wild surmise

a sideblog older than 30 and younger than the Fangorn Forest

[iphyslitterator]

manifesting a nice normal game where the canes' first line scores twice in the first ten minutes and vegas scores early in the second but it's okay because jordan martinook scores a few minutes later and nothing else really happens except jordan staal's empty net goal and we all go to bed at a reasonable hour with our sanity intact 🙏

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

I'm so sorry, having lived in Boston for for over a decade, I can't get this AU of snapping birch out of my head where instead of a home montreal game v. the admirals, The Leak happens during a game in Boston.

All I can think of is that, cut off from their easy retreat to one of Shane's secret properties, Ilya grabs his boy and promises he'll get him to somewhere safe where no one will find them.

Smash cut to them sitting on a bench, out in the open, at MIT.

Students and the like hustle by completely oblivious to the massive stars they are passing. This is MIT, where football practice gets cancelled for a robotics competition and the pope visited unnoticed except for one of the courtyard cut through getting closed down. This campus is the antithesis of Montreal. A couple of Hockey Stars, even ones blowing up the internet will not get noticed, except maybe if they are sitting in the way of a pokemon Go gym. Hell, put The Leak during October, they can literally get on MIT's ice rink in full game gear during Spooky skate, and the most notice they will get is someone thinking that dressing up as hockey players for halloween is boring. Someone else who's more online says no, they're probably being those two hockey players who just got outed. They're just incredibly impressed with the speed they got their costumes together tho. True dedication to the meme. No one actually knows what Hollanov look like because if they know about The Leak at all, it's entirely though text posts on reddit. (Shh, just let me have my comfort AU before you come back and stomp on our hearts with more beautifully painful canon.)

I’m obsessed with this mental image

[chobani-flip]

#snapping birch#absolutely enchanted by the implication that hiding amongst nerds is safer than locking themselves in Ilya’s house#and honestly you may be right about that sports fans be crazy#wait so is Hayden with them or did Ilya just grab his Shane and fucking bolt#I can’t decide which is funnier#Hayden Pike third wheeling Hollanov as the worlds most unwilling cuck#Ilya trying to bring Shane off the ledge and Hayden’s interrupting ever five seconds ‘were in public. people can see you. I can see you. jfc#I wish I was blind.’ alternatively Hayden just like. picks the wrong moment to go to the bathroom and Ilya Is Not Waiting#this is even funnier in the context that it took Several Hours for anyone to figure out that Ilya Rozanov was Shane Hollanders secret gay#lover. so instead of it being Scott Hunter known gay hockey player rushing into the fray to help his fellow gay hockey player it would be#ILYA ROZANOV known hater forcing his way into the enemy locker room to take Shane Hollander in tender embrace and also try to kill multiple#of his teammates. like what would people THINK#Ilya rozanov knew Shane Hollander was gay for 37 seconds and immediately decided to speedrun enemies to lovers#Hayden pike gets out of the bathroom like ‘wait what did I miss’#Hayden like worlds unhappiest camper having to team up with the Boston raiders to hunt down their captains gay asses#it takes them several hours to figure out Shane is Jane and Hayden refuses to explain it the entire time#he does NOT have to tell them things this is purely utilitarian he’s using them for the knowledge of bostons fuckass streets#Boston raiders spend the entire time trying to plan their come to Jesus speeches like ‘cap we know Hollanders a 10 and if we had to pick a#dude of course it’d be him but you and Jane have been burning that shared flame for years now—’#Hayden’s ready to roll out the car door and into oncoming traffic#he needs enemy teams to stop confirming that They’ve At Least Considered It with his best buddy#do not! think! these! thoughts!#hard cut to Shane Hollander in active existential crisis and also having never finished a math class in his goddamn life seeing one of MITs#fuckass equations on a whiteboard and nearly blacking out#he has a LOT he’s dealing with right now and for some reason math is pushing hm over the edge he doesn’t even know what the fuck any of that#is. he’s been pulled out of every single math class he’s ever been to since he was 12 to go do some hockey game or photoshoot or to meet the#prime minister because for some reason THAT had to happen before he hit puberty. he cant do math it already haunts him now what the FUCK is#that. he thinks he can feel his own pulse in his eye balls jfc

[lavenderprose]

Ilya is so lucky that Shane proposed. Ilya would have been a nervous fucking wreck for the entire day beforehand. Wake up in the morning. Look in the mirror. Today's the day. Sob. Breathe. Okay I'm good! Turn around and Shane's hair is all in his face, still asleep on Ilya's pillow. I am NOT good. Cold shower. Breakfast that Ilya does not eat. Morning jog wherein Ilya runs like someone is chasing him. Lunch that Ilya does not eat. Drive out to the cottage. Make Shane pull over because Ilya needs to dry heave on the side of the road. "Baby we don't have to drive out today if you're not feeling well." "NO WE HAVE TO." Get to the cottage. Immediately send Shane on some kind of extended fool's errand. Shane wants to stay because Ilya is SHAKING and he is so worried. "No my love I'm fine it's just the breeze off the lake haha." It's thirty fuckig degrees Celsius. Shane finally gtfo's. Yuna, David, Rose FUCKING Landry all descend to help Ilya set up. Well. Ilya is supposed to be helping but he is standing on the deck fully dissociating. Yuna brings him tea. "Are you going to throw up the tea?" "Yes probably." Yuna takes away the tea. 800 electronic tea lights on the deck. In a parallel Ilya has no way of understanding, he both puts on and takes off a suit. Yuna fixes his curls into the hockey boy quasi-mullet that magnetizes Shane's fingers to Ilya's hair and says, "Oh, you're so handsome!" Ilya cries big fat tears. David tells a story about how his proposal to Yuna almost didn't happen because David went to the hospital for heart palpitations that morning. Thank You David That Does Not Help Even Remotely. Ilya slav squats on the lawn for twenty minutes. Shane's car pulls up in the driveway and everyone hides while Ilya vibrates in the entryway. Shane has no less than thirty grocery bags hanging from his arms, still complaining about why the grocery service cancelled their delivery last minute. Ilya leads Shane and all thirty of his grocery bags onto the deck. Shane is doing his favorite thing (bitching) and his second favorite thing (Follow Ilya) so he doesn't notice his own mother tiptoing behind him collecting the grocery bags he drops like breadcrumbs. There is an Oscar-winning actress hiding under his sofa and Shane does not notice because Ilya takes him on the deck and drops to his knees and Shane is like, "Haha, right now?" and then he sees that Ilya has a look on his face like he's just been told the sun is never coming up again and he has his hands on Shane's knees and he is saying, "Shane. Please?" and Shane puts his hands on his head and says "Oh my God baby what's happening to you" as Ilya melts and melts and then from the depths of the cottage someone who sounds a lot like Shane's very own father is whispering "The ring the ring" and when he looks back down Ilya is fumbling a ring box out of his pocket. The first picture of their proposal is Shane glaring into the middle distance with a hand cradling Ilya's curls like a baby while Ilya ugly sobs into his knee.

