A Brave New World; Or, Why I Dont Want The Barns To Be Ronans Endgame

a brave new world; or, why i don’t want the barns to be ronan’s endgame

let me preface this by saying that i absolutely loved the raven king. i stayed up two nights in a row to finish it and haven’t stopped freaking out since. like any other book/media/you name it, it’s not perfect, but overall, i think it was the book we wanted and the book we needed (or at least, it was for me). it was just so much more and so much better than i expected, especially with regard to the relationship between adam and ronan.

however, there is one thing in particular about the book’s implied endgame - or what a large part of fandom perceives as the endgame anyway – that really rubs me the wrong way. i’ve tried to rationalize it, but honestly i’ve accepted that i’m just not fine with it on a personal level, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon, so here’s my two cents: i am really, really not okay with the implication that ronan is going to live at the barns forever, and adam is going to move in with him right after college.

while trk doesn’t really give us any definite answers regarding the future of these characters (which is the way i like it, honestly; more freedom for us to imagine), it feels like we’re supposed to think the ideal ending for ronan is staying at the barns permanently, and most of fandom has latched on to that implication. i’m not here for that– and this is why.

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The demon kept pulling him unconscious, and in those short bursts of blackness, the dreamer snatched at light, and when he swam back to consciousness, he thrust the dream into reality.

...

Ronan clawed briefly back to consciousness; flowers spilled out of the car in shades of blue Gansey had never seen. Ronan was frozen in place, as he always was after a dream, and black oozed out of one of his nostrils. 

Gansey had never understood really what it meant for Ronan to have to live with his nightmares. 

He understood it now.

There was no time. 

- The Raven King, Chapters 63 & 64

Photo: Phillip Seymour Hoffman “Dream House” BY Gregory Crewdson

“Scratch a bit at the thin topsoil of Irish Catholicism,” the saying goes, “and you soon come to the solid bedrock of Irish paganism.”... paganism and Catholicism in Ireland are joined twins that can not be separated. They are not opposites, as archaeologist Proinsias MacCana has pointed out, for in Ireland pagan ways and beliefs formed an “extraordinary symbiosis.” ...paganism and Christianity in Ireland need each other to live.

Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

New song added to my Ronan Lynch’s Mixtape headcanon playlist. I mean “Traumprinz” means “Dream Prince” so... 

Only now that Ronan had been away from home could he see how full of dreams it was. 

- The Dream Thieves, Chapter 20