The Source Text
On this page, we will deep dive into the seed text to trace Unaccountably We Remain back to the source. While I have identified The Dream Thieves as the primary source text, the novel exists as part of the larger series, The Raven Cycle. I believe the four books cannot exist independent of each other and that I could not have written Unaccountably We Remain in its current form without having read the series in its entirety.
The Raven Cycle as described by Stiefvater in her own words
“A host of co-dependent teens with a battery of psychological issues comb rural Virginia for a dead Welsh king with dubious magical powers. Trees talk; hitmen put down roots; dead people live; living people die. Cars are described in loving detail. Fuckweasel. A house full of psychics tells everybody the future and drinks a lot on-page considering it's a young adult series. Nobody kisses anybody, which is weird because everybody loves everybody. There's rich boys! Poor boys! Sad boys! Angry boys! Raven boys! Collect them all!”
Source Character- a preface about indecision, this writer’s attachment issues, and following a brief.
In all honesty, when I submitted my second proposal it was with the selfish intention of getting to play adjacent to this world. I chose Blue as a source character because she’s a protagonist of the story (which makes her easy to trace through the reading experience) and because I enjoy the fact that she’s vain, fashionable, and hungry for more (much like myself). However, as I dove deep into the story and annotated my copies of the books I hadn’t touched since I was 21 years old, I realized what a tangled web Blue and her friends existed in. I tried, I promise, I tried and tried to extricate one from the other, but as Stiefvater states above; They’re co-dependent. I couldn’t write about one without writing about them all. In fact, Stiefvater believed that the worst thing that could happen to these characters is that they stop being friends. And so Juana was born and, very quickly, Adam followed because they’re also a bit co-dependent and this whole piece exists, in part, because of Juana’s refusal to be separated from her love.
In this section, we’ll explore the five central characters and how Juana and Adam came to be made of bits and pieces of all of them.
"When I was writing The Raven Cycle I had a sticky on my computer that told me to remember that the worst thing that could happen is that they stop being friends”-
Maggie Stiefvater
The Gang(sey)-
A character by character breakdown of The Dream Thieves five central characters and how they influenced the characters of Unaccountably We Remain.
“Blue was so tired of compromises. So tired of sensible.”
“He’d never escape, not really. Too much monster blood in him. He’d left the den, but his breeding betrayed him.”
Ronan Lynch, fighter of men, a heart attack that never stops. At the end of The Raven Boys, Ronan reveals that he is a Dreamer- someone who can dream a thing and pull it out from their head. Ronan is characterized by having incredibly intense emotions that he masks with a mean and biting exterior. His actions are outwardly, rebellious, but inwardly a manner of coping with the fact that he feels bigger than his body. It’s why he Dreams. But when he’s awake he engages in passive self-harm like alcohol abuse, drag racing, and fighting “anything that has a social security number”. Ronan is the protagonist of The Dream Thieves, in it we explore Ronan’s struggles with his power and how his power relates to his self-hatred, depression, grief, and love. This largeness, this overflow of emotion and feeling manifested itself deep in Juana.
As I created Juana, I realized that the parts she was made of included pieces that weren’t just Blue. She included Adam Parrish’s sacrifice, Gansey’s duality, but inside of her existed a whole world, just like Ronan. Having a whole world inside oneself is dangerous. (In The Raven King, we learn that Ronan dreamt the form of Cabeswater as a way to hold and channel of his Dreaming.) It makes it harder to live in the human world and Juana struggles with this constantly. This is why she summons Adam, I think she needs someone/something else not of this world to see the one inside her.
“I want you to know, I was…more…when I was alive.”
Blue Sargent
The seed of this solo piece was Blue Sargent. Whatever Blue is made up of, Juana is made up of the same ingredients; just in different quantities or with substitutions. Blue’s family, a house full of psychics, lives in Henrietta in an effort to be close to a line of magic known as a ley line. Blue is the only non-psychic in her family. Instead, her power is in amplification or being a mirror to the power present in the room. The whole family is in agreement of one prediction; if Blue were to kiss her true love, he’d die. In The Dream Thieves, Blue is battling a number of things; a souring of her relationship with her mother, he crumbling of her relationship with Adam, the realization that Gansey is the true love she’s been destined to kill, and her growing desire to make something bigger of her life.
Blue’s mirror power is something I fussed around with for Juana. In the novels, this is power manifests as a deep and infinite potential. For Juana, I viewed it a bit more as fertile soil. Juana’s lack of powers, but family history of once being powerful, makes her the perfect host to accept Adam’s being and also wield his power.