[ilyander]

thinking about "ilya fell for shane when he saw shane fold his clothes at the first hookup" as a concept and it's. really sweet actually

ilya, all of 18 years old, is a thrillseeker who is already habitually picking up women, already living so fast that the clubs and parties and people and bodies are blending together in his memory. there's a monotony developing there and he's itching to raise the stakes: to take bigger risks, claim bigger rewards. and what could be a bigger risk than hooking up with his golden-boy hockey rival? it would take effort, but the high he'd get from pulling this off just once (and of course it would only be once) would be unlike anything else.

so he puts in the effort. the leadup to his hookup with hollander is entirely off-script for him, a deviation from the patterns and routines he's developed around sex. he premeditates it, he thinks about how good it will feel if this works, fantasizes about what might happen, and plans the joint CCM shoot. the day arrives and he feels electric, takes a real risk in the showers, feels the rush of his risk paying off when hollander says "not here" instead of "no" and, later, offers his room number.

ilya shows up at room 1410 and immediately launches into seduction: this part is more on-script, more familiar to ilya, but still heightened because it's hollander, and heightened again when he confirms it's hollander's first time with a man, and again because it turns out hollander is starving for this, devouring ilya with his eyes and his hands, all intense and urgent and wanting. it's so heady. everything up to this point has already been enough to make this night live in ilya's memory forever. they move to the bed, he tells hollander to take his clothes off and he does -

and he takes the time to fold his clothes. in the middle of a hookup. what?

i love the laugh that connor storrie does in the show at that moment. just, his whole face lit up. ilya isn't bemused, he's not making fun of hollander for doing this. he's genuinely delighted.

because this. this is something that he's never seen before. it surprises him. he is hooking up with shane hollander and this is a uniquely shane hollander thing to do and it burns into his brain. its personal and intimate, it's terribly endearing. he already knows he will remember this moment specifically, will return to it when he thinks about this night in the future, like a bookmark placed in a well-loved book.

he had hoped to walk away from this experience feeling exhilarated and satisfied that he pulled off a hookup with the most dangerous person he could think of. he did not expect to walk away from this with a warm, fond memory of shane hollander - not just his hockey rival in that moment, but a real, knowable man who surprised him in a way that he liked.

i think the next time ilya has sex with someone and she carelessly drops her clothes on the floor, he thinks about hollander. thinks about how he would have never thought that was careless, before. maybe he smiles a little to himself and catches it, has to shake the memory off, feels a little bad for losing focus on the woman he's with. tells himself it won't happen again. but of course that's not how it works, and the memory only digs deeper into him. it happens again the next time, and the time after that.

he's not in control of when the memory comes to him and he ends up thinking about it more and more, thinking about shane more and more. and attention is the beginning of devotion. it's not love yet, but it's something like a crush, and it's more than he's thought about anyone in this way before. it's a crack in the persona he's been building, in his protective armor that keeps people away and keeps his heart safe. it's a step off an invisible cliff. it's inevitable that he falls after that.

[probuccalfat]

every time a young gay person quits smoking or makes the decision that they want to quit, the sun shines on us all with the promise of happiness and beauty.

[probuccalfat]

i appreciate everybody that’s sharing the sentiment that it’s good for anyone to quit smoking (it is) but i very specifically wanted to highlight and encourage LGBTQ youth because lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are about 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to smoke cigarettes than heterosexual people, and the statistics for transgender people are even higher than cisgender people. this is due to tobacco companies marketing heavily and aggressively to LGBTQ communities and exploiting the higher rates of mental health struggles prevalent in our communities.

i want and hope to see all my LGTBQ people live long, healthy, fulfilled lives despite how predatory and punishing this world can be. you should stay around as long as you can to make it a little better in your own way.

[this-is-trans-joy]

I wanna specifically shoutout trans men here because back in the day (I don’t know if it’s still prevalent) there was quite a common rumour going around that smoking could make your voice deeper, which meant a huge upstick in young trans men taking up smoking.

So, if any trans men are being told about this, it’s not true!! Smoking will not change your voice, at least not until you’re about forty years down the line and you’ve already irreparably destroyed your lungs and throat and mouth and pretty much every other organ in your body. When you hear heavy smokers with deeper, scratchier voices it is literally because their vocal cords have been ruined. This is not a passive effect of smoking, it is a very very damaging one!

It’s simply not worth it! There will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Voice training will do a lot more for you than cigarettes will, I promise that the people urging you to start smoking as a voice training method do not have your best interests at heart!

(And you know what, this also goes for not eating due to the idea that starving yourself will decrease your chest size. Like with smoking, there will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Your body is worth so much more than that and there will always be healthier alternatives!)

I wanna see trans people thrive, and one day when things get better and you’re able to start your transition, you’ll want a body that will last as long as possible so you can enjoy every little moment of your life. Please take care of yourself!!

[ob-2-kenobi]

As for trans women and other trans people taking estrogen HRT, smoking has been proven to reduce or even cancel out the effects of estrogen on the body. If you quit smoking, your transition will be faster, fuller, and smoother. I know that it's hard, but your boobs will thank you!

(Btw, afaik smoking only has this effect on estrogen from HRT. Estrogen that AFAB bodies produce naturally is not affected, so smoking is still bad for trans men)

In addition (and this applies to all trans people), smoking increases risks of complications during surgery, so doctors might refuse to let you get whatever surgeries you want if you smoke. They'll at least tell you to quit for a while beforehand, which will be easier to do if you'd already quit to begin with.

[diamondsandphoenixfire]

The not smoking before surgery thing is no joke. I met a guy once who stopped smoking at the time his surgical team recommended and they STILL had to call off the surgery because his oxygen was too low. Can you imagine finally getting your GCS/top surgery/FFS date but then waking up and it’s still there?? (IIRC he’s fully quit now and he got his top surgery with no issues because of it!)

I think also in that conversation, I had a couple people tell me that the book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking is, despite the gimmicky title, genuinely helpful.

If quitting for yourself seems too abstract and it’s hard to care, think about everyone around you. Someone with asthma or migraines will breathe easier if they’re not risking an attack from standing near you.

Lastly, some queer history: a 90’s tobacco marketing campaign that targeted gay men was literally called Project SCUM. That’s what they think of us. Don’t give them your money.

How Big Tobacco Still Targets LGBTQ People

The tobacco industry’s marketing has “systematically targeted” the LGBTQ community for decades…

Tobacco use in LGBT communities

There's a different kind of disparity in the LGBT community that is often overlooked: disproportionately high smoking rates.

