Ok. What do u think chapter 26 meant??? I love it SOOO much even though al the fae creatures didn’t make much sense to me
i mean i dont have a definitive reading of what was actually going on due to ive never been a particularly close reader of the mechanics of trc lore but i just love what it does for ronan's arc. ronan was a child who was told that what he was was secret, which he took to mean bad. blue voice i could say you're evil because you can take things out of your dreams; ronan voice yeah, you could. he grew up thinking he was the only one; he grew up wondering what was wrong with him. please god what am i tell me what i am, et cetera.
while i'm not generally a huge fan of tdt's broadened scope, one of its side effects is the picture it gives us of a world that is actually full of dreamers and dreams and dreamt things. the lynch family is not unique in this way, as we are given to believe in the first series; there is a place underneath the world that ronan feels is killing him - the world of high school and college and stable employment - and in that other place he is not an aberration or a devil or a mistake. it is this place that ronan is able to access in this particular dream, and while it's a dream he's had since childhood, it is greywaren (book)'s explanation of exactly what ronan is and how he came to be born that makes me read this dream not just as a childhood fantasy but as a memory of a real place where he likely lived before being shaped into a son of the lynch family. i read the fae creatures that populate the barns in this chapter as some of the same entities that urge ronan to come home to wherever the greywaren came from when he's deciding whether or not to become human again. (i suppose that's a reading some could disagree with but honestly, whether this place is the "other place" niall and mór came to know or whether it originates in ronan's imagination doesn't really matter: as bryde teaches ronan, we make reality. for ronan there exists a place that is filled to the brim with people like him, and whether it exists because he used to live there or because he can imagine it is sort of irrelevant.)
i honestly also read this chapter as deeply transgender due to what i personally bring to the text; there is a deep loneliness to ronan that obviously comes from the grief of losing niall and by extension the rest of his family, but there is also a more deep-seated, more existential loneliness that comes when you think you are the first of your kind, when you believe yourself to be wrong or twisted or broken in a way no one has ever been before. conversely, there is a specific kind of joy that comes with the discovery that not only are you not the first, you are one of many, that those who are like you love being that way, that there is a place you can go where you can lose yourself in a crowd. it is that joy ronan experiences in this chapter: "how exceptional all these guests were! they were dressed in all manners and they were all races and ages and genders and sizes. some of them did not seem to be human [...] his heart burst with gladness. gladness and relief. thank goodness, he thought in the dream."
i'm literally so sorry for what im about to do but it genuinely does remind me of the ending of wild geese:
he has a place in the family of things. he can see himself in others. he is not alone in the world. thank god!!!
