homo academicus

heated rivalry blog, apparently

[rozzed]

a private joke alexei & ilya; gen, 2.4k #the gaping wound of brotherhood, or something

the first thing they’ll tell you is that you look like your father.

You’re allowed to hate your brother. The world will understand if you hate him because he is a generational talent and pretty and well-fucked and well-liked—but not if it’s because he is your brother. There are only so many hours in a family’s day. You are five. Someone puts two dogs in a cage and hopes they don’t kill each other. You are thirty; you realize there is no key and no dogs and you call your brother and say, I need money. What you meant to say is: I have been thinking about dying and all the ways it comes to us, and then I thought of you dead, and it scared me, if only for a moment, to realize that even you could die, and that if you were to die then I would truly be alone in this world, even with my daughter, and my wife, I would feel a deep aching hole in my stomach between the liver and the heart, where you punched me for the first time, and it rattled all through my body until I shook so hard I broke your nose.

ao3

[evardstentacles]

fuck everything. whats the media people ASSUME youre into. what are people surprised that you havent watched/played/whatever

[space-bakery]

my late contribution to 2014 blogging

[clytemnestraaa]

this doesn’t even hit as hard without context but i’m incensed enough that i’m leaking parts of my own album i guess

[the-witch-of-the-wandering-ways]

My new period-appropriate crack headcanon is that the boston raiders once used akinator to figure out who montreal jane is and it kept telling them if was shane hollander and they kept thinking it was the weirdest fucking bug

[radialarch]

questions ilya rozanov would be aggressively asking wingers on the shane hollander line

[scunthotter]

Ilya: Are the hurricanes in East Carolina or West Carolina?

Shane: you don't know what state the Carolina Hurricanes are in?

Ilya: Well I know from name is one of them.

Troy: I don't think its East and West Carolina, that doesn't sound right...

Ilya: No it is East and West, like East Virginia and West Virginia. Trust me I lived in United States for 8 years.

Dykstra: You never hear about things happening in East Virginia.

Shane: You all are so fucking stupid. Its not east and west, its just one fucking state, the state of Carolina. The Carolina Hurricanes.

[clytemnestraaa]

sorry but i do like and enjoy when shane is a kind of bad captain and bad friend and partially reaps what he sowed with the metros as a result of years and years of a willfully blind eye and a locker room culture he enabled and i have seen the opinion that the metros team loves shane and that’s an interpretation i can understand but don’t myself hold because what i see is not the team loving shane but sucking up to shane and shane not totally having the social skills to recognize that while this group of guys seems really friendly and nice to him it isn’t actually motivated by friendship which is why the pivot takes him by such surprise

[clytemnestraaa]

ok i figured it out the key difference and sum of their characters is that ilya is acting and shane is lying

[clytemnestraaa]

now to expand, we all know it is wrong to lie to people, and it's not particularly wrong to act. however: to lie, you need to be starkly aware of what the truth of you actually is, in order to obscure it. but to act, to fully step into a role, it is better if you never know yourself at all.

[fairyinthetrees]

"In another world" "in another life" no I refuse to accept that thought process actually. this is the only one I have and I want it in this one

[gayhockeyshow]

[astershollanov]

it's been nearly eight months since heated rivalry first aired and i still spend every free minute thinking about hollanov

[hockeyfinches]

i love Not to jump the gun here but with rozanov’s permission…? i think shane in that scene was feeling fiercely protective over another person for the first time in his life. so bowled over by the intensity of his own emotions that he stumbled back to his hotel room in a daze and immediately jerked off in the shower about it. “what if rozanov got arrested and i had to use my immense hockey wealth to bail him out of jail and it was winter in boston. so he had hypothermia. and he had to live with me while we sorted out the legal situation and i yelled at journalists for him and helped him with his paperwork and hired the best lawyer in the world and nursed him back to health and he was like “hollander……..you saved my life 🥺” and he fucked me soooo hard every night for stress relief (obviously he couldn’t fuck other people. due to the lawsuit) and we fell asleep in each other’s arms afterwards. because there’s only one bed in my apartment and he’s too tall for the couch” stuff like that. normal fantasies

[hockeyfinches]

top ten shane hollander shower fantasies:

• holding ilya’s hand while they cross a busy street full of hazards (potholes, roadworks, etc)

