🍇 share a snippet with food(or the palpable lack of food) !
Thanks for sending this!! I went with palpable lack of food for Blue like don't forget about me
Reality slips sideways while Jo is describing the look on Mrs. Reece’s face after she found her at dawn sipping a slurpee on the front stoop of the group home. Nash is smiling at her, too pale, too skinny, but he’s smiling and so long as she keeps up the silly stories he’ll keep smiling, on God.
Then there’s a blue flash, a tingling all over that makes her brain feel buzzy, and when she blinks everything is different. Most noticeably, Nash is gone. It’s dark, the air is no longer comfortable but sticky and hot, the cake that had been listing to the side the longer it sat out has been replaced by a thick layer of dust. She touches the place it was a moment ago and retracts her hand, fingers gritty.
She sits perfectly still, goosebumps stark on her skin while the animal part of her brain screams that something is very, very wrong.
“Nash?” she whispers.
Is she asleep? Was it all a dream? Is she going to wake up to Mrs. Reece frowning about the finicky thermostat and complaining about the landlord’s son and his lack of initiative as she rouses them all into motion to prepare for church?
She digs her fingernails into her arm but everything stays the same. Carefully, she stands and moves for the light switch. The lights don’t come on.
It’s like she slipped into a parallel universe, but even if that were the case she would expect Nash to be here.
“Nash?” She tip toes through the kitchen where a horrible smell is wafting from the fridge and pauses at the foot of the stairs. It’s black as pitch up there. Fear curdles in her throat. “Nash?”
She puts her foot on the bottom step. “Nash!”
He’s not up there. Stupid. Of course he’s not up there. He wouldn’t ignore her like that. Especially not when everything is so…
She tries not to look around as she sneaks to the front door. She doesn’t know what she’s hiding from but everything is all dark corners and wet dusty air and she doesn’t know how she got here or where her brother is. It doesn’t hurt to be careful.
The front door is locked, something they never do, and when she opens it the sticky swelter of the Tennessee summer night crawls over her. Crickets, bull frogs, and buzzing insects replace the horrid silence of indoors while trees lush with leaves sway in an unfelt breeze.
She’s breathing heavily now, tears pricking her eyes. It was spring before. The trees had only just sprouted their leaves, but now when she looks she finds them already shedding. What’s going on? Where’s Nash?
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I wrote a giant Raven Cycle analysis
Hi! Over the last year or so I've been working on a sort of essay about various themes in the raven cycle series, and I finally finished it a few weeks ago.
It is titled: "Why I love The Raven Cycle - An excessive analysis of the themes of friendship, queerness and growing up".
And since tumblr loves its meta (and bc I love peer validation) I've decided to start uploading it bit by bit here, making this the masterpost (if I can figure out the logistics of the linking lmao, bear with me)
(beware of spoilers up to greywaren starting at like 3b!)
Introduction
What even is the Raven Cycle?
Trust me, the characters are queer as fuck and I can prove it
a) Blue Sargent
b) Gansey
c) Adam Parrish
d) Ronan Lynch
e) Noah
f) Henry Cheng
g) Honorary mentions
The Gangsey is a polycule
Analyzing the reoccurring themes
a) Friendship
b) Being a teen/growing up
c) (Found) Family
d) Magic (as a metaphor)
e) Further themes I appreciate
Drawing a conclusion
Click here to start with the introductory parts!
1. Introduction
So here’s the thing: I love fiction almost as much as I love my friends. There’s something deeply comforting about the escapism, even if the book actually makes me want to scream and throw it on the floor (only one book has been thrown so far, I promise!). Fiction is a healthy thing to occupy my thoughts with: headcanons! Quotes being on loop in my brain! Just fandoms!
And for me, if I am hooked on a book (series), it does not even need a good plot where a lot of things happen. In fact, I would say that my enjoyment of a book is made up of 30% plot and about 70% characters and vibes. If the characters are bland, if they do not make me feel much emotion, it likely won’t be more than 4 stars (additional info: I am way too nice rating books!). I really, really need to love the characters, to be able to relate to some aspects of them, or it just won’t become an obsession.
Since I have already started explaining that a bit, let’s look at this question: What is important to make a book special to me?
