Why do people interpret this line from My Dinner with Hayden so negatively.
“I thought you hated him,” Hayden said. “We talked about how much we hated him all the time. For years! And then I find out not only that you don’t hate him, but you… I mean, you must love him so fucking much, right? Like, you’d have to, to go through all of this.”
Like, I get it? Hayden has been basically told by Shane for YEARS 'we fucking hate this guy' and Hayden, like a great friend, took that a ran with it. He was given bountiful evidence over the years, how hard Ilya hits Shane, how much Ilya focuses on, narrows in on, Shane in every game, talks shit in the media. Hayden plays right beside him. He's got a front row view to all this bullshit. Hayden doesn't know they're flirting.
To Hayden, Ilya Rozanov is basically a big bad fucking Russian bully and now Shane's asking Hayden to actually re-write everything, everything you've learned this past 10 years, it's bullshit, I swear. He's good now. If someone turned around and told me my friends ex-boyfriend we've all openly hated 'is good now istg' I'd punch them in the fucking teeth.
And I've heard people read the second part, 'You must love him so fucking much, right? Like, you'd have to, to go through all of this.' as snarky or sarcastic. It feels more, desperate? Like Hayden's scrambling to put together why Ilya, why this, why for so fucking long, why torture himself over all of this when in Hayden's mind, Shane could find a nice guy, any other guy, why does it have to be the guy Shane has openly, loudly, hated for years. The guy who Hayden has seen hurt Shane, over and over.
Yeah, in this moment Hayden's making it about himself, and he recognises that literally the a paragraph later. He says 'I'm sorry'. I just think people forgot that we know Ilya and Shane aren't mortal enemies but Hayden's basically been sitting in the centre of the propaganda machine and everyone expects him to just switch tracks immediately.
aNYWay I'll always have sympathy for Hayden, dude's trying his best, whole world got turned upside down and people are mad at him for stumbling a little