• rescuing ilya from kidnappers (he kicks down the door)

• rescuing ilya from a burning building (bridal carry)

• fighting in a gladiatorial ice hockey arena for ilya’s hand in marriage

• massaging ilya’s bad knee and ilya says with wonderment “wowww wow. shane you’re so good at this… you are better than every physical therapist on earth probably”

• saying “he asked for no pickles” to the mcdonalds cashier

• carrying ilya’s bags

• washing ilya’s hair

• applying o’keefes working hands cream to ilya’s calluses

• fuck or die

[clytemnestraaa]

i know this isn't like super canon but the interpretation of ilya's younger life i like best (assembled from many posts and not just my brain alone) is that ilya's father was some sort of ex-military high-ranking NKVD or military police officer who backed the wrong people after the dissolution of the soviet union and then made a series of bad business decisions. and that since ilya's birth the family was slowly hemorrhaging money and status, a big house getting more and more dilapidated, and then sergei vetrov (svetlana's father) winds up acting as the political lifeline to their family. it also adds a level of tension where, since ilya is the childhood hockey phenom, which is what earns ilya vetrov's patronage and favor for the rozanov family, suddenly EVERYTHING is resting on ilya. it also adds a layer to his and svetlana's relationship, where she's not just the best friend but also the daughter of his patron, which i am sure she resents. so at the gala scene, ilya is there with his father to atone for his sins (losing to latvia) to his patron, because ilya's failure makes vetrov look bad.

[clytemnestraaa]

anyways this ALSO adds to why ilya can't come out until his father is dead--ilya is relying on sergei vetrov's support to keep his father comfortable, and in exchange ilya is vetrov's prized horse. but if ilya comes out and dates shanes, then people will start muttering about why this minister was so invested in this talented young hockey player in the first place, and suddenly vetrov himself is at risk. sasha can get away with running off to paris to be gay, because sasha is politically unimportant, but if ilya tried that, vetrov would have to respond harshly protect his own reputation.

[clytemnestraaa]

back to my sergei vetrov hypothesis that as grigori rozanov fell from favor, ilya as a young teen won the eye of vetrov the powerful minister, and now ilya is playing for his family’s security and his father’s medical care, and as dementia progresses, his father’s safety. it is All on ilya. i also love the dimension this adds to svetlana and ilya’s relationship where she is not just his best friend she is also his patron’s beloved daughter, who holds the potential of a not-insignificant amount of power over ilya that she would never ever use but they both know it’s there.

[radialarch]

at what age do you think they start calling shane generational? thirteen? fourteen? at what age do they start saying: hollander's a lock for 1oa in the 2009 draft. yeah it's a ways off but talent like this is undeniable. look at his speed, his hockey iq. he could be the next one. he could be--

at what age do they start saying, there's this kid in russia who's fucking good. gets under your skin, plays hard, the softest hands you've ever seen. could be a match for hollander. could be better.

at what age does shane start looking at videos of ilya rozanov tearing up russian juniors. it's just tape. it's blurry and pixelated and shane keeps his eyes on 81, marks when he slams a boy straight into the boards and then skates off with the puck, watches the buttery smooth deke around the d, backhand snipe, top shelf, fist up in a celly. you're an awesome player to watch. it's the most beautiful thing he's seen.

at what age does shane start thinking: i wanna play against him. i want to beat him. i want--

[snail-mail-33]

Okay I can't let Ilya hog all the scandal limelight. Here are some things myshane gets cancelled for:

being featured in a Drake mv post-Kendrick beef

only donating $20,000 to a fundraiser for a Montreal-based kids' cancer hospice — the fundraiser unfortunately coincided with the release of the cottage tour video

laughing at a Wimbledon ball boy for getting hit in the face by a ball (it was objectively funny but he broke his nose)

not using pride tape

the summer after he leaves the metros, responding to a very homophobic tweet with a picture of him flipping off the camera with three championships rings stacked on his middle finger

not shaking a player's hand after a 4-game sweep in the playoffs. he'd played embarrassingly poorly and Shane was worried it might be something contagious and fuck him up for the conference finals

not knowing who Harriet Tubman was

getting stoned at a party at All Stars (he was completely sober, just dissociating like crazy)