#(( whoops...))

❊Red son❊ -He’s curious, why you seemed to do a double take at seemingly random points of your time together. A date? You were looking around with wide eyes. A new fight appearing in the media? You look tired, blinking at the screen slowly before sighing. -Admittedly, he is slightly worried at how it seems to affect your health. How some mornings you’ll wake up in a cold sweat, or others when you’ll struggle to wake up- the dream having you in a vice grip. And when it does finally let you awaken, it still takes you several minutes to fully get yourself into the present world and not a dream. -He finally asks about it when you don’t seem surprised when something had gone wrong, despite the both of you trying to make sure it didn’t. -When you told him of your prophetic dreams, it all clicked. Every instance where you just seemed to know what was going to happen, seemed to have Deja vu, all of it was explained. -Of course, he wanted to know the extent of it immediately. How many do you get? How frequent? How much do you remember? Do you even remember them or do you realize as it’s happening that you’ve dreamed of it before? -The list goes on, truly. -You ended up throwing a pillow at him to shut him up, promising to answer to the best of your ability if he would calm down and get you something to write in. He obliged, of course. -So from that day on, he would continue as normal for the most part. Of course, Red son still made sure to pay attention to how you reacted when something would happen. -In the end, nothing much changes. He has new information to study, yes, but his partner is still his partner~

❁Nezha❁ -Nezha worries, about how you would often blankly stare at a scene before sighing. About how you would sometimes wake up gasping, then looking upon a battle months later with a terrified realization. -Whatever it was, it worried the prince how it affected you so deeply. He was your boyfriend, your lover, and even when the two of you were still friends he fretted over if you remembered to eat and keep yourself hydrated. -So many times, he would wake to see you in distress- no doubt in another alarming dream. He tried the best he could to comfort your sleeping body, and most times it worked. -Eventually, he approached you one day while you were comfortable, pleading if you knew why these happened or what they were. When you answered that it was just prophetic dreams, he stared at you blankly. -The poor celestial had no clue what that was. Nezha didn’t do common mortal knowledge. -You ended up having to explain it to him, after laughing of course. Much to his embarrassment. -After understanding from you, and of course doing his own research, he stuck closer to you than before. Seeing if you recognized a situation, seeing if trouble sprouted. -Of course, he didn’t treat you as if you were fragile! You were still the same person. All that had changed was his amount of knowledge about you. -With this, you still bet he curls around you almost protectively whenever you two turn in for the night. He tries to keep the night terrors away from his blossom~

✎Tang✎ -He was clueless, mainly. Sure, sometimes he’d catch you staring at something like you’ve seen it before, but he never really put two and two together. -Don’t get him wrong- he was very smart, just in a different category. He studied mythology and history like scripture, anything outside of that was out of his league. -However, even though he wasn’t the smartest when it came to conditions, Tang still picked up how distressed you would be when something happened. So one day, during a normal dinner, he asked you why you seemed to do that sometimes. Why you just look like you’ve already seen a situation despite it being the first time happening. -You, of course, answered him. You had prophetic dreams, so sometimes you would dream of something that happens and realize it as the situation is happening that you had already seen it before. -He didn’t know of it, but accepted the information easily enough. Nodding and thanking you for the information before continuing to eat. -Tang secretly does research on the subject when you go to bed, staying up and reading any and all he can find on the topic. He wants to understand what it is so he can truly understand what it entails. How it affects you, how it works, how frequent it is, ect. -You find him passed out at his desk in the morning, surrounded by various notes. A crammer through and through, it seems. -Although he’s confused, he tries his best to understand his s/o’s ability as thoroughly as he can~

So right off the bat, we are told that Valancy feels despair because she is twenty-nine, unmarried, and unhappy about it. We are also told, or at least it is heavily implied, that the reason she is upset about it differs from the reason the people around her are unhappy about it. Deerwood and the Stirlings have simply relegated her to someone who failed to get a man, which feels very transactional. The unhappiness is because she failed to hit an expected milestone and achieve something material. A husband is a thing you have, like a nice dress or a well-kept house.

Valancy, meanwhile, wants capital-r Romance. She wants to be desired by someone, even if that person ends up being someone she doesn't actually end up wanting to marry. So already we see the fundamental disconnect between Valancy, who wants emotional fulfillment, and her family/community, who want material things and tangible status symbols.

"The thought of her mother’s expression made Valancy laugh—for she had a sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected. For that matter, there were a good many things about Valancy that nobody suspected."

vs.

"Valancy did not persist. Valancy never persisted. She was afraid to. Her mother could not brook opposition. Mrs. Stirling would sulk for days if offended, with the airs of an insulted duchess."

Valancy can only be herself in the privacy of her own room and her own head. So the only version of her people know is the one she is allowed to present, which makes people assume that that is the real her, which in turn further reinforces the need for her to play at being the person they think she is.

"I don’t say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles."

I pulled this line out last time I read this book too, but it's probably one of my favorite lines in the whole book. I love little author asides like this.

The whole description of the picnic is a veritable slough of "things Valancy will do" versus "things Valancy will want to do". They all pretty much boil down to "Valancy wants to throw things but instead she will listen politely and stay quiet, just like always." Fear is such a palpable theme in this part of the book. Why does Valancy not do the things she wants? Because she is afraid. She is afraid of both emotional and material consequences, and she has nowhere else to go. If Uncle Benjamin writes her out of his will and her mother never speaks to her again, Valancy has no choice but to live with it. Her life now is awful, but it could always get worse and that's terrifying.

But we join her on a day when she has finally hit her limit. She's not rebelling openly, certainly not, but she is planning to do something she wants, something that she knows will upset her family. She will get another library book, which her mother already disapproves of, and then she will go see a doctor without permission, which is a betrayal of the whole Stirling family. As the text puts it: