Cabeswater - Tumblr Posts

The energy flickered and sputtered through him, less like electricity and more like remembering a secret. It was strong, all-encompassing, and then fading, waiting. Sometimes he was nothing but it, and sometimes, it was nearly forgotten. 

And beneath it all, he felt the oldness of Cabeswater. The strangeness. There was something true and inhuman at its core. It had been there so many centuries before him, and it would exist for centuries after. In the relative scheme of things, Adam Parrish was irrelevant. He was such a small thing, just a whorl in the fingerprint of a massive being.

- The Dream Thieves, Chapter 50

New track for my Ronan Lynch’s Mixtape headcanon. But also the song/Fantasia 2000 clip combo is beautiful and makes me think of Cabeswater/tir e e’lintes/waking the third sleeper and is perfect, so jot that down.

H E N R I E T T A , V i r g i n i a  » » personal photos only series

cabeswater gansey post-resurrection: what's a nice place like me doing in a kid like this?

kdjfdasdfgfds

ronan, shaking adam awake at 3am: adam, adam listen i dreamed cabeswater and cabeswater is inside of gansey. adam that means part of me is inside of gansey. parrish are you listening?

adam, not entirely awake: i don’t know what bullshit you’re on about but it needs to stop right now

adam has dissociated in the series? i dont doubt it, just do you have any examples? thanks !!

It’s largely referenced off-screen, but there are big Cabeswater-influenced moments of dissociation as well (which is a really great look at how this series combines pre-existing mental illness with magic tbh).

 Pre-Cabeswater, there’s this, which is fairly straight forward:

Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else.

and this scene after Adam is deafened, which is a bit more implied/something you can recognize if you know what depersonalization looks like:

“Nice Transformer,” Blue said. “Is that the police car one?” 

Adam looked at Blue, unsmiling, as if he didn’t really see her. Then, a moment too late, he replied, “Yes.”

The delayed response, the blank affect, and the single-word replies are all classic signs of dissociation. 

After Cabeswater, this gets twisted up in Adam’s connection to the forest, but it’s still clearly a thing that he did before Cabeswater–his panic response to his father is to shut down entirely and start to see the situation from outside of himself. Look at the scene where Adam’s dad shows up at St. Agnes.

Before Adam’s father shows up, you have Adam analyzing what had just happened in the church. He’s very clinical in his thoughts, but no more than Adam usually is–he’s considering what just happened, what effects it might have had, why Ronan might have reacted the way he did, and what Adam should do about it. Complex, analytical thoughts that are still cognizant of emotion and what/why Ronan might have felt that way. It’s two or three large paragraphs of text.

And then we have this:

Adam check to make sure his hands were no longer bloody, and then he opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” his father was saying.

Adam’s body wasn’t his, and so, with a little wonder, he watched himself step back to allow Robert Parrish to enter his apartment.

Again–cut and dry depersonalization. His body is not his own, his thoughts slow down to repetition and simple, basically constructed sentences, and his narrative becomes passive instead of active (see “his father was saying” instead of “his father said”). 

In the narrative Adam seems to exist outside of himself, and the text is dehumanizing with things like “Adam was a thing standing out of the way” and “his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made”.

And then there’s a continuation of the repetition trick, which always reminds me of the scene in TRB where Persephone says she’s going to use as many of Blue’s words that work as she can. Adam’s not thinking clearly on his own, and so he negates the things his father says in his head:

“You gonna look in my face when I talk to you, or you gonna keep looking at that shelf?”

Adam was going to keep looking at that shelf.

and

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

That was how it was going to be.

and

“Are you not going to say anything?”

Adam was not going to say anything.

Again, his brain is not processing coherently. He goes in and out in this chapter–he starts to analyze the idea of the restraining order clinically, and then has the thought “He did not want to get hit. He did not want to get hit. He would do what he needed to do to not get hit.” Then he hears Persephone’s voice, then he remembers Cabeswater, and then he is able to say, “I think you should go.”