[409-conflict]

Hey loons, since I use a bunch of workskins in my HR fics and it makes me sad that the formatting gets lost when you download from ao3, I did the Totally Sane thing of converting my works with formatting to epubs.

Disclaimers: only available in epub, only tested on the three devices I happen to own, here be monsters, etc. etc.

Available to download via Google Drive here

[penandinkprincess]

I know in my heart that shane is the type of person who would never bring up essential personal details until they are immediately relevant and then would also be so understated about them

he and ilya are hanging out in the yard and some bees are buzzing around because some watermelon juice spilled on the ground earlier and shane suggests they go inside or rinse the juice off the patio and ilya teases him about being scared of little bees and shane SO nonchalantly just, "no, but i am allergic and you don't know where my epipen is"

and ilya

[penandinkprincess]

reblogging with my own tags because i'm also CACKLING imagining the implications of this not being specific to ilya, either. they're having a barbeque at hayden and jackie's house and hayden is good-naturedly encouraging shane to try a piece of coffee cake or something and ilya just goes, "no, bad for you"

and hayden IMMEDIATELY is on the defensive because what? you get to tell him what to eat now? where do you get o-

"no, bad for him because it has walnuts in it, pike. you want him to die? this is what you want?"

"what are you talking about?"

shane: "i'm allergic"

"??? since WHEN??"

"since always??"

"you've eaten over at my house HOW many times?? and never brought this up? the fuck, dude?"

"jackie knows"

"WHY DOES JACKIE KNOW AND I DON'T"

[penandinkprincess]

@chobani-flip

"what, do you want a list or something?"

ilya, intending to be snarky: "oh, there are enough things to be a list?"

now that he's been directly asked: "i mean, yeah."

[penandinkprincess]

I know in my heart that shane is the type of person who would never bring up essential personal details until they are immediately relevant and then would also be so understated about them

he and ilya are hanging out in the yard and some bees are buzzing around because some watermelon juice spilled on the ground earlier and shane suggests they go inside or rinse the juice off the patio and ilya teases him about being scared of little bees and shane SO nonchalantly just, "no, but i am allergic and you don't know where my epipen is"

and ilya

[lavenderprose]

To be clear. Shane's whole thing about Ilya being a Sex God is because of the limerence. Ilya is nineteen and he can get a rhythm going and that's about it. He was throwing shit at the wall when he hit that 'Get on your knees' in Nashville but only he knows that because Shane's brain turned OFF. Ilya said "Let's do a little experiment here" and the results were "Oh my god oh my god oh my god." Shane came hands free because he was that obsessed with the idea of Ilya Rozanov being inside him. Ilya said "Do you like that do you like that" because he's nineteen and he needs the validation and Shane was like "YES YES YES I LIKE IT OH MY GOD YOU'RE SO DEEP YOU'RE SO GOOD" and objectively. It was okay. Ilya fully did not know where to put his hands a couple of times. He forgot about Shane's dick. Luckily, Shane is God's special angel who can come from the idea of Ilya's cockhead being in proximity to his prostate a few times. Mind over matter, says Shane Hollander's dick. And then Ilya said "Oh God Hollander" because it was also, objectively, one of the hottest things that had ever happened to HIM, Ilya Rozanov. Shane sits on that step afterwards plotting about how he's gonna get this over and over and over again for the rest of his life and he has no idea that there are women in Boston who have Ilya listed in their contacts as "Hockey Guy 6/10". Shane Hollander cannot fathom a world in which Ilya Rozanov doesn't lay the maddest pipe this side of Lake Michigan. "Ilya Rozanov is a some kind of nineteen year old sex God" No Shane honey he was just designed in a lab to score goals and make you cum and he's done scoring goals for the night.

[hockeyfinches]

i love Not to jump the gun here but with rozanov’s permission…? i think shane in that scene was feeling fiercely protective over another person for the first time in his life. so bowled over by the intensity of his own emotions that he stumbled back to his hotel room in a daze and immediately jerked off in the shower about it. “what if rozanov got arrested and i had to use my immense hockey wealth to bail him out of jail and it was winter in boston. so he had hypothermia. and he had to live with me while we sorted out the legal situation and i yelled at journalists for him and helped him with his paperwork and hired the best lawyer in the world and nursed him back to health and he was like “hollander……..you saved my life 🥺” and he fucked me soooo hard every night for stress relief (obviously he couldn’t fuck other people. due to the lawsuit) and we fell asleep in each other’s arms afterwards. because there’s only one bed in my apartment and he’s too tall for the couch” stuff like that. normal fantasies

[hockeyfinches]

top ten shane hollander shower fantasies:

• holding ilya’s hand while they cross a busy street full of hazards (potholes, roadworks, etc)

• rescuing ilya from kidnappers (he kicks down the door)

• rescuing ilya from a burning building (bridal carry)

• fighting in a gladiatorial ice hockey arena for ilya’s hand in marriage

• massaging ilya’s bad knee and ilya says with wonderment “wowww wow. shane you’re so good at this… you are better than every physical therapist on earth probably”

• saying “he asked for no pickles” to the mcdonalds cashier

• carrying ilya’s bags

• washing ilya’s hair

• applying o’keefes working hands cream to ilya’s calluses

• fuck or die

[redwinerozanova]

red wine supernova, fall right into me

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

hi i just wanted to say that i absolutely adore your heated rivalry works (both snapping birch and the child star crashout au)

and one of my favorite things about your stories besides the amount of effort and care and thought you put into each of the characters to make sure they come of as real and have their own unique narratives (the work your putting in really comes through in your writing and makes your works so fun and engaging and fulfilling to read)

and just how incredibly well you tackle complex themes and ideas and just never present a simple solution and instead make the reader sit with your work and just fully acknowledge how fucked up the situation is and then draw real life parallels to our own world is literally so fucking good, you don’t even understand

sorry i got sidetracked and also used a lot of ands so double sorry if that made it hard to read

anyway what i wanted to say is that i love that you fully recognize that shane transferring to ottawa is not a happy ending. i think a lot of people acknowledge shane’s right to be angry and have lingering trauma about the metros, but that’s also usually side by side with (or sometimes the exclusive sentiment is) the ‘oh! he gets to be with ilya now on a team that’ll accept him so everything’s sunshine and rainbows!! <3’

i haven’t seen anyone else straight up go ‘hey. that shouldn’t have happened. the metros should not have been able to force out shane fucking hollander and shane should’ve been able to stay with the metros if that was what he wanted. he should’ve been granted a choice.’

i just think it’s so important to recognize that shane should’ve been able to choose where he was going to play. that the lack of choice is really just an extension of being forced out of a space that he used to belong in, it’s a reminder that he’s been othered so he should be grateful that he has any options to begin with. and that’s just something he’ll have to live with that

also maybe it’s just me but one of my instant turn offs that’s unfortunately really popular in this fandom is when shane’s characterized to not have been a good captain, as never wanting to be, or not liking his role as captain - or when he’s written to have never gotten along with any of the other metros ever (which makes no sense cause why would he choose to come out to them??)

