my mother (in her infinite wisdom) has just said “Gansey will be the kind of father who has pregnancy symptoms even though he’s not the one who’s pregnant” and honestly?? nothing has ever been truer
do u ever think abt the fact that gansey fucking thought literally none of his problems mattered compared to this friends’ bc he’s rich. like he literally died and he thought that the repercussions he was dealing with bc of that were completely unimportant compared to his friends’ problems. he Knew literally the Entire Series!!! that he was gonna die but he never told anyone. he shouldered that the whole series and acted like everything was fine bc he thought!!!!his problems!!!! didnt matter!!!bc!!! hes!!!! rich!!!!! fUCK
knowing that on separate occasions, noah said he’d been dead seven years and ronan said he found chainsaw in his mind and gansey remained somehow oblivious to both truths, and reading that sentence in trk about how “everything ronan had ever said about adam reconstructed in gansey’s mind,” i am convinced that at some point ronan said something very not subtle about his feelings regarding adam and gansey failed to take the very obvious hint
remember in the boat scene in tdt when blue finally told gansey his boat shoes were dumb and he literally had an internal monologue where he was like “these boat shoes are the only thing that make me feel alive”
god did gansey even like go to school when he was globetrotting. did he just check Out after seventh grade and then miss like four years of school and drop into aglionby sophomore/junior year??? and he gets on RONAN’S case for cutting class. unbelievable. the hyppocrates.
From The Raven Boys, chapter 12 (page 111 in the paperback, 95 in the ebook):
“Of all the places Gansey had attended boarding school – and he’d attended many in his four years of underage wandering – Aglionby Academy was his father’s favorite, which meant it was the most likely to land its student body in the Ivy League. Or the Senate. It also meant, however, that it was the most difficult school Gansey had ever been to. Before Henrietta, he’d made his search for Glendower his primary activity, and school had been a distant second. Gansey was clever enough and he was good at studying if nothing else, so it hadn’t been a problem to skip classes or push homework to the bottom of the list. But at Aglionby, there were no failing grades. If you dropped below a B average, you were out on your ass. And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will.
He’d said it nicely, though, over a place of fettuccine.”
So Gansey had schools, and he attended as much as required, but they were much more “if you pass your classes we do not care about skipping” and Gansey was good enough to make up for skipping. So yes, he skipped when he could get away with it. The trouble was neither he nor Ronan could get away with it at Aglionby.
So not really a hypocrite. You bet Gansey would skip for Glendower if he could have. But there was always going to be a diploma from somewhere, the trappings of a successful life trajectory and the options that leaves open.
i guess it’s possible that this level of truancy would include school attendance and only involve absences over school breaks but uhhhhhh i doubt it. school breaks are not that long. i guess it’s possible that gansey attempted distance education at some point and there are (now) a number of excellent private schools that offer at least some online or distance courses, but there were not that many options in 2011/12 (which is when loose consensus says the series is set).
also going to a string of private schools is not… like… if you end up having to switch to a different school, that’s not ”attending as much as is required because you’re good enough to make up for skipping,” that’s “skipping and then getting kicked out but with a nicer face on it.” gansey doesn’t go to school, or didn’t go to school, until he got hit with an ultimatum (a polite ultimatum! but it boiled down to ‘you’re not allowed to be damaged in ways that other people can see, or that are going to make other people Talk… this is your last chance, so you’d better make this school work or we’re going to curtail the freedoms we’ve allowed you through our neglect, instead of helping you.’)
anyway the other thing is that they did get away with it aglionby. gansey IS able to make a deal for ronan’s diploma – it’s not aglionby being difficult that makes gansey a good and responsible student or whatever, it’s gansey choosing (because of family pressure, because he’s able to subsume his glendower quest into his relationship with henrietta as a town & repress the urge to Wander, because of the friendships he builds that tether him to the area, and imo most importantly because of his growing awareness of his swiftly-approaching death) to actually make a go of it, and to leave the people he cares about with a minimally-messy cleanup after he’s through
anyway tldr though the original post was a joke about being too mentally ill for school & gansey experiencing the mom friend override when it comes to ronan It’s Not That Deep
anyone want to sit with me and think about how the tree in cabeswater turned out to show nightmare scenarios, not the future, but gansey saw glendower anyway. anyone want to think about how gansey’s nightmare scenario was actually achieving the goal he’d spent his life working to and not having any value beyond that
“the pupil of your eye can expand as much as 55% when looking at something you love” is why gansey has to wear glasses he loves everything and everyone too much and it messed up his eyesight
bullshit central 