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@ace-achilles
Ilya is so lucky that Shane proposed. Ilya would have been a nervous fucking wreck for the entire day beforehand. Wake up in the morning. Look in the mirror. Today's the day. Sob. Breathe. Okay I'm good! Turn around and Shane's hair is all in his face, still asleep on Ilya's pillow. I am NOT good. Cold shower. Breakfast that Ilya does not eat. Morning jog wherein Ilya runs like someone is chasing him. Lunch that Ilya does not eat. Drive out to the cottage. Make Shane pull over because Ilya needs to dry heave on the side of the road. "Baby we don't have to drive out today if you're not feeling well." "NO WE HAVE TO." Get to the cottage. Immediately send Shane on some kind of extended fool's errand. Shane wants to stay because Ilya is SHAKING and he is so worried. "No my love I'm fine it's just the breeze off the lake haha." It's thirty fuckig degrees Celsius. Shane finally gtfo's. Yuna, David, Rose FUCKING Landry all descend to help Ilya set up. Well. Ilya is supposed to be helping but he is standing on the deck fully dissociating. Yuna brings him tea. "Are you going to throw up the tea?" "Yes probably." Yuna takes away the tea. 800 electronic tea lights on the deck. In a parallel Ilya has no way of understanding, he both puts on and takes off a suit. Yuna fixes his curls into the hockey boy quasi-mullet that magnetizes Shane's fingers to Ilya's hair and says, "Oh, you're so handsome!" Ilya cries big fat tears. David tells a story about how his proposal to Yuna almost didn't happen because David went to the hospital for heart palpitations that morning. Thank You David That Does Not Help Even Remotely. Ilya slav squats on the lawn for twenty minutes. Shane's car pulls up in the driveway and everyone hides while Ilya vibrates in the entryway. Shane has no less than thirty grocery bags hanging from his arms, still complaining about why the grocery service cancelled their delivery last minute. Ilya leads Shane and all thirty of his grocery bags onto the deck. Shane is doing his favorite thing (bitching) and his second favorite thing (Follow Ilya) so he doesn't notice his own mother tiptoing behind him collecting the grocery bags he drops like breadcrumbs. There is an Oscar-winning actress hiding under his sofa and Shane does not notice because Ilya takes him on the deck and drops to his knees and Shane is like, "Haha, right now?" and then he sees that Ilya has a look on his face like he's just been told the sun is never coming up again and he has his hands on Shane's knees and he is saying, "Shane. Please?" and Shane puts his hands on his head and says "Oh my God baby what's happening to you" as Ilya melts and melts and then from the depths of the cottage someone who sounds a lot like Shane's very own father is whispering "The ring the ring" and when he looks back down Ilya is fumbling a ring box out of his pocket. The first picture of their proposal is Shane glaring into the middle distance with a hand cradling Ilya's curls like a baby while Ilya ugly sobs into his knee.
And stay safe everyone!
So like. Does TVL do justice to or even substantially engage at all with Gabrielle’s genderqueer identity?
I’m guessing no but I want to set expectations beforehand….
The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“
Just as courage is not the absence of fear but doing the brave thing in spite of it, patience is not the absence of irritation but doing the kind thing in spite of it.
obviously we all know how devastating and heartbreaking it is that shane feels like he has to apologize to his mother for not being able to force himself to be straight but are we talking enough about the fact that he is clearly en route to a meltdown and his mother repeatedly tells him to look at her even though the eye contact is making him extremely and viscerally uncomfortable and he keeps trying to duck his head and look away (to be clear i am not in the least a yuna hater i think she is a very genuinely loving parent who wants nothing but the best for a kid who was always destined to have a hard time navigating through the world of hockey, knowing from the time he was a toddler that the only place he would ever be happy is this incredibly dangerous sport that is specifically and aggressively hostile to people of color. it's a this be the verse situation not a bad parenting situation. furthermore the odds that this intelligent and verbal kid was actually diagnosed with autism are very low and even if he was his parents would almost certainly have been instructed by professionals that the right thing to do was to treat him as "normal" including by forcing eye contact)
but it's just makes me so angry and sad for shane who isn't even allowed to be upset without being told the way he does it is wrong
and so glad that he has ilya, who always finds ways to comfort him that don't pressure eye contact (let's hug facing away from each other, crouch at my feet, let me put my big hand on the back of your neck keeping your head down) despite the fact that he is grabbing shane's face and putting it where he wants it like 80% of the time he's on screen
idk if this is quite what you were thinking w genderqueer ilya thoughts but i think one of the more interesting things about ilya (kind of buried under all the angst and hockey and stoicism of "i am fine fuck off") is that he's technically been wearing a woman's necklace from the moment we first met him. and to me the things he keeps from his mother don't actually stay static
at first it's very simple. grief logic. he keeps her necklace, he keeps small objects of hers, he doesn't think of it in terms of identity or gender or meaning. it's just continuity. it existed, she existed, i miss her so much it rearranges my lungs, therefore it stays.