just anything that creates a narrative to soften the blow of shane being forced out of the metros by turning it into ‘well he didn’t actually like it there and is probably really happy to have left’

i just think it diminishes his feelings on the situation. like personally i would be so fucking angry to begin with but i’d also probably be grieving. and also shit was just happening to this man. he had such limited agency when it came to the situation with the metros and i just really hate how that’s usually completely glossed over or simplified

so i really fucking appreciate you going no. it’s not fucking fair or right that shane has to be the one to leave, and then actually exploring his relationship to the metros (and montreal) in a nuanced way that acknowledges that the situation is actually really fucking complex. that man has been a part of that organization and a staple in that city since he was a teenager, chances are he has some attachment to it - so even if he was happy to get to be with ilya year round and play on the cens, he was probably still feeling some type of way about the metros - because guess what? emotions are not neat and tidy and you can’t just move away from the source of you conflicting feelings to make those feelings go away.

so, yeah, you’re creating some really amazing writing with some really fucking amazing character analysis so thank you for putting it out into the world <3

(sorry for this being so absurdly long, i really didn’t mean for it to be - it got away from me and i got too attached to cut anything)

I have never fucked with an ask harder in my entire life. Anon, you are speaking my entire language.

So, full disclaimer, I know the Ottawa ending is very popular with a lot of readers, and not every story is going to be my cup of tea. That is okay. Not every story is written for me, and that is totally fine, I get that. If you like the ending of the long game, I fully respect that, but maybe skip this post, because I did not like it and I don’t have super charitable things to say about it.

So I legitimately cannot let myself think about or engage with the ending of the long game because it makes me too physically angry.

Which is a really weird reaction for me, if I’m being honest. Like, sincerely, I usually maintain more of an emotional distance from the media I consume. I do not get super heated about stories. I don’t get angry or sad, whether I like how the story was written or not. I like rotating them in my head and picking them apart but I don’t usually have like, a lingering emotional reaction to them. If I don’t like a book, I can usually just be like “oh. That kind of sucked” and leave it at that.

The ending of the long game makes me physically angry.

It is simply not a happily ever after to me. It is such a cruel humiliation ritual that I just can’t see it that way. I would be so much more okay with the ending if Shane had more of a choice in going to Ottawa. But he didn’t. He was forced out, and that fact is barely even acknowledged, let alone processed by the narrative.

If Shane had looked at his life and said “hey, I could stay in Montreal and win 7 Stanley cups and retire here like I always dreamed of, but my life with Ilya is more important to me so I’m going to leave my old dream behind so we don’t have to be long distance anymore,” I would be so much happier about the ending. Because he gets the narrative benefit of it being a sacrifice. There is decision in that. There is autonomy. There is dignity in the fact that he at least gets to choose.

There is no dignity in what happens to Shane.

He gets forced out by homophobia. He is accused of something he does not do. The media eviscerates him. His teammates, who had already reacted poorly to him being gay, who were already icing him out because of his relationship, completely abandon him. His legacy is destroyed. His reputation is trashed. All of the respect he has spent his entire career earning is gone.

Shane leaves Montreal in disgrace. He loses his home of more than a decade. He loses his team. He loses his captaincy. He loses his legacy. He loses almost every friend he has ever had.

But it’s fine. Because his husband already has friends and he can share. It’s really good that all of this happened, really, because Shane gets to go off to the Gay Hockey Oasis, where twinks can frolic freely.

Everyone fucking clap.

There is something so fundamentally repulsive to me about the idea that the answer to being retaliated against by your homophobic teammates is to leave and Go To The Land Of The Gays Where You Will Be Happy And Free. Your homophobic teammates will be keeping the team you spent your entire career building btw. They get to stay. They get everything you built. You go and find happiness with the people who already accept people like you. There is no fixing homophobia :(

Fuck. That. Noise. I will never be happy at an ending that happens because a queer person is forced out of a space. I can’t be happy about that.

I think one of the things that upsets me so much about the long game and its ending is that there is no ability to emotionally process what Shane’s teammates do to him because the entire ordeal is basically brushed off. A lot of it happens off camera. The effect it has on Shane is given next to no attention. Nothing about it is processed by the narrative. There is no cathartic relief. And so I am left fucking angry.

I think it’s helpful to think about catharsis through the lens of its original meaning. The concept of catharsis is rooted in Greek tragedy. In Ancient Greece, they believed that stories and specifically tragedies were important because they helped the audience process and release negative emotion. You left that story feeling relieved even though bad things happened because the stories helped you understand and process your own negative emotions. You get cathartic relief. They believed so strongly in the importance of this that they would build amphitheaters by hospitals because they thought it legitimately had health benefits.

You don’t get any catharsis out of Shane’s storyline. Because the fact that something tragic is happening to him is barely even acknowledged.

Shane comes out to his teammates off camera. We do not see what happens in the room. He has a single sentence about it in the epilogue and told in retrospect. Oh, by the way, he came out to his fucking teammates. No biggie.

Later, we know coming out made it awkward between them. We know sometimes they still use homophobic words around him and it makes Shane uncomfortable. Nothing is discussed in detail, and most of it is brought up retrospectively. Most of it happens off camera.

We also know that Shane’s sexuality is an open secret after. It is the unspoken something that the whole league knows. People didn’t know before but they sure do how.

That knowledge did not come from nowhere. Someone fucking outed him. But we will never talk about it. It is all off camera. It is barely even addressed.

Now, Shane also comes out off camera in snapping birch. But there, it is treated like a horror story.

When writing that text exchange, I broke my usual convention. If there’s a break in the texts, I don’t usually re-show parts of the text exchange that have already appeared—I just pick up where the last texts left off. But when Shane comes out, I copy and paste the texts you’ve already seen before you get to Dave checking in on him again.

Because I don’t want you to just see the silence. I want you to see his father’s encouragement. I want you to see Shane’s nerves. And I want you to see him overcome those nerves. He was afraid and he trusted them anyway. I want you to see that, and then I want you to see those empty fucking time gaps after.

The horror is in the lack of knowledge. It is in the fact that Dave is not there and does not know if Shane is even safe right now. You are meant to feel like a terrified parent reading that conversation back again and again and wondering if he is okay.

That’s not the treatment that Shane’s coming out in the books gets. It’s not off camera because that’s the point—it’s off camera because the details are unimportant. It is the only time in his entire life where Shane gets to choose to come out, and it is an afterthought.

Shane is so often an afterthought in the scenes that should be significant to him that it drives me nuts. Shane’s best friend accidentally outs him to the world, and Ilya, who already wanted to come out, is the one who gets to say it’s okay. And to be clear, I am not trying to diminish the fact that Ilya got outed. The fact that he wants to come out does not make his outing any less violating. He has the right to pick how.

