she may not be a psychic, but the first time blue sees adam and gansey interacting, she says:
there ale also two scenes in which she compares her own interactions with gansey to the way gansey acts towards adam
one during their bonding scene – when blue realizes that gansey can be emotional and fragile under the rich boy façade. that there’s a second gansey.
btw adam made sure to inform the readers that he damn well knows that about gansey in the first chapter from his POV:
(i’m not cutting the fistbump moment out of that quote bcs bro who tf describes fistbumping with your friend like that … adam you 🏳️🌈)
let’s not forget that this is blue we’re talking about, her whole conflict is „i really want to have a Romance but i can’t”* – stated already in the prologue:
and her ideal relationship goal is... literally adansey?
i dunno this feels pretty yaoi of adam and gansey to me
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.
Oh hello. I want to talk about the stylistic/textual role of Threes in The Raven Cycle.
Threes – as a general concept and as a number – are a major symbol and motif in the series. Maggie tells us that threes are important from the very first book: from Maura’s favorite saying being “good things come in threes” to Persephone telling Adam that “things are always growing to three or shrinking to three,” threes are discussed at length in the text of the narrative. Maggie also shows us that threes are important as a motif/symbol for important aspects of the story: three Raven Boys, three Fox Way women, three Lynch brothers, three main ley lines, three sleepers, etc. Threes are, textually, incredibly significant in The Raven Cycle, and we know this because we are shown AND told it throughout the entirety of the books.
We all know the significance that is given to threes in the story itself, but what I want to talk about is the usage of a thrice-repeated word or short phrase (going forward I’m referring to this as “Threes” or “a Three”) as one of Maggie’s writing signatures (across the series, there are 65 Threes). This creates a meta level to threes being an important aspect of The Raven Cycle universe. A classic example of a Three (one of my favorites, in fact) is from The Dream Thieves:
“As they walked, a sudden rush of wind hurled low across the grass, bringing with it the scent of moving water and rocks hidden in the shadows, and Blue thrilled again and again with the knowledge that magic was real, magic was real, magic was real.” (TDT, 12)
In a way, the Threes join the intradiegetic (what is happening within the narrative itself) with the extradiegetic (what the narration is communicating solely to the reader). The reader and characters are told explicitly that the number three is significant, important, notable, and powerful. In using Threes as a writing signature after giving the reader that information, the Threes are designed to signal to the reader that this line, this moment, is important.
So the question is: What Are The Threes Trying to Tell the Reader???
Amazing question.
In my recent TRC reread, I was already keeping track of Threes, because I was curious to see how many times they appeared. And then my sister, who was also rereading, said something interesting (after reading this Three from The Raven Boys):
“He was full of so many wants, too many to prioritize, and so they all felt desperate. To not have to work so many hours, to get into a good college, to look right in a tie, to not still be hungry after eating the thin sandwich he’d brought to work, to drive the shiny Audi that Gansey had stopped to look at with him once after school, to go home, to have hit his father himself, to own an apartment with granite countertops and a television bigger than Gansey’s desk, to belong somewhere, to go home, to go home, to go home.” (TRB, 370)
My sister said: “Adam’s like Dorothy.” And then she said: “Wait. Do you think the Threes are like a spell? Or… a wish?”
Which was……. Interesting.
What I have determined, after completing my reread and spending way too much time analyzing this, is that a Three is either a wish, a hope, a longing, a prayer – or, alternately, a warning, a curse, a negative promise.
In either sense, Threes are a foreshadowing of what is to come – whether it be good or bad. Threes exist to signal to the reader that they should be paying close attention to whatever is being said or observed.
Threes in….. Everything Else:
Before we get too far into TRC Threes, let’s talk about the precedent for three being an important number in art, math, storytelling, etc. I found some interesting information about how three is a satisfying number for the brain:
Grouping things in threes leverages the power of repetition to aid memory; denote emotional intensity or importance; and ease persuasion (research by Shu & Carlson (2014) found that three positive claims is the most effective for persuasion).
Three is the smallest number that the brain can still recognize as a pattern, and the brain loves pattern and repetition. This is true in visual art – having three main compositional figures to create a pleasing image – and also in storytelling and narrative. Using threes for repetition in storytelling is a very common occurrence.
Some classic examples of repetitive threes are Shakespeare’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” or Lincoln's “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In each of these examples, a repetition of three is used to create pleasing auditory rhythm. There is something inherently memorable about literary Threes.
