Oldsaints - Monsters.

I bought a Marquee board

Neil: I've been running my whole life.

Andrew: Then quit running. Stand up for yourself.

Neil: Okay.

Neil: *tries to fight everyone and everything*

Andrew: ...................

Andrew: I've made a huge mistake.

the quote “while i’m gone, dream me the world” becomes so much more tragic if you realize gansey knew he was going to die and he was literally going to be gone forever and he knew how self-destructive ronan was and he didn’t want ronan to ever stop dreaming or lose his magic because of him even if he was dead

There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters

“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying

“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.

Imagine this: Ronan Lynch kisses with his eyes wide open because otherwise he is afraid he might be dreaming

It’s because they’re in his bed at Monmouth and he’s had this exact dream so many times. 

At the Barns it’s different. At St. Agnes it’s different. Hell, even naps in Cabeswater are different. Those are places he inhabits with wakefulness and awareness. The awareness that comes from being amplified by a place and feeling too big for your skin. 

But here he simply is. Here he is not a king or a god or a worshiper. Here he is a boy who dances with sleep, sometimes leading and sometimes following. Who knows the cracks on his ceiling like he knows the back roads of Henrietta. Who sometimes dreams of tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact. Who wakes up alone. 

Who just this evening had tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact and then passed into dreaming alone. Who woke up just now with sleep bleary eyes and a glow-in-the-dark clock (not a dream, a gag gift from Gansey) telling him that it’s just after 3:30 AM and Adam Parrish is still next to him. 

Here, amidst his haphazard collection of impossible things, an impossible boy. All those dreams and he had never once dared to hope…

But it has to be real, doesn’t it? That’s what waking up means, bringing yourself through to fruition, reborn every day with weight and want and need and. Being. Knowing. 

He knows. He thinks he knows. He traces his finger down the slope of Adam’s shoulder where the shine of pale skin in the light of the streetlamp bleeds into the shine of pale sheets. Dreams bleeding into reality. 

Hope is a form of dreaming, right?

Adam stirs and Ronan pulls his hand away. He doesn’t mean to wake him, would never mean to take him from sleep any more than he would mean to take him from anything else Adam finds important. 

Adam wakes anyway. He rolls onto his side so that he’s facing Ronan and looks at him with heavy lids. He yawns and stretches and settles again and reaches out to run his hand gently over Ronan’s head. The pleasant tug of his fingers against Ronan’s short short hairs is so satisfying. Adam’s hand comes to a rest against his cheek and Ronan tilts his head into it, body heavy with sleep but still drawn to Adam’s touch like Adam’s gravity and the earth’s gravity have equal weight. 

They don’t. The tug of Adam is so much stronger. 

“You’re awake,” Adam says, voice low. 

Ronan hums his reply.

“God,” Adam says. He takes a deep breath and then exhales, long and slow. “God, god.” And the word sounds different every time. 

God, the dark suits you.

God, I never knew there was touch like this.  

God, our bodies are a riot in the quiet night. 

Ronan agrees, but words are insufficient, so he kisses Adam instead. Because he wants to. Because he wants to prove that they’re real, that this moment is made of flesh and blood. 

Adam closes his eyes, already halfway back to sleep, but Ronan keeps his open and clings to this. 

Up close Adam’s freckles blur into one another. His eyelids twitch with the restless movement of his eyes beneath them. Ronan slides his hand around Adam’s lower back and pulls him closer. Adam’s eyelashes flutter, then still. They fan out large against the gentle slope of his cheek. 

He of impossible being. He of passionate boyhood. He of crackling magic straining against the frame of one of the people Ronan loves the most in the world. He, he, he. 

It was always going to be a he, Ronan knows now, but he feels lucky that it’s this he, that it’s him. That Adam wants him back. That he’s willing to tangle himself up in Ronan’s sheets and Ronan’s limbs. That he’ll give parts of himself to Ronan, parts he’d previously been holding so tightly.

So Ronan keeps his eyes open, watches for the threshold between asleep and awake, and makes sure to keep his promise to find Adam on either side of the divide. 

The Mirror

The Seeker

The Magician

The Dreamer

The Ghost

THE GANGSEY

weird noises: happen in the wee hours

me, unaffected: the only supernatural and ominous force in this place is me and i was here first, so whatever and whoever you are you need to Go

Why The Raven Cycle isn’t getting any diver$ity cookie from me.

This contains mild spoilers, and text from The Raven King.

The way Henry was introduced in BLLB was unforgettable. We saw him making an offhand rape comment. This is pretty common. See All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic where their lone!good!moc could be seen making the same proclamation throughout the series. I am willing to let it slide, maybe, this is not about race.

Moving forward to The Raven King, we get to know Henry Cheng better. He’s half Chinese and half Korean. His mother Seondeok is a Korean dealer of illegal antiquities. White authors can’t seem to write East Asians without associating them with mob, yakuza, and mafia? Another example: All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic

This is the part where it gets nauseating. 

“Principles? Henry Cheng’s principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter,” Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry’s voice: “Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics.”

Blue saw Adam both smirk and turn his face away in a hurry so that Gansey wouldn’t see, but it was too late.

“Et tu, Brute?” Gansey asked Adam. “Disappointing.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Adam replied.

It was explicitly stated Henry’s second language is English. I’m going to assume Ronan is mocking the way Henry speaks, the intonation or accent of his voice. Whichever fucking way I look it is racist. Nobody even called Ronan out. The gross thing, the author made it into an “inside joke” for pynch.

This didn’t end right there. We have another pynch scene where they made a punchline out of Henry’s ethnicity.

“Adam made puerile jokes at Henry’s expense (He’s half Chinese? “Which half?”) and sniggered clannishly; Blue called them on it (“Jealous, much?”): Gansey told them to put aside their preconceptions and think about him.

Really? This made into the final publication? Minority’s ethnical identity isn’t a subject for crass puns.  Blue and Gansey’s meek intervention is not going to pacify me. I’m not here for this. Once again, this become a “cutesy” pynch scene.

These vile ~scenes~ about Henry’s otherization serves no purpose. It doesn’t contribute anything to the plot. You can reason out the narrative is implying Adam and Ronan are jealous (of Gansey’s new attachment to Henry,) but the author could’ve made a different approach of executing that. This is deliberate.

Another troubling scene with Henry and Blue

It was this: Blue, teetering on the edge of offence, saying, I don’t understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself. And Henry saying. I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time.

Great another Korean character written by white author who might or might not be experiencing internalized racism. Sounds familiar? See Ellen Oh’s intake of Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.

I see a lot of bloggers here are now clamoring for Henry, maybe it’s because he’s greatly sculpted, or because he’s Asian and his characterization speaks to you. If your reason is the latter, I have news for you. There are plenty of Asian authors specifically Chinese, and Korean, who are out there doing a spectacular job at it. Here are some of them; Jenny Han, Renee Ahdieh, Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Ellen Oh, Maureen Goo, Marie Lu, Lydia Kang, Amy Zhang, Celeste Ng, S. Jae-Jones, and more.

ALL FOR THE GAME MOODBOARDS → DAN WILDS

“we’ve lost enough, don’t you think? it’s time to win.”