#tq ryan

Ryan has snuck under the himbo radar for far too long.

Ryan is HOT and STUPID AS HELL and I'm TIRED of pretending he isn't arguably the densest character beside Jacob.

Boy asked Dylan if power tools could help with the radio, hottie was more willing to believe that a bear cut the phone lines than a person. Bestie saw Nick miraculously healing and said "oh nice I guess he wasn't that hurt after all" like he didn't have his hands over the gaping wound on Nicks leg.

When Dylan asks him why Mr H has a gun and Ryan says Chris told him it was for bears and that the reason there were no bears was because Chris shot them all/scared them all off with the gun. You can literally see him processing that information once he says it out loud, realising he believed a stupid lie.

Ryan:

This is such a cute ask and I respect your critical thinking skills anon.

Being totally honest, same anon! when I first played the game I was pretty meh on Ryan but then I replayed and thought more about his character and started really loving him. I saw one post saying Ryan was autistic and it was like glass shattering in my mind and suddenly I was seeing him from a totally different perspective.

But even if you don't like the autistic hc for whatever reason, he's still super endearing. The few things we know about him is that he has a complicated home life and wouldn't be a stretch to imply he feels more at home at the camp than he does at home. Just judging by how he strongly he feels for Chris Caleb and Kaylee and the comment he made about "his mom not really being around".

When I first started playing The Quarry, Ryan gave me strong autistic vibes pretty much right away, and I immediately loved it. As someone who has been doing research on Autism lately because I think I might have it and I want to get officially diagnosed one day, Ryan exhibits a lot of symptoms. Difficulty with understanding sarcasm, a somewhat monotone pattern of speaking, being defensive over his interests (ie the podcast), a strict desire to follow instructions and not understanding why other people choose to break the rules, etc. And guess what? These are all things that I've seen him receive hate for. Every time I see someone hating on Ryan, it's for something that's very reflective of an autism-coded character. So to me, all of the Ryan hate feels very ableist, and I don't like it.

EDIT: Another thing I see Ryan receive hate for is saying that he's not really interested in Dylan OR Kaitlyn. To me, that line just made me think that maybe he just happens to be on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrums. But of course most other people don't stop to think about that because we live in a sex-normative and romance-normative world, so instead they just hate him for not being in love with either of them. Like y'all, just because he's not interested in either of them romantically doesn't mean he doesn't like them. He clearly likes them as friends, he's just not interested in dating either of them, and that's completely valid, because aroace people are valid.