#and i believe scholastic has a lot to answer for wrt ruining TDT

[kindnessinsilver]

Okay I put this in the tags if another post last night but deleted it bc it wasn't actually the place and I'm gonna share my thoughts but might not even tag this idk.

Re: that post abt the trc fandom disappearing post greywaren

First: I like a lot of the dreamer trilogy. I pretty well liked greywaren. I'm not as attached to either as I am to trc, but I did genuinely enjoy them.

Second: I am a trc fandom baby. I am a fandom INFANT. I got into these books about 3 weeks before Greywaren came out, and got to Greywaren about 3 weeks after it came out.

Third: They ate my brain for 3 months. I read TRC twice in the space of two weeks, then TDT, with greywaren specifically twice in a row. I then followed with Scorpio Races and All the Crooked Saints. I genuinely coukdnt read anything not Stiefvater for THREE MONTHS bc my brain was like "this is where the dopamine lives, nowhere else".

Third: I also read a fair amount of Maggie's blog and her thoughts about the series, including the notes that came out right after Greywaren was published. I've read 11 of her books. I own the writing seminar she put together and have watched about half of it just to listen to her talk. I like her art a lot and think her music is neat. I am Not Normal about Maggie Stiefvater.

So. Given the givens, my thoughts. The post I saw was the one going around about how the fandom died after Greywaren came out. I can't really speak to this bc I couldnt look at the tags until I finished Greywaren. So I only really know the fandom post-Greywaren. TRC is what brought me back to tumblr tho, after probably 4 years of only casually being interested in what was happening over here. I needed people to yell with and I found them here.

What I can speak to and apparently cannot prevent myself from speaking to is a lot of the notes on that post. There was a lot of talk of her being bored with the series, of wishing she had taken more time, of feeling betrayed by it not being the series she wanted/she had promised.

I am in many ways a Stiefvater apologist. I am. Yeah, she was probably kind of bored with the series. She was overwhelmed. It was 7 books and 10 years, and she was tired. She's stated that she's never going to write a series again. She's over the whole concept. Series are hard, the final book in a series is especially hard. I think we can look at George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss for truth there.

And maybe it feels as tho she should have gone the way of those 2. Not finishing the story, or putting it odd for longer to get it right. But a- I feel like that actually would have sucked more and gotten her more shit, and b- I have a feeling it wasn't an option given her contracts. And taking more time was probably not an option given her contracts. She had signed on for 3 books, possibly within a timespan, and three books she had to give them.

As go "this wasn't the Ronan series she promised" and "I hated the universe/big pieces of thr plot", we go back to the scholastic contracts. They didn't let her write the story she wanted. She had different titles she wanted, there was a whole different plot and vibe. The fucking Moderators weren't her idea. And yeah this comes directly from her statement post greywaren publishing, where she still had to be careful and still needed to sell books, but personally I believe her. If you've ever listened to her talk about writing, you know she has specific stories she wants to tell. Stories that matter to her and feel important. She'll make concessions based on marketability or what she believes the audience would like more, but she wants to tell a specific story. And she didn't get to do that with TDT and I think it pissed her off more than she let on.

I also think it's pretty fucking clear she isn't super happy with Greywaren. She literally nailed a copy of it to the wall. Like pounded a handmade wrought iron nail through a hardback copy of the book and then put it on the wall in her study. She was soooo fucking done. And it might feel like a betrayal of her readers and the series to be tired of the series and to give us a book that feels tired of and annoyed with the series, but she's a person as well as an author. She has opinions and desires and things she does and doesn't want to be doing. And for the sake on contracts, commitments, and not disappointing readers, she kept writing books she maybe didn't care about anymore. There's enough neurodivergence in the fandom that the difficult nature of that should make sense, right?

I saw at least one person say they aren't going to get any more of her books, and like obviously that's a choice you get to make, it feels like a shitty one. Personally I'm pretty excited to see what she does next. She's apparently working on a fairly long adult novel that's got her excited again. I love reading stuff written by people who are excited to be writing it, so I think this none is gonna be a good time. But idk, her writing style just makes my brain go brrrr.

Also i don't know how relevant is to the point I'm making but I still need to say it:

Idk how many people know/remember/consider that 2 of these seven books were written and published while she was like. Actively dying. Or suffering from a condition that was pretty damn close to killing her. TRK and CDTH were written in the fucking height of her symptoms while no one was paying attention and getting a dx was really fucking hard. She talked about putting a lot of her experience with illness into Ronan, and Addison's is a disease of lack of energy and sleeping too much and missing a lot of your own life because of it. And maybe thats why Greywaren felt right to her, and maybe that's why TRK and CDTH feel different to the books before and after them. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it all and my hyperempathy is getting the better of me.

Idk yall I just. Like Maggie.