Application Things

[fictor]

Player Information
Player name: Kristi
Contact: rageblackouts@plurk or rageiscute@gmail.com
Are you over 18: Yes
Characters in the game already: Ruby
Proof of Reserve:

Character Information
Character Name: Ronan Lynch
Canon: The Raven Cycle
Canon Point: post Blue Lily Lily Blue
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: Alive
History:

The wiki is wrong, too brief and clearly written by someone who paid no attention while reading the books, so I’m going to write this thing out for you guys.


Ronan’s father, Niall, used to say “when you [Ronan] were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood” (2 The Dream Thieves) while his mother insisted that was a lie. She said that when Ronan was born the trees all grew flowers and the Henrietta ravens laughed. Ronan never points out that both versions could be true. (3 TDT). These examples lay a fantastic foundation for Ronan’s history and the person that he is.

Ronan was born in Henrietta, West Virginia. He has a younger brother named Matthew that he adores and an older brother named Declan that he fights with constantly. Ronan was around fourteen when he found his father a few hours after his murder in the driveway of their family home next to the crowbar that had been used to beat him to death. This is when Ronan’s life changed.

We’re not told when Ronan started going to Aglionby Academy, nor are we told when he met Richard Campbell Gansey III aka Gansey, but we do know that Gansey is his best friend. They’re more like brothers than anything else (both Ronan and Gansey say this at different points in the series). Gansey was well acquainted not only with Ronan before his father’s death, but with the entire Lynch family. Four days after Niall is murdered, Ronan moves into an old warehouse slash factory with Gansey. He continues attending Aglionby Academy while living with Gansey.

At some point within this whirlwind of activity and time, Ronan and Gansey meet both Adam and Noah. Adam is a Aglionby scholarship student who lives in a trailer park and is abused by his father. Noah is a former Aglionby student and currently a ghost (but they don’t find this out until midway through the first book).

During this time, Ronan is also on a seriously self-destructive bent. He street races with his frenemy, Joseph Kavinsky, gets into fights with everyone (and is arrested for it) attends school just enough to scrape by, gets drunk and acts unruly. At some point, he attempts to kill himself by slicing his wrists (or so we’re led to believe for the entire first book and part of the second). In all actuality, he was attacked by one of his night terrors that chose to make it look like he tried to kill himself in the Catholic church that he attends every Sunday alongside his brothers. Ronan allows Gansey (who is destroyed by the idea of a Ronan who wants to die) and everyone else to believe he attempted suicide because Niall told Ronan to never tell anyone what he could do. Niall was a dreamer as well, which is where all of their money and most of their belongings come from. Unfortunately, money, cars, brothers, mothers and cows (don’t ask) aren’t the only things that come out of dreams. Sometimes, Ronan’s nightmares follow him into the real world.

By the time the book actually opens, Ronan, Adam, Gansey and Noah are fast friends. Blue, the only girl of their group, is introduced post haste and the real adventures began. Ronan, along with the boys and Blue, assist Gansey on his quest to find a long dead (sleeping) Welsh King named Glendower.

Some things happen, like Adam dating Blue (sort of) and Ronan being jealous over it (sort of) and the discovery of a magical wood named Cabeswater where the trees speak Latin and the forest bends to their whims. Most notably for Ronan, in the first book, he dreams Chainsaw, a foundling raven. She is ugly, featherless, barely a handful in size and helpless. At this point in time, it’s the only real nice thing that his dreams have allowed him. Eventually Ronan tells his friends about his ability to dream things into being.

One evening, Ronan happens upon Adam’s house when his father is beating the shit out of him. Ronan returns the favor, beats the shit out of Adam’s dad. His mom calls the cops and Ronan is arrested for fighting (again). Adam presses charges against his dad so that Ronan won’t get in trouble.

Because he wrecks Gansey’s Camaro, Ronan goes on a drug induced dream binge in which he learns how to actually pull what he wants out of his dreams rather than pulling things he doesn’t want, or bringing back something random. He is a quick and efficient learner, but this ends in something of a disaster. Kavinsky (the guy that teaches Ronan dreaming) forces Ronan to dream a night terror and then use it to kill him because he’s a jealous, possessive little shit.

The quest for Glendower intensifies as the group looks for Blue’s missing mother. Ronan’s night terror follows him around like a puppy. He and Adam blackmail a hitman (mob boss/over all horrible person). It takes Ronan’s dreaming to a whole new level in terms of specifics and details. Ronan also has to face some of the darker effects of dreaming. He and Adam grow much closer and the entire group discovers that their real power is in working together. Ronan also shows that he’s (sometimes) a human being.


