#yarrow reads trc

[yarrowleef-babbles]

i loved the raven cycle (and TDT by extension) and also i am so infuritated with the raven cycle and a lot of it has to do with the conflict-to-resolution ratio being so very unbalanced

like i think i peaked Fixation Mode between Dream Thieves and Blue Lily, like i was so indescribably hooked on the build up of all this emotional conflict, but what gets me hyped on that stuff is the awaiting of some kind of cathartic resolution to all the interpersonal mess and I was just!! not given it!! the love for each other despite everything and the desire to fix things was clearly there but never properly acted on. because ~they didn't need words~

you know I think maybe you do actually need at least an attempt at words sometimes. i think maybe when your relationships are built on eggshells and the same arguments keep happening over and over, a couple (unrelated to the root of the conflict) grand gestures and knowing looks are actually not a resolution. that's just sweeping the problems under a rug until they inevitably come up again another day when you trip over all that baggage building up underneath

the characters fighting so so much only works if a good amount of time is given later to actually resolving them, otherwise it leaves the whole relationship(s) feeling doomed to fail. which is so frustrating because that's clearly not what its supposed to be about. i'm in agonies

[yarrowleef-babbles]

do i fully understand why henry cheng as a character exists?? no. did it feel a bit late in the game to try and introduce and forge a new bond with a new character? maybe. Is it true he didn’t really do much aside from offer a small plot convenience here and there that likely could have been accomplished another way with some element/character who had already been established??? probably

but like, how am i not supposed to want to know the mind of the weird little freak who, after going through some normal methods of attempting to bond over school politics and parties, decides the next natural step is to throw out subtlety and speed run his way into the squad using the fool proof logic of “lure him into a dark hole, trauma dump my horrifying past on him and then maybe traumatize him a little too as a fun surprise. this is a good plan god i’m so good at making friends :)” 

here is the entirety of my little live reaction notes i kept as i went

and it fucking works. what the fuck. they are on a cross country road trip now. whats wrogn with him. i cant get the mental image of him getting kidnapped at gun point in his underwear and a madonna t-shirt out of my head

narrative purpose be damned, henry cheng can do whatever the hell he wants.

[yarrowleef-babbles]

i finished the raven king almost entirely in a 2 day fever dream and my brain feels fuzzy damn should have recorded more thoughts as they came bc now mind is mush

th. the real dead welsh king was th e friends we made along hte way

[yarrowleef-babbles]

i am going through the raven cycle series, half way through book 2 now, and i am having some Thoughts and Feelings thus far of a “might fixate on this” nature. Nothing to put into an intelligent sentence

But as I struggle to figure out what my Type even is, steadily the list of things that my brain wants in books is: Multiple main character POVs, occasional or frequent law breaking, and mostly of all, dysfunctional found family-type friend groups--basically the emotional core of the story can’t primarily come from Main Character and their Love Interest or else I WILL be bored and alienated. I need the platonic relationships to be given similar or more amounts of angst and drama. it makes my brain go brrr. i want them all to go to therapy so much and i know they all would probably rather die <3 and I love that for them <3333

[yarrowleef-babbles]

wait is it actually canon that the characters in the book *literally* have the existence of noah wiped from their memory??? cause i did not get that at all, i thought the author just didn't have time/didn't feel it was necessary to bring him up again.

i thought everyone was just cynically joking that they "forgot" him because of that, i didn't know people meant it literally

was this confirmed out of text by the author or something or is just a popular theory based on the fact he isn't mentioned again after he passes on...???

and if it is canon...w. why??? would that happen?? how was i supposed to gather that, i don't remember any insinuation about things being wiped from peoples minds when they leave the layline??