Perhaps the most interesting information I found while digging into the precedent for threes is about the rule of threes in folktales. This information happens to come from Wikipedia (side note: Wikipedia is a modern tool of collective consciousness and we should utilize it more). This page describes how in its most basic form, the rule of threes in storytelling is just beginning, middle, and end. Because this is such a common convention, writers tend to “create triplets or structures in three parts.” It then talks more directly about the use of threes in folktales:
“Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folk Tale, concluded that any of the elements in a folktale could be negated twice so that it would repeat thrice.”
This is especially interesting to me. The idea that an element of a folktale “could be negated twice so that it would repeat thrice” shows up prominently in the plot of The Raven Cycle – a book that is heavily influenced by folktale motifs – but also in so many of the folktales/fairytales we all know. A classic example of this would be Goldilocks and the Three Bears – Goldilocks must try porridge that is too hot, too cold, and then, finally, just right. The journey of these three actions is satisfying to the brain because it is a complete pattern: the third and final result of “just right” porridge is only satisfying because of the two “not right” porridges that preceded it.
Getting back to Stiefvater Threes:
For anyone who’s seen The West Wing (and even those who haven’t), here’s a good way to explain what I think the Threes are doing. You know that thing they do during a The West Wing “walk and talk” where two characters will be throwing information and little quips back and forth at each other rapid-fire, and then suddenly, they will both stop walking, and the camera will stop moving, and they’ll say a line that contains really important information that you need to know to understand the storyline of that episode? That’s what Maggie’s Threes are doing for the reader. That’s what 6:21 is doing for the characters. It’s intentional: the writers/directors/actors/camera operators on The West Wing know that they’re throwing a lot of information at you, and know that they need to get you to pay attention to the most important parts somehow, so they do it by forcing the viewer to lean in and listen. It changes the focus and energy of the scene from something with momentum to something that pauses, and therefore makes you pause.
The Threes compel the reader to pause and consider the information being delivered as more important than they might consider it if it was not written as a Three. “Maura’s expression was dark” does not read the same as “Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.” And in a text where characters directly state the magical importance of threes, compounded by three as an overarching motif, there is clear intention and meaning behind these written Threes.
In the context of TRC, Threes act as a fourth-wall break.
They are essentially a way to poke the reader and say: “Are you paying attention? Because you should be.”
These Threes use a symbolic motif – the rule of three – that is already heavily discussed in the text – to get the reader to pick up on the internal motivations of the character who is “wishing” their Three or the narration which is using a Three to foreshadow some important aspect of the plot.
The Threes are like the literary equivalent of a record scratch. It stops you in your tracks, breaking the established rhythm and making you take notice of what is being said in a new way.
Let’s Look at Some More Threes (but just a few don’t worry)!
1. We get a classic Three, and a very Gansey Three, right after the group comes out of Cabeswater:
“‘What about that thing in the tree?’ Blue asked. ‘Was that a hallucination? A dream?’
Glendower. It was Glendower. Glendower. Glendower” (TRB, 231).
Finding Glendower is one of Gansey’s core wishes, one of his core longings. Although this line is a literal answer to Blue’s question – he saw Glendower in the tree – in making it a Three, Maggie has given it added weight and meaning. It is prayer-like in its intention. It is almost an incantation: by saying it in Three, Gansey wishes it into being.
2. In The Raven Boys, after Gansey has bribed Pinter to keep Ronan at Aglionby and has learned that Noah has been dead the whole time they’ve known him, we are given this Three:
“The Pig exploded off the line. Damn Ronan. Gansey punched his way through the gears, fast, fast, fast” (TRB, 311).
This moment foreshadows what directly follows: a distinct lack of fast as the Camaro breaks down and Gansey is held at gunpoint by Whelk. This Three is not a prayer, but a warning, and an indicator to the reader that something important is about to happen. Had Gansey not been trying to go so “fast fast fast,” the car might not have broken down; because the Three incanted it, disaster follows.
3. To return to a Three I have already mentioned, but follows the typical Three structure:
“...to go home, to go home, to go home” (TRB, 370).
