed me off,
the discovery of glendower. the lack of fanfare, the fact that he was just a dead dude. that - pissed me off. not because it happened, but because of when it happened. maybe if that happened a whole book ago, i would have been more excited to be honest? like ahhh shit where do we go from here? but since that happened with a few chapters left i was like ‘ok so....’ and i got mad because i knew it would be a crappy ass end like... there’s no build up from that just a straight line of question marks. im still mad. i thought that was so boring. i thought explaining the kill gansey and bring him back to life plan was boring. i thought the demon destroying cabeswater was also a bit boring like... mmm i feel like the demon + piper thing could have been played out a bit better....
these are just surface thoughts like please discuss this w/ me if you had similar feelings because im just <:
the quote “while i’m gone, dream me the world” becomes so much more tragic if you realize gansey knew he was going to die and he was literally going to be gone forever and he knew how self-destructive ronan was and he didn’t want ronan to ever stop dreaming or lose his magic because of him even if he was dead
people who know gansey is going to die: me, you, gansey, adam, blue, the women of 300 fox way, millions of readers
people who don’t know gansey is going to die: ronan