But it is Shane’s best friend and Shane’s biggest fear. And the narrative never processes that. It’s just fine.

The exact same issue is found in the teams’ reactions to the reveal of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. We get to see the Centaurs react to Ilya. He is greeted with laughter, and that is fantastic.

Shane is greeted by silence. He describes the tension as being like he’s playing a game of operation waiting to get buzzed. They are not happy for him. They do not accept him. Even before the trip, they ice him out. But we do not address that in any real capacity. It just happens, and then he is forced out, and that’s it. We do not process it. The point is not the rejection. The rejection is a means to an end, and the end is fucking Ottawa.

To be so, so clear—I am not upset that Ilya got accepted when Shane wasn’t. I am glad Ilya got accepted. And I’m not upset that Ilya gets the narrative attention that he does, because I love Ilya’s character and I want to see him get that attention. But if you want to tackle the kind of topics that Shane’s storyline in the long game raises, you need to give it the necessary narrative space.

And like. I’ve heard all the rationales the internet tosses around about this already. Each book focuses on a specific character and the long game is Ilya’s story, not Shane’s. Shane is not meant to get the same narrative attention because it isn’t his book. The author has said that she never intended for it to be that deep.

She should have written a different story then.

One of my biggest rules of writing is that you do not get to escape the logical consequences of your own narrative. The audience is not fucking stupid. You cannot dodge the weight of the writing decisions you made, so you have to fucking deal with it or you cheapen the narrative.

Take Svetlana’s absence in snapping birch, which I’ve talked about in other posts. I love Svetlana. I want her in the story. But if I include her, it necessarily has narrative consequences.

Russia is a source of conflict because it is illegal for its citizens to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Svetlana is a Russian citizen who regularly returns to Russia. If I have her out here tweeting in the defense of her friend’s bisexuality, then either Russia isn’t that big of a threat, or Svetlana is fucking stupid. That is the logical consequence of the narrative decisions, and I cannot ignore the logical consequences.

As a result, I cannot include Svetlana without cheapening the conflict or her character. So I have to exclude her even if I want her there. Because the reader is not a fucking idiot, and if I can figure out Russia Bad, so can they.

If you do not want to deal with the consequences of writing a storyline about a queer character getting outed and rejected by his loved ones, then do not write that story. Develop it in accordance with its logical consequences or pick a different story.

The logical consequences of Shane’s ending in the long game are fucking tragic. And it is never truly discussed or processed. The narrative gives you no catharsis. Because it is not treated like a tragedy.

Shane is completely rejected by every single person in that locker room. The only person to say something even remotely in his favor is Hayden, who fronts his defense with how fucking weird Shane’s relationship is, but hey, he’s still our captain. Great job, Hayd.

Shane says explicitly that he hoped for better from the people he loved so much. He loved them. They turned on him. And they do not apologize. He loses them permanently. Over ten years together and only two of them come to his goddamn wedding.

And the narrative’s solution is to have him just leave and go somewhere that appreciates him, i.e., his husband’s team, and we should be happy about that. Never mind that he gave Montreal everything. Never mind that it was his dream to see his number retired to the rafters. Never mind that the team he goes to doesn’t have the cap space for him and he wants to be paid what he’s worth. His rich fucking husband will provide. Ottawa gets him at a goddamn gay discount.

Play out the logical consequences of that one. It does not matter if you’re the greatest hockey player in the fucking world. If you tack on enough minorities, then you get him on goddamn fire sale. Too Asian, too autistic, too queer, so he goes for a fucking song. The greatest hockey player in the world, and he is paid less than Troy fucking Barrett.

And I know that’s not why Shane has to take a massive pay cut at the ending. It’s because they do not have the cap space for him, not because they value him less. But that is not what people are going to think when they look at his salary. They are going to see a queer poc with three goddamn Stanley cups getting paid less than every single one of his teammates, and they are going to think they know why.

And maybe you say it doesn’t matter what people think. But I’d say it matters a whole fucking lot to the queer pocs who are wondering if they will ever have a place in this fuck-off white, aggressively straight sport. I think it’s going to matter a whole fucking lot to them when they are negotiating their own salaries and suddenly are finding themselves valued a lot less.

After all, look at what they pay Shane fucking Hollander.

I am not saying that queer people should feel obligated to remain in a hostile space. But I am saying that if they are forced out, you need to treat it like the tragedy it is. Do not write an ending that happens because a character is outed and spat on by his friends of more than a fucking decade and tell me to goddamn clap. Do not call that a fucking Happily Ever After. And I know that’s what it’s meant to be, because that is what the author calls it on her goddamn blog.

As you can probably tell, I feel strongly about the subject.

I don’t fuck with a lot of fandom’s characterizations around the entire thing, to be honest. Like, you nailed all of my issues with it perfectly. I hate the idea that Shane wasn’t friends with his teammates. I hate the idea that he was always a bad captain. Because that is all meant to make the fact that he was forced out somehow more okay. It is meant to make the loss he felt somehow less.

He spent over ten years with those people. He loved them. They all turned on him. And they did not apologize, and they did not come to his wedding. He still invited them and they did not come.

That is supposed to hurt.

If what happened to Shane happened to me, I would be angry for the rest of my life. I would not be able to get over it easily, if I ever got over it.

Ottawa isn’t a happy ending to me. It would have been if Shane got to choose to go be with Ilya instead of getting forced out. But he was forced, and that is what makes it goddamn tragic.

I am not saying that I wanted Shane to stay in a hostile environment. I am saying that the happy ending to discrimination is not to put the high achieving minority out to fucking pasture in the land of the gays where everyone accepts him already. Shane should have gotten to choose where he wanted to be. If that is Ottawa, let him actually choose Ottawa. It is not a choice if you have to tear away the option of Montreal so he’ll make it.

The answer to homophobia is not to segregate the fucking gays in happy centaur land. It is to get rid of the fucking homophobes. Do not tell me that the system is homophobic and you can’t change that. Skill issue. If the system won’t change?

Burn it to the fucking ground.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

your reply to that recent ask (about how shane's body is basically public property) reminded me of the chapter in snapping birch where people online were talking about how desperately they wanted shane to get laid and pass on his Superior Hockey Genes(tm), because Shane Hollander Hockey Player(tm) is not a person; he is their property, their blorbo, their wet little meow meow, their hockey god, and he *owes* them children and those children will *owe* them legendary hockey careers and the whole family will *owe* them a docuseries or a memoir or a reality tv show about being The First Family of Hockey(tm). and now they think that shane *owes* them a relationship timeline and hollanov *owes* them a sex tape so they can determine who is the top and who is the bottom and hollanov *owes* them a wedding spread in vogue accompanied by an interview about being the First Husbands of Hockey(tm). and at the same time, shane also *owes* them a different boyfriend and a different love story or a life spent terrified and alone.

the whole mess just reminds me of that line from ilya's monologue where he says that all his family wants is "more, more, more", and how ilya is basically just his abusive family's property. and for shane, that relationship applies to *an entire goddamn country*

shane is their property, and property does not get to contest the rules of ownership.