[yarrowleef-babbles]

an unfortunate side effect of the dreamer trilogy committing so hard to being a ~stand alone~ series that “new reader can start here!” on is it makes it end up feeling like. an AU?? I do not know how else to describe how it felt reading it, coming directly off the heels of reading the raven cycle like i did

like, there’s such a big disconnect for Ronan, who cannot think in specifics about any of the wild shit that happened in trc, even though any normal person would be thinking about those things and how they were impacted by them more. I remember at one point he off-handedly talked about the past as like “the wild events of his high school years” which could apply to any slice-of life highschool experience. Cause like, that’s not the plot right now, and if you’re treating it as being for new readers, you can’t off handedly mention demons and a whole bunch of welsh mythology and that time your best friend died and got resurrected, or ghosts (which as a result means he can’t mention Noah at all) because it all would require too much confusing explanation for a backstory that would alienate new readers as none of it is relevant to this plot.

But like. This was such a massively important part of Ronan’s life that I don’t know how you can just cut it off and not talk about these life-changing specifics of his weird life so far and have it feel like a genuine continuation of this character. For a moment I legit wondered if he had gotten amnesia somehow after they resurrected Gansey. This Ronan feels like he came out of an AU where nothing beyond the run of the mill weirdness from his dreams happened to him, Glendower wasn’t a big thing, no demon, no ghost friend, Gansey didn’t die, they just met Blue and hung out with her under normal circumstances and had a relatively normal not-unusually magical high school experience. Thats how it feels from how he talks about it

 I do like a lot about the dreamer trilogy!! its just when you spend four books having your central theme revolve around how inseparable these four kids are, there is no way for it not to be weird to not just put them in separate locations (which is fine! i dont think authors should feel obligated to shove in unnecessary cameos when the characters dont have a role to play in this particular plotline) ....but to also have to make it so you can’t think about their relationship in the way it was defined for us (ESPECIALLY for Ronan, probably the most codependent of them all) at all anymore because it would alienate new readers who wouldn’t understand why such a private person like Ronan has friends at all. its weird to the point of being distracting sometimes idk

[yarrowleef-babbles]

someone explain to me why i am so defensive over adam parrish, like I have a personal very very long list of complaints about him as a person and character and yet anytime i hear someone else breathe in the direction of calling him awful or annoying, some knee jerk response in my bones starts internally screeching “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU DON’T GET IT NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT HIM OTHER THEN ME”

[yarrowleef-babbles]

honestly i think Kavinsky has been my favorite antagonist in the series and i low key high key miss him.

rip to a real one, you were a fucking scum bag and i dearly miss the audio book narrator going absolute ham on your weird accent

[yarrowleef-babbles]

so the raven cycle was one of those series i occasionally saw people make posts/fanart about over the years although i knew Nothing about what the actual story was (got it mixed up with six of crows before i read that too, only knew them as "fairly popular YA fantasy-ish series named after corvids"... and the amount of times i called it "six of ravens")

i also had a terrible time figuring out who the boys were and how many there were and what their names were as a result. i just kept seeing the first names and last names used back and fourth so my brain contained a jumble of "adam ronan gansey parish lynch richard noah" and it was ANYONES GUESS what was a first name or last name and what the correct way to combine them was. i had no idea who the characters were so i couldn't connect them to anything (doesnt help that ronan is the only somewhat consistantly recognizable character, everyone else could be drawn identical for all I know. straight up still dont even know what adam/gansey/noah's hair colors are. Adam has been described as "pale/fair" and "brown" skinned within the same book i'm--)

this persistant name-blindness was hell when i started reading because it took me many chapters to remember which boy was which, i combined Gansey and Ronan together a LOT somehow. couldn't figure out who was related or what anyones relationship was literally had to look up a schmoop summary. this is largely because i didnt realize the POV was switching, i thought it was just Blue and One Guy. even now i am STILL swapping gansey and ronan's names around even though i definitley now know them as distinct people. maybe i will finally have it down by the last book lmaooo

usually name blindness isn't such a problem unless i'm watching like, anime, something with a lot of names that i am not familiar with and so don't stick in my head. but i guess these pretentious rich boys all also have names i am unfamiliar with so they blur asjssjsjdsjjdj