The Adam’s dad starts calling him a shit and saying horrible things, and Adam goes away again:

Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones. 

The narrative goes on like that–swapping between Adam’s dad’s hateful speech and Adam speaking to Cabeswater, which is trying to comfort him, until the thorn sticks his father and “brought Adam rushing back to himself”. 

And finally, you have the end of that chapter:

Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks. 

He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.

When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.

Adam’s very clearly using Cabeswater to cope, as a safe place to retreat to away from his body, and he does it in the same way that his brain does naturally in response to extreme panic or trauma.

I know that a lot of the time people look at this and say, “Oh, right, so you added in a kid who depersonalizes and turn it into some magical bullshit instead of real representation,” but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that this is the addition of magic to Adam’s life twisting its way into his mind’s coping strategies; this is Cabeswater heightening what Adam does on his own. 

But yes, it is absolutely canon that Adam depersonalizes in moments like this.

is your teen texting about the raven cycle?

omg - old man gansey

lmfao - let me father adam, okay?

ily - i love yogurt 

rofl - ronan’s oil feelings lit

mcm - missing cabeswater monday

idc - i dreamt chainsaw

sob - scrying only bowl

ttyl - the trees yelling latin

omfg - oh my fucking glendower! 

Adam being a tree.

HELLO EVERYONE I JUST FINISHED THE RAVEN KING( from the Raven Cycle) AND BOY DO I HAVE QUESTIONS

The thing is that I enjoyed the series but I need to solve these doubts of mine to really decided whether or not I really loved it ( also this is going to be a whole lot of basic stuff for you but I am very stupid don't judge me please )

1. WHAT WAS GLENDOWER FOR???? Are you telling me that the magical ley line decided to save poor little Gansey only to make him obsess over something useless??? I'm not even mad that the king was dead , the problem was that finding him didn't solve ANYTHING, nothing in the tomb or on the way to it gave the guys ANY new idea or solution for the situation they were in. And I'm sorry but that is just straight up cruel because it means that Gansey life revolved around a wild goose chase for SO long, in his place I would have been unbelievably frustrated

2. What was Noah's role? Towards the end of the book , when calla and Maura offered to help him pass (?) , he refused , saying that it wasn't time yet. What did he have to do? Why wait? In the end , he goes back and whispers the thing about Glendower to young Gansey and then he goes away and why was it so important that he did it during Gansey's second death? If time is a circle for a spirit he could have gone back any moment, no? I don't get it

+Also about point one I was wondering , maybe getting Gansey to look for Glendower was the only way to get the gang together but no , I'm pretty sure it wasn't, Gansey could have been sent to look for Glendower's daughter ( I don't remember her name lol) , who was weird as fuck but at least she was alive and actually useful and the gang would have still come together

3. At the end of the book Gansey is alive but he is different, he is now bits and pieces that the ley line put together to form a human and how does that work? it can't just be left like this I NEED that to be explored and explained

4. Okay last thing, what did the three women with blue's face and red hands symbolize? I get that they weren't super relevant to the plot and were most definitely a metaphor for something, but my head is really small and I have no idea what they were for

some of you bitches haven’t sacrificed your hands and eyes to a sentient forest that speaks latin and it shows

Giving me Cabeswater vibes

The Green Pool ~ Bullock Creek by Steve Reekie

I've been working a lot on art for school and a really big commission and I realised that painting little watercolour portraits of Adam parrish is so therapeutic so I'm gonna do that instead of actually making an effort

“You don’t have to be sad to make something worth hearing”

-The Shell, Lucy Dacus

Just a quick drawing of Ronan dreaming in dream-cabeswater, also my new obsession with Lucy Dacus and connecting her songs to the raven cycle

The shell can relate to all the raven boys but especially Ronan, I mean

“If the body and the life were two things that we could divide

I'd deliver up my shell to be filled with somebody else” are you kidding me.

Plus the whole theme of ghosts with Noah and the line “you don’t wanna be a leader, doesn’t mean you don’t know the way” is SO Gansey and you can tear this out of my cold dead hands