deer country app;

[threesecrets]

Character Base

• Character Name: The Greywaren / Ronan Lynch
• Age: 18
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: The Raven Cycle (specifically from the last book, the Raven King, at the point where he is fighting the Unmaker and losing, and before Gansey's sacrifice)
• Items Coming Along: Chainsaw his pet raven, a bag with a few outfits, worn black leather boots, Armani sunglasses, a rainbow translation box, a prescription bottle with green dream pills.
• Content Warnings for Character: spoilers for Greywaren, book three in the Dreamer Trilogy, (street date 10/17, only really relevant for retroactive information), depression/suicidality, references to homophobia, suicide of a love interest, really fucked up family dynamics, identity trauma, eldritch weirdness, shitty teenager behavior, alcohol and drug use, murder, trauma, and related themes.

Character Background

• History: So the wiki for TRC is a fucking mess; specifically re: biased interpretations of canon events, relationships and just general bad/wrong information. Also lacks relevant lore stuff, so adding an additional segment that I will try my best to keep brief, will follow with wiki links to the specific novels, which are slightly less trash.

Ronan isn't a person, he is a Greywaren; a thing dreamt by an eldritch alien intelligence, and two dreamers, Niall and Mor – he is a promise to make the dreamers better and stronger. He is a "more expensive" thing than even a dream. Ronan is a name his father gives him in an attempt to connect him more closely to being human, which he sees as being important for something so powerful. However, upon realizing that he does make them better and stronger, and is that powerful, it scares his mother shitless – Mor suggests that they need to kill it. So they creep into Ronan's bedroom, only to find Declan, their biological son, curled up with him protectively. He tells his parents that Ronan struggles with nightmares, but suffers very quietly.

So they realize the son they actually give a shit about loves this inhuman monster, and thus they can't just kill it. Eventually this gets to the point where Mor decides that she has to leave, because she can't stand being so close to it. Niall by this point has grown attached to Ronan, and lets her go. She offers to take Declan if he wants, but Niall opts to keep all of the boys. However, they know they'll both miss each other, since they're in love, and so they dream copies of themselves so that they can each have a dream spouse and not be alone. Yay? Mor softens the version of herself for Niall, and Niall makes himself as young as he was when she met him. So, uh… yeah, it's fucking weird.

Which is to say: the family Ronan grew up with was nice on the surface, but subtly really fucked up. Ronan's view of his parents is pretty skewed for basically the entire series.

Ronan seems to have been dreaming basically from birth, but it was much less frequent when he was younger. Declan quickly fell into the role of being Ronan's protector, both generally and from his dreams, which leaves him as "boring". This comes to a head on a Christmas just after Ronan's fifth birthday- Christmas is always bad times for Ronan and the dreaming because of the solstice- when Declan and Ronan are playing outside and see "one thousand starlings". Ronan declares that he'd like to have a bird army, which Declan, knowing just how viscerally possible that is for his brother, disapproves of. In protest, Ronan hurls himself into the middle of the flock, and for a moment, feels like he's flying, like he's dreaming – but he's just a boy standing on the ground. This causes him real and tangible anguish despite hardly being five years old, but he lacks the words to vocalize it, or anyone to tell.

Instead, a couple nights later, on the winter solstice, he dreams himself a new, better brother. Golden curled and ineffably happy and who will always want to play with him. He's named Matthew.

Notably, Ronan somehow forgets that he dreamt his younger brother, which is a pattern with a number of his dreams. Meanwhile Niall buys this new son a social security number and a forged birth certificate on the black market that he's become increasingly involved with, and arranges for physicians he can bribe – he's not entirely sure that Ronan understands human biology enough to give his brother things like internal organs, since he certainly forgot to give him fingerprints.

They don't talk about the dreaming. Ronan describes growing up with his brothers as his only friends and his father as an idolized but inconstant hero. His father sells dreams, impossible things – and when people ask where he gets them from, he says he has a magic item, called The Greywaren, which allows him to take things from his dreams. He refuses to sell it.

