Shane Hollander is lowkey the most heartbreaking character of all time and I’m glad Jacob Tierney recognized that because Rachel Reid certainly didn’t.
Shane’s comphet and compartmentalization of his sexuality and true self outside of a few frantic encounters with Ilya a few times a year is devastating. His refusal to tell anyone in his life - his teammates, his parents, friends he doesn’t have - what he truly wants because he can’t even admit it to himself.
Everything is hockey, everything is brand deals. No, he can’t have a glass of wine because he can’t do anything that’ll potentially impact his performanceon the ice. He can’t date because everything is about his career and when it’s the off season, he locks himself away at his cottage where he spends most of his time alone. Hayden is the closest thing he has to a friend, but if Shane can’t even admit to himself how he feels, how is he supposed to confide in Hayden?
He can have sex with Ilya behind closed doors without words exchanged, but the second it begins to resemble something real, when Ilya starts trying to figure out what Shane really wants, Shane panics and forces himself into a relationship with a woman, because what he has with Ilya doesn’t make sense or fit into any version of himself that he can foresee.
One of the best decisions Jacob Tierney made in the show was showing Shane be intimate with Rose and frame it as devastating and stomach churning. Shane’s performance of heterosexuality is painful. It actively holds him back from being his true self. The book glosses over it and mentions Shane has shitty sex with Rose a couple of times, and doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about how Shane, a gay man in love with another man, forcing himself to have sex with a woman to perform heterosexuality would be extremely difficult and unpleasant for him.
The scene in the show is unpleasant and heartbreaking. We see and feel how much Shane doesn’t want to be doing this, but he feels like he has to.
Shane’s break up with Rose is 10 tens more emotional and impactful in the show than it is in the book, because Shane’s clumsiness with women is not portrayed as a punchline. We see him processing in real time that he can’t just keep faking it. Shane thinks he is good at hiding and compartmentalizing, but it only took Rose two sexual encounters to figure him out. He’s forced to reckon with the fact that he can’t just keep ignoring who he really is and what he really wants.
The scene where we finally get a glimpse into just how painful everything is for Shane is another scene that’s not in the book - Shane’s conversation with Yuna outside.
“I tried. I tried really hard. I just can’t help it.”
Now that he’s finally starting to let go of the performance and separation he’s tried to maintain all of these years - Shane Hollander Hockey Player versus Shane Hollander The Person - he can admit that there’s nothing he can do to change who he is or how he feels, but that will never erase the pain of all those years of trying, of trying to be who his mother wanted him to be and who the MLH wanted him to be. He denied himself the ability to be fully human and fully himself for so long and he’ll never get that time back.
I never want to hear the words “Shane doesn’t have trauma” ever again.
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