The Barns - Tumblr Posts

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

- The Dream Thieves, Chapter 20

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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so i’ve been reading up on my irish mythology for a possible post-trk fic i have a chapter written of but am still v much developing and i was thinking conflict etc. and it struck me that while the fandom sees all those sleeping cows at the barns and thinks about ronan lynch’s soft farmer potential, when you think about magic + cows in irish myth, cows are literally the whole cause of the epic mythological war that dominates the ulster cycle - the táin bó cúailnge (which translates to the cattle raid of cooley). like fantastical/magical cows are the helen of troy of irish legends i stg and in my mind niall lynch, being the obnoxiously showy fucker that he was, who we know was knowledgable when it came to irish folklore as he passed it on to his sons, is the sort of guy i can see creating this dream herd of cows and deciding to dream himself his own super magical bulls, pulling donn cúailnge and finnbhennach out of his dreams and back into life aka the two bulls queen meadhbh & king ailill mac máta of connacht throw down over.  like i now think of these cows ronan has grazing, and how the gangsey view them in this idyllic way, and then the complete chaos their existence could actually instigate 

god can you imagine being niall's lawyer

niall: i want to leave a few million dollars to each of my sons and the rest to maintaining my house and wife

lawyer: weird way to say that but all right

niall: she's going to go into a coma when i die, you know

lawyer:

niall: also i want my middle son to have the house, but if he ever goes inside it, bankrupt the little shit

lawyer:

niall, brandishing a scrap of paper: also here's this sentence in a nonsense language. work that in somewhere

so i haven’t posted any ronan lynch jams in a while, and while this isn’t being added to my magnum opus ronan headcanon & playlist of alt abrasive techno & electronic music, this is 110% a bygone lynch family favourite that niall used to pump full volume to his sons at every opportunity

irish punk-grunge about the troubles, how could he not? 

even declan wasn’t able to resist howling along to “it’s the same old theme/since 1916/in your head, in your head, they’re still fighting” 

(also niall’s parenting relied heavily on proclaiming “this is not what the men of 1916 died for” whenever any of his sons did something dumb because he always thought this was hilarious sorry i don’t make the rules)  but maybe “another mother’s breaking/heart is taking over/when the violence causes silence/we must be mistaken” cuts a little too close to the bone these days 

Also a quick note to say that generally Irish people think of Irish pipes as Uilleann pipes or I guess elbow pipes? We don’t call them bagpipes as they’re generally thought of as the Scottish pipes, and Scotland is associated with their pipes to a greater degree imo so yeah bagpipes make us think Scotland. I know in trc when they visit Thr Barns we’re told about a set of bagpipes in the corner, but either this is because of the fact that this chapter isn’t written from Ronan’s perspective, and so we’re getting a skewed cultural understanding of what the Uilleann/elbow pipes are, or Maggie doesn’t realise this. But yeah it just looks weird when people talk about bagpipes as an Irish instrument, even though it may be technically true, we just don’t refer to them as that most of the time.

I’m just chiming in to say that Ireland has the second highest tea consumption per capita in the world behind Turkey, the UK coming up behind us in third, but obvz that UK figure also includes Northern Ireland. So what I’m saying is the island of Ireland is full of absolute tea fiends and I can fully see Niall passing this on to his family. 

pynch tea parties binch like just ronan fixing himself and adam a cup of fucking tea 

in the middle of the night when one of them had a nightmare

or when it’s 3am and adam can’t sleep bc he’s worried about school and ronan says ‘fuck off you’re gonna stop studying now’ and makes him some chamomile tea

when they get home from a long drive and it’s a stormy afternoon and ronan puts on a fire in the fireplace in the living room and they sit and drink tea and watch films

rose hip tea for adam on misty mornings at the barns when it’s fall and the air is crisp and he wraps himself in one of ronan’s hoodies and leans against the back porch railing, and ronan comes out a couple minutes later and snuggles up to adam from behind whilst his cuppa steeps way too fucking long left inside on the kitchen counter and he ends up having to water it down a LOT because ew bitter

just pynch drinking tea together, okay?

This is bringing me back to my Irish Wolfhound hc & I thrive.

when pynch babies are old enough to start going on solo adventures Ronan dreams them a huge black dog to follow them around and keep an eye on them and like. scare off any wilder dream creatures roaming the barns. The dog though does become a problem when it can’t like, follow them to school our inside most buildings and can be overprotective and Adam is like “Ronan.” and Ronan is like “Yeah, yeah I know.” aka ronan eases up about being a secretly overprotective dad and the dog chills out. 

Ronan likes to make daisy chains and Noah isn’t complaining