Call: ANIME IS COOL!

Call: ANIME IS COOL!

Alastair: Constantine used to like anime

Call: Daaaad can we have a dog??

Alastair: Constantine used to have a wolf which is basically a dog

Call: Dad I'm boooooored

Alastair: Constantine used to be bored sometimes

Call: *tries to smuggle fruit loops into the shopping cart*

Alastair: Constantine used to complain about the lack of fruit loops in the magisterium

Call: I'm thirsty

Alastair: Constantine drank water sometimes

dressing everyday like im about to embark on a quest to find a dead welsh king

Idk why no one talk abt Finn and mr. Shue relationship in this fandom.

Like Shue being Finn’s Anderson in the beggining of the show and then both growing togheter, Shue being the father Finn never had and when Finn becomes a “professor” in season four and starts dressing just like mr Shue the person Who helped him to be Who he is and inspiration.

Omg i think i will never get over them

Befriend someone is so scary like What if them have been dead for seven years?

it's been a month and a half since I finished the trc series and while I'm still in that nice fic-binging portion of the post-book phase, I've been somewhat unsuccessfully trying to put together my final thoughts on it. so I'm gonna try to do it in writing instead.

I'm not usually a big fan of reading criticism in fandom spaces, so I'm just going to put all my thoughts under a read more and if anyone is interested in reading this: this has been your fair warning.

overall, I obviously enjoyed the books. I think my very first assessment to my s.o. of it the night I finished trk was: good writing, really good character work, excellent world building; so-so plotting.

so here's the plotting thing. just before I read trk I stumbled across an interview with the writer that made me sort of uneasy, and gave me an ominous feeling that turned out to be completely accurate. she told the interviewer, "Secrets and tricks, that’s all I’ve got," and immediately I got the inescapable feeling: this is an author who thinks they're really smart, and wants you to know they're really smart, and they are going to finish the books in a way that makes you think they are really smart, for all the wrong reasons.

let me preface by saying: not every question needs to be answered in the final book of the series. some questions are meant to keep you wondering, and that's fine, as long as they're not integral to the plot. why did the gang find one of the pig's wheels in the mysterious lake? don't know, and it's fine that I don't. iirc, ronan even mentions it at the end of trk and thinks to himself that maybe their adventures with the ley line aren't finished. cool! loose ends!

but some questions are integral to the plot. and in the trc's case, too many of them are left unanswered, to the point where I didn't get even a hint of that 'ooooh, the foreshadowing' feeling you expect to get when everything is finally resolved in a clever way. it left me with the feeling that the writer wanted the book to feel smart and mysterious by using all these tricks and secrets, and then overshot her own abilities to tie all of these tricks together into a cohesive plot, leaving more holes than material.

1. Glendower & Co.

the glendower plotline is one of the most disappointing things I've read in a while. I'm SORRY, but it's true. I love mythology! I loved the potential of this! I don't even mind that he ended up being dead all along - that's fine, if not a bit expected imo. the real magical favor was the friendship we made along the way etc. etc.

but if you really, really think about it, he ended up serving no point to the books. the trc series would've been virtually the same if gansey was obsessed with researching the ley lines themselves for the magical aspect of it, and ended up stumbling upon cabeswater in the exact same way, and wandered around in its caves, and the demon was awoken. glendower could've easily been written out entirely.

OR: the glendower story could've still served a purpose while being dead. they literally woke up both his magicians - gwenllian and artemus - and even drew parallels to two of the main characters by calling ronan and adam "gansey's magicians", but BOTH OF THEM served no purpose to the plot? at all?? I would've even accepted them not serving direct purpose, but instead helping further along blue's character arc. except blue spends three books wondering about her biological father, has one (1) conversation with him, finds out she's a half tree-spirit and... that plotline goes nowhere, enters the game way too late, and doesn't tie in to much else in the end.