This is exactly it. And part of the reason why the Shane Hollander Needs To Be Bred Like A Goddamn Stallion meme took off so hard is because his body was one of the biggest things he denied the public access to.

Shane is canonically extremely attractive. Cosmo’s hottest man in the NHL attractive. In Troy Barrett’s words, he is a fucking babe. And he is the star hockey boy in a city that could not possibly be less normal about hockey.

That dude is fucking tripping over bitches.

That is a guy who cannot go to the grocery store without someone offering to fuck him. He is Montreal’s most eligible bachelor. It does not matter that he can be awkward. That is only going to deter some. People will ride his dick for his face card and shots on goal average alone. His personality has nothing to do with it. Shane Hollander could go on his own fuckass navy blue sheet campaign through the Montreal dating pool if he had even an inkling of a desire to do so.

But he didn’t. So he didn’t. And in an ideal world, that business was his own.

Women were throwing themselves at him, and they were striking out, and enough people talked about it online that people picked up on it. Shane Hollander does not fuck.

For this and Other Reasons, it became a meme. Shane Hollander is in love with hockey itself. Shane Hollander maintains the playoffs sex ban year round so he stays elite. Shane Hollander is a virgin waiting for Rose Landry to come and pluck his flower.

It was early in his career. The questions that reached him about it flustered Shane, which people caught onto. And so the meme stuck.

… if he doesn’t fuck, how is he going to give them little hockey stars one day?

Until recently, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that there would one day be little Ilya Rozanovs terrorizing the greater Boston metroplex. Even if he never settles down, That Dude Fucks. One day, a condom’s gonna fucking break, and hopefully it will be around the time that Shane Hollander finally settles down with a perfectly respectable supermodel gorgeous woman with strong ankles to start cranking out the next generation of genetically superior star centers.

For the last eight years, the NHL has been schilling the idea of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. That is their number one export. The only thing sports fans like more than someone to root for is someone to root against. The rivalry gave them both, and it had a goddamn expiration date. They wanted Ilya jr. and Shane jr. to be fully baked and ready to go by the time by the time that their parents reached retirement age. Which, as a reminder, is 40 at fucking latest. Clock’s ticking, get ‘em in the barrel.

The fact that this is an incredibly weird expectation to put on a stranger had little to no deterring effect. There has always been a weird entitlement around celebrities and their private lives on the internet. We want their nudes. We want to see pictures of their kids. We want to know where they live. We want stories from their private life and their constant, unending attention.

We want to know our favorite actors’ sexualities so we can decide if we liked that they played a gay character. And then we will try to force them to date their fucking coworker because they were cute together in a show.

Shane and Ilya’s relationship was the only part of their life that was fully theirs, and it is not anymore. It is public property. The public wants more because it always wants more. They want to see Hollanov interact. They want to see Hollanov go out on dates. They want to see a Real Hollanov Kiss.

They want to see Hollanov fuck. Release the sex tape already.

I think Shane severely struggles with the idea of having kids, especially biological kids. He loves how Ilya is with children. He knows Ilya likes kids. He even likes kids.

But it has been so much fucking pressure being Shane Hollander. He cannot imagine putting someone through the pressure of being Shane Hollander’s kid.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

what does ilya think about shane’s driving? and once they’re like fully together, does he let/is he comfortable with shane driving them places?

also if we assume that shane’s parents grew up at least partly in montreal (david playing for mcgill, yuna being a metros fan), can we assume that they might have some montreal driving habits?

and can we then assume that they might have taught shane some of those habits when they were initially teaching him to drive?

like maybe shane was an aggressively safe driver but only by the standards of his montreal born and raised parents and that this is what helped him seamlessly transition into regularly driving in montreal?

Ilya finds it unspeakably fucking attractive.

I think one of the things Ilya likes most about Shane is just how much Shane surprises him. He is such a structured and dependable guy that you think you can predict him easily. And then he comes out of left field and does the absolute last thing Ilya expected. He is bewitched body and soul. Shane Hollander is the most interesting person in the world to him.

Like. I love the ecstatic grins Ilya gets whenever Shane surprises him. Shane folds his clothes during the first hook up and Ilya looks enchanted. Shane says that he hired a stylist and Ilya is overjoyed. Ilya calls himself lazy, something everyone in his life agrees with, and Shane’s immediate reaction is “I don’t know that side of you at all.” And Ilya can’t help but smile. He didn’t think Shane would say that. And he is so in love with him for doing it.

Like. I think Ilya just loves how much Shane surprises him sometimes. The man is simply enchanting to him. He is obsessed.

The first time Ilya gets into a car with Shane, he thinks he knows how it’s going to go. He has his Boring Slow Driver Jokes in the fucking barrel. Because Shane Hollander drives a sensible car. He gets excited about sales on snow tires. He lectures Ilya about smoking. He is Mr. Canada and surely he reads the motor vehicle code to himself each night before he drifts off to dreamland. He already knows that Shane Hollander drives with a religious vocation towards safety.

That is not how Shane drives.

Ilya cannot feel his own legs by the time the car is parked.

He has absolutely no idea what the fuck just happened.

What? No, no one is going into the store to buy a fucking tooth brush. They are turning the car around and going home. Ilya needs to fuck him immediately.

Shane Hollander is the goddamn king of bad drivers. He was an eighteen year old who drove like he had a DMV test administrator riding shotgun at all moments of his life and then suddenly he was drop kicked into an ungodly fusion between clown school and the goddamn Autobahn. Public transport was not an option for him. He was borderline a religious figure in that city. What, was he going to not get recognized? His face was on the side of the fucking bus. The city had him do the announcements for the goddamn metro every time they made the playoffs. No, he had to drive himself if he wanted to go somewhere. Or, well, he could hire a driver, he had the money for it, but Shane could not imagine the shit he would get for being the eighteen year old showing up to practice with a chauffeur. He was already worried that people would think he was full of himself considering he sucked the goddamn oxygen out of every room he had ever been in. Like it was impossible to get any attention as Shane’s teammate. It always had been, and his teammates in the junior leagues had always kind of resented him for it.

Every reporter wanted to talk to him. His team was a national news story but only because he was the news story. They were background characters in the Shane Hollander Origin Story and it made it that much harder for them to get any kind of recognition. It’s hard to standout when you’re standing next to Shane.

Shane was new to the metros. The NHL Commissioner himself had become suddenly invested in pushing his rivalry with the dude whose dick he sucked that one time. Suddenly they were modeling fucking all stars weekend around him, which the older, more experienced players on his team weren’t even invited to.

