Latest Posts by eyecosahedron - Page 2

in a magical forest. straight up “killing it”. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s justr say. My Latin Teacher

there are two wolves inside of me. one is wolf 359. one is wolf 359's clone that i've locked outside my space station in the middle of a solar flare.

is that all? that’s all there is

is that all? that’s all there is

is that all? that’s all there is

is that all? that’s all there is

yeah fuck it i'm making this its own post. basically very long winded (but still not as extensively detailed as i'd like) thoughts on adam & ronan (sort of) & whelk & noah

i remember reading the raven boys back in 2014 (ten years of rot in my brain!) and being sooo disappointed that there was basically zero fandom interest in whelk & noah beyond "omg whelk is evil and awful and terrible, poor baby noah!" when that is not the narrative surrounding them, not really. i feel it's a disservice to both of their characters to do that, especially noah's:

there is nuance there. there are implications. like... it's ALL about the implications!!! we basically see nothing of whelk and noah beyond what's left after the carnage. and it's a theme in trc for characters to have irreparably changed before we ever meet them (gansey, ronan, whelk, noah). we don't know what they were actually like when noah was alive, when they were best friends. when they were tight as ticks. whelk was noah's gansey. what we do know is this: whelk was cheating on his own girlfriend with noah's, which is a shitty thing to do for sure, but we have zero context for that. we also don't know how true it is, because whelk has such a self-inflicted warped view of his past. he keeps rewriting his own memories to think lesser of noah, because his absence hurts that much! we know they were best friends, the same way adam & ronan are best friends with gansey. we know they did everything together.

i'll paste the part where adam is possessed, sorry for the amount of screenshots:

and this line from a bit further along the chapter:

then, from noah's possession scene:

compare this to whelk's recollection of killing noah, and the effects it had on him:

"red lines streaked in the corners of his vision" "in whelk's head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together" "dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself" "somehow invited into his body through czerny's death" yes i am going there, yes i am making that point. i think, to some extent, barrington was possessed when he murdered his best friend. neither noah nor adam get their own pov while possessed, so...

i mean, time is a circle. noah needed to die so that gansey would live. noah had already died, gansey had already lived. it needed to happen, and so it would.

where the difference lies, i think, is in barrington's reaction to being possessed, versus adam/noah. for all that i'm arguing possession, i don't think barry's a stand up guy, he's a kid who's never had good role models (need i pull out the quotes about his shit parents) and who was raised by money and objects and reputation, which is why i think the possession worked. the idea to kill noah might've seemed like his own in the moment, an escalation of the situation he was already in, but unlike adam there was no one to hold him back. in that moment, whelk did truly lost it. he did the unforgivable. but there is no universe in which he doesn't.

for every time we see noah reenacting his death, we also need to imagine barrington whelk, seventeen and shivering. realizing as he's committing the act that he can't go back. perhaps realizing too that he couldn't stop his hands from gripping onto that skateboard, no matter how much he wanted to after that first hit. ("[...] something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.")

there's also adam in this. both him as a parallel to barrington, and as a strange sort of part of noah in a way. adam and noah interact the least out of the main group, arguably, but they too are a two-headed creature; they started out as one singular character and you can sort of tell. something something hands and eyes, something something sacrifice. ronan sort of parallels noah, in that he is not the same lively person we hear about, and he never will be that person again. both are cabeswater personified (although in different ways).

some more things:

"he once had been tight as ticks with his roommate czerny" "only whelk and czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers" "it was possible that czerny's death wasn't for nothing after all" "[...] his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water" (in relation to: "he had been a swimmer himself, once") "czerny, you're in a better place than me, i think" "whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn't laugh this time" "the dry, half-eaten burger on the passenger seat / the first fast-food burger he'd had in seven years" "these days, when whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead" "we were friends"

whelk dying in the same place noah did. these lines:

both noah and barrington look the same in the end. broken, rumpled, forgotten. noah's family will never know his bones were reburied outside of their family plot. whelk's mother, however distant they are, will never be notified that her son has died. i think in a way barrington died at the exact same time noah did; something something invited into his body through czerny's death. basically what i'm getting at is, noah and barry could've been ronan and adam i think, had the circumstances been different. they never will be, but i think about it sometimes.

and there's so many more things i'm not even gonna TRY going into, like noah and whelk both being parallels to gansey (the three of them kings in their own right), or the disparity between whelk talking about czerny vs adele talking about noah, or whatever the fuck is going on with whelk's backstory in general (what's the deal with his mother? how the hell did he get the aglionby job? a random headcanon of mine is that his and noah's search for the ley line lead them to fox way, seven years before the events of the book, and that's partly why whelk refuses to give out his name to maura, because barrington is hard to forget, and easy to trace back)

there is so much to talk about here and i'm so peeved no one is doing it properly... why are we still talking about declan bringing his weekly girlfriend over to monmouth for no reason when we could be talking about whatever the fuck kinda soul-fate-destiny bullshit noah and whelk have!

the most gansey song ever.

"there's something about the dying that feels familiar" fucking unbelievably metal thing to be told. you die and you could swear you've been here before. the last thing you feel before your breath leaves your body is intense deja vu. you've never died before but somehow you know how this goes. you have an uncanny feeling being dead is a temporary gig for you, but you have no idea what gives you that impression. and then you're alive again. and you remember dying. and all you remember is that there was something about it that felt familiar.