Personality:

Ronan Lynch, keeper of secrets, fighter of men, devil of a boy

The most common descriptor used for Ronan is asshole because Ronan is, generally, an asshole. I suspect that Ronan has always been a bit harder, a bit sharper, a bit more asshole-ish than most people, but we know that he changed after finding his father’s body. He became more self destructive, allowing the guilt of having not saved his father to eat him up and make him hate himself. In fact, at one time, Ronan hated himself so much that he dreamed up nightmares that tried to tear him apart. Obviously, this points out that Ronan’s emotions are generally extreme. There’s very little about Ronan that’s ambivalent. He is always a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in some sort of emotion, generally violence or anger because those are emotions that come easily to Ronan.

He was clearly related to Declan: same nose, same dark eyebrows, same phenomenal teeth. But there was a carefully cultivated sense of danger to this Lynch brother. This was not a rattlesnake hidden in the grass, but a deadly coral snake striped with warning colors. Everything about him was a warning: If this snake bit you, you had no one to blame but yourself.

This is an incredibly accurate quote not only about Ronan’s outward appearance, but about him emotionally. Everything about Ronan is meant to put people at a distance. He shaves his head, consistently wears tank tops that showcase his tattoo (when not in school uniform) and tops it off with a leather jacket. He doesn’t look at people; he glares at them. His language is offensive as is the manner in which he speaks to people. Everything about Ronan is a challenge and a rebellion.

There was very little worse than Ronan in Henrietta (90 TDT)

All of this anger and rebellion for appearances sake isn’t just appearance. Ronan really is as bad as he wants everyone to think. He’s been arrested before (most likely for fighting) because when he’s arrested for fighting with Adam’s father he tells the cop trying to ‘guide’ him into the backseat of the car “I said I got it, man. Don’t you think I’ve been in one of these before?”. However, anger, violence and rebellion aren’t the only things that make up Ronan Lynch.

But one of the marvelous things about being Ronan Lynch was that no one ever expected him to do anything nice for anyone

Ronan can be gentle and soft. He’s incredibly gentle and loving with Chainsaw. He raises her from this helpless, ugly, foundling raven without any mishaps or endangering her at all. Even after she’s much larger, he’s still very gentle with her. Blue observes Ronan with Chainsaw and comments: “Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare”. Animals (and Adam) seem to bring out Ronan’s softer side. He takes all the boys (and Blue) to The Barns. While there, he shows them some field mice that always lived in the feedbags. He pulls these tiny , sleeping, baby mice out of the feed back and holds them up to his cheek because “you can feel their heartbeat that way” (this has everyone with the exception of Gansey gaping at him) then offers the mice to the others, encouraging them to hold them up to their cheek as well. However, once he has the mice back in his hand he says ‘anyone want one more go before I put them back? Field mice have shit for a life span’. He also pays Adam’s rent (and convinces a nun to lie for him—that’s another thing entirely) when tuition at Aglionby goes up and Ronan knows that Adam won’t be able to pay it. He dreams up hand cream for Adam (because fuck going to the store and buying it like normal people) because he notices Adam’s hands are chapped. He also dreams him up a mixtape—yes, a cassette tape because that’s what’s in Adam’s piece of shit car. Of course, it’s got horrible songs on it (because Ronan’s taste in music is shit) but it’s the thought that counts. (Did I mention he’s a big, gay boy? As if his gifts to his boyfriend doesn’t reiterate it enough.).

The thing about Ronan Lynch, Adam had discovered, was that he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—express himself with words. So every emotion had to be spilled out in some other way. A fist, a fire, a bottle.

He enjoys destroying thing. One of his favorite pastimes at Monmouth Manufacturing is throwing various bits of machinery and equipment out the second story window to watch it crash on the asphalt below. He gets a high from fighting and he believes he knows most what happiness is about when he’s screaming down the road in a car going FAR too fast. He makes a ramp to jump the BMW in Monmouth’s parking lot and there are tire marks where he’s done donuts there. He drives his car like a hellion (which is why he’s not allowed to drive Gansey’s car). He picks and worries at scabs and wounds, unable to leave them to heal on their own.