At fourteen, Ronan starts school at Aglionby High School, a prestigious boy's private school. Over the summer, he first meets Gansey, who comes to town with stories of magical ley lines and dead Welsh Kings that grant wishes, and buys a garishly orange Camaro – he and Ronan become fast friends, and Gansey is allowed to spend time at the Barns, despite its wonder and danger.

And then Ronan finds his father's body in the driveway: his skull beaten in with a tire iron while he slept in his bedroom twenty feet away. Days later, their mother falls into a coma. Their father's Will bans the boys from being at the Barns, or taking anything from the property, and that they must immediately move into the Aglionby dorms. Ronan changes; he becomes harder, sharper, filled with venom. He steals his father's car; he and Declan are no longer friends. And a few days later, he moves into Gansey's warehouse, Monmouth Manufacturing.

It seems relevant to note that when the Greywaren was first made, Niall's big contribution was trying to humanize and soften it, putting in all the emotions and complexity and empathy of being human. And this personality shift that happens is sometimes talked about in ways that make it seem magically-induced. Living dreams are said to fall asleep when their dreamer dies because they're like a computer with no input – so it's possible that the abrupt shift in temperament isn't just from trauma, but because he loses a measure of that intentionally-humanizing "input".

And so begins Ronan's journey to figure out what he is:

The Raven Boys
The Dream Thieves
Blue Lily, Lily Blue
The Raven King

• Core Relationships:
Gansey: So canon more or less jumps forward about eighteen months after the death of his father, with little information given about this aside from the addition of another boy: Adam Parrish. He describes Ronan and Gansey as being akin to a two-headed creature: Ronan-and-Gansey. Gansey is basically the only person that Ronan will listen to, capable of pulling him back from his worst impulses when Ronan is dead to everything else, capable only of snarling venom. However, it is worth noting that Gansey's power in the series is the ability to command things with his voice; so there is more to this than just friendship based on the fact that Ronan has lines like: "It was the voice Ronan couldn't not listen to. It was sure in every way that Ronan was not", and talks in other places about how it's his voice that induced Ronan to follow him – "Gansey was using his Mr. Gansey professorial voice, the one that exuded certainty and commanded rats and small children to get up, get up, follow me! It had worked on Ronan, anyway."

But while ICly Ronan views Gansey as the most important person in his life, multiple times referencing him as being more of a brother to him than Declan is at this point – it does not come across as a friendship that is particularly great for Ronan. There is this focus on "fixing" Ronan; Declan says "he's your dog Gansey, you leash him", when talking to Blue about Ronan Adam describes him as "the sort of pitbull that makes the evening news" and says that "Gansey is trying to retrain him". So there is very much this implication of who Ronan is as being flawed and not good enough, despite how dearly he cares for Gansey and his other friends. In Raven Boys and Dream Thieves especially, Ronan seems to have some attraction to Gansey – we know that Adam and Ronan frequently vied for his attention, and that seeing him dressed down in a way that made him seem attainable got under his skin. Because for most of their friendship, Ronan seems to see himself as less-than, as not deserving of Gansey, and having to somehow make up for it, a view that Gansey seems to unintentionally reinforce.

He never acts on his attraction though, once saying "there were a thousand reasons that he couldn't say it". And at the end of Dream Thieves classifies their platonic bond as being the thing about his relationship with Gansey that he rates as being important to him. Ronan is actually the one character among the friend group that develops in TRC, with no interest in finding Glendower whatsoever. He knows that magic exists and has no need for wishes – he's part of Gansey's quest purely because it is Gansey's quest. Instead the thing that consumes Ronan's focus, is finding a way to save Gansey from his deathly allergy to bee stings.

