earlier amy and I were discussing both real life hockey player sergei fedorov's baffling decision to leave an extremely successful team in favor of a far shittier one, and also this fabulous post:
and just thinking like. when ilya signs with ottawa, there will be plenty of speculation and conspiracy theories proposed to explain why the fuck he would ever do such a stupid thing. ilya is asked about it whenever a reporter comes within 50 feet of him. he is also hassled by every fan who recognizes him at the airport or in a bar. and I think he responds to this by giving a different bullshit answer every single time.
"I have developed life threatening allergy to dunkin. tim's is very bad coffee of course but it will not kill me"
"ottawa promised me free lifetime supply of little maple candies they sell to tourists, how can I refuse this"
"I have always dreamed of exciting career at treasury board of canada"
"I am russian spy actually, hockey is just a cover. unless you are the immigration agent looking at my citizen application and you are watching old interview of me to make sure I am nice enough to be canadian. in that case this is joke. ha ha."
if he wasn't the main character of hockey twitter before, he is now, and of course one of his answers is the real one - that he moved to ottawa to be closer to shane. this means that when they eventually get outed, the running gag becomes posting clips of his other stupid answers and being like holy shit. can you guys believe ilya rozanov is ACTUALLY a russian spy who's working for the treasury board of canada in exchange for maple candies??
before they're out though, the other gag is making increasingly unhinged thirst posts about shane, all of which include captions/tags about how ilya is uncancelled, free my man he did nothing wrong, if he'd signed to a peewee team on the moon because that's where his man was he would have been right, etc. etc. and THEN people start posting photos of themselves in remote or bizarre locations like hey guys. I live here in this abandoned apartment complex in belarus. to be closer to my gay lover shane hollander <3
this gives ilya's gay lover shane hollander several dozen heart attacks at first but ends up being fantastic cover, because now they can start occasionally posting their own photos together whenever they happen to be in A Location, and everyone thinks they're just going along with the bit
even after they're outed, shane is making very normal posts about where he is and what he's doing, thanking whichever sponsor or whatever. and then ilya is posting something from the same location like hi guys. I'm here at wimbledon. to be closer to my gay lover shane hollander <3
meanwhile the city of ottawa is on their official twitter like may we remind you all that we are not the middle of nowhere or a weird place to be. we are not antarctica, an isolated yurt in mongolia, or the international space station. we are literally the capital city of canada
