The best part of trc is the yearning. They’re all yearning, aching for something more and it’s evident in every line. Blue is yearning for Gansey and Gansey is yearning for Blue, sure but that’s not all.
Blue yearns to have an impact on the world, to be important and valued and necessary of her own volition not just because she makes things louder. At times she feels unseen at 300 Fox Way because there are so many people there and so many things happening, but most of all she yearns to be special. She wants to be special so she can access the world of magic the rest of her family can peruse at will, and by the end of the series she does get that.
Gansey yearns to be like Adam, but he also yearns for the feeling of aliveness, of purpose, that the hunt for Glendower provides him. Gansey wants to change his status, not be seen only as his family’s money. He wants to exist as a person beyond that.
Adam yearns to be like Gansey, but he also yearns to transcend his station, to live comfortably and well. He yearns for rest, for comfort, for safety. He yearns for money, sure, but that’s not all of it. He yearns for the safety net of money, the ability to live without his pain and trauma and lack of wealth being the first thing people see.
Ronan yearns to understand himself. He yearns for Adam also, not to be like Adam or to have him, but to devote himself to Adam. He yearns for home, for his father, for beauty. You see it in the things he dreams, all of them full of light and beauty and his joy at being alive. He yearns for the ability to love himself.
And I think Noah yearns to rest, to save his friends, and to be alive again. And he is the only one who doesn’t get what he yearns for. And that’s the tragedy of Noah Czerny, is that he is forgotten, even though the love was there and it change everything, he ends up being forgotten.
But I think the yearning of the raven cycle is one of the main reasons I love it so much. It feels alive in its desperate want. Even when there isn’t much plot the story is driven forward by each character’s desire for more. And it’s beautiful.