Kavinsky: Ronan seems to view Gansey and Kavinsky as sort of opposites; describing Kavinsky as "Henrietta's Dark King", and that while Gansey ruled the daylight spaces that Kavinsky operated in those places just outside the glow of the streetlights. Kavinsky and his "pack of dogs"- four boys, Skov, Swan, Jiang and Prokopenko, known to be his closest confidants- are the only friends that Ronan has outside of Gansey's circle. This is a friendship built on companionable cruelty and rivalry that Ronan regardless describes as "this is what it was to be happy". Kavinsky is someone that seems to be cut from similar cloth as Ronan, who doesn't see his sharp edges as things about him that need to be "fixed". Ronan spends the entirety of the first series, and much of its companion series, the Dreamer Trilogy, unsure of what he wants, and there is a moment where Ronan and Gansey are at one of Kavinsky's infamous parties, where Kavinsky claims to know what Ronan wants: interesting here, is both that when Gansey parrots the line back wants becomes needs, as if Gansey cannot see what Ronan wants from how much he focuses on what he sees as essential which Kavinsky clearly does not suffer from. The second being that Kavinsky is clearly correct. Ronan talks about heat filling his body, and finally being able to breathe.

Later, when Gansey is derisive about Kavinsky's lifestyle of parties, drugs and street races, Ronan asks "You don't see the appeal?" – because he clearly does. We never see Ronan accept drugs from Kavinsky on the page, but the way that he offers them seems like Ronan has agreed in the past. It's also notable that Ronan imagines Gansey watching him- and the resulting guilt- as a way to keep himself from agreeing. We also know that Ronan is a frequent and long-term attendant at Kavinsky's gatherings, including his so-called "substance parties", which Ronan refers to as one of Kavinsky's "coarsest rituals". And Ronan knows the location by memory. Gansey sees Ronan as someone corrupted under Kavinsky's influence, but this does not seem to hold water. Instead, he seems attentive to Ronan's desires, and yes, clearly romantically attracted to him, but he is one of the few people willing to give Ronan the space to want things without judging him for them.

Kavinsky is also a dreamer: like Ronan's father, like what Ronan assumes himself to be. But unlike Niall, Kavinsky offers to teach him what he knows, how he does it. They spend days together taking dream pills with cheap beer and snacking on twizzlers – "wasted on dreams". But one of the really notable things in this sequence, is the way that Kavinsky is basically the only person in the series to ever question the way that Ronan sees himself as unworthy, and to assert that he is worth Gansey's friendship – and more – without having to make up for who he is.

Kavinsky clearly does his best to teach Ronan, despite clearly having had no one to teach him himself. Kavinsky is touchy with Ronan, but Ronan seems to tolerate or even enjoy this – even when Kavinsky does so in public, in front of Gansey and friends. There was clearly sexual tension between Ronan and Kavinsky, with Ronan even having what was pretty clearly a sex dream. And there's a redux of this when they're in the dream field together: a moment that Ronan isn't sure if it's a dream or real, where Kavinsky traces fingers softly against his tattoo. However, once Ronan has what he needs, he leaves. He seems suddenly unnerved and uncomfortable, which canon does not answer directly, but seems likely tied to the fact that Ronan does not seem to have accepted the fact that he's gay at this point. At the end of the sex dream sequence, there's a line about how "the euphoria wore off long before the shame did". Ronan is also raised Catholic, and calls himself a sinner, while clearly equating both being a dreamer and being gay as things counted as "sins".

Ronan uses Kavinsky and walks away, but it's clear that to Ronan, this was not intended to be permanent: in scenes after he talks about still considering dreaming something to bring to his 4th of July party. When Kavinsky texts him and Ronan doesn't reply, he describes it as feeling overwhelmed by how much time they'd spent together in the dream field (and likely by the intimacy of it). Ronan is oblivious to how much he's hurt the other boy and thinks that Kavinsky is still going to be there when Ronan needs him, which is obviously unfair. Notably, it does not work out that way.

After Kavinsky's death/suicide, it's clear that this continues to be something that torments Ronan for years, and that he continues to blame himself for: "Dread and shame together, thick enough to vomit up": a reference he makes simply from seeing a tarot card that Adam had associated with Kavinsky. But this is not a sort of trauma that he seems to have any people that will understand. It's implied that he continues to race with at least Jiang from Kavinsky's dog pack, and possibly the others, but it doesn't seem like they really talk about their feelings, even if they likely take comfort in people that understand that loss. But Ronan does continue to use Kavinsky's dream pills well into the second series, like he tries to hold onto what scraps and pieces he has of the other boy, regardless.