What I really distilled Blue down to within Juana Fuentes was want. A lot of this comes out in her relationship with her mother. I took the story of Blue’s lack of power and instead warped and diluted it through the Fuentes line, leaving Juana virtually powerless, her mother only slightly more powerful than her. Blue is distinctly comfortable with her lack of powers; she doesn’t wish for a look into the future. Juana craves power, she wants the freedom it will allow her.
My favorite thing about Blue is her seemingly endless capacity for love so I gave that to Juana too. A major difference, however, is that Blue believes she is rich in love and support. This was why I removed the element of Blue’s true love curse- because feeling like your mother doesn’t like you is a curse in of itself. Juana is an experiment in writing a version of Blue that didn’t believe she was rich in love until she met someone who could love her with the depth that she loved, someone who loved her in the same language- Adam. Juana and Adam’s relationship share the same soft heart of Blue and Gansey’s fated love. It’s based on a mutual seeing, a deep understanding of the other person.
Richard Gansey III
This duality and his anxieties were the pieces of him that made their way into Juana. In Dream Thieves, the reader meets a side of Gansey which Ronan nicknames Gansey-on-Fire. “The Gansey that contained every wild spark so that it wouldn’t show up in other versions.” I like to think that the Juana presented in this monologue was a Juana-on-Fire. That the version of Juana that summons Adam is every bright bit of her that she hides from her mother, from her family, from classmates and the congregation. This Juana-on-Fire is one of the versions Adam likes best, in fact, it’s the version that shows him she could withstand the possession process. She’s more combative, she’s daring, she’s all of the bits of humanity that Adam is endlessly fascinated by and she shuffles through each role as deftly as she can. Juana’s anxieties of never achieving something truly great, of being magic-less, are traced back to Gansey as well, but the more evident thread back to him is her loyalty. For as far gone as Juana’s relationship wit her mother is, she feels that sense of filial loyalty burn brightly just the same as Gansey. He is, at times, a willing punching bag for Adam and Ronan. They key difference in this loyalty is that Juana is aware her mother will never change and so she can turn away and follow the path she needs to take to stop the hits coming (as difficult as it is), but Gansey would never.
Narratively speaking, Gansey and Blue’s fates have always been tied together. So it almost went without saying that Gansey was going to somehow weave his way into the narrative of Unaccountably We Remain. Societally, Gansey is a king. His mother is running for congress and his family has enough money to make casual use of a helicopter. However, Gansey feels frustration that all of this fell out of his control, that his fate was predetermined and set in stone by the family he was born into. From this stems his quest for Glendower, which is really a quest for the proof that magic, that something greater than his fated life, exists. Gansey’s refusal of his locked down fate, much like Blue’s, was a very big inspiration for Juana.
Gansey is the understood leader of their group. However, he sometimes make decisions that others in the group find frustrating out of a sense of responsibility or desire to use his privilege to help. In Dream Thieves, Gansey’s insecurities and anxieties are heightened as they get closer to Glendower, but the group splinters and his relationship to Blue changes. Gansey is marked by his dual nature; both an old man and young boy, a cool, collected facade masking deep insecurity and passion.
Adam Parrish
Throughout the series, Adam functions as both Gansey’s foil and a double/mirror to Blue. At the end of The Raven Boys, Adam sacrifices his free will and becomes the hands and eyes of Cabeswater, a sentient forest on the ley line in Henrietta, in an effort to reawaken the ley line and find Glendower. In Dream Thieves, Adam’s fiercely independent nature is being pulled in many different directions. His obsessive need to be top of his class to escape poverty is being dragged down by the fact that he needs to work three jobs to afford his private education. His need for autonomy and not feeling like he owes/is owned by Gansey is destroying his friendship with him. As the quest hurtles closer to Glendower, Cabeswater begins to close in on Adam’s body and mind as he’s granted psychic abilities and communication with Cabeswater that he can’t ignore.
Evidently, Adam Parrish is the namesake of my swamp-monster-entity, Adam. In the backstory of Unaccountably We Remain, Juana gave him the name Adam as a way to be able to speak to him. She named him Adam for the first man, who came from the dust of the ground as a way to tie into the fact that he is a creature of the Earth. Adam’s willing possession by Cabeswater was the inspiration for the ending of Unaccountably We Remain. Cabeswater grants Adam powers he didn’t concieve he’d ever have access to. However, it also changes him into the person he’s supposed to be once he accepts Cabeswater as a partner in his body rather than ignoring it. Once Juana accepts Adam into her body she is able to embrace all of her power and that acceptance is where I decided to end the story of Juana and Adam.
Like Gansey and Blue, Adam is marked by a deep want. Adam comes from an poor, abusive household and his ultimate goal is to find Glendower to secure a bright and successful future. Unlike Blue and Gansey, he is willing to do anything to get what he wants even if the methods are darker and put him in harm’s way. Before he accepts the part of him that is Cabeswater, he lived with an underlying terror that he’d be found out and that his roots would be uncovered. This was the bit of him that made its way to Juana. As a Cuban girl in Central Florida, Juana is constantly working hard to hide her Latin heritage for her safety and her acceptance in a majority white community. Once Juana accepts Adam as a part of her and lets the possession fully take hold, she won’t care about her heritage being found out and in fact embrace it as part of where her power comes from.
Ronan Lynch
For Juana and Adam, I wanted them to have a shared language. The spoken Latin that exists in the piece is also another Ronan-ism. Ronan’s manifested version of Cabeswater communicates to him in Latin and all of Ronan’s Dream Things speak to him in Latin as well. Adam Parrish is the only non-Dream Thing who can keep up and understand him in Latin outside of Cabeswater and dreams. If the soft heart of Juana and Adam’s relationship is born from Blue and Gansey, the more dangerous, sharper edges of it come from Ronan and Adam’s relationship. The two often separate from the group to go do the dirty work and the magical work. They realize they’re more powerful together, their combined abilities not only get them closer to the larger goals of the group, but also make their separate abilities easier to deal with.
Ronan also made his way into Unaccountably We Remain’s Adam. In the novels, Ronan dreams things on purpose (a whole car or wings) and sometimes, when he has a big spill of emotion, he dreams what he feels. Usually, this means some dark, horrific monster crawls out of his dreams and attacks him. I gave this ability to have emotions/feelings manifest in different shapes to Adam. He’s appeared to Juana as a gator (her favorite), a dog, and once he’s been around her for a while more fantastical things. Ronan is a thing that needs to be understood and channeled or he’ll die. Adam, when Juana meets him, is a dying thing. Her energy is the thing that channels him.
Note: Juana’s buzzcut is a shout to Ronan.
Noah Czerny
While I was writing UWR, I knew that the entity- Adam- was dying. This is due, in part, to the fact that I needed the entity to need the sacrifice from Juana. But is narratively due to the fact that the land (which exists on a ley line) on which Adam is rooted in is dying. Large swaths of the state of Florida are predicted to be underwater by 2100 and I wanted to marry the environment into this piece. However, Adam wants, quite desperately to be alive. Or at least, restored to what he once was. There was a quiet sadness to him laced with the brutality of not being human. I realized, as I re-read the source text, I was pulling this from Noah Czerny. In The Raven Boys, quiet, unassuming Noah is revealed to the group to have been dead the whole time. The Noah that existed with them now was a ghost of the boy he once was, tethered to the energy of the ley line.
In The Dream Thieves, Noah is not so quiet, not so unassuming anymore because his secret is out. There’s a liveliness to him when he’s around and he, at times, reveals himself to be just as much a creature of want as any of the other four. He craves the more-ness of life. He wishes he could stop Ronan from hurting himself, that he could ask out Blue. Except, he’s dead. And to counteract how alive he seems to be, the group is always reminded that one of their own is a dead thing and that he suffers in this half-life. See, existing on the ley line traps him in weird loops of time and leaves him vulnerable to the ley line’s magic and anything else that might exist on it. He flickers in and out of existence, he manifests when people think about him, and perhaps worst of all, he is forced to re-enact his own brutal death because, somewhere along the ley line, he would always be dying.
In the lore for UWR, some of this applies to Adam as well. Adam is weakened, as mentioned above, by the dying land/ley-line and is bound to the ley line to continue existing. Meeting Juana makes him more alive as he can draw from her energy, but to be fully off the ley line he requires her body too. In a way, the Juana that Adam knows is a ghost of his true being. Just a shadow of what he once was before the land began to die.
What a strange, shifting person he was. The Gansey who turned to her now was a world away from the lofty boy she’d first met.”
“Calm down, Ronan, stop being needy, Ronan, get yourself together, Ronan, you’re always the car crash, Ronan.