or instead, the writer could've leaned into the obvious hint-dropping and played out the reincarnation plot that was lying in waiting. but as soon as the hints about gansey actually being glendower started being too heavy, I knew it wouldn't happen. because again: a writer who wants to come off smarter that their readers won't drop hints that their readers can easily decipher (even when sometimes it's definitely the right thing to do, to improve the reading experience).

the glendower pointlessness pokes more holes in the story. why did noah become a ghost? not every dead person in henrietta does, clearly. presumably, he became a ghost because gansey was dying at the same time. but why? "You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not." gansey heard this glendower line because time is a loop, etcetera; noah whispered it to him before he passed on because he knew he was supposed to, because gansey already told him. but if there's no glendower magic, only ley line magic, then the whole "balance" thing was supposed to be that gansey got to live because noah died. except noah didn't die. presumably #2, noah didn't die (yet) because he was supposed to trade his life for gansey's, which he does, at the end of trk. but what all this means is that noah traded his life for gansey's twice, both when he got stung and when blue kissed him, at two different points in time. and we still have no explanation, or even a hint of an explanation, for what powered the ghost thing.

2. Prophecies

in the raven boys, we get several prophecies: one, from the fox way psychics; blue will kiss her true love and he will die. two through five, from the dreaming tree; blue will kiss gansey, in his aglionby sweater, and he'll ask her to kiss him knowing it'll mean his death. adam will cause gansey's dying and his friends will turn on him. gansey will see glendower lying in his grave. blue and gansey will almost-kiss in his car and talk about wanting to just pretend they can.

in the raven king, ronan says the prophecies in the dreaming tree aren't prophecies at all: "[They're] Nightmares. [...] When I dreamt that tree, that’s what it did. Worst-case scenarios. Whatever mindfuckery it thought would be most likely to mess you up the next day.”

except, blue's vision is an exact match for the kiss scene in trk. gansey's vision about glendower is an exact match. their combined vision about the almost kiss is an exact match for a scene in bllb. all of these come true.

so one of two explanation has to be true: ronan is wrong, or the writer ret-conned herself into a corner so she won't have to deal with the last vision. but this is an internal conflict - if ronan is wrong, that means adam's vision is a prophecy, and it just never gets addressed properly. did he really change his fate by sacrificing himself to cabeswater? how? what was supposed to happen, originally? and if the future changed, what was the point of showing the vision to begin with...? it's very possible there could be a reason, but seeing as it's never presented to the reader, it brings me back to the writer wanting to be smart more than she cares about the reading experience.

3. Henry

I'll probably get hate for this, but that's okay. what the fuck was the point of henry?

don't get me wrong: he's a fun character. I'd argue that he's not significantly more fun than the fox way ladies, or mr. gray, or any of the other side characters that didn't get a huge amount of focus and certainly could've, but it's less that I'm mad about henry than the fact that I'm mad about henry's patchwork insertion.

henry gets mentioned for the first time in bllb, and only gets actual action in trk. that's fine. another side character. but in a sudden, unexpected turn, he goes from cameo to main character that is present in all of the big plot moments, is suddenly in the gang, and is tied into gansey and blue's future post-canon...?

if henry was so important, he should've been written in from the get-go. I cannot be expected to care about a character that turned up in the third act of the play. if henry wasn't so important, but serves as a plot device in the fight against the demon and/or a character replacement for noah (like we're in a disney tv show and when a character gets written off another is written in as their "archetype" replacement), he shouldn't be given so much screen time and should definitely not be there at the culmination of the story (gansey dying).

I just couldn't bring myself to be as excited about gansey's plot in trk - when, arguably, trk IS about gansey's plot - because most of gansey's chapters were spent on trying to sell me on henry. and like, he's fun! he ends up deeper than he looks! the toga party chapters are... fun...? but I didn't see the point, and so couldn't bring myself to care all that much. and now whenever he's in fics I resent him, and that's sad, because it's for no reason at all. if he just got treated as the minor character he is, I would've liked him so much more.

CONCLUSION: I might add more points when I think of them. lol, sorry. this is a rant, not an actual review.

I can’t stop thinking about Declan lynch