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Hi, just wanted to say your adam parrish meta is fantastic and i love reading it. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the difference between Adam's reaction to when he thought Gansey paid his rent vs. his reaction (or lack thereof) to Ronan paying it. I feel like it maybe says a lot about his relationship with both of them and how he maybe views their richness differently but idk. I'd like to know what your views on it are though
I think there is no point at which Adam assumes that Ronan Lynch is trying to control him, which is really the difference.
Adam outright links his father’s control to potential control by Gansey in the first book. He clearly sees how Gansey is different from him socially and what others might take from Gansey offering him assistance: not love, but charity, and charity of a kind that makes Adam one of Gansey’s things. And he seemes to read Gansey’s love in that way too. He doesn’t really give Gansey credit for trying to be a friend until BLLB’s courtroom scene. And I don’t think Adam is 100% wrong? He’s like 75% wrong, but I will give him partial credit because, honestly, Gansey and Control is a thing. every time I’ve suggested that Gansey likes to control his situation and that of those around him, I’ve had people violently react with Gansey is not controlling!!! which, like, okay. He’s not controlling in the way Robert Parrish is controlling. He’s not controlling in the sense of being deliberately manipulative or cruel or getting high off of having power over people’s lives.
but Gansey absolutely – absolutely and understandably when you think about his background and his upbringing and his trauma – does not want situations to spiral out of his control. To misquote Ronan Lynch in TDT, because he is Gansey, he usually wants all of them there and he wants to be in charge. It’s not malevolent control but it is a desire to make sure his people are safe, to know they are all handling each other appropriately, to trot out logic and rationality and wisdom and all those clear-headed Glendower qualities and use them to make everything right for everyone. Because he loves these people! He loves them and he wants to make the world right for them. Control. you can’t really be a king without it, though maybe he’d like to think he’s a king like the best myths about Glendower and can rule people out of sheer love, idk.
My point is: I wouldn’t really be surprised if Adam has a hard time telling love and control apart, and I wouldn’t really be surprised if Gansey theoretically can tell the two apart but in practice expresses his love by, like, trying to talk at Adam about what Adam’s experiences are like and very logically delineating the boundaries of Adam’s life in a way you really shouldn’t do with abuse survivors because their right to trust their own impressions >>> your right to love them so hard that you get to be annoyed when they don’t let you dictate how they should be reacting to you.
Gansey clearly never means to come across as controlling to Adam, but he does, and part of that is Adam’s own issues and inability to see genuine friendship, and part of that is that Gansey really does want to control Adam’s life for the better.
so I don’t even think Adam is kinder to Ronan about it because he loves Ronan more or because Ronan is so super clever about the way he offers help or w/e. I think it’s mostly because Adam hardly sees Ronan as likely to control his life. mind you, this isn’t totally fair to Gansey. Ronan isn’t immune to telling Adam what Adam’s needs are or what Adam should be doing. in BLLB, Ronan tells him to forget Aglionby and college because Adam has a bond with Cabeswater. Adam just dismisses him outright. There’s no agonizing over it; there’s no internal pain over Ronan setting out what Adam should do or Adam becoming one of his things. Adam pretty clearly doesn’t perceive any danger of that with Ronan. Ronan’s not going to try to control the universe to make things better for people. and tbh at several points in the books Adam’s (and a lot of other people’s) perception of Ronan is that Ronan barely makes any effort to control himself.