Chris Hartley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thechoiceisyours) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dankmemes2016-02-26 10:06 pm
thechoiceisyours) wrote in dankmemes2016-02-26 10:06 pm
The (Modified) Hearts + TL;DR CR Meme!
The (modified) Hearts Meme + The TL;DR CR Meme
Welcome to another combo meme! This meme is one parts my modified version of the hearts meme, and another part the tl;dr CR meme.
As a note, remember that you can change the alt text so that the hearts say different things when you hover your mouse over them. Look for title="" in the code you are copy and pasting, and change the text between the quotation marks to whatever you like!
This meme has been modified from it's original format to add more hearts, so be sure to read the descriptions! Also feel free to suggest more heart categories~
"I would kill you."
❤
"I would physically or emotionally hurt you."
❤
"I would like to get to know you better."
❤
"I would spend time, have fun, or be friends with you."
❤
"You frighten or unsettle me."
❤
"You confuse me or I'm confused about you."
❤
"You amuse me."
❤
"I would rescue you or fight by your side."
❤
"I would hug you or hold your hand."
❤
"You are my friend."
❤
"I would date you."
❤
"You're my family."
❤
"I would kill for you."
❤
"I would kiss you."
❤
"I would have sex with you."
❤
"I love you or could fall in love with you."
Gansey | The Raven Cycle
no subject
no subject
Adam is one of Gansey’s best friends. He’s also probably the one with whom Gansey has the most difficult relationship. I think the reason for this is the same reason why they’re close. Gansey and Adam are both clever and academically minded. They both also, for different reasons, have serious control issues. Both of them want to be the captain of their ship, and neither really wants to give ground to another opinion. So long as they’re in agreement, this works out fine, and good luck to anyone who tries to contradict them. It even works out well when their argument is purely academic, because Gansey likes exploring a problem from all angles, and Adam tends to approach it from a different perspective. Gansey is someone who likes to trust his instincts. To do this, he will establish a seriously expansive back-catalogue of knowledge about his subject area, and then he’ll make a judgment call based on what’s worked in the past, what options are open to him, which of those options holds the least risk, and then ultimately, which option feels right. Adam is someone who will approach a problem logically, and look for a strategic answer to it. Gansey likes the sharpness of Adam’s mind, likes that he thinks in directions that Gansey does not, and sees the value in having another pair of eyes. When Gansey isn’t sure of where to go next, when he’s confused and wants to talk something through, when he wants an idea or inspiration, it’s Adam that he looks to.
However, when the problem is personal, and they disagree, then they clash, and they clash spectacularly. Neither of them wants to be wrong, and neither wants to lose. They are both trying to escape from their pasts, and both trying to prove that there is more to them than where they come from. But they are from very different worlds. For Adam, Gansey represents everything that he’s trying to attain – wealth, respect, influence. Gansey sees those things as superficial, and feels they only represent his family – not himself. Still, he is wealthy and influential, and he feels that so long as he has something to give, he ought to do it. If he sees a friend unable to afford something, he wants to buy it for them. If they don’t have somewhere to live, he’ll give them a room. If they’re being hurt, he wants to protect them. This puts him at odds with Adam, who doesn’t see it as either kindness or friendship – he just sees it as a reminder of how different they are, and he won’t take charity because he wants to be on a level footing with Gansey. He feels that if he lets Gansey give him things, they won’t be equal. It’s taken Gansey a long time to even begin to understand that perspective. He tries, and he’s getting better at knowing what kind of help is acceptable, and what is not. But the result of all that is that his relationship with Adam has been fractious, full of fights that no one could win, which culminated in Gansey thinking that Adam genuinely hated him.
To Gansey, few things could be more terrible. He has a relentless admiration for Adam. He recognises that Adam has lived a life lacking in privilege, and yet Adam is the smartest person he knows. Adam defies every stereotype. He’s a terrifically hard worker, he’s sharp-witted and full of ideas. He’s also sacrificed far more than Gansey ever wanted anyone to, in the name of their quest, and that still upsets him. He doesn’t like, and doesn’t entirely trust, Cabeswater’s tendrils inside Adam. He’s afraid of what it means for him, and he still wishes he’d been able to stop it. He knows Adam would say that it was never his choice to make, and Gansey knows that’s true, but he still wishes it hadn’t happened. Just as he wants to find the ‘old’ Ronan, the happier Ronan from before his father died, Gansey wants the ‘old’ Adam - his Adam. There’s a naïve, painfully hopeful part of him that wants to get rid of everything that’s come between them and make it better.