Ronan is generally very solitary and lonesome, but not lonely. He knows he has friends and he knows that he can be himself regardless of how ugly that is around them. He’s likely felt this way most of his life. He dreamt his brother when he was three years old because he felt alone. He didn’t get along with his older brother, his father was gone most of the time. Later, he dreams this helpless bird that has to need him to survive, that has to love him unconditionally (and she does). Ronan shows affection through insults and barked orders. He won’t hesitate to tell anyone, friends included, when he thinks they’re being stupid, but he does recognize when people are fragile and tends to soften those sharp edges ever so slightly, not enough for them to ask what alien has taken him over, but enough that he doesn’t cut people. He’s observant; there’s very little that Ronan misses. He sees Gansey’s attraction to Blue even before Gansey sees it. Some of this is natural and some of it is learned. He knows (now) that in order to take something out of his dreams, he has to be able to not only recall every single detail about an object, but he has to be able to know those details like it’s a part of himself.

Each of the boys are on Gansey’s quest for Glendower for their own reasons. Ronan’s reason is simply Gansey. Ronan is the one who believes without persuasion. He doesn’t need proof to believe in the impossible because he is an impossible thing. It seems at odds with everything that Ronan puts out there, but Ronan is the believer of the group. While Gansey wants to believe, Ronan just does.

Ronan is Catholic and that plays a big part in his life. He refuses to draw a tarot card like the rest of the group because of his religion. Church is the one place that all the Lynch boys go every Sunday to be together. Sometimes they bicker in church, but it’s the only time that Declan and Ronan are ever in the same room that they aren’t punching each other. Whenever Ronan needs to dream something particularly horrible (the evidence to blackmail Greenmantle with) he goes to the church. When he is afraid of bringing a terror back into wakefulness, he goes to sleep at the church. He arranges for Adam to rent a room over the church he attends so that he will be protected (or what Ronan believes is protected). The church is a safety net for Ronan. It’s never mentioned, but I imagine that Ronan is big on confession as well.

Ronan suffers from both insomnia and hyper-somnia (the latter is apparently a side effect of insomnia. He’ll often fall asleep for huge swaths of time—whole days—and when he does fall asleep it’s not necessarily at night or at ‘appropriate’ sleeping times—I had to look it up when I read it in the book so here is the fruit of my prior ignorance of it). This leaves him prowling around a lot at night. His anger and restlessness is always more intense at night. A lot of this probably stems from the fear that he’ll dream something awful and becomes habit after a while even when his nightmares are less likely to be the sort that come back with him (because he’s learned to let go of the self-hatred and guilt that he carried around for so long after his father’s death).

He actually enjoys other people’s awkwardness. He forces silences just to watch people backpedal. I don’t think Ronan wants to see anyone in pain, but off their game, awkward as hell and scrambling, absolutely. He even enjoys seeing this in his friends sometimes.

He doesn’t bow to authority figures well. This is seen several times in his interactions with his professors. Gansey is pretty much the only ‘authority’ figure that Ronan will respond positively to. He loves inflicting his horrible music on others. His very best friend is a ghost and he throws him out the window because he can. Noah’s dead. It’s not like it’s going to kill him.



Items on your character at canon point:

Black leather jacket
Black tank top
Jeans
Leather belt
Heavy, leather boots
Chainsaw (pet raven/dream thing/ live animal)
Keys to the BMW
Cell phone (battery dead)
A couple of Kavinsky’s green dreaming pills in his pants pocket
A bundle of leather bracelets

polyvore because I can.

Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:

First and foremost, let’s discuss Ronan’s ability to dream things into being. At this point in his canon, he can dream most things fairly easily (like night terrors). What he does when dreaming something isn’t so much sleep as a sort of place between sleep and wakefulness (though he can be dead asleep and dreaming then enter this state to bring something back). There’s not much limit to what he can dream as long as he’s very familiar with it. For example, when they’re blackmailing Greenmantle, he needs to see and hold Greenmantle’s phone to get it exactly right. There are downsides to Ronan’s power. If he’s dreaming something particularly loathsome, he has to go to a dark place where things will try to kill him. When he dreamed the evidence to blackmail Greenmantle, the place he went to was so dark and so horrible that he knew he was going to be attacked and killed when he first got there so he dreamed a clone of himself for the terrors to attack. When he awoke with the envelope of things they needed in hand, he also brought back the clone of himself which was so torn up that Adam says it looked like his skin was on inside out and they watched him die together (yay! boyfriend bonding times!).

