EXCELSIOR

no plot just vibes

Actually adansey can should and will have a happy healthy relationship and friendship despite being neurotic about/at each other in high school and should continue to be close. 💕💕💕 They love each other deeply and have things in common and will continue to grow together.

when will i get to have a shouting match with my hot rich best friend at a dinner party, leave in a fit of rage, and then wander the interstate on a hallucinatory blackout bender for 24 hours. when will that happen to me

i love gansey so much i love him so much. i love that he’s a fucking wreck for the entire series but so unable to face it that his own NARRATION tricks the reader into thinking he has it together, literally while he is like. narrating panic attacks and obsessive spirals about potentially dead friends and tortured insomnia and borderline hallucinatory sleep deprivation. i love that he comes at everything from a POV of “i want to help :( let me fix :( i love you :(” but has no framework for how to healthily do that bc He Is A Wreck. i love that his most consistent character flaw is that his inability to acknowledge and work on his own issues sabotages his ability to care for other people the way they need to be cared for, i LOVE what that says about relationships thematically, i love him slowly going to pieces in trk, i love that his trk arc is about seeing all the friends he THOUGHT were “worse off” than him get better & being like oh i am alone and going to die and no one will mourn and i can’t fix it and i can’t distract myself. i love that gansey really 100% honest to god truly and wholly loves people and 100% honest to god truly wants to do the right thing and do the best thing for his loved ones but that simultaneously that’s a shield so he doesn’t have to look inward. he’s so well-intentioned and so loving and so inherently kind and his refusal to work thru his own trauma STILL almost ruins him & his relationships bc he projects his own viewpoint of “right” and doesn’t realize he’s doing it.  and bc he cannot separate trauma-based terror from rational terror.  (which is not helped by how terrifying most of his friends’ situations are.) i love that he thinks he’s too privileged to feel pain but that the only way through is to feel the pain and he doesn’t want to do that so he hides behind the privilege. i love that he is simultaneously incredibly strong and crumbling to dust & i love how complex his narration is & i love that the second series read is COMPLETELY different from the first. once you know what gansey has known and been repressing for 3.5 straight books.

not saying a lot of gansey criticism isn't valid but i also think if YOU were 17, previously died and were brought back to life, suffered from insomnia, your parents didn't love you in ways that were helpful to you, hyperfixated on a dead welsh king said to grant three wishes, were in love with all your friends, didn't know how to say anything to anyone without it coming off wrong, had a crush on your friend's ex who is also fated to kill you, were so repressed that your closest friends have different names for every version of you you use for different scenarios, AND wore boat shoes... you too would have trouble navigating personal relationships