In this scene, Adam’s wish is less about actually wanting to return to his literal home, because his house was never really a home for him. Adam’s wish/longing is for a home that he could return to, that he would want to return to. He is longing for a place/feeling/experience that does not exist for him. The Three in this sentence comes after a string of active wishes/longings, and by ending with this Three, it casts a spell of sorts, honing in on the truest underlying wish that Adam has. In using the phrase “to go home” three times, the narrative is making sure you, the reader, know that this want, this need, this wish, is the most Important to Adam, and will drive his actions for the rest of his story.
Most of the Threes feel like this. They are often tacked on at the end of a sentence or embedded in a sentence. They’re an addendum to the action of the story. They’re like casting a spell – once to manifest, twice to charge, three to cast.
…..And Some Other Types of Threes:
Then there are the Threes that don't follow the typical pattern of the same word repeated three times one right after the other, but are still a Three in a different way.
There are short phrases/sentences that are repeated three times throughout a page or chapter. In the prologue of The Raven King, we get this:
“He was a king…
He was a king…
He was a king.
This was the year he was going to die.” (TRK, 1-3)
In this case, the Three acts as a promise of Gansey’s kinghood, but in ending the sequence with “this was the year he was going to die,” the promise of the three is given a condition: it is not going to be a joyful kinghood, but instead a kinghood intertwined with the death we’ve known is fated for Gansey.
One of Adam’s Threes from Blue Lily, Lily Blue, uniquely breaks the mold of Threes in a format that does not appear anywhere else in the four books:
“It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father” (BLLB, 242).
❋ (We’ll talk about this one more in-depth later.)
There are also a few “unfinished” Threes:
In The Raven King when Ronan is having a nightmare (infected by the demon) about Matthew and the mask, he has this Three:
“Ronan’s throat was raw. I’ll do anything! I’ll do anything! I’ll do anythi
It was unmaking everything Ronan loved.
Please” (TRK, 96).
With the uncompleted Three, there is an uncast wish. Ronan’s wish is about Matthew, yes of course, but also about being willing to do anything to keep those he loves (ie. Adam, Gansey, Blue, his brothers) out of the reach of the “unmaking.” This unfinished Three serves to foreshadow the harm that does ultimately befall first Adam and then Gansey as a result of the unmaking of Cabeswater by the demon: without the Three spell completed, his wish is not fulfilled.
*This is Not all the uncommon/mold-breaking Threes, just a few that are interesting!
Do All Threes Come to Fruition???
The short answer is: No. Or at least not in that way.
Once again looking at the text of The Raven Cycle, we are given an answer of sorts. In discussing Gansey’s predicted death, Maura says:
“First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee” (TRB, 155).
This seems to apply to Threes as well. Threes are not a guarantee. They are a promise. Not all Threes come to fruition the way one might expect – or at all, for that matter. The important part of Threes is not that they will definitely come true, it’s that they could come true, because the Three gives them the potential to come true.
Structure, Structure, Structure:
The main Threes structures are:
Three of the same word separated by commas:
“magic, magic, magic” (TRK, 59).
A short phrase/sentence separated by periods:
“My father. My father. My father” (TDT, 369).
A short sentence that is repeated three times throughout a page/paragraph:
“Gansey did not breathe…
Gansey did not breathe…
Gansey did not breathe” (TRK, 209).
A word that is repeated three times and is connected by “and”:
“Round and round and round!” (BLLB, 224)
Italics vs. Non Italics:
Italics in The Raven Cycle are often used for character’s inner thoughts/anxieties. This continues to be true in the context of Threes. A Three that is not written in italics indicates a promise, or some foreshadowing of a plot point being foretold through the Three – it is typically more “real” – whereas a Three that is written in Italics seems to indicate a wish/hope/longing that is unattainable in some way. Italics almost always indicate a Three that may never come to fruition, or at least not in the way the character hopes it will.
An example of this distinction can be found in chapter three (hah) (I don’t believe in coincidences and neither does Gansey) of The Raven King:
First we are met with Ronan wishing/hoping to return home:
“That morning, Ronan Lynch had woken early, without any alarm, thinking home, home, home” (TRK, 24).
This home, home, home, is in reference to the idea of home rather than the reality. Ronan is wishing to return to a home that does exist physically, but is not the same as in his memory – he wants to be at the Barns as it was in his childhood.
Then, in the very same chapter, Ronan actually returns home and we are given this Three:
“Slowly his memories of before — everything this place had been to him when it had held the entire Lynch family — were being overlapped with memories and hopes of after — every minute that the Barns had been his, all of the time he’d spent here alone or with Adam, dreaming and scheming.
Home, home, home” (TRK, 27).
This second home, home, home, is about the actual reality of being in his childhood home – the good and bad that has existed in the years since the childhood he longs for.
The Addition of AND:
The most notable use of “and” is in Noah’s very last chapter:
“Sometimes he got caught in this moment instead. Gansey’s death. Watching Gansey die, again and again and again” (TRK, 416).
When “and” is added into a Three, it becomes circular, cyclical. The “and” gives the Three a sense of infinity, or creates a loop of sorts.
This Three operates in the same way “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” does in Macbeth – it is meant to convey the endlessness of time, a relentless cycle of tomorrows.
❋ While there are not many of these Threes with “ands” in The Raven Cycle, there are other examples of Threes or Three-like occurrences that fulfill the same purpose as the “and.” For example, remember this Three:
“It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.” (BLLB, 242).
In this case, instead of the word “and,” the Three (It was his father) is connected by “he opened the door.” This Three is accomplishing the same feeling as “again and again and again” – the feeling of being caught in an endless loop.
Another example of an (implied) “and” in The Raven Cycle is: Gansey’s life. Gansey starts out alive and then dies as a child only to be reborn, and then killed again through his sacrifice, and then reborn for a final time. Gansey is Alive, Dead, Alive, Dead, Alive. And so Gansey’s life is a cycle of Three.
As with the Threes that contain “and,” Gansey starts where he ends: alive.
Other Ways Threes Show up in The Raven Cycle:
I will state the obvious once again: there are three Raven Boys, three Lynch brothers, three Fox Way women, three sleepers, three main ley lines (the lines that “seem to matter” to Glendower’s story), Gansey the Third (Gansey Three, Dick Three).
There are also the more obscure: the “three kinds of secrets” in The Dream Thieves prologue and epilogue; each Lynch brother inheriting three million dollars from Niall Lynch; the three figures with Blue’s face on the tapestry and later as a vision in Cabeswater; Adam and Gansey going to DC for three days; the shield pulled from the lake having three ravens embossed onto it; Ronan having dreamt Matthew at the age of three; the door to the Demon’s room needing “three to open” it; Aurora Lynch staying awake for three days after Niall died.
And of course, we have the ley line symbol/chapter header:
And then there are the 300 (three hundred!) Fox Way “villain” readings. (This was something that was particularly interesting to me.)
The first antagonist we meet is Whelk. When he comes for a reading at 300 Fox Way, he first pulls the Three of Swords.
When the women all draw cards together, they pull identical cards for Whelk: three of the Knight of Pentacles, then three of the Page of Cups. After drawing, essentially, three threes (the Three of Swords, then two sets of three matching cards) in this reading, the first Three of the entire series appears:
“Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark” (TRB, 124).
The second “antagonist” we meet is the Gray Man, who comes to 300 Fox Way in The Dream Thieves to “observe.” Maura, Calla, and Persephone are predicting which card is on the top and bottom of the stack and the first card, predicted by Calla, is the Three of Cups off the top of the deck that Mr. Gray is holding (a remarkably happy card in stark contrast to Whelk’s Three of Swords).
When the third antagonist, Greenmantle, comes for his 300 Fox Way Reading he also draws the Three of Swords. The fact that each of the three antagonists come for a reading is in itself a sort of Three, but to further the importance of these moments, each of them draws some sort of three-related card.
All of the examples I have touched on have been more symbolic references to Three as a motif of the books as a whole. However, Threes also show up in the literal number of times important quotes are said/written.
I was tracking some of the most well-loved TRC lines to compile them, and noticed that the lines “don’t throw it away” and “safe as life” happen to appear exactly three times throughout the series. This was honestly pretty surprising based on the importance of those quotes – I would have assumed they showed up far more. Actually, they both appear twice in The Raven Boys and once in The Raven King. Threes, and the importance of Threes, is embedded so strongly into the narrative of The Raven Cycle that even the quotes we all think of as the most beloved of the series follow this rule of Threes.
Now, could you chalk some of these up to coincidence? I guess. But Gansey doesn’t believe in coincidences so I don’t either. So what’s the point of all these Threes?
Conclusion???