1. I need to cry reading it.
2. I have to think about it often, even weeks to months after having read it.
3. Obviously, I need to love the characters.
4. I need to be in the fandom! This can be hard with some books, but the internet is a whimsical space allowing you to find at least a small number of people who are obsessed with a work of fiction to a similar extent as you are.
Now, why am I elaborating on this so much?
It’s because The Raven Cycle did all that for me. It is my favorite comfort book series at the moment, for all those aspects mentioned, but of course I cannot just leave it at that.
No, I wrote a whole-ass analysis on headcanons and some of its themes. You’re welcome.
2. What even is The Raven Cycle?
The Raven Cycle is all I adore and live for (next to my friends).
So, naturally, it’s a book series, specifically a four book young adult contemporary fantasy series by American author Maggie Stiefvater.
The books in question are: The Raven Boys (2012), The Dream Thieves (2013), Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014) and The Raven King (2016), and yes I will admit that the publishing dates are a bit of a red flag.
There is also the very relevant follow-up series called The Dreamer Trilogy (Call Down The Hawk, Mister Impossible, Greywaren), but it’s a lot less easy to get into that here as I do not know these entire books by heart, so I’ll stick to the original tetralogy here.
To stick to red flags, the books are set in the fictional Henrietta, a rural town in non-fictional Virginia, US, in the 2010s.
However, that doesn’t really say *that* much about the plot, so let me summarize that really quick, because I can do better than the official synopsis! (Or let’s pretend I can.)
Blue Sargent comes from a family of psychics, yet she does not have any powers of her own. Even worse, she is a bit of an amplifier for the others, meaning she is always somehow but never directly involved in the business. As if that isn’t enough for an identity crisis, every psychic she has ever met has told her that her kiss would kill her true love. Yikes.
But because she is that amplifier, she comes to a church watch on St. Mark’s Eve, where psychics see the spirits of those to die within the following year. It’s important business, but to her it’s really just staring into the dark.
Until she does actually see a spirit: That of Gansey. Of course this is not a coincidence. No, to add to this teen’s mount of problems, there are only two reasons why a non-seer would see someone’s spirit: They are their true love, or they killed them. Or, in Blue’s case, maybe both.
The aforementioned Gansey is Henrietta’s Golden Boy, the son of politicians (read: he’s fucking loaded). He does not run with the Republicans though, he runs with dead Welsh kings, meaning he has been searching for the probably dead, presumably sleeping Welsh king Glendower (*1350; †1416; yikes) for the past like seven years. Why the fuck would he do that? Well, legend says that he will grant a wish to whoever wakes him, and our favorite PTSD-ridden guy really wants that favor.
Aiding him are fellow Aglionby students Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch and Noah Czerny, plus Henry Cheng, though only a lot later in the series, but I really did not want to leave out that menace (affectionately) here.
The paths of Blue and the boys cross because of Gansey’s search for Glendower, plus the fact that Blue works at a popular pizza place, but that’s a lot less whimsical.
And, well, there’s the implication that Gansey might also be her true love, but perhaps she just kills him because of his bad fashion sense, it would be justified.
Anyway, in true Famous Five fashion (Ronan is the dog; I won’t elaborate, the girls that get it, get it) they are of course not the only ones searching for the king, so it’s not completely a wholesome friend bonding activity all the way through.
Be prepared for: friendship and growing up, lots of treasure hunting, family mysteries, magical forests, illegal and slightly distasteful activities (our favorite of course), but most of all, heavily queer-coded (or even canonically queer) characters. Be Gay, Do Crime.
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Happy Blorbo Blurbsday!!
Do any of your character's names have a special meaning? If yes - who and what? If no - how then did you choose the names?
<3
CJ
Happy blorbo blurbsday!! Thanks for sending this 🥰
Usually all the thought that goes into character names for me is:
It needs to not get annoying to write it all the time
It needs to be a reasonable number of syllables if I'm going to have to read it all the time
It needs to be either unique or entirely mundane (I almost always swing toward mundane for secondary and background characters lol)
So you have to understand my surprise when I realized that I hit it out of the park with Nash and Teddy. They're inverted!! Nash is the big soft teddy bear and Teddy is the feral little ghoul gnashing and clawing at the furniture. I'm so pleased with myself.
