An Asexual Reading of The Raven Cycle: Part 1
Introduction
The Raven Cycle is an asexual text, not because many of the characters give off “ace vibes,” but because there is something inherently asexual in its themes and messaging as well. We see our characters confronted with allonormative ideas and assumptions about their own relationships and sexualities and reject them. We see them struggle to relate to an allosexual world, and so, they find comfort in alternative relationship models and with peers who do understand them. These themes are not explored with just one character, but with almost every single character in this series. Yes, I do mean almost every character. So let’s dive into the asexual themes, the characters, the scenes, the struggles that The Raven Cycle tackles.
The Rejection of Allonormativity
Over the course of the series, Gansey, Blue, and Ronan all are confronted with allonormative assumptions about their core relationships that they vehemently reject. These assumptions seek to reduce and erase the nuance in their relationships because they do not fit into allonormative and amatonormative expectations.
With Gansey, this emerges in the frequently quoted scene with his sister, Helen. I discussed this scene in my “An Asexual Reading of Gansey” post. Helen wrongly assumes that Gansey bribes his school principal because he (Gansey) is sleeping with Adam. She is, of course, doubly wrong because the bribe is for Ronan, not Adam, and Adam and Gansey are not sleeping together.
There are so many allonormative assumptions underlying this implication. Namely that sexual relationships are the only relationships strong enough to cause someone to make crazy or stupid decisions. There may even be an underlying assumption that Gansey’s poor decision making is caused by his horny, teenage boy brain. Helen even asks “what has he possibly done to deserve such a thing?" and she immediately jumps to sex as the conclusion. As if sex is the only thing that is “deserving.”
To asexual people, who do not inherently experience sexual attraction or desire, this sort of assumption is confounding and disheartening. The idea that sexual relationships are these powerful or potent things that supersede things like logic or friendship or familial bonds is something we push back against.
And Gansey does push back against this idea. He is indignant, and he challenges Helen’s idea that friendship isn’t worthy enough because it is worthy enough to him. In his mind, all of these relationships, with Blue, with Noah, with Ronan, with Adam, they are all so incredibly important to him. Much of the series is him desperately trying to keep them altogether because they are that important.
We continue to see this sort of misunderstanding occur between Ronan and Kavinsky as well.
Throughout The Dream Thieves, Kavinsky is constantly sexualizing Ronan and Gansey's relationship. While many of these comments are made for comedic effect, it becomes clear when Kavinsky and Ronan are alone in dreamspace that he truly believes that there is a romantic or sexual element to the relationship, at least on Ronan’s end.
Unlike Helen, Kavinsky is at least right in one regard. Ronan is gay. However, he misinterprets Ronan’s feelings for Gansey. Kavinsky, being queer himself, projects his own sexual repression and yearning onto Ronan and assumes that he is sexually pining after Gansey just as he, himself, is pining after Ronan. Kavinsky is working under a framework that does not understand intense platonic, or even familial bonds, because he hasn’t experienced either. His closest friend is someone he dreamt (and presumably has a sexual relationship with?), and his parents have only ever shown him abuse and neglect. He does not understand any other type of love, and Ronan knows this. Ronan even tries to explain it to him.
“That's not what Gansey is to me. [...] Life isn't just sex and drugs and cars.” (TDT 411)
But Kavinsky states that his life is all sex and drugs and cars. And so he has no way to explain the Ronan and Gansey of it all to himself, so he reduces it. Diminishes it. It must be about sex. How could it be about anything else?
Blue is also forced to confront allosexual opposition to her relationships in the form of Orla. Orla is a funny character to me because she is quite literally the image of allosexuality. I know we joke about Adam, but I think we can all agree that Orla is the most allosexual allosexual of the series. I mean she literally talks about people fucking in the grass like wild animals the way nature intended or whatever weird shit she said when the Fox Way women were comforting Blue in the bathtub.
Also, she keeps trying to hit on Ronan, a gay teen. Like Orla you’re a psychic. How do you not know he’s gay? Also he’s 17 and you’re 20 something. Does anyone else find this illegal?? Google what is the age of consent in Virginia????
Orla is set up as a contrast to Blue whom is in the midst of puberty, believes in the power of platonic friendship, and does not understand the emerging sexual scripts of the peers around her (more on that in another post). Whereas Orla is a sex positive, conventionally attractive, heartbreaker of men and older female figure for Blue to compare herself to and rail against.
Blue and Orla’s dynamic is, however, distinctly different from the previously mentioned interactions in this essay. She doesn’t necessarily misinterpret Blue’s relationships. She just doesn’t understand it.
“It’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys” (BLLB 103).
Blue concedes in the very next line that Orla wasn’t wrong, but that Orla didn’t know that all of them were in love with one another.
But what does that mean? What does it mean for the raven boys to be in love with one another?
To Orla, it means disappointment. She tells Blue that her raven boys will all inevitably leave her.
Orla voices a fear that many asexual and aromantic people have: that their platonic relationships, no matter how important to them, are fragile and fleeting. It sounds very similar to what my mom told me about my college friends. We won’t always be so close. We will grow apart. Once everyone gets married, we won’t spend as much time together. While this may be true for a lot of people, the idea of it hurts. We don’t want to let go of those friendships.
Especially Blue! The idea of it hurts her, “down to [her] marrow” (BLLB 104). These friendships are so intense and important to her that she doesn’t know how to be “just friends” with people. She can’t be “friendly” in the way Orla tries to convince her to be.
Orla’s advice also implies that Blue’s relationship with the raven boys is abnormal and not possible for Blue to have with anyone else in Henrietta. What it amounts to is Orla telling her she should settle for a shallower version of friendship. One where people “just chat.”
These two characters seem to be operating under two different frameworks. Orla is very much a part of an allo world where the lines between the sexual and the romantic versus the platonic are clearly delineated. That is why the blurring between the platonic and the romantic that Blue experiences is so foreign to someone like Orla. Similarly, Blue doesn’t know how to have casual friends like Orla does. How do you not become obsessed with your best friends? She is operating in a very queerplatonic framework, much like the other characters, which is why they are misunderstood by many others in the story.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, the series sets up this opposition between the allonormative views of the outside world with the queerplatonism of the raven boys which is honestly really interesting to analyze as an asexual reader.
I'm really excited to finally post some of the ace thoughts I've had floating around in my head for a WHILE now. Hopefully, this will be the first of many posts, looking at the series through this lens. I definitely have a lot more in the works in my big google doc.