In a literal, literary way, Threes are a fourth wall break to make the importance of a moment obvious, but I’m not sure what the larger “point” of Threes is. My best analysis comes from the idea of The Raven Cycle being all about time and Threes playing into the importance of time as a sort of record scratch or loop. The Threes, as a stylistic, written motif, seem to connect the time-based cycle the characters experience to the time-based cycles the reader experiences by reading the books.
But my conclusion feels incomplete and so I would like to rely on the collective for this one – just about the most Raven Cycle thing you can do. So I’m asking you, the collective you, what conclusion would you draw? What do you think?
What I do know for sure is that Threes are magic, magic, magic.
For Your Convenience: Here is the textual significance given to threes within the books (chronologically):
And here are the Threes, Threes, Threes (compiled):
(If you made it to the end of all this, I love you. Have a gold star and a hug <3)
thinking about how one of the main themes of tdt is the price of being yourself. like literally every character is facing choices and dilemmas dealing with facing the risk of what it takes to become oneself vs becoming the self you think you’re supposed to be. like:
declan: the price of staying safe and invisible vs the price of being seen.
ronan: the price of fitting in to a world not designed for him vs the price of owning his power.
matthew: the price of being the perfect golden child he’s always thought himself to be vs the price of discovering what he really is.
hennessy: the price of continuing to run and hide from trauma vs the price of facing herself.
jordan: the price of living on the sidelines as just another part of hennessy vs the price of becoming her own person.
carmen: the price of following what she’s been taught to believe is right vs the price of listening to her internal conscience.
adam: the price of being liked for a fantasy vs the price of being known for his true strenghts and vulnerabilities.
even the visionaries as a metaphor for the terror of becoming. they literally oscilate between ages and can either create explosions with their changes or pay the price of letting themselves slowly die for the sake of keeping others safe and comfortable. and the main “villain” of the lace not being a villain but an amorphous thing that is literally just a metaphor for trauma and the things you fear about yourself. bryde simultaneously being someone ronan desperately wants to be and completely fears. like. I could go on and on. It makes me so fucking FERAL
obsessed with the idea that Gansey was never the (metaphorical) “king” of the gangsey court - gansey is a scholar, a scout/explorer, and a KNIGHT - but not the king.
gansey deliberates seeks out every member (ronan by coming to aglionby, adam by his car breaking, blue by going to fox way, noah by dying) directly or indirectly. that, to me, is the kind of action that a knight takes - gansey never COMMANDS anyone directly, he always asks & they follow
HENRY is the only one who seeks HIM out. henry is slightly apart from the rest (again, the way a king is separate); he’s the one who makes a “when i’m president” comment when thats the furthest thing from what gansey would want.
when ganseys dying, HE is the one who commands them to be magicians. he’s level headed (literally standing where everyone else is bent next to gansey iirc), he’s the one who inspires the shift from despair to action - i think narratively speaking henry is the one who completes the court/the final crucial piece of it
i was thinking about the sex dream ronan had of adam and kavinsky in tdt and i was thinking about the implications of adam showing up before kavinsky and i have a theory about that
i think ronan consciously changed adam to kavinsky and let me explain why:
before ronan falls asleep he thinks about “the dark bags beneath Adam’s eyes” (Stiefvater, 235) last which shows that it was on his mind last before he started dreaming
now if you know a bit about dream theory you know that it talks about your unconscious (or the id in freud’s words) that comes up during dreams because usually you repress this. during sleep, however, there is no conscious that suppresses hidden feelings or emotions which causes you unconscious to run wild in your dreams. i won’t bore you with quotes but look up some essays if you’re interested in this!
back to the main thing tho: adam pops up first because ronan’s unconscious finally has the freedom to come up and it takes ronan’s feelings for adam the ones he has represses so far, with it. what is interesting is that you can link the intricate design of the tattoo to the complicated feelings ronan has of adam!
however, ronan is not a normal person. he can (to some extend) control his dreams.
“As [Adam] traced it further and further down on the bare skin of Ronan’s back, Ronan himself disappeared entirely,” (235)
what i think happens here is that the ronan that is looking at dream ronan getting touched by adam takes control back, which makes dream ronan disappear.
kavinsky replaces adam but the “tangled pattern of ink” (235) gets “smaller and smaller” and it becomes a celtic knot, which is a much simpler design than how ronan’s tattoo is usually described
so, i think that ronan replaces adam with kavinsky because it is easier to feel something (anything really) for kavinsky, someone he thinks he deserves because he doesn’t love himself, instead of adam, one of his best friends and the person ronan thinks he is not good enough for.
the simplification of the tattoo signifies not only that ronan’s feelings for kavinsky are simpler but also that ronan sees himself being with kavinsky as simpler than being with adam
of course there is also much we can talk about with the different latin phrases they use but i don’t know enough about latin to make a post about that
okay, this is inspired by an old deleted post by, and a later conversation with @lynchlesbian about the “adam parrish and his band of merry men” line by the gray man, and us wondering what the fandom consensus is on who the real protagonist of the series is and why. i think mstief did a decent job of putting alll of them on the same level narratively speaking, or at least giving them the same amount of space, so a case could probably be made for all four characters and no option would be wrong a priori.
i’ll put the rest under the cut, because this is going to be a little long.
i still wanted to try and break this down with a more thorough analysis. so, i think we should start by the definition of what a protagonist is: the term comes from ancient greek drama and literally means “first actor”, in the sense that the protagonist was literally the character that made the first appearance on the stage and was the focal point of the story. i consulted a number of websites and they all seem to agree on the fact that for most of history and in most cases a protagonist is also the hero, simply defined as the character we hope to see “win”, and the main character of the story. but sometimes the three do not coincide, and there begin the problems, because if they’re not one and the same we need to define separately what a protagonist and a main character are. and academia apparently hasn’t got a single and unanimous outlook on the matter, which makes things a little confusing.
the main character is easier to classify:
it is either the character from whose perspective the story is written (sometimes this is also called the “point-of-view” character – in this instance gansey, blue, adam and ronan are all unequivocally main characters)
or simply the character with the most screen time (again, all four are main characters)
but, as defined in this article, usually a main character is also a character who experiences inner conflicts, and how said character resolves those conflicts often determines how the external conflict is resolved; to avoid confusion, i will call this case that of a “central character”
the protagonist is where things get muddier:
it is the person who opposes the antagonist (this is easy, they’re all protagonists again, save for tdt maybe, where ronan is the protagonist and the other are all co-protagonists)
it is, mainly, the character who is the primary pursuer of the story goal, which affects or involves most of the characters and its the source of external conflict; often the protagonist tries to persuade the other character to follow them in pursuing the goal
it can be the person who drives the plot, the one who makes decisions, who makes things happen and creates action; one writer suggested here that greg, the father of the family, is the protagonist of little miss sunshine because he drives the story forward by driving the car. i don’t necessarily agree with this interpretation, it feels somewhat simplistic, but there you go
it’s also a character that undergoes change, emotional, intellectual and/or spiritual growth, and travels from a point a to a point b, either literally or figuratively; at the end of the story they’re often wiser, more nuanced, better or just changed people
now that we have our definitions, we can start applying them to the characters.
let’s start by the most obvious one, i.e. gansey. if you want my straightforward opinion, gansey is the protagonist of the story; it’s not the answer my heart wants to give, but it’s the one that makes most sense to me. all characters are involved in the main plot, but gansey is the one clear pursuer of the story goal and the focal point of the story. whilst reading, the questions we’re supposed to ask ourselves are, will he find his dead welsh king? will he survive? why was he brought back to life the first time anyway? and, of course, he is the unspoken leader of the gangsey. and when someone challenges that leadership, he acts hurt and offended, like for the most part of tdt where he shuts adam out and feels betrayed by him. actually, in his words, the betrayal feels worse than if it had come from ronan, because evidently gansey wasn’t expecting adam of all people to discuss his central role in their quest. but. BUT. as per our precedent definitions, the protagonist is supposed to change and grow as the story progresses and this doesn’t seem to be gansey’s case. in fact, one could almost say that his main character flaw is his inability to change. he starts at one point in the story and he finishes in the exact same spot. the narrative denies him the possibility to become a better person and rectify his mistakes. and he’s also not always, perhaps not for the most part, the person driving the plot forward, making decisions and creating action.
