Panromantic Asexual, Genderqueer, they/them. I'm all about those gay ships! This is a safe place for LGBTQ+ discourse. Feel free to send me messages, it warms my heart!
I've been thinking about this for a few weeks. A high percentage of the Supernatural Family not only enjoys this show, but has embraced it. There's so many healing and wholesome aspects of Heated Rivalry, but perhaps for us: Those who kept hoping til the (very) bitter end that we would see the love, devotion, and (literally) world-changing affection we *knew* was there finally validated. And were tossed crumbs. This gives us a chance. Yes, it's a very different story. Yes, these are unique characters. Yes, we fucking *adore* them as they are.
But one can't deny (fkn fight me) that they have the same 'I will find you, in any universe' connection we watched play out for 11 seasons.
Our strong, independent, betrayed by those who are supposed to love him most, stubborn, working against terrible odds to protect and love, golden-haired boy.
Our brave - especially when scared -, barrier breaking, world shifting, strong and mighty on his own, but better when together, Autistic and weird about food, determined, raven-haired boy.
So what if the freckles are on a different face. If the supportive family members have shifted. The challenges against them may not be the fate of the *entire* world, but it's the fate of *their* world and that's just as daunting and important.
And they can fucking *love* each other. They fight, miscommunicate, struggle with language and emotion barriers, hurt each other again and again across *years* of distance and strife. But they love and kiss and hold each other. They find places and hidden moments to find solace, even if the other isn't aware that's what it is, together. We get to watch them, we get to hold them in our hearts and *know* that they are there for each other. Unequivocally. And that is something we desperately needed and deserved. Something that was stolen from us time and again. And here it is. On screen.....
I'd like to note: I am in No Way claiming some connection between the stories intended by the author. I'm not claiming plagiarism or copying. The themes in both stories are ones that are inherently human, and inherently queer. They are beautiful, they are tragic, and they are far too real for generations of queer folks. 'Heated Rivalry' is a gift. And it is precious to all who relate to it.
You just know that baby Shane was the grumpiest, most serious, chubbiest little thing.
All the photos they have of him with different family members picture him frowning with a little pout. He only ever smiled when he was in David or Yuna’s arms despite other people trying to make him laugh.
Ilya absolutely adores looking at these photos and cannot get over how cute Shane was. His favourite photo of baby Shane was from Shane’s first Halloween where he was dressed up as a little cat. The first time Ilya saw it he was like “omg Shanya you were actually an angry kitten!! This is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. Look at your little pout!”. And ever since he’s been trying to get Shane to dress up as a cat again for Halloween to recreate the photo.
He (finally!) succeeds when the trend for recreating childhood photos comes around (can't remember what year that was??). However! Shane asks Sveta for a photo of Ilya before he agrees. There aren't any photos, but she tells him a story. So Ilya is dressed up in a version of the dresses the Romanov daughters wore in this:
He saw them at a museum and: "Mama! Look! She has hair just like us! And she's so pretty! I want to look like that!"
So Irina makes dresses for both of them and does their hair and they have tea. But only when Grigori is away on 'Business' and Alexei is at school.
(Bonus points if they somehow convince Luca to dress in a little sailors outfit to match the painting)
things my kids at work have done which i think autistic baby shane would also do:
hide under the pool table when things get Loud
refuse to eat anything but buttered noodles and chocolate milk at kindergarten
ominously answer the question "Where's your teacher?" with "Why don't you go look in there... you might find her..." and pointing to the classroom
ask every single adult in the building what their favorite dinosaur (hockey player) is and then rattle off every single dinosaur (hockey player) they know
pitifully slink up to his teacher and go "I think I need a time-out :("
say he thought about it, and hitting his friend was the best option to resolve their fight
lock himself in the bathroom stall and require a teacher to use a laddder to climb into the stall and free him
run full-speed into a wall, smile hugely when asked if he's okay, do it again
try to alert a teacher to other children fighting by saying "Miss, shit's going down"
tattle to other parents if their kid behaved badly during the day
- Does Not think it's cute that he can't say 'Spaghetti' correctly! >:(
- Wear his Comfort Parka and Snow Boots year-round, no matter how hot it gets (There's a swatch from it that Yuna had saved. He rubs it for luck on game days)
- Deconstructs things to figure out how they work. Can not put them back together.