Adam: A friend that Gansey makes a few months into the school semester, thus expanding the duo of Gansey and Ronan into a trio. By the start of the series, it seems that Ronan has developed an attraction to the other boy, but their relationship is notably fraught and conflicted – Adam's feelings about Ronan are not typically very positive. At the beginning of the first novel, he says that Gansey is afraid that someone is going to "fall and cut themselves on Ronan" because of how sharp he is, and that he thinks Gansey needs to let him stand (or fall) on his own two feet. And yet from the beginning, we see Ronan doing things like teaching Adam to drive in the BMW – his father's car, and one of the only things he has left of Niall. So this is clearly more significant than Adam seems to consider it. He also defends Adam when he sees his father attack him – and one of the significant beats there is the way that when Ronan is leaving in his car, Adam notes that he's doing so slowly: as if he was keeping watch on Adam. Ronan is not someone that does many things slowly if he can at all help it, in most cases. He's also the one that gets Adam a room above the church that he attends, and when they all receive a letter about a tuition increase, he goes down and pays the nuns to lower his rent in order to not put him through additional financial hardship, as Adam is notably insistent about not being dependent on other people.

But it's not until after the end of Dream Thieves, where despite the weight of Kavinsky's death, Ronan seems to come to terms with being gay and a dreamer and starts to actively pursue Adam with something like romantic intention. There's a scene where after being sent to the grocery store, Ronan orders him into a grocery cart and proceeds to crash him into a car, seemingly with the intention of making him smile, and Adam allows this. Ronan also invites him over to the family farm in a scene that the author dubs Ronan considering a date but that "not talking about the date remains the most important part". This is, however, the scene where Adam first seems to realize Ronan's attraction to him. The origin of the two of them as a couple seems to stem from this – Ronan's desire to not be alone and Adam's desire to be wanted and valued.

But even outside of romantic attraction, they work well together. Whether that's trying to blackmail the man that ordered the death of Ronan's father with a series of ugly crimes, assisting Gansey in his quest, or trying to repair Cabeswater when it's clear that something is going wrong.

But it's obviously when they kiss at Ronan's birthday party that really cements their relationship, even if it isn't in words. They never agree to something as clear as dating per se, which likely has reasons touched on more in the companion series: Adam has clear plans to go to college while Ronan drops out of high school and has no intention of continuing his education – there is a clear rift in their relationship and in their intentions for their future. This is tense for them, especially given that they're not great at talking through things to begin with. So rather than talk about dating and all that would include, Ronan kisses Adam, and Adam kisses him back. And on a night in which the possibility of not living long enough to worry about their future looms large, they touch in the tactile language they both seem to speak best.

But this is a rift between them that goes undiscussed all the way through Adam leaving for Harvard in the second series. So they're something much more nebulous than boyfriends at his canon point.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

• Cares for Others: Okay, so I talked about this a lot in the character relationship sections above, but one of Ronan's big personality traits is that he does care for others under his admittedly prickly exterior. And not just with his closest friends / romantic interests, but Blue is a brand-new addition to the group of friends at the beginning of the series, and Ronan is slow to warm to her. However, by the third novel, he repeatedly looks out for her. The first moment where we see this is when he's trying to make her feel better after she's suspended from school, telling her "I'll be proud for you," with the smile of a born troublemaker. And then again later, when they're in the caves under Cabeswater, he hands her his dreamt globe of light, telling her to leave him behind, because she can go where he can't.
  
  
• Sort of a Jerk: However, Ronan is violent and abrasive and a jerk, someone for whom being venomous is his first impulse. The scene with Kavinsky that Ronan describes as "this is what it was to be happy" notably begins with tossing slurs at each other. Ronan calls K "Russian" to which he responds "hey let's not make this nasty", as Kavinsky is Bulgarian. One of the things that allows Ronan and Kavinsky to be something like friends and attracted to each other, is the fact that Kavinsky is also a sharp boy, and thus can weather Ronan's barbs, whether that's calling him Jersey Trash out a car window, or later when Ronan punches him in the face at his party. The later an incident likely incited by Gansey's presence and for his benefit – and yet Kavinsky never holds any of Ronan's worst urges against him.
  
