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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 1 year

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hoping this isn't a ~weird request but i would love to read your takedown/opinions of the failures of TRC as someone who was also reaaaally underwhelmed with how it handled an interesting setup/cast of characters and was left feeling very blah about the whole experience, and i'm having no luck poking thru your tumblr archives if it already exists :) no pressure ofc, enjoying your opinions on the new series regardless! (i personally deleted the ebook after struggling thru the first chapter oops!)

i was going to say "you have caught me on a day when i am crazy exhausted even after sleeping 12 hours so sure why not" but tbh i think that's giving myself too much credit re: my ability to resist this particular flavor of haterade, although it provides a nice justification. disclaimer that i haven't read anything from the original series since right after the raven king came out so i don't remember it super well. but like basically the problems with the raven cycle are two-fold: (1) the first three books are not very good (2) the raven king is the dumbest and most hateful piece of shit masquerading as a novel i have had the misfortune to encounter in my life. like you have to understand i went into this series having had it pitched to me but Dumb But Fun and for the first three books i was having a good time. i was often like "lol this is stupid" but i would say equally often i was like "aw my kids :')" in particular i remember that something clicked for me with BLLB where the books didn't get better but i suddenly like legit loved and cared about the characters and was invested in their relationships in a way where the flaws jumped out a lot less and i appreciated a lot of things stief had done and i made a pynch playlist and started drafting some fic and blah blah blah. and then the raven king came out and it was just, i can't emphasize enough, the worst book in the history of the printed word.

on point the first: the books are not great. stief comes up with some decent lines (funny similes, the occasional spurt of something pretty), and one of the things i will give her is that she can definitely set an Atmosphere (although this skill seems to have gone missing for CDTH) - monmouth manufacturing and fox way both feel like places that are just a bit too interesting to be real but in a nice way. overall though i find her prose weirdly stilted and artificial and tryhard. i think at some point i called her what taylor swift would be as a novelist, back when our most recent taylor albums were red & 1989, and i more or less stand by that - "losing him was like driving a new maserati down a dead-end street" feels like something stief could write, but instead of a 3-minute country-pop song, it's 350 pages of that. also i have genuinely never encountered an author worse at plotting. there's a weird and almost baffling shapelessness to the books that is truly like nothing else i've read in a bad way. like i said this a couple days ago but i felt like it gave me a new respect for every other bad to mediocre novel i had read in my life, because apparently those authors did all have some kind of basic skillset so fundamental i hadn't appreciated it until i read one who absolutely does not. and also the thing i have said before of, every book has a million chapters about the villain who has nothing to do with anything, and every single one of those chapters is boring as absolute fuck. the whelk chapters in TRB are sort of retroactively justified by the noah reveal, which on reflection i think remains the most successful thing she's pulled off, but the others are interminable and completely without reward for the reader.

even fans of the series seem to concede that plotting is not her strong suit, and the things people tend to like her for are (1) her writing, which... sure. i don't think it is good but you do you. and if i am forcing myself to be fair i will say that at the very least she does have a distinct voice and doesn't have that horrible flat YA Novelist Affect that has taken over what i sometimes feel insane swearing used to be a much more vibrant and stylistically diverse genre at least in terms of the things that made their way to my sphere of awareness. so. fine. and then (2) her characters. and like yeah the TRC crew is cute. they're fun. i liked that gansey was kind of insufferable and the books made no attempt to pretend otherwise. i did love classic scorpio depresso bean trauma freak ronan lynch, and i loved how as the series went on he was both a snarling anger machine and an idiot teenage boy with the most embarrassing crush in the world. i liked blue's ambition and her imperfect but passionate feminism. i loved adam parrish's teeth-gritted determination.

and i did absolutely fall for the pynch of it all. ronan lynch, who could have anything he wanted, desperate for the affection of the one guy who had no patience for his bullshit! adam parrish, who saw himself as so lowly, falling for this almost ethereal creature who dreamed beautiful things! the way ronan's main hobby was wallowing in self-pity but the person he was attracted to was the guy who refused to act like it wasn't time for ronan to grow the fuck up. the way adam had such a fraught relationship with anger, his own anger and that of other people, but he saw so keenly through to who ronan really was that while ronan's anger exasperated him, it never scared him or made him feel like he had any obligation but to be his honest self. the way hard-edged ronan dreamed adam lotion for his hands and labeled it in freaking LATIN, the way tense adam started finding a new respect for ronan without ever feeling a need to become more deferential or apologetic. i mean it was good shit. it was such good shit that i really and truly believed that while she was not the greatest writer in the world, stief must have built this particular dynamic between these two people on purpose. she must have deliberately planned for their slow-burning mutual attraction and deepening care to communicate these exact things about what their value was to each other - ronan giving adam space to dream, adam tugging ronan into reality - and while i was pretty sure the last book would be dumb, because all the books were dumb and she'd thrown a lot of balls into the air that she was not gonna catch, and especially because i had the sense she was going to want a neat happy ending which meant either gansey wasn't going to die (boring) or gansey was going to die but everyone was somehow going to be okay by the end anyway (stupid), i was also like, well at least pynch are gonna get together and it's going to be this really nice culmination of both their arcs.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