- Loooves boxes! Not to put things in, or to collect. He 'turtles' in them. This creates a problem when he takes naps with boxes he hid under and can't be found. Eventually David sources boxes big enough from work and they just put one in his room. (Sourced from my cousin who is 'not autistic')
- Potty trained himself before age 3 because sitting in one's filth is Very Off-putting. (True story, that was me)
- Puts himself to bed at Exactly 7pm, regardless of who is around. (Another true story, the babysitter freaked out and thought she lost me. I was in bed, teeth brushed and jammied)
From Shane's day one with the Centaurs he is just in for the bit when it comes to Ilya's antics and he is Ilya's biggest enabler.
Admittedly, Ilya was a bit worried before that first day, thinking off all the silly stories he made up for his team just funsies and how Shane is actually the only one who knows him so well that he could read Ilya for filth and expose it all. Shane is funny, his chirps are deadly, but how far is he willing to go along with Ilya's bullshittery?
Turns out, very far. Til the end of the world, probably.
Luca immediately asks Shane if it's true that Ilya is a descendent of the Romanov family? Yes, Shane answers without batting an eye, Ilya is royalty, technically, and through their marriage, he is as well.
Did Ilya really have to fight a bear in the Siberian winter when he was just 14 years old, Bood asks. Oh, totally, and afterwards, he still had to walk through one-metre-high snow for ten kilometres to get to school, Shane answers conversationally, absolutely impressive isn't it? (Shane has to raise his eyebrow at his purebred city boy of a husband afterwards).
Holmberg asks if Ilya really got invited to a friendly race against a few F1 drivers in Monaco and actually won? Yeah, beat Lewis Hamilton, Shane answers with a feigned eye roll. By 0.35 seconds, Shane and Ilya answer in unison, and Ilya winks at Shane.
But Ilya doesn't really have contacts with the Bratva, does he, Dillion asks, obviously slightly terrified. Shane shrugs and is like, yeah, well I can't tell to which extent, but I mean it was an open secret that Rozanov gave out season tickets to his special friends, if you know what I mean. And I know you had this rookie in Boston, Ilya, what was his name, I don't know, the lame one? Yeah, Miller, right, couldn't keep up with the speed on the wing. He disappeared, must be 8 years ago now? Can't find any trace of him, anywhere. Of course it's only rumours but...
This will be the best seaon ever, Ilya decided then and there. Playing with his husband/hockey king/best friend/soulmate is already a dream coming true. But honest, earnest Shane, with his deadpan expression and good boy reputation will make the perfect partner in crime.
I guess it makes sense, but the idea of there still being Habsburgs floating around is wild to me. Also,I will never not enjoy 'hang on let me search something rq' posts.
inspired by an interaction I had as someone with an allergy and a lot of concerned friends when seeing my medical examination schedules.
so, 1 in 5 Canadians don't have enough vitamin D according to health canada (shane's definitely one cause he lives and breathes the ice)
i find people with nut allergies/multiple allergies are on the smaller side and are more likely to have had a bit of malnutrition from childhood
This is due to a lack of healthy safe foods as in Canada the ingredient lists doesn't really help those with allergies its more for corporations to not get sued, most safe snacks are highly processed without much nutritional value coupled with parents navigating it for the first time leads to a restrictive early diet especially if both are working (kids with allergies are epensive, not the epi-pens but the food and insurance premiums) and a lot of restaurants will turn you away so fast food is usually a common meal for busy kids this one isn't a stat more like a personal observation as someone currently suffering from lingering health issues with that BS
Asians are more prone to lactose intolerance due to a historical lack of use in cooking (a lot of us have lower levels for calcium). Google the map it's really inresting
Consider:
When Shane's drafted and he sees other players looking at him amazed and in shock he thinks it's cause he's one of the few Asians in the league so he pushes himself to be a better role model since he actively sees the change he's bringing
Meanwhile other players:
How does a half Japanese, half white, 180 pounds soaking, drafted number 2 in his class by the metros, deficient in a to d
Grow up to be a star center and a face of a franchise !?!?!?!
Bonus: A lot of players are scared of checking Shane hard into the boards and will actively hesitate which gives Shane a scoring advantage. The metros knows this and has abused it
Shallergies-verse Ilya comes across this and purchases a fuck ton of copies. He puts them in the house, the cottage, Yuna and David’s house. The locker room, players lounge, the rink’s gym, beside both the home and away benches. He prints flyer sized versions for every member of the team.
Shane comes home one day and finds a giant version framed and hung above their bed.
“It’s important medical information Shane! Eating ass could save your life!”