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⭐️🎶
Thank you!!
⭐ - share a snippet where a character is the best at something. This is from Blue like don't forget about me. Nash is the best at detailed paperwork and taking care of his sister.
Mrs. Sweet is staring at [Nash's] binder with wide, alarmed eyes. “Who told you that you needed to go to the doctor? That’s not something we—,”
“Nobody, ma’am, but I thought it would reassure… I thought you’d want to know I’m not likely to drop dead from some kinda illness or…” He shakes his head. “I was only covering all the bases. I need you to know I’m a fit guardian. Without question.”
“Hun, this is above and beyond what we— Is this a physical evaluation from the army?”
“Yes, ma’am. Not that I’m going to enlist,” he assures her quickly. “I just thought you’d appreciate seeing an evaluation from a fellow government entity and the recruiters are always lurkin’ around so…”
He shrugs. It was a bit awkward at the end when he declined to enlist and asked that they remove his contact information from the database, but it was worth it to pad out his credentials with something official looking.
“Why…” Mrs. Sweet flips through several pages—his birth certificate to show he’s American born, his budget painstakingly detailed to the penny, and a letter of character attestation from Lori. “Honey, you didn’t need to do this much.”
“Yes, I did.”
Perhaps he says it with too much force because she snaps her teeth together and frowns at him under a furrowed brow.
“You seem to be under the mistaken impression that my mother did anything other than run the diner in town and get plastered at the bar when her shift was up. I don’t mean to imply that we weren’t grateful for the paycheck or the fact that her implied presence kept the government off our doorstep, but nothin’ much has changed ‘round here ‘cept that now I have to prove to someone who don’t know the first thing about me or Jo that I know how to do the things I’ve been doing since I learnt to walk. Jo is in the state she’s in thanks to me. The house isn’t a pile of moldy splinters thanks to me. There’s food in the fridge and toilet paper on the roll thanks to me. That’s the way it's been since—,”
He barely stops himself before he admits he’s been driving to the deli in town since he was ten. He had to sit on the phone book to see over the wheel and could barely work the pedals, but Jo was hungry. What else was he to do?
He can also hear his accent getting thicker as he draws closer to losing his temper and it only serves to fan the flames. He hates the way he sounds when he’s angry. He hates that it gets him dismissed as a dumb hot-headed hick.
He clears his throat. “What I mean to say is, I’ve been taking care of Jo my whole life and don’t mean to stop. As far as I’m concerned nothin’ has changed except that we’re a paycheck short and if you flip to page six you can see I’ve more than made up for it by—,”
She closes the binder. “I believe the tea is ready.”
He glances back at the pitcher. It’s respectably dark, but…
She softens. “I’ve seen all I need to see Mr. Owens. Now please, a glass before I drive back to the city would do me some good. I’ll submit my formal review and you’ll hear the result within the next week or so.” She puts her hand on his forearm. “Your sister is lucky to have someone who loves her as much as you do.”
He spends the following nineteen days holding his breath and waiting by the phone.
🎶 - share a happy moment. ANY happy moment. You must have ONE. This is a sfw snippet from a smutty parkner one-shot about baseball pants 💖
“I was trying to sound hip,” Peter grumbles and crushes down his empty water bottle.
“You? Hip? Darlin’, you said, ‘right-o’ before you went down on me. There’s no hope. Give up.”
“I— No, I didn’t.”
Harley laughs. “I’m not arguin’ about this. You’re a dork and a nerd and a geek all rolled into one unbelievable sexy package. Take the gifts you’ve been given and quit bellyachin’ for more.”
“I’m going to pretend I only heard the part where you think I’m sexy.”
“Whatever craws your dad.”
Peter glowers at him then makes for the passenger seat and yanks open the door. “Don’t start with your weird southern slang.”
“You can’t bridle a horse once it’s out of the barn, sweetheart.”
Peter throws himself into the car with a sound of disgust and only then does Harley allow himself a smile. Somehow Peter hasn’t cottoned on to Harley’s game of inventing silly sayings purely to get his goat, and he’s in no hurry to end the torment.
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