To that end, he’s very determined not to fight anymore. He also doesn’t hate every aspect of what Cabeswater has done. Ultimately, Gansey is someone who loves magic, and seeing that in Adam is genuinely wonderful to him. Gansey still has the same faith in magic that he always did, but he’s a good deal more wary about it now. He’s also very afraid that one of his friends could get hurt through their quest, and he harbours a lot more doubts about it than he did at the start. This isn’t something he feels he can express to Adam; he feels that Adam has already sacrificed too much, and he owes it to him to keep going. He feels the same way about Ronan, and it’s because of this that the only one he’s really opened up to about his fears is Noah. Gansey is also seriously co-dependent when it comes to his friends, and of all of them, Adam is the one who’s determined to leave Henrietta. This means that for all he’d like to, Gansey can’t hold onto him forever. That’s not something he likes to think about. He doesn’t want to lose Adam.
Because of all this, he’s careful around Adam now. He’s wary of fighting with him again, and would go to some lengths to avoid it. He trusts Adam, implicitly, and he’s full of respect, admiration, and even envy when it comes to him. For all that they’ve clashed heads, Gansey looks at Adam and he thinks, ‘that is the kind of person I want to be’. Someone hardworking and determined, someone who has genuinely earned every inch of respect anyone gives him, rather than having it handed to him because of his name. Gansey thinks the world would be a better place if there were more people like Adam in it.
He’s just afraid of losing him, and he tries to cling to him in the wrong ways. In another series, theirs could genuinely be a story of epic romance. It sometimes reads that way. And Gansey is so possessive over Adam that sometimes, it’s hard to tell if he’s jealous of him, or jealous of the person with him.
So in summary of…all of that. Gansey loves Adam. He’s his best friend, he admires him, he wants to be like him. He’s afraid of losing him, and though his intentions are usually good, he has a tendency to push Adam away even while he’s trying to hold on. He’s trying to be better about that, though. And he’s definitely trying not to fight anymore, even though he’s not always sure why they were fighting in the first place!
no subject
Poor Gansey - Adam is a prickly and difficult friend to have even at the best of times, with his need to prove himself and his own difficulty getting close to and trusting people. On top of that, he views everything in his life through the lens of his abuse and only sometimes realizes that's what he's doing. It's not Gansey's fault that Adam's had a controlling presence looming over him for most of his life, and because of that he reacts poorly to anything that seems like control over him. Gansey tries, and while he's definitely not perfect, trying is a lot more than Adam can expect from most other people.
But, yes. I love their relationship, as divisive and complicated as it can be, and absolutely at the core of it they love each other. Which of course makes some things more difficult, as neither of them wants to walk away from the other even when things do get bad, but also means that their friendship isn't so easily broken. Adam is still working on understanding that, which isn't so much of a surprise considering he didn't have any real friends before Gansey, and of course he doesn't have much experience with love or being loved in general. He's getting there, slowly.
Regardless, he's going to be trying real hard not to fight with Gansey. :c
no subject
And he hates fighting with him. He will not return to that summer! That is his best friend and nothing is coming between them again.
no subject
bring on the tl;dr
no subject
Ronan Lynch is Gansey’s best friend. Okay, in canon, he has like four best friends, but there’s also a kind of trio between him, Adam and Ronan. And between them, there’s a particular kind of closeness between Ronan and Gansey, because it was the two of them before it was anyone else, and Gansey is the only one among them who knew Ronan while his dad still lived. That influences a lot of how Gansey acts around him.