  
• Lonely: Despite what Ronan tries to convince Kavinsky of in the dreamfield, he is clearly very lonely. There are a number of scenes that lean into this, but there is a notable pair in Dream Thieves, between killing the night horror with Gansey, and then later when Maura says "The Greywaren. As you know, that's you." And these are both notable thrills for Ronan, because his dreaming has always been a secret, something that Niall and Aurora would not even say outloud. As a small child he dreamt a picture book for Aurora, and she told him to "bury it … forever". And progressively it isn't a secret anymore. Instead it's something that can be said out loud in a room. And even at this early point when he's still asking someone tell me what I am, he clearly wants to be known, to not be alone in the world. Which is clearly part of what fuels Kavinsky and his attraction to one another.
  
  

  Deer Country Attributes

  
  • Canon Powers: Ronan is keeping his canon powers, and gaining blood powers, but as they are similar in tone, the intent is to sort of group them together. Unfortunately the wiki is also awful in terms of Ronan's powers, which are difficult to encapsulate in a way that's brief, so forgive me for the TLDR.
  
  The Greywaren: This is what happens when an eldritch being from Somewhere Else convinces two magical humans with the power to bring their dreams into the waking world to have a baby with it. He is "a creature of two worlds". Ronan makes it easier/better/stronger for other dreamers (and possibly others with a similar schema for their powers?), but it's worth noting that Ronan's abilities are associated with time and reality warping more than how dreams typically exist.
  
  Ronan is also a literal supernatural doorway between worlds/dimensions, but not in a way where he could use that to travel. Instead, it functions where he can open a door for eldritch beings from other places, and create a physical form for them in reality- although the shape of it is limited by what he can imagine/conceive of for it.
  
  Ronan himself is not nearly as human as he appears, either: when kept out of his body because of there not being enough magic to sustain him in the real world, he ends up in a strange magical ocean that allows him to move across space and time to experience memories and feelings. It is also adversarial to human life: when his ex uses scrying and discovers that place, Ronan has to literally try to keep Adam's body and consciousness together, to prevent him from being torn apart. Ronan's "true form" seems to be some kind of large lovecraftian squid thing, but he does have enough control to be able to make himself human-shaped, once it's pointed out to him that he's huge and weird and terrifying.
  
  Most of this stuff is beyond his canon point, but I mention it as it seems to largely be triggered by Ronan starting to realize what he is under his human skin, which seems likely to happen faster in Deer. But, even at his canon point we're told that he's a "difficult thing to unmake" because so much of him "snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots, fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops". The implication has thus always been that Ronan was something Vast and Other, even if the exact shape and origin of that wasn't clear.
  
  The Dreaming: The author did a fake WikiHow for Dream Manifestation which lays out the basic process. It does seem to talk more about dreamers in general, rather than Ronan specifically.
  
  Dreaming has been the main piece of Ronan's powers for most of the series. When Ronan goes to sleep, he can bring his dreams back with him, and wake with them in his hands – anything that he dreams. "Monsters and machines, weather and wishes, fears and forests". Dream, to memory, to reality. These things are permanent; Ronan cannot wish them out of existence or wait for them to vanish when they're dangerous or inconvenient – when he kills one of his night horrors, he and Gansey have to stuff its corpse in the back of a car, drive it to the Barns, and bury it in a hole in one of the fields where hopefully no one will ever find it.
  
  Normally this seems to take around forty-five minutes at his canon point, but when the Unmaker is trying to kill him, he's able to under duress do this seemingly in moments. But, when he brings something back with him he is paralyzed for a non-specific length of time, but that is clearly usually measured in minutes. With the Unmaker, the paralysis doesn't keep him from dreaming again, but it does keep him from being able to interfere or comment when Gansey decides to sacrifice himself.
  
  Canonically, the Shit Ronan Dreams has included cars, magical dream forests, a raven, plants that grow chocolate-covered-peanuts, earthbound stars, flaming crowns, music that sings by itself, a gossamer armored-skin meant to protect his best-friend, night horrors, his own blood and injuries, strange creatures like a housecat the size of a deer with human hands, small furred dragons, a literal copy of himself ("like it had been waiting for him to ask"), and more. After the summer that Ronan spends refining his powers, this starts to include less concrete things that more overtly twist the world and affect other people directly: rumors, storms he can hold and weaponize, and so on. With practice and enough energy and clear access to the ley line, he gets to where he considers himself "good at dreaming".
  