Shane was the new guy who didn’t have an established place in the team dynamic yet and he was fucking terrified about coming off as full of himself. He was not going to be giving these guys another reason to think that. He had to drive himself.

So Shane looks at his options and the absolute trash can fire that was Montreal city driving and says These Are New Skills That I Must Learn To Succeed In My New Environment and by fucking god does he do that. He is trapped on a road system with 1.5 million of the worst goddamn drivers to ever disgrace the Earth and he is dodging and he is weaving. Everything he does makes perfect sense in the context of the mass psychogenic illness that is the Montreal highway network and comes off as a psychotic break everywhere else on the goddamn planet. He Will Get You To Your Destination Alive But You Will Doubt That Fact Every Single Moment Of The Trip.

The man is a self trained stunt driver. Rose keeps threatening him with a cameo in the fast and furious movies. If she ever gets sucked into that vacuum of a franchise she is forcing him to be one of the background drivers she is so so serious Shane.

Shane has no idea what she is talking about. He is an excellent driver.

Ilya feeds this delusion but only because Shane driving is low key foreplay to him now. Yes baby you are an EXCELLENT driver please drive us home you are so so good at it. He wants so badly to be passenger princess in whatever live action Mario Kart Shane seems to think everyone is playing at all moments in every city on earth. When Shane comes to visit him in Boston, Ilya insists on picking him up at the airport instead of Shane renting a car or calling a rideshare because all of Ilya’s windows are tinted and someone’s more liable to recognize Shane if they’re in close proximity and wonder why the fuck Shane Hollander is in Boston without a game happening so really it’s SAFER for Ilya to come get him, really.

It is not because of that.

It is because Ilya has a biological need to see Shane Hollander whip his Porsche 918 Spyder across I-90E like he’s competing in the goddamn Indy 500, all while lecturing Ilya about how unsafe and impractical of a car this is. Ilya lives in a city with some very narrow streets and very harsh winters he needs to have at least one car built for the snow. Shane’s car, for example—

Ilya is not listening to a goddamn word. He never listens to anything Shane says while driving. He is not physically capable of it. All of Ilya’s mental bandwidth is dedicated to strategizing about the shortest possible path from Shane putting the car in park to Ilya getting inside of him. Ilya is playing 4D chess to make sure Shane only ever drives them home and when no one else is in the car because he needs to fuck him too bad as soon as the car stops to ever risk witnesses at their destination.

Svetlana makes the mistake one (1) time of getting in a car driven by that fucking psychopath and immediately clocks this as a sex thing. Oh, you need to talk to Shane in private immediately? Yes she bets he does. Ilyusha, how dare you risk her life for foreplay especially when she is not even invited to watc—

I don’t have strong opinions about Dave and Yuna’s driving habits. I could see them being bad drivers because they are Formerly of Montreal. I can see them having shaken that since they are now Of Ottawa. In my mind, Shane Hollander was an exceedingly safe driver turned Terrible Montreal Driver because he almost never drove himself before he moved to Montreal. He learned to drive in a driving school where he learned Good Driving Habits and then almost never got behind the wheel of the car. Other people drove him everywhere.

Like, that is a guy that got pulled out of every math class growing up. He started making waves in the hockey world before he hit puberty. His schedule would have been fucking packed beyond all reasonable limits. He has not had free time since fucking 2003. His parents were driving; he was in the backseat doing his homework and trying not to fail 11th grade English.

He was not truly shaped as a driver until he hit the hellscape that is Montreal roadways. And boy did it shape him.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

On the subject of Shane's pay cut at the end of tlg - idk, I think it was a no win situation all around. I think it was probably for the best to glaze over it, because trying to dive into it seriously wouldn't have looked good on anyone.

Sure Ilya could take a pay cut, but then it'd be 2 queer players who aren't getting paid what they're worth. Publicly, it would look like Ottawa only took them because they came cheap, 2 for the price of 1. And narratively it might have come off as Shane valuing his public image over Ilya's, something that had already caused friction in the book. It would look like he was regressing.

And sure the rest of the Centaurs could take a pay cut. But it's wouldn't read well as a viewer. Because Shane is going to go to Ottawa basically no matter what. That much the reader knows. If he took money from the Centaurs, he would be doing it strictly to save face.

And a team taking a pay cut to play with a great player is one thing; having them take a pay cut to spare his feelings is another. And maybe the characters wouldn't know he was always going to sign there, but the reader would. And it would feel weird to essentially watch Shane and Ilya trick their new teammates into financing an emotional bandaid.

It would also feel a little bitter on any reader who like the Centaurs. Because the Centaurs already face a ton of humiliation in-universe just being the Centaurs: worst team in the league. Even Shane talks down about them. You spend the whole book rooting for them as underdogs, watching them grow from a joke to an actual competitive team. Having them pay money to essentially soothe Shane's pride would feel bad - yes you want Shane to be paid his worth, but not at the cost of anyone else. Bood and Troy and Luca also deserve to be paid their worth, ya know?

I think the main problem is that any attempt to make up Shane's pay would be performative in-universe, and possibly reflect badly on the character as a reader. He's not going to be making the same amount no matter what, and he's going to Ottawa no matter what. These things are set in stone. Discussing it in length would only bring attention to a problem that doesn't have a good answer.

Narratively, I think it was just something better glazed over. When Ilya tells Shane to consider he has a rich husband, it's more of a joke than anything. And he does agree that Shane deserves to be paid his worth. But their conversation isn't being too serious at the moment - it's just an emotionally charged rant when Shane is feeling mad after the trip. It's not a planning moment or even a serious discussion moment, and Ilya doesn't even think Shane is serious about leaving Montreal.

Idk, I think this is one of those times where it was better that RR didn't go into detail. It leaves enough space for the reader to decide for themselves the details of Shane's salary. Maybe the team did take a pay cut, maybe Ilya did, maybe someone retired. For the sake of the story, it doesn't really matter. Kinda frustrating if you really care about that, but there are a TON of things that RR doesn't go into depth over because that's simply not the story she wants to tell. Maybe it'll come up in Unrivaled, who knows.

I do agree that RR doesn't dive deep enough into Shane's ethnicity, but that's more of a "writer didn't consider exactly how deep a rabbit hole went before she put it in" type thing.

Anyway this isn't a criticism on you or your take, which is valid. I just think it's an interesting subject to think about. I love snapping birch btw

So I’m gonna respectfully disagree with all this.

First, don’t agree that it looks like Ottawa only got them because they came 2 for the price of 1. Because they can’t do that. They already have Ilya.

Ilya is under contract. His contract is not expiring. He is entitled to the full amount of that contract unless they agree to execute a mutual termination and renegotiate a new amount to free up some cap space. Any downward departure cannot happen without Ilya making it happen.

