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."
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"I would physically or emotionally hurt you."
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"I would like to get to know you better."
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"I would spend time, have fun, or be friends with you."
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"You frighten or unsettle me."
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"You confuse me or I'm confused about you."
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"You amuse me."
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"I would rescue you or fight by your side."
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"I would hug you or hold your hand."
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"You are my friend."
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"I would date you."
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"You're my family."
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"I would kill for you."
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"I would kiss you."
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"I would have sex with you."
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"I love you or could fall in love with you."
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. (: