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Player name: rui
Contact: E-mail/Aim/Plurk. alioth at gmail, omoidasu @ plurk
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Character Information
Character Name: Richard “Dick” Campbell Gansey III
Canon: The Raven Cycle
Canon Point: End of Blue Lily, Lily Blue
History: A middling summary of the plots of the books can be found here.

Anyone with a name like Richard Campbell Gansey III is bound to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and this one is no exception. He was born and raised in old-money Virginia, where he materially lacked for nothing. All signs point to Gansey’s childhood being full of fancy parties and fancy vacations doing things that cost unimaginable sums of money with parents that treated him and his sister with a distant sort of affection colored with high expectations. When he was ten years old, Gansey accidentally stumbled into a hornets’ nest. The entire nest swarmed, and Gansey’s allergic reaction to the stings was so severe that he should have died on the spot. However, instead, he heard a strange voice in his head. It said You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.

So, Gansey lived, and became obsessed with finding Glendower, who turned out to be a Welsh King that was rumored to have been brought to the Americas to be buried in the mountains of what would become Virginia for reasons having to do with the magic of ley lines. Between his studies and keeping up family appearances, Gansey continued his search, which his family found odd but harmless. He would talk about it to anyone interested, and the person who put up with this the most was Ronan Lynch.The reader doesn’t see their relationship as children, but their present friendship indicates that the past one was deep and fairly exclusive.

When Gansey and Ronan were fifteen, Ronan’s father, Niall was murdered, his head bashed in with a crowbar. Ronan was the one who found his father’s body lying in the driveway the next morning, and has never been the same since. Gansey is one of the only people who can leash Ronan’s temper, and from that point he gladly more or less becomes Ronan’s keeper. They enroll in Aglionby together, and Gansey drags Ronan through his classes and cleans up his messes. There, they meet Adam Parrish, one of the few boys in Aglionby who didn’t get there on a trust fund but who shares their love for sexy cars. They almost instantly become an inseparable group, along with Noah, another student and the other occupant of Monmouth.

Before we even meet Gansey in the first book, the reader learns that he is going to die within the next year. Unknowing of this prophecy, Gansey goes about his normal life, trying to keep Ronan from fighting with his brother and attempting to convince Adam to escape his abusive parents and come live at Monmouth with his other friends. While he is able to maintain the tenuous peace between the feuding Lynch brothers, all of his offers to help Adam seem to lead to arguments.

In the meantime, his search for Glendower suddenly starts leading places. Blue Sargent, who foresaw Gansey’s death, begins to get sucked into his quest even as her psychically powerful family lends the boys as little help as possible. Their search eventually leads them to a magical forest named Cabeswater, where all the trees speak Latin. They call Ronan ‘Greywaren’ and Gansey ‘King of the Ravens’. They learn that they must wake the ley line, and along the path to doing that, Gansey is held at gunpoint by his Latin teacher, goes into a magical tree-trunk that shows him a future-dream of almost kissing Blue, and finds the long-dead body of his roommate Noah, who turns out to be the person whose life ended so Gansey could live. Adam prevents Gansey from sacrificing himself to awaken the full magic of Cabeswater, taking on the job himself by becoming the forest’s ‘eyes and ears’.

The second book is much more about Ronan than Gansey, as it turns out that the Greywaren is a person who can bring things from his dreams into reality and more than a few people are really interested in that. Meanwhile, over the summer Gansey takes Adam to one of the parties his mother is holding to support her Congressional campaign. Introducing him to these politicians will help Adam start making the connections he’ll need to climb the ladder to the success he so desperately wants and is so jealous of. At the party, Adam learns how much Gansey actually dislikes this life, and they fight over how easily Gansey would discard something Adam has lusted after for as long as he can remember.

Within the 12 hours after their argument, Gansey learns that Ronan has stolen and wrecked his Camaro, and that Adam has disappeared. They eventually find Adam on the side of the road in a fugue state, unsure of where he is or how he got there. After giving Adam a little time to recover, the boys head back to Henrietta, where Ronan presents Gansey with an exact replica of his precious wrecked car, excitedly telling him that he pulled it whole from a dream.

There isn’t much time to celebrate this before another Aglionby student, Kavinsky, who helped Ronan hone his dreaming abilities, kidnaps Ronan’s younger brother and summons a monster to try and kill everyone Ronan cares about. Ronan manages to overcome his long-held self-loathing to summon a creature to fight Kavinsky’s, Blue, Adam and Gansey rescue Ronan’s brother, and Kavinsky commits suicide via dream-creature. Gansey, though fascinated and delighted by Ronan’s abilities, is also worried about the influence Cabeswater is exerting on Adam, as well as his forbidden but ever-growing feelings for Blue.

In the third book, everyone remembers that they’re on a quest to find a dead Welsh king, and the search for Glendower is taken up in full force again as the school year starts. As they get closer and closer to finding the king, Gansey swings between happiness at their progress and the growing realization that since he was ten years old, his whole life has centered around Glendower, and that he has no idea what he will do or who he’ll be when they finally reach the end of his quest. When they find a series of connected caves around but outside Cabeswater, finding Glendower seems more and more inevitable. On their first journey into the caves, Gansey falls into what seems like an endless hole, held up only by the rope tied between himself and his friends. Even though Gansey has plenty of rock-climbing experience, inside the perfectly dark and terribly magical cave, he has to be pulled up by his friends. This is because he finds all of his energy taken up in an attempt not to have a flashback to being stung to death by hornets, because places like Cabeswater have an unfortunate tendency to take thoughts and expectations extremely literally. Whether it’s from the cave’s influence or his own self-doubt, from that point forward Gansey begins having anxiety attacks in which he starts feeling hornets crawling on his body.

Some more hunting leads them to a different cave, where the whole group is actually able to pass through, and in doing so they discover a tomb. It turns out to be the wrong one, however, and instead of Glendower, they end up with his mad daughter, who has been awake and progressively going mad for 600 years or so. At that point, they realize that the only way through is the first cave, where Gansey fell. Once they discover that the hole is a lot less bottomless than it seemed, they find a room filled with the skeletons of animals, frozen in movement as though still alive. Ronan realizes that they are dream-creatures, just like all the animals on his father’s farm. Ronan, Adam, and Blue attempt to wake the creatures by combining their various abilities, but it isn’t until Gansey touches an animal and commands them to wake up that the creatures come back to life. Further shenanigans ensue that end with Gansey being stuck in the animal room, and Ronan and Blue ending up in a room with a pond only Blue can cross. This all leads to an encounter with someone else seeking to wake Glendower, a cave-in and the kids barely escaping with their lives, leaving the other treasure hunter to wake up something that is very decidedly not Glendower.

So, Gansey doesn’t get to kiss the girl who really would also like to kiss him, hasn’t found his king, and is beginning to doubt the purpose of his life. Meanwhile, the quest he began is slipping further and further out of his control and into the hands of his magically powerful friends. Plus, they managed to make the thing happen that really, really wasn’t supposed to happen. Seems like a great place to be taken from!

Personality: Everyone who takes the time to really get to know Gansey (and there aren’t many of those people) notice that he has two distinctly different faces, and a mask appropriate for almost every occasion. The Gansey people meet first is the polished one, with an all-American look, smooth Virginia accent, and the sort of magnetism that makes him stand out even in a room full of equally polished, wealthy people. He’s been nicknamed the unofficial ‘king’ of Aglionby, the fact of which he seems to be entirely ignorant. He has a way of befriending professors, asking just the right questions to charm people into doing him favors, and showing the sort of genuine interest that makes him every teacher’s pet. He remembers names, stories, and favors in a way that makes him a darling at his family’s parties. These things are partially calculated--he mentions at one point that chatting up teachers in their favorite subjects can have a positive effect on a flagging grade--he does them so well that people usually see it as genuine. In short, he’s That Guy everyone in high school secretly both hates and wants to be, and he doesn’t even realize the cumulative effect of his behavior because he’s just that good at putting on his masks.

Then there’s the other Gansey, the one only the people closest to him get to meet. That Gansey doesn’t have any kind of fancy accent, slouches his shoulders, and loves old things. He’s the boy who looks under the stones other people didn’t turn over, and finds treasures there. His choice of vehicle is an old, traffic-cone-orange Camaro that mostly runs, most of the time. Instead of living in the school dorms, he buys an abandoned factory called Monmouth Manufacturing and turns the second floor of it into a living space for himself and his friends. (Admittedly, his privilege is showing, but Gansey would still infinitely prefer to live in an old, halfway-broken-down former factory than in the school dorms.)

He’s obsessed with ley lines and Welsh kings, but also with the city of Henrietta, where Aglionby is located. A frequent insomniac, Gansey spends his sleepless nights building a scale model of the town when he’s run into a dead end on his research. This Gansey chose Ronan Lynch, all sharp edges and unpredictable moods, over his charismatic elder brother Declan, and bends over backwards trying to keep Ronan as safe as he can and not failing out of school, which would deny him his inheritance. He is, in fact, loyal and protective of all his friends, sometimes to a fault.

This second Gansey doesn’t lack the charisma of the first, he just doesn’t purposefully project it. In fact, at first some of his friends don’t notice that he’s become the second Gansey until he slips seamlessly back into the first. It’s clear throughout all the stories that Gansey is the sun that the rest of the characters revolve around, even as they develop their own relationships that don’t include him. He brings the group together and keeps it from imploding or exploding despite the volatile nature of its members. Despite his upbringing and the distance between his parents and their children, Gansey is the most compassionate person in the group. Sometimes this leads to them resenting him (Adam and his constant anger over Gansey offering him financial help is an especially obvious example of this) or him resenting them (his frustration with not being able to have a relationship with Blue solely (he thinks) because it would hurt Adam, his hurt and frustration with Ronan over his self-destructive behavior, etc.). But he can't seem to stop doing it, even when it hurts, because it's just a part of his nature. When Gansey puts his faith behind someone or something, he does it to the utmost, in a way that can both encourage people to be what he sees in them and to feel undeserving of that faith.

All that said, Gansey is far from perfect. Growing up as he did, Gansey tends to see money as the solution to all problems (because it usually has been, in his experience), and therefore tends to be careless with throwing it around. It’s implied that Gansey isn’t asking anything of his two roommates to live at Monmouth (how could he collect money from a ghost, anyway?), while Gansey himself has spent tens of thousands of dollars bribing Aglionsby to keep them from expelling his best friend. He doesn’t take any particular care with his clothes, regularly ruining pieces of his expensive school uniform.

This attitude can be especially insulting to two of his friends, Adam and Blue, who both come from poor backgrounds. What Gansey sees as problem-solving looks like charity and pity to his friends, and even when he learns to (usually) respect their wishes, he still doesn’t really understand the why of it.

He is also quite single-minded, inevitably sucking his friends into his search for Glendower, which is actually more of an obsession than a hobby. After his miraculous not-death, Gansey feels obligated to make something of his second chance, and the 'something' he fixates on is finding the Welsh king. Until Aglionsby, Glendower takes priority over pretty much everything in Gansey's life, including his schoolwork, and he only starts taking Latin because it will help him further his research. Especially at the beginning of the story, he’s also sometimes helpless in the way that the wealthy tend to be, unable to fix his car when it frequently breaks down and instead dragging his friend Adam out to do it.

As the books progress, we see Gansey becoming more competent. He starts learning to fix parts of his own car from Adam, to respect boundaries he doesn’t comprehend, and to choose his words more carefully. But Gansey’s unshakable confidence gets very shaken as his quest becomes more and more complex and his friends all turn out to be magically unique while he remains normal Gansey, unquestionably still the leader but unable to progress without them. Having devoted himself to this search for Glendower, as they get closer and closer to finding him, Gansey’s sense of self begins to crumble, because he has no idea what he will be or do once his quest is over. This worry isn't just Gansey's; Adam and Ronan also fear for what will happen to their friend once the driving force behind his life is over. Gansey can't imagine an after to finding Glendower, and his friends can't seem to imagine one for him either.

Although he doesn’t know it, it’s probably a moot point, since he’s prophesied to die before next April.

Items on your character at canon point: Wallet (credit cards, driver’s license, school ID, cash, probably some sort of super-posed photo of his family), smartphone (the latest, most expensive model), mint leaves, a coin-sized remnant of Glendower’s shield that has three ravens carved into it, his Glendower journal, a pen, his Aglionby uniform.

Abilities: Rock climbing, rowing, hiking, camping and general outdoorsyness as long as he’s equipped. Native speaker of English, high-school French, and can at least read and speak some Welsh. Has the most basic Latin, enough that he can pick out words in sentences, but that’s about it. Knows an awful lot about dead Welsh Kings, ley lines, and has a fair grasp on how the magic of his world works, even if he can’t use it. Naturally charismatic and leadery, willing to take charge of a situation even if he has no idea what’s going on. A good strategist. Surprisingly accepting of people who aren’t like him. Can (somewhat) control Ronan Lynch. Has a knack for finding things other people have overlooked, in both the mental and physical senses. Also has a transparent aura, the meaning of which isn’t entirely clear yet. However, a character sensitive to auras says that he is comfortable around Gansey because his transparent aura makes it a lot like being by himself. Has a certain tone of command that he uses mostly in emergencies, but other characters mention it feeling impossible to disobey Gansey when he uses that tone. He is only semi-aware of this ability.

Strengths/Weaknesses:
+ King: If Gansey had an archetype, it would be King. He’s a natural leader, and he’s also courageous, in the sense of courageous that means going forward while scared shitless. He likes planning, and planning thoroughly before taking action, but can improvise when he needs to. He surrounds himself with people who bolster and strengthen him.
+ Charisma He’s intelligent, witty, and quick-thinking, has perfect hair, and has worked very hard to be this way. It gets him and his friends out of a lot of sticky situations, but it also tends to make Adam jealous. How dare Gansey be so personable and rich and good looking all the time?
+ Diplomacy: Gansey is not the strongest person in their group, or the best fighter, or the smartest. But he is the glue who holds things together. He asks good questions. His sweet-talking and generous monetary donations are the only things keeping Ronan in school. He knows all the right people in all the right circles in the world outside of ley lines and Cabeswater.
+ Belief: Belief is what keeps Gansey's entire world turning. He quests endlessly for Glendower because he believes. He seems to have a knack for finding things, especially old things, and attributes this to the fact that he simply believes they must be there. What he believes in, he believes in wholeheartedly, even when the rest of the world is skeptical. Some of these beliefs include magic, ley lines, Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish.


+/- Loyal: His people are the most important thing to him, and he disapproves heartily of them risking themselves, especially on his behalf. Despite his mask of friendliness, Gansey is choosy about his friends, and will put himself and his friendships at risk for their safety. Being as that he's the King of these ravens, it's never a good strategy to be unwilling to lose any of the pieces on your board, and Gansey definitely is.
+/- Pride: On one hand, Gansey is proud of his accomplishments and those of his friends, and isn't afraid to revel for a moment in a job well done or tell all of his mother's political friends that Adam Parrish is the next biggest thing coming, even more clever than Gansey himself. On the other hand, Gansey hides his actual self behind a veneer that makes people either want to be him or want to punch him purely on the principle of the thing, and doesn't ever like to appear weak or out-of-control. He wants to be liked nearly universally, but he only wants to be known on his own terms.
+/- Strength: As for physical strength, he’s fairly athletic, but not in olympian shape. He can't fight worth a single damn (he throws one punch in the series and breaks his thumb doing it), but he can hike and rock climb and row boats and is generally a broad-shouldered fit American Boy.

- Rich White Boy Syndrome: What it says on the box, basically. Gansey learned from a very young age how to behave within the circles his parents participated in, and when taken out of his environment he can be an accidental but monumental douchebag. Through the series he's been learning when to keep his mouth shut, but his Foot-in-Mouth syndrome can be truly winceworthy at times. This is only partially redeemed by the fact that he's not trying to be offensive, and he generally attempts not to repeat his mistakes.
- Obsession: The other side of the coin of Gansey's belief is obsession. Finding Glendower isn't just a hobby to him, it's the focus of his entire life. He researches endlessly, travels all over the world, collecting every scrap of information that might even maybe lead somewhere. He doesn't just move to Henrietta, he builds a scale model of the town in the middle of his home. He doesn't just make friends, he is the center of this unit of people who are all tangled up in each other so much that Blue describes it as them all being 'in love' with each other. As the group gets closer to finding Glendower, his friends (and Gansey himself) begin worrying about what there is for Gansey after. All other purpose and ambition slowly fell away from his life due to his single-minded obsession.
- PTSD: Everybody in the story seems to have it, and Gansey is no exception. He is deathly allergic to hornets, wasps and bees -- an epipen might save him from a single sting, but even that isn’t guaranteed. The swarm of hornets that should have killed him at the age of 10 became another obsession, and Gansey had years to do little but research Glendower and replay the event in his mind over and over and over. It is revealed that in the past he used to have panic attacks and screaming nightmares about it, that he researched hornets, bees, and wasps, doodled them endlessly in notebooks, etc. Initially, we don't see this side of Gansey, just know that he is a chronic insomniac. But by his current canon point, he is starting to have flashbacks and anxiety attacks again, and has possibly always been having nightmares. When he describes the attack to Blue, he mentions that there were hornets between his fingers and in his ears, and every time Gansey panics, he ends up covering his ears. He also attempts to hide his anxiety, because he is very aware of his position within the group and doesn't want anyone to know how he's faltering. Everyone knows he's faltering anyway.

Samples
Network/Action Sample: TDM
Prose Log Sample: Gansey hasn’t slept well in a long time, long enough that he’s stopped trying, stopped rolling over when he wakes in the middle of the night from some dream he can’t remember, feeling the fluttering of wings in his ears and between his fingers. When the moon is bright enough, he attempts to repair his model Henrietta, finds that there’s less pleasure in repair than in creation. Sometimes he can tell Noah is there, a cold presence that nonetheless makes him feel warm. Even when he doesn’t manifest, Gansey likes having Noah around. The way he just knows things sometimes means Gansey doesn’t have to always keep himself turned toward Ronan’s room, just in case. It also means that he wants to be with them, that their friendship is worth the effort and energy to stay. That means more to Gansey than he can say, but he hopes Noah knows it anyway.

He’s turned toward Ronan’s door anyway, tonight, even though Ronan has been bringing fewer and fewer dangerous things back with him lately and all he can hear is Chainsaw murmuring raven noises to herself. A living thing, with her own personality, pulled right from Ronan’s mind. Miraculous. Even if they didn’t ever find Glendower, Gansey figures, his friends have found so much.

As he carefully glues a roof back in place, Gansey tries to recall what it was he would wish for. He ponders it through a wall and a pair of tiny shutters before realizing that if there ever was anything, he can’t remember it now.

A fly buzzes at the window, beating against the glass, and Gansey finds himself sympathizing even as a shudder runs up his spine at the sound, and he feels the phantom flutter of wings between his fingers. He rubs his hands together hard, scrubbing his spread fingers against each other until the sensation passes, and gets back to repairing Henrietta.