but then it starts to expand in a way that doesn't feel as clean....
he likes the scarves she used to wear in her hair. and instead of putting them away as keepsakes, he starts wearing them, like around his wrist, tucked into his belt, sometimes just because his hand reaches for something and it happens to be there. and it stops being only "this reminds me of her" and becomes "this belongs on my body"
and then it branches out beyond her entirely. he gets his ears pierced. not as a statement, not as a reinvention arc, just because at some point he realizes he can, because there is space now, geographic and emotional and social, that doesn't automatically punish small deviations from sanctioned masculinity. grief gave him access to objects. exile gave him access to possibility. and his body just quietly stops respecting the old rules about what it's allowed to become. if that makes sense
and i think the childhood piece matters here too. he remembers picking out earrings with his mother before events, helping her tie her dress, matching the shoes. he spent his teenage years around svetlana and sasha. he was intrinsically invited into those spaces young, and i think that bleeds into his adult life once he's no longer living on red alert. in ottawa, secure, finally safe, married, an organism that's been on high alert for decades is allowed to put things down. so yeah. he likes tennis bracelets and diamond earrings and soft leather gloves with fur trim like his mother wore
the post-soviet context matters here more than it gets credit for imo. soviet masculinity wasn't just social pressure, it was structural. and then the state stopped existing six months after ilya was born, which means the men who raised him were performing those rules on inertia, with nothing left to enforce them. hockey adds another layer on top of that. two systems, stacked, pointing the same direction. the miracle isn't that he eventually wears the earrings. it's that the impulse survived long enough to meet the permission
and what i find most interesting is that the cross gave him the grammar for all of it without him knowing. it was the first thing his body just kept without asking whether it was allowed. and that taught him something: some things aren't punished. they're just outside the frame. unthinkable rather than forbidden. the scarves have less cover, there's no grief logic that requires him to wear them rather than fold them in a drawer, but by then his hands have learned to reach for things and keep them
not an arc. not a label. just a man who slowly stops respecting a border he never agreed to, in increments small enough that it never becomes an announcement. in a body that got very good, very young, at doing things without making them into events. this feels very ilya to me
Hi sorry it took me so long to answer this but this is genuinely fucking beautiful to me. Legitimately. I’m not sure I even have the words for it so I’m going to let this ask speak for itself, I hope you don’t mind <3
if tom and greg's relationship development was the main focus of the show i guarantee there would be a scene in 2x7 return of greg seeing the Bullied To Death article about the waiter and discovering for the first time, through that, that the waiter who died was the one he'd spent the night with. like wouldn't it just be narratively so delicious... literally a couple weeks after the events of argestes put an end to the air of an affair between him and tom that had been building up for months, like right before it was absolutely about to start, he gets not only reminded of the guy he'd slept with on the night before tom's wedding but actually also learns that that guy died within 24 hours of it? wouldn't that be genuinely such a significant thing that's bound to cause a shift in their dynamic that flows seamlessly into them separating briefly in season 3? and furthermore a shift in greg's relationship with his sexuality that's perhaps a factor in him trying to pursue a woman during that separation too? it's kinda too perfect
I am thinking about what would have happened if Greg knew Andrew Dodds died ALL THE TIME.
Not only for his relationship with Tom, but also for his relationship with Kendall—especially if he knew how it happened. Cause between seasons 2 and 3 he separates from Tom to pair up with Kendall, which wouldn’t necessarily have happened…
The perfect storm of events at the wedding, from Gay Dad Mention to the pre-wedding fight (which Andrew drove Greg to! In the car Kendall would later leave him in, underwater!) to Greg the Egg making a deal with Kendall are all so precisely set up and if more had happened with the Greg of it all it would have been fascinating. High on the list of things I’d love to read or plan (and maybe write) a long canon-divergent fic of…
Harrison Browne, the first openly transgender professional hockey player and “Heated Rivalry” actor, wants people to know why inclusion is i
When Harrison Browne was on the ice, there was only speed, instinct and the familiar rhythm of skates cutting across frozen ground. Long before he became the first openly transgender professional hockey player and before he wrote a book, created a short film or had a supporting role in the Canadian TV series “Heated Rivalry,” Browne was simply “Brownie” in the locker room. It was a nickname that, for a time, gave him cover. “Hockey was the one place where I could turn my brain off,” said Browne, who coauthored “Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes.” (The paperback edition will be released on May 26.) “The one space where my body wasn’t the enemy. All that mattered was how fast my feet moved.” “I could just say, ‘Hey, I’m the same Brownie — can you use he/him pronouns?’” he recalled. “And my teammates were like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”
Ilya and Shane are over for dinner again, at Yuna and David’s cottage, they’ve had a big feed and the apple pie David spent all afternoon making is going golden in the oven and David and Ilya are working on their summer puzzle while Shane helps his mum put away the leftovers of dinner, portioning away a box for the boys to take home with them. David Ilya are chatting about school- what subjects they enjoyed somehow stumbled into the topic and then David is talking about how Shane hated English class most of all because it didn’t have “proper rules like math dad”. And then David is telling Ilya about how Shane didn’t really like any of school much and Ilya is like hm why?
And then David is telling Ilya softly oh well you know, Shane well, I’m sure he’s told you some of it but he was never really great at the friends thing. He, well he’s a sensitive kid, sensitive man now I mean. You know and he just, people didn’t get him when he was younger. He was really particular about things, and people and. Anyway you know once he got to highschool and hockey really took over he started to find his place, had a few friends but never really a good group of people around him you know? Not that really knew Shane and not just hockey Shane. But it was better than the first eight or so years where he was eating lunch alone. But you know well that’s in the past now, he’s got so many good people around him” and David is smiling voice calm, all of this old, moved through, navigated with his son.
but Ilya’s stomach hurts. Badly. He’s like oh. Oh. Um.
And he’s fidgeting with the corner piece in his hand and he hears Shane’s laugh from the kitchen and he drags his finger tips over his own collarbone. Ilya tries to tuck it away but it itches behind his chest wall as they eat dessert and Ilya holds Shane’s hand the whole time. Shane frowns a little at first like Ilya I need both my hands to eat and Ilya just says “no” and then Shane shrugs and they eat like that, fingers tangled in Ilya’s lap, one hand to eat the pie.
After dinner there’s cleaning and chatting and plans being arranged and then a game of some description on- so they are sat and watching and Ilya gets up to pee and he passes this picture of Shane on his way back to the living room and he’s just kinda stuck staring. Because. Well. That’s his Shane. His sweetheart.
And Ilya gets a big lump in his throat because he and Shane found each other pretty early in life- but he finds himself greedy, he wishes he and Shane had found each other earlier. He wishes he could have been there to make sure Shane never felt alone, misunderstood by those who weren’t family. Maybe little shane could have done the same for him. Taught him earlier on what it was like to feel love and safety from someone else, someone who you weren’t obligated to. And then he’s interrupted his staring and thinking by Shane himself.
Shane’s suddenly there, hooking his chin on Ilya’s shoulder, arms coming around him. “Thought you fell in” Shane mumbles and Ilya smirks because it’s a dumb joke and he loves it. Ilya lays his hands over Shane’s where they are linked on his stomach and turns his head to nose at Shane’s pretty face. His gorgeous boy, so sweet and kind and funny and warm. His Shane who carried a whole big world inside his brilliant brain, who was the best, who let Ilya bathe in his light of the person he was. Who made him feel safe and understood and never understood memes and was horrible at eye contact and had a dirty fucking mouth, loved sex and was filthy and also tracked his protein intake obsessively and never forgot a friends birthday and was so good with babies and was so fucking funny. His Shane who was this brilliant supernova who so many people only ever saw out of the corner of their eyes.
Ilya got to look at him head on.
Ilya leans all his weight back into Shane who takes it, squeezes him until he grunts.
“Okay?” Shane asks, low and warm and he loves Ilya so nicely. Noticed him being quieter during dessert, noticed him being gone for too long to the bathroom.
“Yeah” Ilya says softly and then
“I would of had lunch with you” he says before he can stop it, eyes on young Shane’s glowing face, free and relaxed, his Shane.
“Oh” Shane says softly, and Ilya feels him understand it.
They stand there for a long time.
this is so beautiful…
i genuinely don’t think shane and ilya will have kids in the traditional sense i think they 1. foster kids 2. semi adopt every irina foundation kid 3. house rookies.
they both like hockey so much i think shane becomes a commentator and ilya gets an offer to coach and they decide after a few years of retirement to take those offers.
also they have to write A LOT of reference letters for when irina foundation kids go off to university (“shane why can’t they write it and i just sign it” “that’s dishonest and lacks integrity - the irina foundation has an image to uphold” “you’re such a nerd… take your shirt off”)
funniest scenario would be if they billet two rookies who hated eachother during college hockey but become best friends when they’re in training camp and it’s just very interesting seeing them do certain things that give shane and ilya flashbacks of 2010-2017… “you could share a room if you’d prefer” “oh no i just… fell asleep uhh we were watching a movie” “okay…”
Canon To Me
Shane Hollander and the Geometry of a Single Desire
Two things have to be said about Shane Hollander before any theory comes near him. He carries a tenderness that, for most of his life, has had nowhere to go. And he is brave. The work he undertakes across Rachel Reid’s books, and across Jacob Tierney’s adaptation for Crave, is the slow and frightening labour of building a self large enough to hold a love that arrived without asking permission. He is gentle about it. He is also tired. Anyone who has watched Hudson Williams play him knows how much it has cost him, and how rarely he lets Ilya, or anyone, see the cost.
The reading I want to set down for him, and stand behind without overclaiming, is this. Shane Hollander loves one person. He has only ever really loved one person. His body, his attention, his honour, and what we might once have called his soul, have organised themselves around a single Russian face. Reid has called Shane gay, and the word is true; he names himself so by the end. She has confirmed he is autistic, and that word is true too. She has not used the word demisexual. That one is the reader’s reaching, a way of naming something Reid puts on the page, Tierney has filmed, and Williams has made visible. The shape is there. The word is a contribution from outside. The rest of this essay is its defence, and a tribute to the people who made the shape visible.
Begin with the shower at the CCM photoshoot in episode one. Two rookies, two captains-in-waiting, alone with no protective frame around them. The camera holds on Williams’ face as Shane looks at Ilya for what is plainly the first time, and what registers there is not lust. It is closer to recognition. Williams has spoken in interviews about wanting specificity in everything he did with Shane; he used that exact word with CNN. The shower is where the specificity begins to pay out. The face does no flashy work. It is alert, attentive, almost frightened by what is in front of it. When Ilya asks for his hotel room number, Shane gives it: 1410. The composition reads less like conquest than like a door number remembered in advance.
The autism reading sits underneath all of this and deserves an honest paragraph of its own. Reid has confirmed it on the Heated Rivalry subreddit and in interviews since. Williams has confirmed it from the actor’s side, telling Glamour that he could see Shane’s neurodivergence in the script before it had been named, in the dialogue and in how Shane moved through a room. He pushed back, in the same conversation, on the broad signals television tends to use for autistic characters, and described instead a flat affect, a body that takes ten seconds to move because the gesture has not yet been parsed. He has spoken in interviews about his own father, who has told him that he relates more to Vulcans than to humans, and about taking a page out of his life with that father into the work. The autism reading and the demi reading are not parallel claims about Shane. They are the same observation made in different registers. Autistic attention is often patterned by depth rather than breadth, by saturation rather than survey, by long attention paid to one particular thing. The word demisexual, when one reaches for it, is reaching for the same shape in the language of desire. Shane’s body, in Williams’ hands, does not skim. It stays.
Tierney’s adaptation makes the case more boldly than the books do, because television has to commit visually, and he has committed. He has said the show lives and dies on the relationship between Shane and Ilya, and he means it as an instruction about what to film. The Las Vegas sex scene in “Olympians” was shot on the first day of production, alongside the Tampa hotel conversation that had been part of Williams and Connor Storrie’s audition. Williams filmed the Vegas scene without protective padding and hurt himself doing it, because he and the show had decided, before anything else was in the can, that bodies meeting bodies was where the meaning would live. Tierney has described sex on this show as character development rather than incidental decoration. The phrase has been quoted everywhere, but it only means something if the actor is doing the development. Williams is.
What proves the case is not what gets filmed. It is what the show declines to film with anything like the same attention. Reid grants Shane two further sexual encounters with men during the long secret years, one in Mexico and one in Los Angeles, and neither is rendered. The condo Shane secretly buys for the hookups, an abandoned-looking building in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal which the books call his “weird hideout building,” is also absent; the scenes were relocated to Shane’s Westmount apartment for budgetary reasons, though the consolidation has its own clarifying effect. The camera knows one bed. The camera knows one face. Other rooms exist in the world of the books, but neither Shane’s heart nor Williams’ performance has built any reason to visit them.
Episode four, “Rose,” is where the case lands most beautifully and most painfully. After a panicked night at Ilya’s apartment, where Shane realises he has stepped inside the sphere of Ilya’s actual life and likes it, he flees. The episode then mounts what one recap rightly called an erotic horror disguised as a romantic comedy, a multi-year montage in which Williams plays Shane drifting through endorsement work in less and less clothing while Ilya, across the world from him, wears himself out on women whose names neither he nor the show bothers to keep. Shane has not stopped loving Ilya. He has stopped properly existing without him, and you see it in Williams’ shoulders before you see it in the writing. He begins dating the actress Rose Landry, played by Sophie Nélisse, a kind, smart woman whom the show takes seriously. She is not a foil; she is a real person whom Shane likes. He still abandons her on a dance floor to stare across the club at Ilya, because his attention has nowhere else to go. Williams’ eyes during that stare go quiet, the way an animal goes quiet when it sees something it knows.
Episode five, “I’ll Believe in Anything,” sharpens the case for Shane. Rose, the kindest woman in the season, gently asks Shane whether he has ever said aloud that he prefers being with men, and Williams plays the moment with tears in Shane’s eyes because Shane has had no one before her to confide in. The scene does something quietly radical. It does not let Shane name himself as gay-in-general and then move him through a procession of other men. It lets him name a preference, sits with him in the weeping, and immediately returns him to Ilya. Within the same hour of television, separated by an ocean, Ilya rings Shane from his father’s funeral and delivers a four-page monologue in Russian. Tierney used all of it, after his dialect coach told him every word should stay. The labour behind that monologue is Storrie’s, and it matters here for Shane’s sake. Storrie was Texas-born, with no Russian and no skating when he was cast; he did four-hour Russian lessons every day for six weeks to get Ilya’s voice into his mouth. He gave Shane a voice worth not understanding. Shane comprehends none of the words. Williams plays the listening as if his life depends on it, which in some quiet sense it does. Two men learn the shape of each other through breath and cadence and the willingness to be heard in a language one of them does not speak.
Then “The Cottage.” Two weeks alone, finally. Tierney made the writerly decision to end the season at the cottage rather than at the news conference Reid uses to close the book. He has said in interviews what he wanted for them. He wanted them, in his own words, to get to be in love. Watch what gets filmed inside that simplicity. Two men with their phones on a couch, showing each other things. A loon on the lake that Ilya finds bewildering. A whispered confession of love in Russian, then again in English, with no music swelling underneath.
The scene that holds the most weight does not exist in the book. Tierney wrote it. Shane apologises to his mother, Yuna, outside the cottage, for having tried so hard to be different and not being able to help himself. Williams has spoken about it as the most personal scene of the season for him. He grew up in an Asian family in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Christina Chang’s response as Yuna gave him a release he had not expected while filming. The apology is the Asian-Canadian thread of the show finally surfacing where it can be felt. Shane has been carrying a double burden across all six episodes, queer and half-Japanese inside one of the whitest sports in the world. Tierney told Teen Vogue he could not let Shane be whitewashed in the audience’s brain just because his surname is Hollander, and the apology pulls the unspoken weight of that into one moment. Shane is apologising for being gay. He is also apologising for being his mother’s particular son, the one she shaped and worried over and pushed. Williams plays it not as confession but as release. He has been faithful to one person for a decade, and the cost has been every other version of himself the family and the league were waiting for him to perform. Chang holds him through the moment with the kind of grace that flattens you.
What Tierney refuses at the cottage matters as much as what he gives us. There is no montage of Shane finally free and exploring. There is no gesture at unfinished business with other men. There is a fifty-minute episode in which Shane Hollander, in his cable-knit, stays up overnight to draft a plan. Ilya will move to Ottawa. They will found a charity in his mother’s name. They will slowly reframe the public story until the world is ready for them. Honour, for Shane, is not a private moral system. It is a willingness to organise an actual life around one person and one promise. Williams plays the planning with the same care he brings to the sex scenes, because the planning and the sex are the same project. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus that Tierney has lovingly adapted Reid’s books into a love fest of true queer intent is unusually exact. The intent is one love.
The Jungian thought worth holding here briefly is that Ilya is the shadow Shane has carried his whole life: appetite, ostentation, anger, the body that takes up its own space, public queerness without apology. By loving Ilya, Shane is loving back into himself the parts of him that the captain, the responsible son, the marketable face had been asked to put down. The casting helps the idea land. Williams plays Shane with the held, neurodivergent stillness he developed from a life with his father; Storrie meets him with a sprawling, loose-limbed swagger that gives Shane something solid to narrow toward. Together they look like two halves of a single person learning how to stand up. Tierney signed both actors for three seasons because the show is, strictly, the relationship between these two faces.
It would be wrong to convert any of this into a moral hierarchy in which Shane’s singular love stands above Ilya’s earlier, plural one. The books do not let us. The show does not let us. Ilya, hurt by Shane, sleeps with dozens of women in a few months trying to forget him, and the work grants him that without judgement because his way of moving through pain is his own. Monogamy is not nobler. Two different shapes of desire find each other and choose each other anyway. The meeting is the love story. The singularity belongs to Shane.
What we have been reaching toward with the word demisexual is, in the simpler language of the heart, Shane’s way of coming home to himself. He has spent his life unable to grant himself the warmth he extends to others. The only person in the whole narrative who looks at him reliably, without the careful scaffolding of captaincy and reputation, is Ilya, and Ilya’s gaze is the one mirror in which Shane’s own face becomes bearable. The fidelity is not a virtue practised against temptation. There is no other temptation. The honour is not a moral pose. It is integrity in the literal sense, the integration of a whole life around one recognised centre. The love for Ilya is not a deviation from the love of hockey. It is hockey at last acquiring a mouth, a temper, a difficult father, an unmade bed. The body, when it finally reaches the body, is only catching up to where the attention has been the whole time.
That all of this can be seen at all, and not only argued, is because Williams has decided it can. His face is the reading on screen. He prepared by studying a man he loves. He has gone into Glamour, The Hollywood Reporter, CNN, and Time, patiently and repeatedly, and made the case for Shane’s interior life with the seriousness of someone who knows what is at stake. He has called what Shane carries an anxiety four or ten times his own. He has called the work specificity. When he speaks about Shane he sounds like someone in love with the character. Reid’s verdict bears repeating. What Williams does with his face tells a whole story. You can see everything Shane is thinking and feeling.
The image to end on is small and concrete. After Shane and Ilya tell his parents that they have only ever loved each other, the four of them keep eating dinner, and Shane’s foot finds Ilya’s foot under the table. The world is not yet ready to see them. They reach for each other anyway, in the closest contact they can manage in front of family, and they hold the tap for a long beat while the evening goes on around them.
I am speechless at how perfect this analysis is. Oh my gnomes.
Need this in an academic journal. On a billboard. Honestly they should put this on the screen before season 2.
THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!!
Did you know that in the original books, Mr. Holmes was a functioning cocaine (and tobacco) addict? Also when he was thinking hard about a case he would sit in a chair and play a bunch of long droning sounds on his violin and then after that he'd play a song he knew Watson liked so that Watson wouldn't get too annoyed with him about it.
I read A Study in Scarlet for the first time recently, thought that was fun. Shitty dead boy comic be upon ye
They could reboot BBC Merlin for a 15 min special where Arthur pops out of that fuck ass lake, tells Merlin he loves him and they make out for 5 minutes then roll credits and honestly that would be enough closure for me.
There is a kid out there who did every single one of his school essays and projects and short stories and friendly introductions at the beginning of the year about Shane Hollander. He did his book reports on the books Shane recommended in interviews. He saved his money to buy that stupid cologne Shane advertised. He got a puck from Shane once at warm ups and he slept with it in his bed for three weeks. He writes his moms name on his stick tape because Shane did it first. He watches the Olympics in awe. He gets into fights with kids at school about whose a better hockey player and its Shane all the way, no matter what the other kids told him or what their moms and dads said. Shane is the best.
And this kid did not have a lot of friends. His teachers thought he wasn't very smart because he made everything about hockey. And they dismissed him when he struggled with math and reading. "if you could just put some of your hockey energy into school, then maybe you would get better." His classmates laughed at the hockey themed valentines day cards him and his mom had to hand make because nowhere was selling hockey themed valentines day cards. And they laugh at him when he repeats the same thing over and over about "getting pucks deep, pucks deep, pucks deep." When he would play all by himself on the yard pretending he was skating, picking up any big stick he could find on the ground, they'd push him around. "Can we play? We'll be defenders" and ram him and take his stick. And he'd just go through all the penalties they would have just gotten over and over again until he can calm down. He celebrated every birthday at the ice rink in his full hockey gear even though he didn't really have classmates showing up. Not for lack of invite.
And his parents try to steer him away from it. They try and watch new sports, they try and get him to watch kids shows, get into things kids his age like, but all he wants to do is watch reruns of the metros cup wins. Wants to wear his hat backwards with his black shirt because that's how Shane looks in the interviews. Memorizes the answers he gives in french even though this kid never learned french in school. And its useless. This kid is hooked and they just kinda have to ride this wave.
So when the announcement comes for the Game Changers camp, these parents do absolutely everything to get him there. They don't care what it takes, this is like a light for all of them really in the midst of all the bullying at school and the meltdowns at home and the obsessive routines that fall apart if even one thing is out of place.
And they explain to the camp that their boy might have a hard time. Might need some time to adjust. That he struggles with math, and reading, and can get caught up in all the rules sometimes. Preemptively trying to say "he's not a bad kid. he's trying his best."
So at the end of the first day, his parents are prepared for a meltdown. Its new, its a lot of kids, the rink can get loud and cold, and he doesn't always do well with transitioning out of hockey. He's hard to pull off the ice at home.
And they can see some upset under the surface when they arrive. He clearly doesn't want to go home. Thats no surprise.
What is a surprise is the way Shane gets down on one knee next to where the boy is sitting upset on the ground. He doesn't move to touch him. He just gets down and the two of them softly have a chat. The boy is tugging on his hair and nodding at what Shane says. And eventually he stands and the parents walk over to them.
"You must be the parents. Its good to meet you," Shane says softly. "I was just going over some things about tomorrow. So that way he would know the schedule."
And they can see their son isn't quite happy, still clearly exhausted. He'll nap in the car and be grumpy at dinner. But he is much more regulated than they expected him to be.
"And, I was telling him about my schedule when I go home. About getting some quite time, making sure I can decompress. I think that's what all good hockey players need, right buddy?"
"Right buddy," he repeats.
And for all the understanding that seems to be there, his parents are just grateful that of all the things their kid could have a special interest in, its Shane Hollander.
i had a twisted dream this morning when my alarm tried to wake me up where jeff goldblum said 'Actually if you sleep a bit Longer you'll have More time to get ready It's called the Goldblum's Law and it works just go back to sleep' and i believed him and i overslept
hey boss sorry im late. i got Goldblumed
no joke i got Goldblumed again