Ronan is a boy who responds to almost every emotion with anger. That’s how he processes them, and that makes him both difficult and violent. Gansey is the opposite. It’s not that he deals with emotions any better than Ronan, it’s that Ronan expresses emotions explosively, and Gansey puts his in a coffin and seals the lid. This is not to say that Gansey is unfeeling, or even pretends to be unfeeling; he’s not. That’s because the thing he’s trying to do is keep control of how he reacts, and how others perceive him. Part of it is because Gansey was raised by politicians and businessmen who understood the importance of making a good impression, and they taught him to do the same. Part of it is because he’s gone through a time when he went through panic attacks and night terrors that kept him from sleeping, and even had him screaming in the street. This combination is what makes the Gansey of now; someone who wants to be seen as smiling and cheerful, not anxious, and someone who wants to keep his negative emotions under wraps. By contrast, Ronan tends to express even positive emotions with a certain degree of violence. Both of them have trauma in their pasts, but it has impacted their development in almost opposing ways.
This has an interesting effect on Gansey’s feelings about Ronan. On one hand, he’s aware of the destructive qualities of Ronan’s temper. He feels the need to intercede upon it and act as damage control, partly to keep Ronan from doing something he’ll later regret, and partly to minimise the collateral damage of his violence. Where others take the view that Ronan has to be responsible for himself, Gansey can’t help but try to shoulder that responsibility. It’s not that Gansey wants specifically to be controlling (although this is often the practical result of what he does). It’s that he wants to protect Ronan from those negative feelings. He wants to protect Ronan from himself. He once saw Ronan’s bleeding body and thought it was the result of a suicide attempt. He didn’t understand then the complexities behind Ronan being attacked by his own dreams. He thought that Ronan consciously and deliberately wanted to kill himself, and this horrified him. It spurred him to want to stop Ronan’s violence, because he’s genuinely afraid that it will end badly for Ronan and that he’ll lose him because of it. There is also the secondary feeling that he should make sure other people aren’t hurt by Ronan – but Ronan himself is Gansey’s main concern. Ronan is not someone that he can bear to lose.
It’s notable that he feels moderately better about this once he realises that the ‘suicide attempt’ was not a result of conscious decision, but a result of Ronan’s dreams. In the conscious world, Ronan chose to fight for his own life. That’s important to Gansey – it means that for all there might be a part of Ronan that hates himself, he doesn’t want to die. Gansey can trust that he isn’t just going to disappear some night. In theory, he should be upset that Ronan would let him think otherwise for so long – but the relief outweighs anything like that.
Ronan is someone he obviously cares about, and he doesn’t want to see him either get hurt or hurt someone else – that’s a standard, and it’s also the motivation that is easiest for other people to see. Beneath that, though, is Gansey’s personal knowledge of the happier and less violent person Ronan was before his father died. Gansey knows that Ronan isn’t just an asshole, and that he’s been through something terrible. Since he is also a person who has been through something terrible – and specifically, the terrible that comes with death – he empathises, and he’s not able to avoid wanting to help. He thinks if he can be that damage control, then eventually Ronan will be able to work through his anger and be happy again. This is a simplistic, and unrealistic hope. It’s part of Gansey’s naivete; he wants to believe there’s a simple way for the pain to go away. It’s the same impulse that drives him to search for Glendower, as if the finding of him will answer Gansey’s own questions and resolve his own anxiety. It’s not as easy as he wishes it could be. He can’t reconcile himself to that, even though there’s a part of him, underneath all that naïve hope, that’s afraid things never really will get any better.
That’s part of how he feels about Ronan. On the other hand, there’s also a part of him that looks at all that rage and is jealous of it. No one could look at Ronan and think that he’s anything other than himself. He stands out as different, and he does so aggressively. Gansey can’t do that. He constantly wishes that people could see him as he really is, even while the nature I described above is stopping him from showing them. He envies the ease with which Ronan doesn’t care about whether people like him. In fact, Ronan dislikes people as a matter of course and seems more comfortable if this feeling is mutual. Again, Gansey is the opposite; he wants, even needs, to be liked. And yet he’s drawn to people who are far from the school’s most popular kids. Gansey is caught about halfway between wanting to be accepted and feeling he doesn’t belong, and he feels the conflict keenly. He’s envious of Ronan for not having that conflict even while it propels him into damage control. He wishes he could be that comfortable as an outcast, but he’s not.