  "It works in reality like it does in the dream", has been the mantra of Ronan's dreaming. The things Ronan dreams do not need to obey the rules of reality: they work anyway. Whether that's a car with no engine or an RC drone plane with no batteries, fireflies that are all light and no bug – Ronan can basically bring back anything he can imagine, as long as he can survive the dream. The reason he dreams a copy of himself in canon, is because he needs a version of himself to die for him so he doesn't lose his dreams as he's trying to bring them back. Ronan dies in his dreams a lot, which is normally quasi-harmless. Normally.
  
  Ronan can even dream sentient creatures as well, although ICly he avoids doing so intentionally. A mirror copy of himself, the mentor he needs and someone with a quest that Ronan can follow, a sunny younger brother, a scared little girl with satyr legs so he didn't feel so alone, a night horror that protects him instead of destroying him. Kavinsky also dreams people, but his seem to all be copies. Ie, he dreams his dead best-friend and his dead father. Ronan seems capable of making new creations with new personalities. Ronan's father was also capable of dreaming things that were "alive", but this was less direct; a coffee machine that ran off affection instead of power, and that similarly stopped working when Niall died. Because everything a dreamer dreams that is alive is implicitly tied to them. On their death, they fall into an endless slumber.
  
  He's also capable of using dreams to alter time: Ronan dreams his dead father. And while he doesn't bring him back, he's able to talk to him in the dream forest and obtain information that Ronan very specifically was unaware of. Also when Ronan, Gansey and friends first find Cabeswater in the first book, aside from finding it familiar- as well as being aware of some of its dangers- Ronan finds a rock, with a message he's written; we later see him write the message in a dream the following book. This takes place chronologically later, but it is indicated that Ronan is no stranger to messing with time: "Time was a circle, a rut, a worn tape Ronan never tired of playing". There are also a few notable points in the series where Ronan seems to have sort of prophetic deja vu, and talks about how it feels like things are coming full circle / ending where they began, etc.
  
  The Dream Forests: https://beochaoineadh.dreamwidth.org/1202.html (journal is mine for pre-series Ronan, basically an infopage as a speedrun on "what are the dream forests?" lol.)
  
  Other Weirdness: So basically in the new book a big thing is Ronan basically fully realizing that he's not human and accepting both sides of himself. Doing so seems to give him some level of power that works in the real world, when his eyes are open. Specifically, the ley lines which are basically the source of magic in the series, have been turned off. Ronan talks about how years ago, Adam made a deal with one of the eldritch beings that control them in order to wake them up. When asked if he knows how to contact one of those things, Ronan replies that he is one of those things. And then he puts his hands together and he wakes up the ley line. Awake, and like it was nothing. He can feel the ebb and flow of power with his eyes open, something he struggled with for years.
  
  • Blood Type: Darkblood.
  • Omen: Can he have his night horror for his Omen? It's a dreamt pet he has in canon, which recently died, and he basically treats it like a very large dog. Because he's a mess.
  • Blessed Day: 11/01
  • Patron Pthumerian: The Tower; but I have thoughts about him possibly being drawn towards the others (Never Mind and Mariana, maybe?) on an IC level as well, once he knows more about them, and more about himself.
  • Blood Power Manifestation: So Ronan's dreaming works pretty implicitly through the manipulation of time and reality, which becomes more overt the more he understands himself. Which is obviously not a point that he is at yet, but between having someone from canon in game and the potential to explore that in a place where he doesn't have as much tying him to his humanity (and a pretty large weight tying him closer to the Other side of himself, given how characters arrive—) I imagine that will be a point that comes up eventually.
  
  

  Writing Samples

  
  One: Here
  Two: Here
  
  

  The Player

  
  • Player Name: James
  • Player Age: Yes I'm 18+
  • Player Contact: safeaslife#0150 @ Discord / PM
  • Permissions: Here