Fyi I Just Finished Six Of Crows, Put The Book Down, Left My Apartment, And Am Now Trekking Through The

fyi i just finished six of crows, put the book down, left my apartment, and am now trekking through the cold and rainy dark to pick myself up a copy of crooked kingdom before the shops close because there is no other choice

big m00d - maybe it has something to do with the prevalence of "irish" culture globally? i mean the majority of that is some kind of contemporary Stage Irish-ness™ & harking back to an imagined ireland that doesn't really exist, largely for the benefit of the admittedly massive irish diaspora & their descendents to try to connect their roots to (9-10 million people born in ireland have emigrated since the 1700s and we have a minister of state appointed to our diaspora) (i could also talk about how appropriating faux irish culture is used as an excuse for a drunken good time and further adds to the general simulacrum and muddying of how people view ireland/irish people, but that sounds tiring to me so i’m not gonna). I mean even as far back as like 1910, Desmond FitzGerald recalled visiting the Blaskets to learn Irish and observed the linguistic landscape in writing: “There in that Irish-speaking district one could, as it were, watch the progressive death of the language. Not only was there a difference between the language of these old men from pre-Famine days to that of the middle-aged men, but also between that of the middle-aged men and the younger generation. The old men spoke Irish all of the time, even when they went into Dingle; the middle-aged spoke Irish at home in the village, but Englsih when they went to town. And often even in Ballyferriter one would hear the younger men [only] speaking English together.” In 1910. Like the area he visited is still one of the most active Irish-speaking regions in the country but the effects of british colonisation weren’t entirely ceased with irish independence and the celtic revival movements that were entwined with it. The Blaskets haven’t even had any permanent residents since 1953, there’s no one even there to speak that variation of the language anymore.  The thing about living in a postcolonial country is that you’re still living in the detonation site of a cultural bomb, the effect of which “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their untiy, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves... It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own.” [Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 3]   We were colonised by the English for 800 years and live in a post-colonial world in which English is the third most spoken language. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) - and as Irish has been strangled and smothered progressively over centuries, as barely anyone in the country learns it as a first language, as it’s dying and misrepresented and misunderstood, there’s understandably a sense that there are more practical languages to learn to expand the limits of the world. Even Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator himself, viewed “the old language [as] a barrier to modern progress.” I mean, in an ideal world, reviving our language, which has shaped the hiberno-english we speak and is a part of our heritage, would be more of a priority for us as deconstruction of the limits imposed within our identities by colonialism. But like I’m saying this as an Irish person who has barely any Irish, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

(woops i wrote a lot)

tl;dr Irish is Irish, not Gaelic, and also very few of us can even speak it, so having Irish characters start philosophising romantically as Gaelige to impress the people around them usually comes across as completely and utterly ridiculous and drenched in cringe 

PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here. 

there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in. 

adam has dissociated in the series? i dont doubt it, just do you have any examples? thanks !!

It’s largely referenced off-screen, but there are big Cabeswater-influenced moments of dissociation as well (which is a really great look at how this series combines pre-existing mental illness with magic tbh).

 Pre-Cabeswater, there’s this, which is fairly straight forward:

Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else.

and this scene after Adam is deafened, which is a bit more implied/something you can recognize if you know what depersonalization looks like:

“Nice Transformer,” Blue said. “Is that the police car one?” 

Adam looked at Blue, unsmiling, as if he didn’t really see her. Then, a moment too late, he replied, “Yes.”

The delayed response, the blank affect, and the single-word replies are all classic signs of dissociation. 

After Cabeswater, this gets twisted up in Adam’s connection to the forest, but it’s still clearly a thing that he did before Cabeswater–his panic response to his father is to shut down entirely and start to see the situation from outside of himself. Look at the scene where Adam’s dad shows up at St. Agnes.

Before Adam’s father shows up, you have Adam analyzing what had just happened in the church. He’s very clinical in his thoughts, but no more than Adam usually is–he’s considering what just happened, what effects it might have had, why Ronan might have reacted the way he did, and what Adam should do about it. Complex, analytical thoughts that are still cognizant of emotion and what/why Ronan might have felt that way. It’s two or three large paragraphs of text.

And then we have this:

Adam check to make sure his hands were no longer bloody, and then he opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” his father was saying.

Adam’s body wasn’t his, and so, with a little wonder, he watched himself step back to allow Robert Parrish to enter his apartment.

Again–cut and dry depersonalization. His body is not his own, his thoughts slow down to repetition and simple, basically constructed sentences, and his narrative becomes passive instead of active (see “his father was saying” instead of “his father said”). 

In the narrative Adam seems to exist outside of himself, and the text is dehumanizing with things like “Adam was a thing standing out of the way” and “his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made”.

And then there’s a continuation of the repetition trick, which always reminds me of the scene in TRB where Persephone says she’s going to use as many of Blue’s words that work as she can. Adam’s not thinking clearly on his own, and so he negates the things his father says in his head:

“You gonna look in my face when I talk to you, or you gonna keep looking at that shelf?”

Adam was going to keep looking at that shelf.

and

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

That was how it was going to be.

and

“Are you not going to say anything?”

Adam was not going to say anything.

Again, his brain is not processing coherently. He goes in and out in this chapter–he starts to analyze the idea of the restraining order clinically, and then has the thought “He did not want to get hit. He did not want to get hit. He would do what he needed to do to not get hit.” Then he hears Persephone’s voice, then he remembers Cabeswater, and then he is able to say, “I think you should go.”

The Adam’s dad starts calling him a shit and saying horrible things, and Adam goes away again:

Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones. 

The narrative goes on like that–swapping between Adam’s dad’s hateful speech and Adam speaking to Cabeswater, which is trying to comfort him, until the thorn sticks his father and “brought Adam rushing back to himself”. 

And finally, you have the end of that chapter:

Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks. 

He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.

When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.

Adam’s very clearly using Cabeswater to cope, as a safe place to retreat to away from his body, and he does it in the same way that his brain does naturally in response to extreme panic or trauma.

I know that a lot of the time people look at this and say, “Oh, right, so you added in a kid who depersonalizes and turn it into some magical bullshit instead of real representation,” but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that this is the addition of magic to Adam’s life twisting its way into his mind’s coping strategies; this is Cabeswater heightening what Adam does on his own. 

But yes, it is absolutely canon that Adam depersonalizes in moments like this.

I just finished The Raven Cycle and I am L I V I N G for your accurate-Irish!Lynch content. and pretty much all the rest of your content ngl.

This is the best mail I could have possibly hoped for! THANK YOU! Tbh this is what I thrive on and is definitely more than a smidge self-indulgent so I’m v glad to hear other Irish trc readers are enjoying my musings 💞 I’m sure there will be many more to follow so do join me for the hibernian discourse

kavinsky: look, if you don’t want to date me, and you say you don’t want to date gansey, then who?

ronan: 

PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here. 

there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.