Fannish 50: Post 1!
Jan. 1st, 2026 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soricelOK so like I said the other day, I'm going to try this Fannish 50 thing by doing a re-read of The Raven Cycle, picking one quote per week (chosen from roughly four chapters of re-reading) to reflect on using these prompts. And I'd love it if anyone else weighed in on any of these quotes, whether or not you've read the books. OK here we go!
Here's this week's quote, from chapter 4 of The Raven Boys:
"But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor."
1.) Narrative (what's going on when the quote appears?)
So this is from chapter 4. Declan has brought his latest girlfriend, Ashley, over to Monmouth Manufacturing, the abandoned building Gansey bought and lives in rather than staying in the Aglionby dorms. Ashley is presented as kind of a ditz, completely interchangeable with any of Declan's other girlfriends, but she's obviously smarter than any of the boys think: when Gansey asks her what she knows about Welsh kings, she says "“Mmmm. Llewellyn? Glendower? English Marcher lords?” and then says that the legend about Llewellyn and Glendower being asleep rather than dead sounds like a metaphor...neither of which are things I would have said, or could imagine any high school student saying, in response to a question/mini-lecture on this topic. Anyway, we get our first glimpse of the inside of Monmouth, including Gansey's knee-high cardboard replica of the town of Henrietta. This might have been one of the moments when I first started feeling like, okay, these books are gonna be something special and cool and weird and I'm in, because it just seemed like such a weird and idiosyncratic and kind of improbable thing, that this kid would work on a huge cardboard model of his town when he was plagued by insomnia. The model town doesn't have any really significant "purpose" in terms of driving the plot forward or anything, as far as I can tell, and there are plenty of other little details that could, and do, let us know what kind of kid Gansey is, but the inclusion of this model town just gave me the feeling of Stiefvater being like, I'm going to load these books up with stuff I just think is cool, just go with it, but also, it made me feel like the kids in these books are weird in ways that most YA characters are not. I don't know, maybe I'm making too big a thing of the model town, but anyway, back to the quote. At this point, the gang is getting ready to head out for pizza, but Adam is fixated on Ashley's interest in Gansey's journal--he feels suspicious and "proprietary." And here we get a sense of what/how much the Glendower quest means to Adam, as well as a point of tension between Adam and Gansey that's already kinda been established and which will continue to grow as the books go on: Gansey is rich, comes from an intact family, etc., and Adam is/does not. The favor he could have Glendower do for him would change his life in very material ways, whereas for Gansey, it's more abstract...though I guess no less real/significant?
2.) Connections (what does this quote remind you of?)
So this might not be a very accurate or fair comparison, but the thing that jumped to my mind here is Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. It's been ages since I read those books, but from what I remember, there's a similar if smaller class gap between the characters, but what I'm thinking of specifically is a scene toward the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Huck and Tom are trying to help Jim escape from the Phelps' farm, and Tom seems to think of the whole thing as an adventure like in the stories he loves reading (and goes to pretty ridiculous lengths to make sure the escape plan conforms to the conventions of those stories), while the stakes are obviously way higher and more *real* for Jim and Huck. Like I said, I don't think this comparison totally works, but I do think there's something to it.
3.) Contemplation (how does the quote relate to your own life?)
I feel like I grew up lower middle-class but with a sense of proximity to Gansey's and Adam's worlds. That said, I definitely feel more resonance with the description of Gansey's quest here than Adam's, and generally related more to Gansey than Adam throughout the books. I wouldn't describe myself as having a "desperate" need to do much of anything, but that sense of wanting to be useful, to contribute, to make something of my privilege, to kind of pay back my debt of living (to refer back to that quote from Martyr! I posted a few days ago, which is I guess another connection I could have written about above) has always been with me.
4.) Invitation (what does the quote call you to do?)
I guess this is a good quote to start the new year with, because it makes me think about wanting to try to find ways to make myself a little more useful this year. I'm not comfortable with the idea of big quests and Life Purposes and Hero's Journeys and all that, but still, I feel like I'm always having this internal argument about how best/appropriately/ethically to live my life and what to do with the privilege I have. But somehow this quote is also making me think about wanting to challenge the conditioning that makes me think about life in these terms in the first place, and I don't know how I feel about that.
Here's this week's quote, from chapter 4 of The Raven Boys:
"But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor."
1.) Narrative (what's going on when the quote appears?)
So this is from chapter 4. Declan has brought his latest girlfriend, Ashley, over to Monmouth Manufacturing, the abandoned building Gansey bought and lives in rather than staying in the Aglionby dorms. Ashley is presented as kind of a ditz, completely interchangeable with any of Declan's other girlfriends, but she's obviously smarter than any of the boys think: when Gansey asks her what she knows about Welsh kings, she says "“Mmmm. Llewellyn? Glendower? English Marcher lords?” and then says that the legend about Llewellyn and Glendower being asleep rather than dead sounds like a metaphor...neither of which are things I would have said, or could imagine any high school student saying, in response to a question/mini-lecture on this topic. Anyway, we get our first glimpse of the inside of Monmouth, including Gansey's knee-high cardboard replica of the town of Henrietta. This might have been one of the moments when I first started feeling like, okay, these books are gonna be something special and cool and weird and I'm in, because it just seemed like such a weird and idiosyncratic and kind of improbable thing, that this kid would work on a huge cardboard model of his town when he was plagued by insomnia. The model town doesn't have any really significant "purpose" in terms of driving the plot forward or anything, as far as I can tell, and there are plenty of other little details that could, and do, let us know what kind of kid Gansey is, but the inclusion of this model town just gave me the feeling of Stiefvater being like, I'm going to load these books up with stuff I just think is cool, just go with it, but also, it made me feel like the kids in these books are weird in ways that most YA characters are not. I don't know, maybe I'm making too big a thing of the model town, but anyway, back to the quote. At this point, the gang is getting ready to head out for pizza, but Adam is fixated on Ashley's interest in Gansey's journal--he feels suspicious and "proprietary." And here we get a sense of what/how much the Glendower quest means to Adam, as well as a point of tension between Adam and Gansey that's already kinda been established and which will continue to grow as the books go on: Gansey is rich, comes from an intact family, etc., and Adam is/does not. The favor he could have Glendower do for him would change his life in very material ways, whereas for Gansey, it's more abstract...though I guess no less real/significant?
2.) Connections (what does this quote remind you of?)
So this might not be a very accurate or fair comparison, but the thing that jumped to my mind here is Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. It's been ages since I read those books, but from what I remember, there's a similar if smaller class gap between the characters, but what I'm thinking of specifically is a scene toward the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Huck and Tom are trying to help Jim escape from the Phelps' farm, and Tom seems to think of the whole thing as an adventure like in the stories he loves reading (and goes to pretty ridiculous lengths to make sure the escape plan conforms to the conventions of those stories), while the stakes are obviously way higher and more *real* for Jim and Huck. Like I said, I don't think this comparison totally works, but I do think there's something to it.
3.) Contemplation (how does the quote relate to your own life?)
I feel like I grew up lower middle-class but with a sense of proximity to Gansey's and Adam's worlds. That said, I definitely feel more resonance with the description of Gansey's quest here than Adam's, and generally related more to Gansey than Adam throughout the books. I wouldn't describe myself as having a "desperate" need to do much of anything, but that sense of wanting to be useful, to contribute, to make something of my privilege, to kind of pay back my debt of living (to refer back to that quote from Martyr! I posted a few days ago, which is I guess another connection I could have written about above) has always been with me.
4.) Invitation (what does the quote call you to do?)
I guess this is a good quote to start the new year with, because it makes me think about wanting to try to find ways to make myself a little more useful this year. I'm not comfortable with the idea of big quests and Life Purposes and Hero's Journeys and all that, but still, I feel like I'm always having this internal argument about how best/appropriately/ethically to live my life and what to do with the privilege I have. But somehow this quote is also making me think about wanting to challenge the conditioning that makes me think about life in these terms in the first place, and I don't know how I feel about that.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 03:47 pm (UTC)I love that you chose a Gansey-Adam quote.
Additionally, I'm very fond of Gansey's model Henrietta. I love that the gangsey is all full of kids who are /weird/ in a way. I love that so much about them aaaa
I love them so much. I look forward to your fannish 50 posts as a way to go through the book again. Yippeee!!!
no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 05:44 pm (UTC)yeah, totally--i also liked this quote i noticed this morning when i was re-reading: "Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless."
and yay, i'm looking forward to making more of these posts. glad you enjoyed this one. :)