#just that it looks cool and that i'm gonna feel like gansey when driving it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

clamityganon · 3 years

Note

girl where is my live blogging. where are your thoughts on trc. I've been promised such things dude I NEED IT PLS DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME

AH FUCK I FORGOT ABOUT IT I ALREADY READ THE DREAM THEIVES AND BLUE LILY LILY BLUE I'M STILL WAITING ON THE RAVEN KING FROM MY LIBRARY

i guess i'll just add in my thoughts under the cut? yeah i'll do that

also i don't know when i got this ask because sometimes tumblr puts my inbox in through a wringer and i get things a lot later than i should. hopefully you find this?

dream thieves

RONANRONANRONANRONAN

i loved his POV. what an angsty dude. what a spectacular thought about the taste of gasoline being summery and sexy.

my favorite so far man it was very nice development for ronan and it was a great look into his brain

the book was nice and fast which sometimes made me a bit confused but it held my attentio

kavinsky's... well, he's kavinsky.

i hated him a lot but since we were kinda made to hate him i appreciated how he was written

the gray man was awesome

i hated him and then i hated him more for trying to get with blue's mom but then i realized he was a cool guy and now i love him a bunch

THE KINKS SOUNDTRACK!! i love the kinks

ALSO I LOVE GANSEY TOO HE'S SO CHILL i'd love to talk with him about old welsh kings and drive around in that shitty camaro

however this book did sort of instill some hatred for adam in me because all throughout the book his point of view was unbelievably whiny

i wasn't a big fan of him in this book especially since i liked him quite a bit in TRB

gansey and adam's little trip out to D.C was a little out-of-place to me personally, but i did like how gansey's whole family cared about adam in their own rich-people way

i know we're supposed to ship adam and ronan but gansey and adam were so gay together i couldn't help but ship them instead

annnnd blue was blue

i like her and i love how her outfits are described but i think more can be done with her, y'know? she's technically the main character but i feel like stiefvater threw her aside in favor of the boys

also her sudden "i like gansey now" emotions were confusing as FUCK throughout this arc. it didn't really make sense to me when she and adam were making moves in the first book

blue and noah have such a great friendship though i really love them together! when they went to monmouth and kissed it was everything they were so so so cute

all in all, it gets a solid 8/10 as a book because of everything we saw through ronan's eyes. his back must ache like a bitch from carrying the plotline

blue lily, lily blue

maura you goddamn idiot. you fucking idiot

i thought she was kidnapped but no? she decides to suddenly up-and-leave to look for a man who left her 18 years ago at the exact same time her daughter's entering her senior year and when another perfectly good man shows interest in her

her note wasn't even specific? nobody knew where she was, nobody had any means to contact her...

hurrah, they found her in the end with blue's dad. was i supposed to be happy for her while her family and friends were worried sick about finding her?

fuck you maura sargent, you irresponsible, rash, fool. fuck you

the "finding maura" plot left me feeling disgruntled and frustrated the entire time but i'm gonna stop talking about it before i put my fist through a wall

adam was a lot better in this book! i forgave him for being annoying because we were finally shown why he was so irritable in the last book

ALSO HIM CONFRONTING HIS FATHER!!! GOOD JOB!!!

blue was blue yet again. i keep saying this like it's a bad thing but do know that i like her all well. the scene on the boat was pretty great, with her jumping in and orla shamelessly flirting with everyone.

but blue and gansey were so weird. one second she's saying she finds him irritable and the next she's trying to kiss him? make up your mind! or don't! just don't confuse him or the readers any more!

persephone, persephone, persephone. i really liked her and they just snipped her off :// i'm glad she got along with adam and helped him out before she died though!

the gray man's employer was forgettable and just plain fucking annoying. i really wish ronan had been able to kill him. what a cowardly, weak man. i expected more from him but in the end he was disappointing.

his wife was a girlboss though and while i hated her i respected the grind she went through to get to the caves.

her waking up the sleeper while ignoring neeve's instructions is probably going to be of significance in the next book but i think it's a pretty wonky ending. not really looking forward to her or neeve's return.

#i'm still fucking mad at maura #acting like a goddamn teenager #anyway i'm gonna cool off with a nice pina colada or something #reggie answers #maki #the raven cycle #the dream theives #blue lily lily blue

2 notes · View notes

arielmagicesi · 7 years

Note

Hi, sorry. So I am new to the st/efvater world, and I've only read one of her books (raven boys), and like I see you posting stuff about her a lot, but only like little bits and pieces, and I feel like I'm missing something and don't understand what's going on cause I'm not really in the fandom; I've just read one book, and don't really know anything about her. I'm sorry, this is rambling mess, but if you could enlighten me a little bit I would appreciate it.

OK I took a while to respond and I’m gonna try to be objective and polite but there isn’t a whole lot of objective politeness in this soul of mine, but I will try.

Maggie St/efvater (I only spell it that way so it doesn’t show up in her tag and annoy people, I’ll just call her Maggie for the rest of this post) is this fairly popular YA author, and she wrote the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, the Scorpio Races, and the Raven Cycle. Her writing is very good (I have some bones to pick about it as a writer but mostly it’s pretty good) and the Raven Cycle in particular has gained a big fandom because it’s an excellent series. I guess you would know cause you’ve read TRB- the concept is unique, it has cool magic stuff, there’s fascinating character concepts, and the teenagers do a lot of realistic teenager stuff like being annoying and cursing and either doing their homework or not, etc. And if I haven’t made it abundantly clear with my posts, a lot of us in the fandom fell in love with the main characters for many reasons, but especially because they represent parts of ourselves that aren’t often represented. Abuse victims who don’t react in a Good Abuse Victim way, poor teenagers who scrape and claw to get out of their shitty towns, mentally ill kids who have ugly unpleasant symptoms, girls who are feminists but whose feminism is a little messy because they grow up in a terrible small town, etc.

Unfortunately, the development of the Raven Cycle fandom online, like the development of ANY goddamn fandom on the accursed Internet, led to some gross pockets of fandom. In the second book, an abusive character called Ka/vinsky shows up, and some heavy subtext suggests that he’s gay and into one of the main characters, Ronan. He’s absolutely awful and monstrous to Ronan and the others, but you know how fandom is, they started shipping it and being like “Ka/vinsky’s just a misunderstood cinnamon roll uwu” and generally being the worst about it. Additionally, some parts of fandom started hating on the two lower-class characters, Adam and Blue, for not always being sweet and nice about the class privilege of all their wealthy friends, and for reacting "badly” to literal abuse and sexism. so the fandom is a mess, yeah

In the second and third books, also, (spoiler alert I guess? I mean if you follow my blog you can’t avoid knowing this haha) it’s suggested and then made all but direct canon, that Ronan is gay and has a crush on Adam. So, like, everyone shipped it because they’re a great ship and it was pretty obvious it was gonna be made canon in book four.

But Maggie interacts a lot with the fandom online, and obviously the clashing of fandom issues like this with any author would lead to some mess, but the way she treated it was....... terrible. She would make jokes about Ronan being Gansey’s “dog” and things like that. She milked the whole “writing a gay character” thing for all it was worth, and would never really say “hey, Adam and Ronan are a romantic thing” but would hint at it constantly, which, if you don’t know, is agonizing to watch when you’re desperate for any representation of your identity. She eventually said “I realize you guys are used to being baited, so don’t worry, the ‘other kiss’ will be between the people you hope it’ll be between” or something like that. And she would talk about Ronan being gay, but never address whether Adam was bi, and god forbid those words were used in the books. In the fourth book, although they do actually kiss and presumably get together, they don’t talk about it, and they never use the words “gay” or “bisexual.” Her excuse was that she’s writing for a world without labels. Leaving aside that that’s bullshit and a straight* woman doesn’t get to say that when we are out here in a homophobic world and saying our labels out loud is a sign of pride, she actually didn’t write a world without labels. The aforementioned Ka/vinsky is constantly using homophobic slurs to describe Ronan, boys at the private school make homophobic jokes, Adam’s dad makes lowkey homophobic remarks, etc. So labels are OK if they’re nasty and negative and used against you, but you’re never allowed to say who you are out loud.

When she gets called out on this whole mess- or a number of other things**- her response is to block people, tell people “if you are hostile one more time you’ll be blocked,” to reply to private posts by teenagers, to sic her army of clueless fans on young LGBT mentally ill readers, to claim that she’s being bullied and attacked, to make vague posts talking about “callout culture” and how it’s mature to avoid “discourse,” etc. I talked a while back about how I’ve made several fully thought-out posts critiquing her, but when I sent her a polite ask about her next book, she replied linking me to one of my own joke posts about “hating” her, making it clear that she apparently has me down on some sort of list of haters or something. And at least she responded privately, so that her other fans didn’t attack me, which has happened to other younger fans before.

She claims to be an ally, but she only really wants the ally points. She’ll talk your ear off about how brave she is for “writing an on-page queer relationship” as a straight woman, but when actual queer teenagers critique her for the way she writes it, she throws a fit and absolutely refuses to listen. She doesn’t want to do the work.

