A Kingdom Or This

I know what you are.

Firmly saying “That’s my wife!” and knock someone out in one punch

@morocorra BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT ABOUT THIS

well, i definitely did not, let's talk about Adam impersonating Gansey

so there's a lot to unpack here, obviously, and i am of two minds on the matter. well, ok, i'm of more than two minds. at least three or four minds. i'm conflicted, is what i'm saying here. there are pros and cons to this whole little sequence.

let's start out with the obvious: it was SO unnecessary. they literally didn't have to do this. it doesn't line up with anything in book canon and it didn't serve much of a practical purpose within the show canon that couldn't have been covered elsewhere.

if i recall correctly, in the books, the information about Whelk's father's embezzlement was given to the reader through the narration in Whelk's POV chapters. we don't get that kind of exposition handed to us on screen, we need to see and/or hear it more directly somehow, but it would've been fairly easy to either show it as part of the Noelk flashback sequence or to just have Noah or Whelk outright tell us/another character about it.

usually i'm all for showing and not telling, but sometimes it really is as simple as "my dad got arrested, the bank took all our money, i needed the glendower favor to get it back". instead of using up 20 minutes of screentime on having a main character sneak off, disguise himself as someone else, charm his way into city hall to illegally access police records that i don't think realistically would even be available at city hall in the first place, and then bring that same information back to his friends while refusing to provide them with any context on where or how he got it.

(honestly, he probably could've just fucking googled the Whelk name. was there no press coverage for this at all? come on, man)

so anyway, none of this needed to happen. like, i can see why they thought it might've been a more interesting way to convey that information, but really it just robbed us of a lot of their already very limited screentime. they crammed two whole books into 8 episodes and wasted our time with THIS??

on top of that, it's just........it's absolute UNHINGED behavior. i've seen some people say that it feels out of character for Adam and, yeah, honestly, i agree, at least to a degree.

it's not that book!Adam doesn't want to wear Gansey like a skinsuit. he absolutely does and he's really fucking weird about it. he gets to harvard and cosplays as Gansey so hard that even Ronan is like "dude wtf are you doing" but the thing is, book!Adam would never do it consciously and intentionally. that boy would rather chew his own arm off than recognize/acknowledge/admit how badly he wants to BE Richard Campbell Gansey III. he would literally rather die.

so for him to be on our screens, dying his hair dark and stealing Gansey's clothes and wallet and introducing himself as Dick Gansey to state employees is WILD and feels so so wrong. like, no offense to the writers, but Book!He Would Not Fucking Say That.

-sigh-

however. canon is canon, and he did, in fact, fucking say that on our screens. and i'm gonna be real here, it makes tv!Adam look even more like a complete fucking sociopath than book!Adam ever did adlkjfgh. like, what a batshit psychosexually charged immoral thing for him to do. especially because not only did he use Gansey's name while committing a crime, but he also used Gansey's influence, name-dropped his mother, and promised the county clerk a FAVOR from a US senatorial candidate if she broke the law for him. idk if that's ever gonna come back up again, if it's gonna be relevant and cause problems in later seasons, but even if it doesn't, dude, that's fucked up!!!! wtf lol

...........SO THERE'S ALL THAT

but then, on the other hand

i really enjoyed Adam being a conniving manipulative amoral little mastermind on my television screen, not gonna lie, adlkfjhg

and we know the real crowning glory of this whole ordeal!! hence the tags!!! we knew i was coming back around to this XD

when this show as first announced, i didn't have a lot of hope for the Adam/Declan parallels surviving to screen. many of them were purely textual, phrases and descriptions used for both of them that stand out starkly because of how they're written but wouldn't carry over as well to a visual medium (ie, they weren't born afraid but they learned). i was emotionally prepared to lose those and just make do.

AND THEN THE SHOW WENT OUT OF ITS WAY TO INVENT A WHOLE NEW PARALLEL THAT'S EVEN MORE UNHINGED THAN ANYTHING THE BOOKS COULD'VE GIVEN ME

i cannot believe that they made a big change to Declan's character and then also made a corresponding change to Adam's that matches Declan's deviation from canon, like did they do that one purpose?? is it a coincidence??? it can't be a coincidence, surely

okay i'll cop that it's not a perfect parallel. or, i'd say, it's both a parallel and a contrast.

we didn't get to see Declan going blond or making that decision, we don't know if it was a trauma-fueled impulse like him re-dying it dark was or if it was a choice made with a little more poise and composure, but either way it was something entirely intrinsically motivated. he did it for him, even though it caused him problems and he likely knew that it would, while Adam dying his hair dark (temporarily, it's only a level 1 dye, the kind that washes out pretty quickly, and we see that it's gone by the next episode and no one else is any the wiser about what he did) is externally motivated and for a practical purpose. it's part of a scheme rather than something that he feels emotionally driven to do as part of a coping process.

but even that says so much about them as people. Declan likes to claim that he's so rational and detached, but underneath the facade he wears, he's as impulsive and passionate as Ronan is. his emotions lead him far more often than he wants to admit even to himself. both instances of his hair fuckery are driven by emotional overwhelm, and both are permanent changes (for a given value). you can't unbleach hair that has been bleached, and level 3 dye takes weeks or months to fade. and he owns his choices in the aftermath because, as the books say, Lynches always want to be seen as deliberate, even if it's deliberately cruel or, in this case, deliberately with bad taste in aesthetic choices (lmao).

meanwhile, Adam truly is a much more rational thinker. even when he feels strong emotion, he examines it and picks it apart and makes a real effort toward not acting on it. regardless of his emotional state, on the whole, he is driven by thought and logic. he dyes his hair because his appearance is a tool to be utilized to achieve an end - in this case, accessing information that he wouldn't be able to if he presented as himself. Gansey has clout that he doesn't, and thus taking on Gansey's appearance and name allows him to leverage that clout for his own ends. and when that end is achieved, Adam takes off the disguise. he rinses the dye out of his hair. he is himself again.

through this whole metamorphosis, Adam never loses his sense of self. he is playing Gansey's role, yes, but it's a costume and he knows it is and he takes it off when he's done. but Declan doesn't have a solid sense of self. his identity is a fractured mess, and he has to go through another external process in an effort to regain what he'd stripped away from himself. he cannot unbleach his hair, he has to dye it dark again in an attempt to match his natural color. even when he's trying to be himself, he's still pretending.

if i were to read even more too much into this (😂) i would say this could also be representative of their stations in life and how they feel about themselves -- ie, Declan has the means to make whatever changes he wants, he can live any life he likes (in theory), but none of it means anything if he doesn't know who he is or how to be that person in an authentic way. and Adam feels like, as much as he can play at being better than his roots, in truth he will always be what he is and no amount of slapping paint on top is ever going to change him. from dust he came and to dust he will return. Declan cannot decide if he wants to look like his father or not, that association is fraught and complicated for him and the push-pull of it is tearing him apart, and Adam desperately aspires to distance himself from the father he resembles but believes, deep down, that there is no escaping their similarity.

color palette meme 

Allison Argent + S a g i t t a r i u s - Requested by anonnymous