Reading Through Life

the raven king countdown → day two

favorite character ronan lynch 

Just lie, I told myself. Say anyone but Ronan. They’re all going to expect you to say Ronan. You want to be predictable? Craft an elegant lie! 

But I couldn’t. 

My real favorite in this series is the dynamic — the spaces between all of the characters — but if I have to choose, it’s Ronan. I’m sure the internet believes that he’s my favorite because he is the most like me (which, yes, fine, everyone likes stories about themselves), or because he is the “coolest” (I’m so pleased that a sullen gay boy who loves small animals and wants to live on a rural farm forever is the current cultural standard for cool). But really, he would have always been my favorite because he is the oldest. Not age-wise — he’s the second youngest, actually, of the group — but storywise. 

When I began writing these books as a teen, the story was Ronan’s story alone. There was no Gansey, no Adam, no Blue. No Welsh kings. There was the farm, the dreaming father, the dreamed mother, the dreaming son. What was the world to you if you were an impossible thing? What did you do with society if society didn’t know what to do with you? It was only after multiple scrambling iterations over nearly a decade that the rest of the Raven Cycle’s sprawling appeared, subsuming Ronan’s plotline. 

But even now — he’s still the heart. Ronan’s magic is still the oldest and most unchanging. During the writing of the current version of the Raven Cycle, every piece of magic in the series still turned its face to the rules of his magic for its marching orders. It will be weird to say goodbye to him at the end of this. 

It’s just like: