ok this post was getting super big and clunky so im just putting this here but. the raven cycle is a story where literally every character thinks they know the ending. noah is skipping through time like it’s a jump rope; gansey feels destined for greatness but also for death; blue knows he is her true love who is destined to kiss her and die by the end of the first chapter of the first book. adam sees gansey die in the vision tree in book one; first he and then ronan find out that gansey is on 300 fox way’s death list. the only main character who doesn’t know how the story ends, whose arc gives the impression that he is living in his own story, one of a different genre which just happens to intersect with the events of trc, is henry. henry is the one who, when faced with the reality of gansey’s death, says the story doesn’t have to end there. henry is the one who gives the story a new ending, because he can’t see how it ends, which reminds all the other characters that knowing the ending to a story is just that; knowing one possible ending, one possible iteration of all the different points at which something could come to a close. it’s a metanarrative point about genre, because henry is not living in a tragedy like everyone else, and so he makes the tragedy not a tragedy; it’s a metanarrative point about narratives and limited perspective, because henry reminds us that even when you think you know how something ends, you are often wrong, and what you need is a friend who has a different angle on things. depending on where you began the story, it was a story about henry cheng.
sometimes, “this isn’t how i thought it would end” is all you need to say for a new ending to become possible.
truly cannot believe that henry’s arc, which was about not having the right words, ended with him having not only the exact right words but also the right ending for the story.. cannot cope w the fact that henry, the least magical of the whole group, said “be magicians” and brought gansey back to life… that as one of the few characters with no prophetic abilities to speak of he said “i thought we were all going to venezuela” and it was true not because it was the only possible way for the story to end, but because it was the ending he wanted the most