the short version of why TRK made me feel so wild with rage was that it made extremely clear that everything i had enjoyed about the books up till that point had happened 10000% by accident. pynch is a good example of this. all that stuff i talked about above, all the push-pull dynamics of them, all the stuff that made them a good ship - it turned out that none of it mattered. none of it was relevant. none of it was even worth mentioning. because none of it, actually, was on purpose. adam and ronan get together by making out, which i respect. they do not have a conversation after that happens. not like, they hook up and don't took about it right away. i mean they don't have a post-makeout conversation IN THE ENTIRE BOOK. there is no moment where either of them says or even thinks, like - why this person. which is dumb for ronan because he has been so horny about adam, but hateful for adam because he is out of ronan's league unless we're being very clear about why this is a good fit! the stuff about ronan helping adam normalize his relationship to anger, lmao. nowhere to be found. instead we get gansey telling adam, "don't hurt him." repeat: we get gansey telling adam, who tries the hardest all the time of all people ever and who is half convinced he should be in jail for having feelings, to make sure he is nice to ronan, whose ENTIRE BRAND is "huge fucking asshole all the time for no reason." because ronan is "fragile." which like, sure. he's a half-orphan [at that point] with a fucked up life whose brain tried to kill him two years ago. but adam is an 18 year old paying all his own bills who moved out of his parents' house the day his dad DEAFENED HIM IN ONE EAR, and somehow this does not grant him any kind of special dispensation for care in the ganseyverse. and this is not ever in any way contradicted or challenged or complicated or even referred to later by the text. crime!

meanwhile, ronan... [pinches nose, sighs heavily]. again i said recently that the dream thieves should have told me her hand was not steady on the steering well. because what happens in the dream thieves is ronan meets someone who is like him but bad, and learns from him, and then figures out how to be himself but good. which is a fun sexy idea for a story, but the book fucks it up because ronan is too aware at all times of what a dirtbag kavinsky is and too untempted by his wild ways. there's no real fall, so there can't be a real rise. he fucks up his best friend's car, which he knows is also his best friend's number one most prized possession on earth, and the resolution to that is: hey dude my bad i killed your car but it's okay i dreamed you a copy of it. ???????? that's like parent who runs over your cat and says it's okay because they'll take you to the pet store tomorrow logic [realized in the middle of that i stole that image from sandman sorry]. i mean, in a vacuum, i guess it's not exactly. but like: ronan doesn't address the situation by learning anything about how not to be the kind of person who destroys something of great emotional value to someone he cares about. he addresses the situation by learning how to do his superpower good. this is not emotionally satisfying fantasy writing. it's hollow and stupid. and it's extra stupid because the book's attempt at an emotional resolution later down the line is that ronan needs to... hate himself less. which he can do by... realizing he doesn't hate himself. ??????? once again: empty. unbelievable. stupid. there's no connection there to, like, "now that i hate myself less, i can and should be less of a dick to everyone all the time," much less "one way of hating myself less might be to stop doing things that make me extremely unlikable." just: he hates himself less, he's no longer alone, he can dream whatever he wants, he's cool with his big gay crush now. weak. and like it was weak for me at the time, but reading BLLB i did think: well, the hand lotion. well, the trying to dream up a soul for the dream people. well, the big hug with blue at the end. ronan is growing and changing following his experience. it's kind of a shame we don't get his POV on any of this. but we'll probably catch up with him in the next book.

and again: no. i mean, we get ronan's POV, yeah. but none of it is reflective of someone like consciously trying to break the destructive and harmful (to self and others) habits he had forged in his grief. none of it conveys any awareness on the part of character or text that, like, deciding on purpose to be a decent human being matters. that maybe it's the kind of thing you should commit to before falling into a long distance relationship with someone who probably has PTSD from their abusive parents. that it can be hard, that it's rewarding. none of that. instead - i don't even fucking remember what. at one point he feels guilty about holding adam back and then he thinks, i'm not asking him to stay, just to come back, like ok that makes it so much better. you're just asking adam parrish, a steel whirlwind of ambition, to go to the ivy league college he has just about killed himself getting to because of how desperately he wants to escape the shithole town where he had his traumatic childhood, and then move back in four years' time. which again is not discussed. it's just taken for granted that ronan wants to stay at the barns forever. he tells declan he wants to drop out of high school [a choice being made by an eighteen year old two years after the traumatic experience of finding his dad's murdered corpse] and be a farmer and drive a tractor in circles on the property, which would be kind of funny given that his family farm is populated by dream creatures, except that like the book takes him weirdly seriously and also this is not intended as a metaphor. like his endgame in that series is that this traumatized teenager is living by himself on the barns fucking around and dreaming forever with like 3 friends all of whom are leaving town and zero ties to human reality or goals or desires of any kind and this is treated as a happy ending. even though by the way his mom got brutally murdered eight months before the stupid epilogue. but he's doing fine [stief hates women so bad]. [again it's SO funny that the first dreamer book opens with "ronan realized that his life was totally pathetic and depressing so he decided to move." like there was not this level of complexity present when you wrote the dumb epilogue!]