Despite all of that, the truth is that Gansey does know the Ronan underneath the anger and the violence. He knows about Ronan memorising Irish songs by heart, knows that he loves animals, knows the strength of his feelings about loyalty, and family. His favourite things about Ronan are these hidden gems – how quietly kind he can be, how he’d never betray his trust, how he can always be relied upon to be on his side, how he never struggled to believe in any of the outlandish things Gansey asked him to. Gansey says once that Malory was the first person who ever took his search seriously, and that it had meant a lot. Equally, Ronan’s faith and loyalty means a lot. It means that Gansey doesn’t want to let Ronan down. It means that when he has doubts about their quest, when it makes him afraid, when there’s a risk he doesn’t want to take or a fear that presses on his mind, he doesn’t want to tell Ronan about it, because he wants to be worthy of that faith. It’s not just that he wants to shoulder responsibility for Ronan. He also feels responsible to him.
For me, my favourite canon scene between them is when Gansey is driving back to town from DC, knowing that Ronan had broken his trust and stolen his car, and he’s steeling himself for a fight after days of fighting with (and being exhausted by) Adam. Ronan drives up in the Dream Pig, and he’s happy and thrilled with what he’d achieved. And Gansey sees Ronan happy in a way he hadn’t been happy since before his father died, and he thinks that this isn’t the Ronan of before, who was happy without knowing pain. This is a Ronan who knows pain so well but is happy anyway. Seeing Ronan like that expels every inch of Gansey’s frustration and anger. They don’t fight. Gansey had been, genuinely, furious with Ronan for breaking his trust, and yet seeing him happy is enough to make it not matter. This is really all Gansey wants; Ronan happy, and by his side. He would do anything for that.
Come to that, he would do anything for Ronan. He would risk getting himself hurt to stop a fight. He would spend vast sums of money to make sure Ronan doesn’t get kicked out of school (and, as a result, lose access to his inheritance). He’d share his home with him, defend him when others speak badly about him (even when Ronan has done something to deserve it). Despite hating violence, he doesn’t stop Ronan from attacking Mr Gray, because he’s very much on Ronan’s side and thinks it’s fair for him to confront the man who killed his father. The one thing he ever refused to let Ronan do was drive his car, and when Ronan took it anyway, they still got over it. He might get frustrated or judgmental, his care might come across as controlling or even overbearing, but all of that comes from how much he really does care about Ronan. Gansey’s loyalty to him runs deep, especially when you consider that the same level of feeling is not expressed between Gansey and his own family. He’s travelled independently of them for years. He goes long periods without talking to them. But he and Ronan are in each other’s pockets. The world would feel fundamentally wrong to Gansey if he and Ronan were on different sides.
Speaking of fundamentally wrong. Gansey mentions at one point that Blue joining their group ‘feels right’, just like it had felt right to befriend Adam, Noah and Ronan. Gansey is someone who trusts his instincts. His instincts have led him to find things that have eluded other searchers for centuries. He ‘feels’ whether he is on the right track during his quest or not. For example, it feels wrong when they come across Gwenllian, thinking that she is Glendower. Gansey knows it’s wrong from the start. He trusts his instincts, and to him, Ronan feels right. He knows that there is something special about all of this, something between all five members of his group. He doesn’t know what it is, but he can feel that it’s there. I have theories which I won’t go into; the point is, this matters to Gansey. It’s part of why he’s so close to the group, in a way he’s never been with anyone before.
Finally (I promise this ends soon), Gansey is very reliant on Ronan. This comes last because, of all the things mentioned above, this is the part that’s most personal to Gansey, and thus the part that he is least likely to show. He is fiercely dependent on his friends. He needs them. There is a part of him that feels terribly lonely, a part that still suffers very badly from the anxiety resulting from his ‘death’. The books don’t outright say that Gansey has PTSD, but I think that’s what it is – or some unnamed anxiety disorder with very similar symptoms. For all that he presents himself as someone brave and strange and hopeful, Gansey is restless. It’s why he can’t sleep. He’s full of longing, and full of fear. A terrible and traumatic thing happened to him, and he can’t fully understand it and can’t resolve his feelings about it. He’s never really dealt with that fear; he’s just buried it, behind smiling masks and confidence that convinces people that he’s okay when he’s not. This isn’t something he is able to vocalise to anyone. He can’t put words to it, and his predominant response to it is shame. He knows he’s led a privileged life, and knows too that his friends have also been through traumatic things. Gansey doesn’t think he has the right to his own anxiety. He thinks he’s weak to feel that way, that he shouldn’t want or need anyone to comfort him and, instead, it’s right for him to shoulder the burdens of others instead – which, of course, is something he tries to do for Ronan.