This Easter Weekend, Don't Forget To Think About That Time Declan Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Him And Still Showed Up To Mass On Sunday 🙏🕊️✝️

blue sargent <333

lofi beats to study (dead welsh kings) to but instead of lofi girl its a hardworking but wistful gansey 😌

adam is austen-protagonist-coded bc he starts falling for ronan once he sees The House and walks around The Grounds with him.

i need more art of these two together

raven cycle this raven cycle that BLUE KISSED NOAH AS A SYMBOLIC PARALLELISM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HER KISS AND DEATH. HER FIRST KISS WAS DEATH. DONT TALK TO ME DONT LOOK AT ME DONT GO NEAR ME I CANT I REALLY CANT OH MY GOD

I mourn the loss of trc tv like a limb. but like a rotting gangrene limb. im better off w/o it but well I still miss it

Adam Parrish canonically gets dry and cracked skin on his hands, probably enough for it to bleed. He would have heard a hundred times about how it looks like he's been in a fight, a joke that never gets funnier every time he hears it. Adam "Do you think it makes me look tougher?" Parrish. Adam, who goes to punch the wall and just presses his hand against it. Who is terrified of becoming his father.

And, despite all that, still has cracked and bleeding knuckles, without needing to hit a thing. As though, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it, the capacity to hurt was written into his skin- inherited.

declans inspired by this post

I think if we ever got bi declan real it would have been done in like a one paragraph anecdote in his internal monologue about the most boring gay experience in the world and never brought up again. like at some point he would've been like 'once declan had slept with a senator's son, a man with the false american charm and loud presence of one used to getting what they wanted, for the political advantage. he had left promptly the next morning as if merely returning from a meeting, and had spent almost a whole hour staring at guido reni's st sebastian which he had stolen from the dulwich gallery without anyone noticing. the twisting, erotic form of the man seemed untouchably alien to anything declan could reach. what declan had felt the night before was merely a polite transaction - nothing like the passion this saint achieved just by dying' and it would leave us still kinda uncertain as whether or not that means he's actually into men or not

…for ever in my hearth

If Gansey were in PJO he would be a child of Aphrodite because how else could you explain the fact that all of his friends were in love with him.

This man wears exclusively boat shoes, pastel polo shirts, and his school uniform. He implied the love of his was a prostitue. He called Ronan his dog. He has the vocabulary of a 70 year old english professor. He’s a loser who I love very much but he should not pull as much as he does.

He’s got to be pretty.

Electronic music bled into his awareness, reminding him that his body was actually in Ronan’s car. In this other place, it was easy to tell that the music was the sound of Ronan’s soul. Hungry and prayerful, it whispered of dark places, old places, fire and sex.

he loves his younger brothers so deeply he can't function without them. his entire sense of self is predicated on service to his family. he is everyone's least favorite family member. he hates his brothers. he needs to be needed by them because he's never felt wanted. he has the shape of Matthew's forehead and the texture of his curls memorized. goodbye to whatever Declan Lynch would have grown up to be. his mother isn't real and maybe that's why he doesn't love her like he should. keeps an attic full of paintings that make him feel things tucked out of sight where no one can ever see him do it. he drives a 4 hour round trip every sunday to worship a god he no longer believes in because it's the only time Ronan concedes to spend with him. he dates three girls all with the same name and knocks his mother's wedding ring down the garbage disposal. he is a perpetual motion machine, never alone but always lonely. coffee and antacids and sleeping pills so he won't dream. he misses his father so much it hurts. he curses his father's name with every breath. trained so thoroughly to lie that telling even innocuous truths feels like giving something away. "fuck, do not fall in love with this girl." he's his father's only natural-born child. his father doesn't remember his birth. he was the first to love Ronan and so Ronan lived. off the rack suits and italian leather shoes. he wakes up every day wishing he didn't have to. goes to work, goes to school, takes Matthew to organ practice. his mother isn't his mother but his mother left him behind so maybe that's for the best. he gets beaten bloody by the hitman that killed their father and neither of his brothers pick up the phone when he calls to make sure they're alive. he still drives 4 hours to share a pew with them.

when you cycled by, here began all my dreams

if adam was stupid about his pride gansey was stupid about adam DO YOU GET IT

Everyone say happy birthday Eiffel

a very “‘Jesus,’ Gansey said. ‘Christ.’” Christmas to you and yours!

I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but I love that each raven boy corresponds to a horseman of the apocalypse:

Ronan: war (fights anything with a social security number, is also battling his own emotions/fears)

Noah: pestilence (his body/spirit decaying over time)

Adam: famine (often described as hungry, represents a more figurative interpretation of starvation/desire)

Gansey: death (for obvious reasons)

I guess Noah and Gansey could be switched, as Noah is quite literally dead and Gansey could be interpreted as Conquest in place of Pestilence.

anyways, I just thought this was kind of interesting

the raven cycle is hilarious because blue and gansey are living in a coming of age romcom and adam and ronan are living in a supernatural horror film and then when they all hang out it immediately turns into an 80s treasure hunting brotherhood flick. and then they go their separate ways and adam and ronan immediately start battling the horrors again while blue and gansey eat yogurt

TRC gangsey halloween costumes! 🎃🦇

I just love them all so so much

curator!declan art thief!jordan au where declan procures pieces for private collections which are always promptly stolen (by the girls)