i keep forgetting about how ronan dreams into existence a weird little feral fawn creature/person and is bizarrely chill about it. also how his mom is his dad's dream and his little brother is his own dream and it's really explicit that his mom in particular does not have a personality of her own but just responds by giving whoever she's talking to whatever kind of person they want to interact with, which is the moooooost fuuuuuucked uuuup thiiiiiing eeeeeeverrrrrrrrrrr, and the books are just like. yeah this is normal and fine. [again sooo funny that in the dreamer trilogy declan is like "unbelievably fucked up that my little brother and mom are dreams." like yeah it is! where did you get that idea maggie. was it in the tumblr tags.]

what else. she ruined blue liking space, which didn't seem possible. blue doesn't like space and want big things because she's a smart spunky girl in nowheresville virginia feisty enough to dare to believe she can make her own life. no. it's because her dad is a tree person and trees like the sky because they grow upwards. whenever i tell people this i have to emphasize how much i'm not exaggerating or making it up. this is what it says in the text. she's like "oh that makes sense." ???????? i dwell on this one a lot because it's soooooo so so so stupid, but also because i think it really encapsulates the thing that makes TRK not just stupid but actively repellant to me, which is that you get the sense reading it that stief thinks it's better when things come from weird magic shit instead of from like real human characteristics and psychology. like for a series about friendship it winds up feeling to me weirdly and grossly misanthropic - none of these people are special or worth caring about because they are human people, it's all because of their magic Stuff. it's all because oh they actually WERE more special than everyone all along, not because of the choices they made but because they were born to it (why is ronan the only one who can take from the ley line without stealing? is it because of the kind of person he is? no. it's bc he's Special). ronan's dreaming, blue's treeness, and then gansey being actually all along a time-shifted resurrected friendship amalgamation creature who felt an instant kinship with his friends, again, not because he was a lonely teenage boy seeking out fellow weirdos to care about, but because they literally had met him before. adam, the only genuinely human character left by the end, meanwhile still is constantly asked by the text to apologize for his existence, not just in the "don't hurt him" scene but in the absolute nightmare section in the end where he goes back to his abusive parents' house for closure(????) and reflects primarily on how ugly and small his trailer was (?????????) and feels startled to discover an instinct in himself to help other adams who might be stuck like he once was, and then immediately conceptualizes this as something blue or gansey would think, which is so hateful i can't even process it. like adam at no point in this last book is acknowledged to have had a positive influence on anyone else even though he's better than the lot of them put together, but he has to kowtow to blue and gansey in his own brain for teaching him (a poor abused kid) that he might empathize with poor abused kids???? when to my sincere recollection NEITHER of them has ever like on the page demonstrated any kind of do-gooding impulse? their hobbies are myth-hunting and unskilled clothing manufacture? perfectly acceptable hobbies for a pair of teens but like? why does she hate poor people and victims of abuse so bad...

the big bad demon that is destroying the town is shaped like a wasp. gansey has a bee/wasp allergy and one time died from bees. these two things are never connected. henry cheng is upgraded to a main character because maggie heard you like diversity and now has a completely different personality than when he was an amiable preppy dbag who happened to be asian. now he has a mother in the mob and a tragic backstory about being kidnapped that taught him that you can't let fear rule your life and if you're scared you should be scared and then do it and be happy anyway, which is pretty good advice for things like an irrational fear of closed spaces that can't actually hurt you but really not applicable to someone who both does literally have a deadly allergy to bees and also has spent the past four years traipsing willy nilly all over the place not even bothering to keep his epipen with him. it turns out gansey's big moral lesson has nothing to do with for example his obsessive desire to control his friends but actually like ronan he just needs to love himself better and realize that his friends care about him after all. please notice again that ronan and gansey, rich boys acting out, need to love themselves more. this is dumb but if this was like the thesis of the whole series i would be like, that was stupid but whatever. but what of adam parrish, a poor abused kid who was abused so hard he is now a poor abused disabled kid? does he get self-love? no. he gets to realize that his rich friends have made him a better person, and be relieved that he's escaped from poverty because of how the aesthetics were bad. I MEAN IT'S SOOOOOO CRAZY AUGHHHHHHH

i forgot when i was talking about henry cheng the scene where blue and gansey go to the asian kids' house and are like "wow such diversity so culture," which is like a nightmare edward said had once. like they're just so excited to have discovered this exotic exciting new world and to learn about things like how henry cheng makes asian jokes because if he says all the bad things about himself first then other people won't say them. and i shit you not, the entire sequence is done in narration, with spoken lines appearing in italics in the middle of descriptive paragraphs, not rendered with dialogue as an actual scene, a technique she doesn't use anywhere else that i can recall and which really serves to just be like... here is this Mass of Asianness, as opposed to being normal about it and being like "here's some asian kids having a party." i haven't seen anyone comment on this technical feature but i think about it all the time because it makes me feel insane. it's one of the few things i've read in the past however many years where i read it and was like "i guess i was naive before about racism." like it's not that i didn't know but i was like, wow in 2016 you can still just transparently have your entire ability to conceptualize scene and narrative totally warped by an attempt to feature non-white people and no one will be like, hey we're all unlearning a lot of stuff but maybe let's rethink this before we go to print. there's a scene where ronan jokes about henry's mixed-raceness by saying "which half" which i do think is stief being unaware of the optics bc she's dumb but still comes across real bad and then there's also a scene where ronan does a "vaguely offensive" imitation of henry's voice which i truly have no fucking idea what the hell that is supposed to mean on a literal concrete basis other than making fun of an asian kid's accent. in both of these cases gansey and blue are disapproving and adam snickers and it's like, ok so pynch is racist now. cool. who asked for this, maggie. and also see above re: i really gaslit myself into thinking that one of the points of this series was that ronan learns to be a better person. my bad! (he sort of attempts at one point to make up with declan about how ronan has treated him so bad and also ronan was obviously his dad's favorite. but like his way of doing this is he gives him a toy he dreamed called a Orb. if i were declan i would throw his Orb back in his face. but like that's how broken the ethos of these books is. a heartwarming reunion between two brothers torn apart by the death of the father that they both equally lost hello declan is also a teenage orphan - and it's just. here's some garbage i got you. i didn't even spend money on it. it just happened.)

in addition to ronan's mom the lady bad guy also dies a horrible bloody death that feels a lot more gratuitously fucked up than any of the man deaths in the series. oh i forgot about how blue's mom is dating a hitman who killed ronan's dad and ronan just like doesn't care about this after the first five minutes at all. and neither does anyone else. and then he wanders offscreen... i forget why. we never get any intel on why blue is destined to kill her first love if they kiss or if that would have happened with anyone but gansey or if she and gansey can kiss after he's resurrected or what. like the prophecy that kicks off the series, and just: nada. gansey sells his beloved home to bribe aglionby into letting ronan graduate and the two of them never talk about this and the text never clarifies whether ronan bothered to graduate or not (and in CDTH it turns out he didn't). like another way this alleged series about friendship is weirdly misanthropic is i really was not convinced by the end of it that these people were friends. none of them are seen ever enjoying each other's company or thinking well of each other outside of the two romantic pairings and gansey going apeshit about how awesome henry cheng is. also gansey's whole big quest for meaning blah blah, like i don't super care that glendower is dead, i think you could write a good book with that moment working thematically even though it does fuck with your continuity because who the fuck were the three sleepers. what was with those birds. (there's a lot of mysterious/spooky shit that never gets addressed and like... again i think you could write a book where that works, i don't like to be prescriptive about this stuff, but again: play stupid games win stupid prizes. write a dumbass book that invests a lot of time in the importance of its magic and worldbuilding, and i will get annoyed when your magic and worldbuilding is dumb as fuck and/or totally pointless.) but it's like ok so then the idea should be that the whole point of gansey's glendower quest was actually an internal one, that the payoff of SIXTEEN HUNDRED PAGES of this is some kind of life lesson or emotional shift or whatever. and the payoff is that gansey realizes his friends love him (which again: but do they though? like do they really?), and that he and blue and henry take a gap year. that's the big exciting finale. a year off before gansey goes to college, with his true love and a guy he first hung out with eight months ago. HELLO? like who gives any kind of a shit about that. about any of this. what the fuck was all this for. this all happened so that two rich teenagers could like themselves better. are you fucking kidding me maggie? hateful!

anyway. i'm sure at the time there was more i was forgetting because this book was sooooo boring and every single thing that happened in it was stupid. i feel like this was very incoherent but in my defense these books are hard to critique coherently because they are, again, so stupid. CDTH from what i remember reading it through the first time and continue to pick up now like hangs together as a book better certainly than TRK did but my experience is such that every time she does something passably right i truly can only be like, wonder how she's gonna fuck this one up to kingdom come.

#askbox #the shmeamer shmilogy #the shmaven shmycle #i had a bunch of stuff under that tag at my old now deleted blog but not this one

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