in fact, that role could be fulfilled by adam or ronan. adam is the first character to create action, because a) he’s the one asking blue out and therefore making their fates intertwine, and b) he’s the one who convinces gansey to go to the psychics about glendower. he also jumpstarts the narrative by waking the ley line, thus setting the magic element in motion. he makes a bargain with cabeswater and becomes the link between the boys and the forest; he painfully learns how to communicate with this sentient entity and he reshapes his future by choosing another tarot card at the table; he becomes the magician, he comes up with the plan to blackmail greenmantle, he finds out how to wake the animals in the valley of skeletons, which later allows blue fo find her mother; he learns to scry to help ronan with his dreams; he’s the one suggesting to ask cabeswater to sacrifice itself for gansey and he’s pivotal in the process or reviving him teaching cabeswater about humanity. person driving the plot? check. he also undergoes a lot of personal change. he frees himself from his abusive household environment, he cuts ties with his family and goes on to live alone and support himself financially; he grows so much as a person, learning to count more on his friends, to let go of his pride, to control his anger, even when he has every right to be angry, and to not vent it out on others, to let himself feel things. so, character who undergoes personal growth? check. but he admittedly isn’t the focus of the overall story, the role is still gansey’s.
a similar argument could be made for ronan. he is the dreamer, he manifests cabeswater, he’s a main driving force of the entire story. as with adam, he changes a lot from the beginning to the end of the books: he starts out by being this ever-angry boy, all sharpness and edges because he’s grieving and traumatised but slowly begins to heal, to find some kind of closure with his father; to free himself from his self-hatred, to accept himself the way he his; he learns to control his dreams and to free himself from kavinsky’s toxic influence; he becomes a better friend to blue and lets himself love his crush, he loses his mother in a horrifying way but he’s there again for his friend shortly after; he becomes a parental figure for opal. so we find ourselves again in front of a character who carries the story forward and has a notable self-growth throughout it. at this point, one could be tempted to say he’s the true protagonist because there’s a novel in the series entirely devoted to him, but it’s exactly his role in tdt that makes me reject this idea. he’s a fundamental part of a piece of the story, a link between the beginning and the later portions of it, the effective protagonist of tdt; but tdt feels too much like a kind of stand-alone book inside the series, and yet again, the rest of the story doesn’t revolve around ronan, though he is, as much as adam, an impossibly central character in a book with four main characters.
blue is, instead, clearly the decoy protagonist: the premise and the first chapters of the series make it look like she’ll be the only main character and the hero of her own story, but going forward she kind of fades into the background, to tumble out of it in bllb, to go back there in trk. she has too few relevant moments by herself, and most of them are concentrated in the first half of trb and the ending chapters of bllb, to be considered a fitting candidate for protagonist role. and as with gansey, she just doesn’t grow that much as the story goes on. which, if you ask me, is a pity because not only she was a very interesting character, she also was the only female character in the main ensemble cast. but, alas, we had to see her fulfill her destiny and kill and one true love with a kiss. me was hoping for a plot twist at the end, but of course that wasn’t my destiny as a reader.
so, to sum things up, this is how i view things: gansey is the de facto protagonist of the story, because he’s the clear focal point of it. but remember point three in the main character definitions? i’d say adam and ronan are the most central characters in the novels, those whose internal conflicts determine how the external conflicts are resolved. and they’re both gansey’s contenders as protagonists. although, i also think that ronan feels comfortable in a defiled position and is quite happy to follow gansey in most occasions, whereas adam openly challenges gansey’s leadership and decisions, and makes his own accordingly. so i get where mr. gray takes his idea of “adam and his band of merry men” and it makes perfect sense to me that he would think that way for what had been his involvement in the story. and i have to say, my heart thoroughly agrees with mr. gray. just this once.
What’s the mood tonight? Me destroying myself with angst and my undying love for Pynch and being simply unable to wait till November for CDTH.
And just, like I know that MS said she won’t break up something she spent four books building up (TY God) but like we all know that she’s gonna throw something in their way of happiness, and I know a bunch of people are taking the fears over Ronan’s death as a red herring, and just like what if Adams actually a visionary! And we know they have these explosive deaths and what if the struggle NS puts for Pynch I’m this trilogy has to do with Adam kind of just excepting his fate and Ronan gripping on to everything he knows because no! Just NO! He never gets to keep anything good, and Adams something real and here and alive and he can’t not be all those things. He can’t not be the person Ronan grows old with.
Just.... they both love each other so much but Adam is quietly excepting his fate becs he always believed he never deserved a good thing for long, and Ronan’s ripping out his hair becs he’s only just begun excepting the deaths of his parents, not this too, he can’t except this too!
I was listening to Open Your Eyes by Snow Patrol while dying over this thought.,
