im so scared ilyas isolation is going to come about through pitting shane against svetlana, because lets be honest the majority of the fandom do it in their ilya whump fics anyway. svetlana is painted as the "better option" for ilya because of an assumption that she will forever understand ilya better than shane. she speaks russian, shes known him forever, and she apparently has no life outside protecting ilya. so many fics paint this picture of her rushing to help ilya when his shitty bf would never do the same and its so infuriating. for the shane hate yes, but also she has her own fucking life! shes a busy woman, and its clear they only pretend to like her as long as she keeps in her role as ilyas therapist. if she were to dare to deviate from that (which i feel is made clear in the show by her being busy with her new business) they would hate her as much as they do shane. if she acts anything less than perfect towards ilya theyll discard her in the same way.
also if she is pitted against shane shell get so much hate from shane stans as well, who already feel threatened by her involvement in ilyas life. hopefully jt isnt that stupid but like, its clear how much he understands from his shitty interviews
I completely hear you and of course hate the thought of all of this, but if I had to guess, Tierney would sooner use a conflict between Shane and Svetlana to negatively implicate Shane than Svetlana.
I think this solely because of how tlg and the first season of HR are written. Really, the first season is already set up, if Tierney wanted to, to make Shane have a problem with Svetlana because of Ilya’s history with her.
Also, Shane is the one who is going to have a problem with Ilya coming out, and guess who knows about Ilya now - Sveta.
Sveta also isn’t a main character. She doesn’t have conflicts of her own, she doesn’t have growth to go through, she doesn’t have her own story. It wouldn’t make any sense even from a craft standpoint to give her the issue with Shane and make any part of season 2 about Shane needing to win Sveta over. It would just derail too much from the main plot.
Plus if I’m being honest…though I do not think Tierney is overtly misogynistic, and I was actually impressed with the lack of obvious misogyny in HR, I do think he is probably the type of man who can’t picture Svetlana being anything more than Ilya’s support network lol. Like, the fact that he decided to make her have feelings for Ilya alone kind of tells me everything I need to know about how he views Sveta. I don’t think he could imagine her as someone who would be just as willing to casually fuck a friend as Ilya, and so I just think he views her in this very pure and perfect angelic way that would prevent him from ever wanting to make her more complicated than simply existing to be, well, Ilya’s therapist, or babysitter, or what have you.
Like it is a subtle and less hurtful form of misogyny, but a lot of male writers do this thing where they make women Perfect because that’s the only way they can stand their woman characters, or because they just aren’t very interested in their woman characters, or because they don’t really grasp women have interiority and complex personalities like men do, or even because they’re afraid of being called misogynistic, who knows. It’s like superimposing the “you’re prettier when you smile” brand of misogyny on the very essence of a character and Reid does this with Rose, and Tierney did it with her too and he also did it to an extent with Svetlana.
I know this isn’t much reassurance, because it isn’t any better for him to negatively implicate Shane instead, but it does make more sense. It is much easier for me to imagine Tierney taking the opportunity to make the audience think “How could Shane take Ilya from Sveta, who does nothing but exist to be there for him?” than “How could Sveta take Ilya from Shane?” It just makes more sense based in what’s already written. Also I’m aware it’s not ideal for the audience to view Svetlana as this pure and perfect angel with no needs or feelings of her own who is heartbroken and victimized by the narrative either - but it would mean people empathizing with her instead of hating her.