#ravise

Doodles

Requested by @thelilylav, @reverie-king-of-eah and @athena-xox

Hellooooooo alt lesbians! I should probably start by saying I am biased towards these two. My favorite scene in the entire series---books, show, diaries, whatever---is between the two of them in Shannon Hale's The Unfairest of Them All.

Raven accompanies Cerise home to Hood's Hollow, where Cerise finally reveals herself to her village. To settle whether or not she should be banished, the Wolves and the Hoods hold a basket run. The Hoods have to carry a basket of sweets through the forest to a finish line, while the wolves have to try and steal those baskets. Either the first hood to cross the finish line or the wolf with the most baskets wins.

Cerise, being both Wolf and Hood, has to play on her own team and do BOTH---cross the finish line first while stealing other people's baskets---and Raven volunteers to be her coach, watching the whole game and giving her directions.

The whole sequence is both sick as hell and super touching. As I said it's my favorite scene in the ENTIRE franchise, and a great jumping off point for their relationship. Cerise trusts Raven. Raven's outspokenness and willingness to support her friends through whatever trials they're going through means Cerise is comfortable sharing her secret and trusting Raven with the scariest parts of her life.

And that unconditional support goes both ways! Cerise has spent most of her time at Ever After High trying to fade in the background, to pass as a royal, and stay beneath notice. When people start going after Raven though? That's the first person who's ever bothered to protect her. She makes an effort to speak up and tell them to shut it.

Cerise is one of the earliest examples of the effect Raven has on individuals and the world as a whole. By choosing to be kind and caring, but also by choosing to not sit by while people suffer, she gets Cerise to trust her and inspires Cerise to reveal herself to her whole village and proudly live as herself. And that is really really cool, and certainly a concept for a romance!

It's actually really similar to Dexven in that regard. But instead of Raven inspiring confidence and a desire to save others in Cerise, Raven inspires a confidence and a desire to save herself. And instead of Cerise helping Raven feel she can be good, Cerise makes Raven feel that all of this is worth something. She isn't uprooting everyone's lives and possibly putting people in danger for no reason, she's doing it because she knows things are terrible as they are. Cerise gives her something important to fight for.

These two are fun because I think having them together does shift the tone of the series in interesting direction. It gets more punk, more grunge, more radical, and a little darker. Cerise has a very dangerous life and secret, and it makes Raven furious that she has to keep it that way. Cerise is protective of Raven and has a wolf's ability to fight people off. Raven does actually curse people for Cerise. It's very cool. While it doesn't humanize the royals the same way Dexven does, it's definitely worth the trade-off (plus there's no reason platonic Dexven wouldn't be a thing in a Ravise scenario).

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Raven ogling Cerise's leg muscles and being awed by her performance in basketball in Shannon Hale's The Storybook of Legends.

Not to crowd up the S-tier, but it'd really be wrong to put them lower: