rocky: im not a scientist, im like the least qualified person on this ship, the only reason i survived while the actual scientists died was pure dumb luck :(
ryland grace's internal monologue like every five seconds: oh my god this guy is like a supergenius, he's literally the best engineer i've ever seen, there's no way every other eridian is this smart, like do you even KNOW how cool you are-
meanwhile grace is like: im a coward, im selfish, i put myself over the entire world, im not brave
and rockys like: grace is the bravest person ive ever met. he is brave and selfless in ways he cannot see yet and if he will not tell himself that then i will say it for him
I love all the whimsy and fun around this whole project, it's not just men in ties and suits with serious faces. There is a special space plushy to visualize zero g, there is a nutella jar floating through the billon dollar spacecraft, there is a guy with a sailor moon lanyard sitting in mission control, there is music to wake the crew up every morning, there are so many women working with so much joy at the top of this project (looking at you Jenny Gibbons and Kelsey Young) and there is a crew that does a recreation of a 80s sitcom intro while traveling to the fucking moon and they are fun and chill and human.
Some of my favorite quotes from Artemis ii so far:
"Copy. Moon joy."
"I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."
"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."
“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”
"To all of you down there on Earth... we love you, from the moon."
"We just went sci fi."
"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."
"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."
“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”
Something I find interesting is that McKay seems to be the only person who consistently sees Javadi as a twenty year old girl.
Robby and Garcia and Shamsi and even Trinity look at Javadi and see the prodigy and they don't question how strange it is for her to be there. We see that in their reactions to Javadi making a mistake which is on par with or even smaller than the mistakes made by her peers. They treat her like in every situation, she should already know exactly what to do. It's not treated like a teaching moment like it is for other med students and interns. She fucked up and should have known better.
But McKay from day one sees Javadi and acknowledges how strange it is for her to be so young and where she is. She behaves almost maternally to her because I think Cassie puts in her a category more akin to Harrison than to her peers. She doesnt expect a level of emotional maturity from her that really doesn't make sense from someone that young. Instead, she talks to her. She actually teaches her instead of just assuming she's a prodigy with all the answers and berating her when she doesn't have them.
I'm glad that Javadi has one person in her corner and I will continue to believe that McKay is the most underrated character on the show.
al-hashimi confronting mckay about her maternal self righteousness. mckay confronting robby about his suicidal vibes. robby confronting dana about her assault trauma. dana confronting robby about his martyr complex. whitaker confronting santos about her fear of abandonment. i love you mentally ill people in my phone
I've talked about this in tags but I need it to be a full post. There's something about Ilya wearing long sleeves here that kills me. I love that Shane is in a cozy hoodie, too, but it doesn't grab my attention as much because he's not dressed that differently from his usual wardrobe.
But Ilya? He's constantly showing off his body whenever he has the chance. This man is allergic to sleeves. He usually rips his shirt off at the first opportunity.
Ilya's usual wardrobe (or sometimes lack thereof lol) reflects the way he views his body as a commodity, like it's the only thing he has to offer, so he's constantly showing it off.
But then we have this beautiful montage showing the ways that Shane and Ilya have slotted into each other's lives in a pretty regular routine. It's a hot montage, but it's also creeping toward a feeling of domesticity, especially in this moment.
Wearing this shirt to a hookup shows that Ilya has reached a new level of comfort with Shane. He doesn't feel the same pressure to play the seduction game. Shane is going to kiss him the same way regardless of what he's wearing.
That plus the fact that Shane is taking control and pushing Ilya against the glass. Ilya's whole demeanor reflects the way he feels comfortable and taken care of in this moment and it does something particular to my heart.
I don't think Ilya is consciously thinking about why he dresses all comfy cozy for this hookup. He still has a while before he internalizes the truth that Shane wants him just as he is. But Ilya also tends to act based on feeling before he fully understands the subconscious behind those actions.
I love this demonstration of instinctual comfort he's feeling with Shane, even if he's not actively realizing it.
Asexuality and aromanticism being defined as "little to no sexual/romantic attraction" is crazy to me. Imagine if they redefined being a gay man as "little to no attraction to women" and you had to, like, figure out for yourself that liking men was a part of it.
Personally, I define my aroaceness not as a lack of romantic or sexual attraction, but as an orientation towards relationships that are neither romantic nor sexual. Redefining my orientation this way has helped me find a lot of peace I didn't have before.
Finished my TLG re-read and I've been seeing posts circulating coming to Shane's defense in that central conflict, and I am finding them interesting because there's often this tactic agreement in them that anyone else would have picked up that Ilya is going through it, but Shane doesn't because of [insert valid reason I usually agree with].
But...I actually don't think Shane is missing it. I think Ilya has built a pattern of lying about anything that isn't absolutely perfect about his life or interior state, from something as small as not sleeping well to as major as how much he would mind Shane sleeping with other people.
Shane in-text is aware that something is off with Ilya. It's very present in his thoughts that he's missing something, that something is going on with Ilya, that Ilya is withholding things and picking little fights but not saying what the issue is:
And what I think Shane doesn't get credit for is that he asks Ilya about it.
Shane doesn't just ruminate, or barrel on as if nothing is wrong. He tries to engage, he tries to do things to cheer Ilya up and plan things he knows Ilya enjoys. And when that doesn't work he asks, outright and directly, and Ilya shuts the conversation down, repeatedly.
Ilya is deflecting and avoiding the discussion through feigning ignorance, snark, purposefully misunderstanding Shane's words, trying to turn it into a fight, and outright telling Shane not to worry and that he's fine. And to Shane's thought there at the end, how is Shane supposed to force the issue, if Ilya doesn't want to talk about it? What does support in that moment look like, when Ilya won't share what's wrong?
And Ilya is actively aware that he's dodging conversation and withholding the information from Shane. He acknowledges it in both his internal monologue and out loud:
And it's clearly a deep-rooted habit of avoidance.
Ilya recognizes the specific face Shane makes when Ilya us using snark to deflect a serious conversation, aka, it happens so often that there's a recognizable and specific response it elicits. Shane yanks back that bid for connection and understanding the second Ilya doesn't meet it. It's such a habit that even after the plane incident, Ilya can't acknowledge that he might not be okay, when it would be wild to expect him to be okay in that situation (and when Shane clearly doesn't expect him to be).
Even in the Big Fight itself, we see the pattern playing out in how it starts. Ilya snarks and digs instead of saying why he's upset. Shane asks five (5!!) times for some type of help in understanding what is going on with Ilya. And Ilya rebuffs him with passive aggressiveness, snark, purposeful misunderstanding, and bad-faith interpretations of his words.
Ilya is trying to pick a fight to avoid the actual conversation about his emotional states and wants and needs, and he's resenting Shane for not understanding something that Ilya not only never told him about but worked to actively hide from him (something Ilya's own therapist points out isn't reasonable for him to expect of Shane, which. Many people seem to forget in their recollections of the book...)
And how does Shane respond when he learns the shape of what Ilya is upset about?
He feels terrible for not knowing Ilya's emotional state and that he'd been unhappy in their status quo, though he sets aside his own feelings in the name of supporting Ilya in the immediate moment.
And he arrows in on Ilya's self-sacrifice in the name of Shane's happiness as a problem that needs to be addressed, even with others in Shane's life don't seem to recognize it as a problem. Their relationship is foundationally one between equals. Shane doesn't want Ilya giving unequally into it. Ilya lashing out frames it as a balance of 'who has given more', but Shane doesn't want either of them to 'win' the who-can-sacrifice more-for-the-other-competition. He wants neither of them to be engaging in that competition in the first place!
The other piece I think that gets forgotten is that Shane is the one who initially introduces the idea of changing things. They have a plan together (that Ilya actively participated in making!), but Shane floats the idea that they could have another plan:
Ilya doesn't take him up on it, which is fair. But that's a sign for Ilya that Shane is ready to have that conversation (and the reader sees Shane's narration is full of chafing at hiding), one that Ilya misses in his assumption that Shane is perfectly happy in the status quo because Ilya hasn't actually asked:
And importantly, Ilya's stakes have changed. At the end of Heated Rivalry, he communicates that the consequences of being outed are fairly dire in terms of being an openly queer, famous Russian. Ilya through therapy is acknowledging (or coming to realize) that the stakes are different for him now.
But Ilya never tells Shane, who is still operating on 'dire impacts' assumptions in his drive to protect their relationship and keep it a secret. And so Shane doesn't tell Ilya that he is frustrated with aspects of needing to hide their relationship in turn, because that frustration feels like a small price to pay against Ilya's stakes.
They both proceed forward with incorrect understanding of each other, born out of trying to protect the other from their own unhappiness. And it's great, organic, character-driven setup for them both to learn and grow, individually and together within the space of their relationship, and come out the other end stronger.
Weird to see people who think Svetlana has an unrequited crush on Ilya, who wonder if she knows he fucked Sasha, who think she’s pining away while he fucked around.
To me, Svetlana and Ilya “dated” for like four months in middle school and that cured them of any latent romantic feelings. Svetlana knew Ilya was going to be broken up after the Sochi loss so she literally organized Sasha being there and pulled him into that fuckass coke bathroom and left them so Ilya could be cheered up with gay sex and drugs.
She’s bi, she parties harder than Ilya, he’s her best friend and she would never in a million years put up with him as a romantic partner, even if she did want a romantic partner.
Which she doesn’t. Because she’s too busy fucking girls with a strap and making men buy her expensive things for fun and then also fucking boys with a strap and doing designer drugs in the fleets of luxury cars she canonically has.
She taught him how to eat pussy and considers it a public service and so requests dividends from him on Venmo annually for this, which he pays her because he thinks it’s funny. Seeing him settle down with Shane makes her happy because she knows deep down he’s a lover boy, but it is also the most entertainment she’s had in years.
He tells her he’s going to go birdwatching with Shane over his New Years break instead of going to St. Barts and she tries to stage an intervention.
It kind of irritates me that people dog on Shane for suggesting Ilya leave Boston for Ottawa when Ilya is the one who said he didn’t want to re-sign with Boston and that he wanted to play for a Canadian team. Saying Shane came up with the idea and that the idea removes any sacrifice he could potentially have to make completely ignores the fact that Ilya is the one who brought up leaving his cup winning team in the first place. Shane chose Ottawa because it makes the most sense in terms of being a Canadian team (which is what Ilya was already thinking of), “desperately needs a star centre”, and is the closest Canadian team that’s also in reasonable proximity to Montreal. Moving to a team in the west isn’t going to help anything because they’ll still be extremely far away. Toronto is even further from Montreal than Boston is.
Shane also wasn’t nearing the end of his contract with the Metros yet. Ilya was heading into free agency. Shane can’t move teams whereas Ilya can literally go wherever he wants if there’s enough cap space.
Shane made a suggestion that sounded like the only good option at the time and it ended up facing complications, because at the end of the day their situation still fucking sucks. They still barely see each other and the suffocation of the closet and the toll of hiding their relationship, combined with Ilya’s team having a bad season, begins to take its toll on Ilya’s mental health. The entire point is they thought they’d be able to do the hiding thing until they retired and their journey throughout the story is realizing it isn’t sustainable and it’s causing them both to suffer.
Ilya suggested leaving Boston and moving to a Canadian team. Ilya was willing to leave everything behind for Shane and didn’t have the foresight to understand the problems that might cause him. I don’t think Shane was under the illusion that Ilya moving to Ottawa was the perfect solution, but the point is there was no perfect solution and that was really the only one that made sense at the time. The idea that Shane selfishly suggested Ottawa so as to avoid not disrupting his own life just isn’t accurate when the entire concept of Ilya leaving Boston was Ilya’s idea in the first place.
I understand a lot of people don’t like the moving to Ottawa plot and I think that’s valid, but that’s not what this post is about. My point is that it’s unfair to call Shane selfish and stupid for his Ottawa plan when he genuinely was trying to make something work. I really don’t like trying to make Shane more of the bad guy in this situation when, at the end of the day, it’s their situation that sucks.
Two male hockey players in a homophobic league who spend most of the year travelling nearly every day of the week and training the rest of it, who only get summers off, trying to make a relationship work. That’s the real torture nexus. Ilya’s team playing like shit just makes it worse.
Here's the cat burglar. She wears comfy clothes and has zero social skills. She has sex appeal but only if you're into a very specific type of woman, and crucially she has zero idea she has it. She probably doesn't know what an innuendo is.
Here's the hacker. He's a Black nerd, and also the most moral character of the bunch. He's a nerd but also not socially awkward; in fact, he's the second best at grifting, right after the person who's been doing it for decades.
Here's the muscle. In his heart of hearts, he is a chef. He is tough and manly but he uses that to look out for the working class and children and everyone else the system leaves behind. He's feared by politicians and he reminds his friend to tip the delivery person.
Here's the femme fatale. She's over forty years old, and she's the one seducing the mark. She's the heart of the team. Her calling is to be a director. She loves attending her own funeral.
Here's the mastermind. He's the only one who doesn't start out as a career criminal. He manipulates his own crew, kills two people after promising them he won't, and takes deals behind their back. He was in seminary school.
