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the lynches are weird about each other in ways that i think we do not talk enough about. some of declan's first few words to jordan, a girl he finds attractive, is "you remind me of my brother." like, dude, i think your gothic family vibes are showing. also technically, matthew was the addition to the family after aurora which would mean that the last two additions to the lynch family were both sweet, docile, beautiful and made to fit seamlesslyly into the existing lynch family. which is something that needs unpacking, i feel.

in some ways, ronan is like a niall that declan can get mad at and call an irresponsible father and matthew is like an aurora whose love he can accept and trust. he has to be responsible for them but they're also the closest thing he's ever going to have to a truly honest relationship to his parents. declan finding matthew's love easier to trust perhaps has to do with the fact that he did, in fact, grow up with matthew. he's seen matthew develop into who he is as a person whereas aurora would have just shown up one day looking like his mom who left him and claiming to love him.

"YOU REMIND ME OF MY BROTHER" "CONGRATULATIONS" "ON WHAT?" "ON HAVING SUCH A BEAUTIFUL BROTHER"

canon exchanges that give me brain damage, i can't believe that's actually on the page!!! now combine it with the 4 times that Ronan himself positions him and Declan as Matthew's parents or specifically refers to them as mommy and daddy and watch freud start frothing at the mouth and rolling in his grave

ok i swear i made a post about the Lynch family as true southern gothic horror but i cannot find it because tumblr hates me, but it was about how the dreamer/dream as parent/child metaphor renders the entire family incestuous by default and there's simply no getting out from under that. Aurora is, for all intents and purposes, Niall's child. she is, for all intents and purposes, Ronan's sister, and Matthew his child, and Declan is the only one of them who knows it and he just has to live with that knowledge and not even be able to speak about it to anyone, even the other people involved. the hazy romanticization of Aurora's favorite book being pygmalion, the inherent twisted irony of her being named after sleeping beauty, the way she has no identity of her own and shifts to reflect what her conversational partner needs, it's all just really and truly horrifying.

Matthew, at least, does not have that reflective quality. that's what makes him tangibly different from Aurora and what Declan picks up on. Matthew was essentially just "born" a little strangely, but he is his own person and he is capable of growth and change and he develops along normal person lines more or less, while Aurora was spawned into being to replace someone and was never truly meant to be a person in her own right. we really do (or at least i do) get the sense that Aurora wasn't designed to be independent, while with Matthew the feeling is more that he just hasn't needed to be yet.

i'm really upset that we didn't canonically get more exploration of the fact that Ronan is, essentially, a clone of his father. we never even really get Ronan getting confirmation of that on the page. Declan gets the information about Ronan's dreaming, but Ronan doesn't, and so the whole issue is just sidestepped, as if there isn't a fucking MOUNTAIN to unpack there!!!! Ronan and Declan both taking after their father in different ways and deviating from him in others, both representing something of him for each other that they can push back against. fighting each other because they can't fight a ghost.

every way you orient or arrange this family, there are truly fascinating dynamics to explore.

Ronan as Niall, the wayward dreamer and deadbeat dad, and Declan as Aurora, forcibly assigned caretaker with no means of escape

Declan as Niall, young parent doing a shit job of balancing personal trauma with criminal inclinations with actually parenting the vulnerable child dependent on him, and Matthew as Declan, the vulnerable child struggling to reconcile loving someone who has power over him and is in the process of hurting him with that power

Matthew as Aurora, a person built for the purpose of being loving struggling with insecurity and dependency on the person they didn't choose to love but do, and Ronan as Niall, the creator with no sense of the responsibility he should hold toward the people he creates or willingness to face the ethical nuances of what he's done