Additionally, she is writing a follow-up series called “the dreamer trilogy” which she drops constant hints about on her social media. It will center on Ronan (naturally, because she’s admitted Ronan is her self-insert and has butchered his character development for the sake of giving him a life identical to hers and fulfilling her fantasies of driving fast cars 24/7 and being an asshole with no consequences) and she’s making it increasingly obvious that none of the other characters we all fell in love with will feature at all. And basically any plotllines we enjoyed, she scraps (often out of spite?), and any plotlines we hate, she makes sure to write tons about (I’m talking about the magical artifact community. No one cares. We started reading for the house of psychics and Glendower and Gwenllian, not the fucking Greenmantles and their haunted doll babies or whatever).

The fandom obviously responded with like “ooh! more Pynch!” because like, fandoms like ships, but ALSO BECAUSE some of us are goddamn LGBT teenagers who are starving for representation and we want to see that “on page queer relationship” she brags about. And yet, at every opportunity, she makes remarks like, “This won’t be a romance. It won’t be the cuddle trilogy. It won’t have relationship drama, that doesn’t interest me. It won’t be fanservice. It won’t be lovey dovey, it won’t be cute, etc.” No, I don’t want fanservice or drama or the cuddle trilogy. But given her history, when Maggie says shit like that, I get worried, as someone who’s been baited a thousand times before. Doesn’t anyone see how awful it is to dangle representation like this? To say “ooh, look, someone who has the same identity as you? Juuuust kidding I’m not writing about it?” She can’t just say what we want to hear, which is “Adam will be there. I’ll say the word gay. I’ll say the word bisexual. Their relationship will be treated as real as Blue and Gansey’s or as any other relationship I write. Not the main focus of the plot, but THERE.” Because she’s not GOING to do any of those things, because writing actual gay relationships makes her uncomfortable. But she can’t say that or she’ll lose her sales.

And when she says all this bullshit about “I won’t write a romance” she gets so much FUCKING praise from her straight readers who think she’s the sun and fucking stars because their shit brand of feminism thinks all romances are equal and romance is insipid drivel and that a feminist book, apparently, is one token white girl who has a pink switchblade being sort-of in the background of a bunch of rich boys fucking around. I’m not saying I didn’t like that very book and that I don’t love that girl and her switchblade, but Maggie has to actually LEARN and IMPROVE and not go backwards. If she wants all this credit for gay representation, she has to actually write gay representation. And if not, I’m not congratulating her for “not writing relationship drama!!!!” because all that says to me is “yuck, I’m not writing gay stuff.” She says “relationship drama doesn’t interest me” and yet she wrote pages upon pages of Blue’s mother making out with a hit man. Relationship drama sure does seem to interest her. This isn’t her taking a Stand against romance, it’s her finding a way to make homophobia seem cool and progressive.

So yeah. That’s why she pisses me off.

*I know I know, “she’s never said her sexuality! How can you call her straight?” On the off chance she’s bisexual (she’s married to a man with kids), that doesn’t excuse her homophobic bullshit. She’s acting like an asshole straight person so yeah I’m gonna call her straight.

**Here are some other problems she’s been called out for and her bullshit reactions:

-Blue is basically the only female character and has no female friends or anything. Maggie says “well none of them had friends!” OK so why isn’t there another girl in the group? Why is her family the only other women who have page time besides villains and other relatives of main characters?

-Gansey gives Adam a lot of grief for not being fond of Gansey’s wealth, but Adam never makes Gansey apologize for blaming Adam for the abuse he endured? Maggie doesn’t have a comment on this, I don’t think.

-In book four, Ronan and Adam make racist jokes at the expense of the One (1) character of color, Henry Cheng. Maggie didn’t address this outright because “spoilers” but made a post about it saying that it wasn’t meant to be a racist joke, it was a throwback to some random joke from book one, and any good reader would know that.

-Blue isn’t a very intersectional feminist, which is fine, but it’s never really addressed, apparently because “all the characters are damn fools!” Who never get any character development except for Adam whose development essentially consists of “I stopped being prejudiced against the rich!” (and lots of other personal things but still)

Yeah, that’s about all I can think of. This didn’t end up being very neutral but I have class in 10 minutes and yeah this is hella long I just wanted to get it all out. I hope I don’t get shit for this, but you know what, anons? Go ahead, send me stuff saying I’m a nasty bitch and should stay away from fandom for criticizing poor Maggie. I don’t even care.

OH AND THEBROKENBREAKINGSEAS: THANK YOU FOR YOUR QUESTION. I know I answered in a horrifically mean tone but that ISN’T directed towards you, you were just asking! Don’t take my words at face value, I’m super biased. If you’re interested, you can go read Maggie’s blog and Twitter account, or other fans’ essays on this, etc. I’m glad you asked! And thanks for still following me after all this stuff haha. I’m normally... nicer? I think? Thanks again.

10 notes · View notes