Dreaming has a negative effect on the ley lines. It pulls power off those ley lines to create those objects and creatures. The bigger, more detailed and more alive a thing is, the more power it takes to dream it. Because Adam is tied to the ley lines, pulling too much power off the ley lines will make Adam go a little crazy so Ronan tries to keep his dreaming in check. The alive things that he brings back into the world are in the world for the rest of time BUT if Ronan dies, those live things fall into a sleep like a coma without any ill affects. Together, the boys can awaken dream things, but Ronan and Adam probably wouldn’t be able to do it on their own. They need the whole group.

As for his other abilities, Ronan is a hellva fighter. His father taught him to box when he was young and he’s been fighting most of his life for one reason or another. He is only human so his fighting abilities are limited in that way. He’s fluent in Latin to the point where he and Adam use it as a secret language to talk when they don’t want others to understand them. He tells jokes in Latin and often uses vulgar Latin phrases and swear words. It’s as natural to him to use as English is.

He’s a good guy to have in a violent situation because he responds to fear by lashing out violently. Fear does not shut Ronan down. It drives him forward, pisses him off and makes him aggressive. He’s fairly literal and logical which can be beneficial. He confronts most things head on. He doesn’t like sneaking around and going through the back door. He’s loyal and he can take orders if he trusts the person giving the orders. He’s referred to Gansey’s pit bull on more than one occasion in the books. This is because Gansey can control him.

However, moving onto weaknesses here, Ronan can be a loose canon if he doesn’t trust the people giving the orders. He’s volatile to say the least. He doesn’t do well in social situations, or with social niceties. He won’t filter himself for anyone’s sake, but particularly not for someone he doesn’t care about. If a situation can be set on fire (metaphorically and sometimes literally) Ronan will do that just to watch something burn.

Ronan is loud psychically. The women in Blue’s family can barely stand to be around him (they call him The Snake or The Boy that’s more Raven than the rest of them). He’s fairly quiet noise wise though.

I think in a supernatural situation, he might tend to overestimate himself. He won’t like admitting that he needs help. If he were to lapse into a particularly self-loathing state of mind, he could end up dreaming terrors that will attack him.


Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:

Right this way
Prose Log Sample:

The bell over the door clanged violently when Ronan shoved his way through, moving straight for the counter. He took no lingering glances at the art on the walls, nor was there any hesitation in his stride. He slapped the sketch he’d torn out of his book, edge ragged, on the counter and waited for someone to approach him.

It hadn’t been a particularly bad day, nor had it been a particularly good one. It had merely been a day after Niall’s death, another fatherless day for Ronan. Even minutes later, he couldn’t recall that detail that sparked the fight between he and Declan, simply that it’d ended with the promise of a black eye for Ronan and Declan’s blood dribbling down his chin from a split lip. If Ronan had been any other teenager more prone to throwing words rather than fists, he would have yelled You’re not dad! and stormed off.

Instead, it’d taken a fist fight with his older brother to prompt his storming off and he’d done it in a BMW that had once belonged to his father and now belong to a boy who couldn’t even drive it legally (but that didn’t stop him).

“Can I help you, Kid?” At first the man thought the kid was in the wrong place, or unclear about the age requirements to get a tattoo, then Ronan had turned his attention on him and the man had found he was clearly mistaken.

“I want that covering my back.” He splayed his hand flat on top of the sketch and pushed it toward man. The pen marks had been made heavy and dark, all clean lines and stark white spaces. It was a Celtic knot with all the pieces of Ronan’s dreams peering out of it.

“Big expensive piece,” the guy said, instantly intrigued by the drawing. His eyes roved over it, trying to identify each creature, each object and finding a new one peering at him all the time.

Ronan threw a wad of cash on the counter in response. His fake ID fell next. It said he was twenty-three. The man picked it up, giving it a careful once over. He glanced up to Ronan only to find that same, angry young man glaring at him. He nodded and jerked his head back toward the back of the shop as he collected the cash.

“Have a seat. We’ll get the top part of the knot done today.”

“No. All of it. Today.”

The man shook his head. “Kid, you’re gonna be begging me to stop after an hour.”

Eight hours later, not including several smoke breaks for the artist, Ronan’s skin was swollen tender and weeping blood, but his back was a work of art. The artist had curled the tattoo over and around his shoulder, some hybrid of a Celtic tribal tattoo, hooks creeping over his shoulder and out of his collar, sharp enough to catch something on.

“That what you wanted?” the artist asked, already fumbling in his pack of cigarettes.

Ronan had his head turned so he could see his reflection in the full-length mirror. “Fuck yeah,” he growled, lips twisting into a smile that cut.

Declan was going to be so pissed.