However, Ronan’s presence does comfort him. When his insomnia is at its worst, Ronan is there – also insomniac – and he’s not alone anymore. When he’s at his most obsessive, talking about things that most people don’t care about or even understand, Ronan listens and actually believes him. And helps him. And he was the first person of Gansey’s own age to do so. Ronan makes him feel better and more able to cope with his own brand of craziness, just by being Ronan. And though Ronan can be jealous and possessive, Gansey is in his own way just as possessive. He’s clingy, he’s dependent. He’s co-dependent, in fact, because it’s also important to him to be needed by Ronan. At his core, he’s afraid that if he can’t make things better for Ronan, if he can’t make him happy, if he can’t protect him from his own unhappiness, then what good is he? He really doesn’t want to lose this friendship. He doesn’t want things between them to change. He wants Ronan to stay with him and he wants them to find Glendower and be happy.
That’s a childish want, and he knows it. He has the growing fear – and growing instinct – that things won’t turn out that way, that things are ending and the ending won’t be the happy one he always hoped for. And maybe, possibly, Ronan doesn’t need him as much as he thought. Maybe none of them do. After all, Ronan has been getting a lot closer to Adam lately…
But that’s just a fear, and it’s not like his instincts are right every time.Right?
Apologies for how long this got! This really was tldr! If it wasn’t obvious, I really love these two. (:
no subject
no subject
A trait that emerges in all of Gansey’s friendships is his tendency to feel responsible (or try to take responsibility) for his friends’ unhappiness. He’s that guy who wants to make things better for other people. He’ll give them a room when they have one, he’ll pay for their sandwiches, he’ll get involved in their drama. He tends to be controlling, too, and the combination of this can frankly be obnoxious, sometimes.
But it’s fair to say, there’s no one for whom he feels more responsibility than Noah. Noah is a ghost. He died horribly and painfully, and even now, his spirit seems like it’s eroding away. Noah is already dead, but it’s like he’s dying again, before all of their eyes.
Because of his own experience with death, Gansey has some serious issues when it comes to death, the risk of death, and loss in general. He has a lot of leftover trauma that has left him with anxiety that is actually crippling, even if he (usually) hides it well. With all that in mind, Gansey looks at Noah and sees the boy who was dying on the ley line the day that Gansey was also dying. Gansey was saved, because Noah was dying when he shouldn’t have. Gansey absolutely knows that he ‘should’ have died and Noah ‘should’ have lived, because the faceless voice that brought him back to life told him so.
As a result of this experience, Gansey has always felt that he is living on borrowed time. Now, though, he knows that he borrowed that time from Noah, and he is face to face with the results of that every single day. He doesn’t understand why he would be chosen to survive, and Noah left to die. It’s not fair. The survivor’s guilt is strong with this one. It’s why he’s so determined to ask Glendower to save Noah. Has he thought about what that would mean, or what it could mean? Has he considered that maybe a life is needed for a life, and that both of them couldn’t live? Gansey has thought about all of this so much that I don’t think he could have failed to consider that. And yet he’s determined anyway.
In Hadriel, there’s another element to this relationship. Here, Noah has a living body. To all intents and purposes, Noah is alive again. One thing that Gansey has never really been able to swallow is the idea that someone might prefer to be dead than alive. It was something he couldn’t make himself understand when he thought Ronan had tried to kill himself, and it’s something that he finds equally impossible with Noah here. That’s really a result of Gansey’s own deep-rooted fears about death. But Noah is alive here, and although Gansey will remain absolutely determined to find his way home, he’ll want to make sure Noah can live through the experience. He won’t want to consign him to death again. That’s something that will probably leave him conflicted in time, especially if he starts to believe that Noah can only be alive in Hadriel. It’s not something he’s thinking yet, but it’s a place he may well get to in time!
The responsibility for bringing Noah back to life also manifests here in a need to help him acclimatise to being alive. He wants to do everything he can to make that easier on Noah. He wants to be supportive, he wants to show him that it’s okay and there’s nothing to be afraid of. He wants to make sure that there is nothing to be afraid of. Essentially, he wants Noah to be happy and living and safe. And he’ll do pretty much anything to make that happen.
no subject