Traveling to a place where you don't speak the language with allergies is so hard. Plus I don't really know a reason why Shane might be in Taiwan. But, when I lived in Taiwan, I became the person in math problems, buying 12 mangos at a time, and they were all the best mangoes of my live. Shane should not be having 1 mango, let alone 12, but I want him to experience the pure joy of Mango Season in Taiwan. I don't know enough about mangos to know if he would be equally impacted by all varieties, but I think it would be something worth testing. What if there's a mango he could eat without being cursed down by allergies?
the exact rationale shane uses when he is trying to convince ilya that this is a good idea
There are several hundred varieties of mango. Statistically, there has to be a few kinds he can have, and quite a few more that cause less severe reactions....
Omg just btw, Russian houses are Warm. It’s mostly centralized heating that is on from like October to mid April (ish depends heavily on where you are), and it’s relatively cheap, so. The heat is HEATING. It can be negative 10-20 degrees outside and, if your apartment is in a decent building (not everyone’s lucky enough…but a police higher up’s family would be lol) and has good windows, it’s easily like +23-25C inside and you can walk around tits out booty shorts on. You also can’t really regulate the temperature in the vast majority of houses, so you better keep that apartment well aired out if you like it slightly colder. Layers are for when it’s Really fucking cold outside, like -35 and below, or for when they inevitably turn the centralized heating off during the first good spring week and then it randomly starts snowing again in like May, because of course. So everyone who ends up moving to western countries (including myself) has to live through the culture shock that is 19 C homes and warm pyjamas 24/7lol
ilya (used to living in a terrarium) vs shane (autistic struggle with thermoregulation): FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
I have the same issue in other people's houses all the time! My house has always maxed out at around 63/64 in the winter and gets down to 58 or so at night. I lived in a basement for over a decade, and have lived in a daylight basement for another (almost) decade. It does not get super toasty in here unless I use a space heater. Other people have their houses set to 73-76 and I am melting. Wym I can't use a safety blanket to protect my skin from your furniture cuz otherwise I'm over-heating?? You mean I have to just raw-dog whatever fuck ass material your couch is made of? For an unknown amount of time‽‽
it is just endlessly so funny to me that a central issue in the tuna meltdown is that ilya is trying to account for shane's moves in a game of 3d chess and meanwhile shane is just desperately trying to play tic tac toe
ilya is layering his questions in like four layers of misdirect while still trying to get the answers he wants and then shane is just asking "you want me to stay?" "you want to make me food?" "do you have a girlfriend?"
ilya is out here coming up with his riddles three to see if he can cross over the becoming a boyfriend bridge, and he could have ACTUALLY DONE IT if he'd been able to ask "hey, do you want to be exclusive and not just fuck buddies?"
man was out here writing a novel when a one sentence survey question would have actually achieved his goal
It's So Frustrating when NTs do this tho. This, and the All-Stars bar scene drove me absolutely bonkers first watch thru! Poor Shane, we've (Autistics) all been there Dx
Subsequent re-heatings have allowed me to appreciate the nuance of Ilya's experiences and emotional turmoil. But also! Just. Ask. XDX
thinking about the boston raiders spending years watching ilya flirt with models, actors, pop stars, and all sorts of Professionally Hot People. always at the top of his game, no matter how famous or supernaturally attractive they are. no one’s seen him so much as stutter when chatting up someone whose face looks perfect on a billboard and somehow better in real life.
then the raiders shoot a PSA for the boston library. it’s the first time ilya’s been in a library since he was a child. and he simply cannot handle the librarians. they spend an extra hour filming because ilya stutters whenever someone with glasses asks him a direct question. he misspells his own name while getting a library card when the man helping him rebuttons the top of his collared shirt. he tries to flirt with a woman reshelving books by asking her what the numbers on the spines mean and if he can get hers; she doesn't clock his pick-up line and explains the dewey decimal system to him for ten minutes. ilya blushes the entire time.
marley tells this to shane years later and shane is like,,,that tracks and no i will not elaborate. but we own an industrial grade glasses cleaner because i couldn’t figure out how else to get cum out of the crevices.
Re Spaghetti Escape: Shane trying to be like "He's nice! You know he's nice!" "I know he's nice, Hollander! I know he loves you! You know what this means? It means he will try to get in bed with you!! You know who else is in that bed? Me!!"
THE BED IS A SHARED SPACE, SHANE
SHARED WITH YOUR INNOCENT SLEEPING HUSBAND WHO DOESN'T WANT TO WAKE UP SPOONING A SNAKE
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