[yarrowleef-babbles]

today i made the awful mistake of listening to the end of mister impossible at work, because i was too impatient to wait till i got home and can i just say I HAVE NEVER SO ACCUTLEY FELT LIKE I WAS GOING TO THROW UP

I HAVE TO JUST GO ON LIKE THIS??? BEING NORMAL?? FUNCTIONING??? WHAT THE F U C K

[yarrowleef-babbles]

maggie stiefvater fucking gets me i think

[yarrowleef-babbles]

y our hon nor. your honnorr the y meaan so mu ch to m e. and i do no t liKe. the dar k cloud of foreshadowing ov er the futur e of their relationship h e L P

[yarrowleef-babbles]

update: i am in fuckign shambles ((:

[yarrowleef-babbles]

FELLAS I AM FEELING VALID IN THIS CHILLI'S TONIGHT

thinking emoji???????????? THINKING EMOJI?.???????????????!???!?????

(it case it needs 2 be said, when i make speculative live-blog thought posts like this, i Do Not want anyone to confirm or deny or give me hints about what happens later, unless i specifically ask plz and ty)

ANYWAY jumping off that last post, one of the things I consistently saw in fanart before i knew anything was a queer pairing involving...SOMEONE, couldnt say who since my memory is being filtered through a me that couldn't keep any of the names straight. I ALSO could not for the life of me tell if it was *actually canon* or if it was one of those instances of a fan pairing getting really popular and taking over fanworks, even though its just ""subtext"" in canon (which often translates to 'the characters hang out a lot'.....i'm not *mad*, i have simply been mislead and then disappointed by canon when it comes to fandom habits like this more than once)

but it felt so consistent that i THINK it may have actually been based on canon. so i have spent this reading wondering who and how it was going to manifest

like is Ronan having vaguley homoerotic nightmares about Adam but twisted up and colored through the Catholic Guilt(tm) filter or am i reading it wrong lmao

[yarrowleef-babbles]

not me literally forgetting about the whole “her seeing him means she might be the one to kill him” thing, I guess that’s probably it a little bit, but like. I still think she could tell him that her family member saw his ghost or something. Just seems like a very important thing to Not Tell Someone At All because you’re feeling awkward idk!!

i am going through the raven cycle series, half way through book 2 now, and i am having some Thoughts and Feelings thus far of a “might fixate on this” nature. Nothing to put into an intelligent sentence

But as I struggle to figure out what my Type even is, steadily the list of things that my brain wants in books is: Multiple main character POVs, occasional or frequent law breaking, and mostly of all, dysfunctional found family-type friend groups–basically the emotional core of the story can’t primarily come from Main Character and their Love Interest or else I WILL be bored and alienated. I need the platonic relationships to be given similar or more amounts of angst and drama. it makes my brain go brrr. i want them all to go to therapy so much and i know they all would probably rather die <3 and I love that for them <3333

[yarrowleef-babbles]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO0000OO0000OOOOOOO000OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGGGGG

(it case it needs 2 be said, when i make speculative live-blog thought posts like this, i Do Not want anyone to confirm or deny or give me hints about what happens later, unless i specifically ask plz and ty)

ANYWAY jumping off that last post, one of the things I consistently saw in fanart before i knew anything was a queer pairing involving...SOMEONE, couldnt say who since my memory is being filtered through a me that couldn't keep any of the names straight. I ALSO could not for the life of me tell if it was *actually canon* or if it was one of those instances of a fan pairing getting really popular and taking over fanworks, even though its just ""subtext"" in canon (which often translates to 'the characters hang out a lot'.....i'm not *mad*, i have simply been mislead and then disappointed by canon when it comes to fandom habits like this more than once)

but it felt so consistent that i THINK it may have actually been based on canon. so i have spent this reading wondering who and how it was going to manifest

like is Ronan having vaguley homoerotic nightmares about Adam but twisted up and colored through the Catholic Guilt(tm) filter or am i reading it wrong lmao