Let’s say Ilya is getting paid $17.5M. But they only have the cap space to give Shane Hollander $2M. Ilya has the freedom to say “hey, lets mutually terminate and I will re-sign for $10M or however far of a downward departure that the NHL will approve. Give the other $7M to Shane. We will be paid roughly in line with each other, and it will be clear to everyone watching that we are making a salary sacrifice to make this team a cup contender.”

The optics are completely different on that decision. Shane is leaving his team in disgrace. But Ilya is an established captain who does not need to change his salary at all. Shane taking a low salary looks like no one values him anymore. Ilya choosing to lower his own salary looks like he is a good captain who is doing whatever it takes to make his team a cup contender. Jamie Benn took a massive pay cut to help maintain a competitive roster for the Stars and we lauded him as a goddamn hero. The optics for Ilya are fantastic if he does this. The optics for Shane are atrocious.

One thing I fundamentally disagree with is the premise that Shane has to go to Ottawa. He doesn’t. Especially if we look from the perspective of someone in-universe.

As readers, we want Shane and Ilya to be on the same team. We know that the book is trying to bring them there. So to us, it feels obvious that Shane is destined for Ottawa.

People in-universe don’t know that. Even though they know he’s with Ilya, people regularly make long distance work or super commute. Up until this point, they know Shane and Ilya have been comfortable doing exactly that. Shane Hollander can theoretically sign with any team close enough to make the relationship work.

You know where he can go? The New York goddamn Admirals.

Scott Hunter is going into retirement. The cap space just freed up for them for a new star center, and Shane Hollander has three goddamn Stanley Cups. He and Ilya would have to be long distance, but they were already long distance, and this is the same distance that they had when he was in Boston. They are rich enough to super commute via private jet. In the public’s eyes, this is a guy that should have options.

If he signs for pennies after his name was just dragged through the mud, he looks like he doesn’t. He is radioactive. No one wants Shane Hollander anymore. Only his husband’s team will take him, and that’s only if he is on fucking sale.

I don’t agree that this would come off as Shane regressing either. Especially because it would be so simple to frame it in a way that negates the possibility.

Don’t have Shane ask. Have Ilya offer.

Have Ilya bring it up. Have him say “come to Ottawa. Yes we are low on cap space but I will call management right now and tell them that if they let me terminate and resign for lower I will bring them the goddamn Stanley cup. We will both have to take pay cuts but it would be worth it to be together.”

The pay sacrifice is now mutual. And Ilya comes off like he is considerate of his partner who just got publicly humiliated and abandoned by his best friends of more than ten years. I’m saying “thank god he has Ilya” not “fuck Shane for wanting money.” Shane never has to ask for money to begin with.

From the canon ending, I do not think better of Shane. I think worse of Ilya.

The way it goes in canon, Ilya has his partner tell him he is so fucking angry after he was spat on by people he’s known for a fucking decade. He says he doesn’t deserve this. Ilya barely even acknowledges this. He just says “okay well we will appreciate you in Ottawa.” This doesn’t do anything to address the pain and loss Shane is feeling about what his friends just did to him.

Shane immediately raises the fact that they are out of cap space and the fact that it’s not about money, it’s about wanting to be paid for what he’s worth. And Ilya’s like “oh don’t worry baby, hubby will provide.”

Pause for laughter.

Ilya absolutely ignores what Shane just fucking said. He’s not worried about money. He just wants to be valued by the team he’s on. I think worse of Ilya because his partner who just got fucking hate crimed raised a valid concern that he outright blows off.

Shane doesn’t come off like he’s putting Ilya above his career from that scene either. He just agrees that he has a rich husband to provide for him now, so it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t get the character benefit of saying “you know what? I don’t care what I’m paid. I just want us to be together” because the thought doesn’t even occur to him.

The entire analysis I just said about Ilya also applies to the Centaurs. Their contracts are set, so it does not look like they are being valued less by management if they take a cut. Management literally cannot value them at any lower than their current contract price. Nothing can happen without the Centaurs making it happen. So it looks like they are the goddamn heroes bringing home Shane Hollander and getting their team its first ever Stanley cup. They would get a fucking parade for that, and any marginal percentage that they lost from their contracts would be more than made up for in the sponsorships they’d get from the good PR. This would be ultimately a good move for them in the public eye, and there is no need to “trick” them to do shit.

The solution is the same. Do not ask them. Have them offer.

You’d need to change the structure of the scene to do it, but you could do it with a few paragraphs. Have Ilya tell the rest of the team that he may be able to get Shane on the team too. Have them affirmatively flood the group chat with “oh my god we’re going to win the Stanley cup. Fuck wait the salary cap. I would take a pay cut to make this happen. I’m calling my agent right now.”

Shane didn’t ask them to do that. He didn’t ask them to do shit. Let them affirmatively recognize that there is a problem and immediately mobilize to fix it.

Do you have any idea how much better that would make the reader feel about Shane’s move to Ottawa?

Shane has just been rejected by the team he has spent more than a decade on. And it is a team that has been in varying degrees homophobic towards him since they found out he was gay. They act with vitriolic anger towards him after the trip, and almost none of them come to his wedding. That hurts.

Now here’s a new team. Shane doesn’t know them that well. He’s not friends with any of them. All he has is Ilya and that is because he just lost everything else. He is a fish out of water and he has no assurance that this will go well for him.

If those people go out of their way to do something to make him feel welcome after what his friends just did to him, I love them. I love their characters. I am excited that Shane gets to go to Ottawa because even if he shouldn’t have been ousted from Montreal, the narrative has just reassured me that he is amongst people who care about him, and it has soothed some of the pain of what just happened. These teammates want you, and are going out of their way to show you that. You didn’t ask. They offered.

There is another solution to this problem. And it’s to not bring up the salary cap at all.

Who put a gun to Rachel Reid’s head and made her bring up the salary cap? Just don’t include it in the conversation. Shane never says shit about the salary cap, and neither does Ilya, and the problem does not exist. Most readers will never think about it. The ones that do are free to draw whatever conclusions they may. Maybe Ottawa has oodles of cap space. Maybe the cap is higher in universe. Maybe they all took pay cuts. There is nothing in the narrative to contradict them, so the reader is never obligated to say “Ottawa does not have the cap space for Shane Hollander.” The answer could be anything.

Like, I do agree that it would be better to leave the space for the reader to draw their own conclusions. But Rachel Reid did not leave that space. She presents the problem and the solution in the same breath. Ottawa does not have the cap space for Shane Hollander. Take the pay cut, hubby will provide. It leaves the space to say that maybe something changed after that conversation, but that is not a lot of space. After all, Ilya just said it didn’t fucking matter, Shane just agreed it didn’t fucking matter, and who the fuck is going to challenge that?

There’s another thing I fundamentally disagree about with the premise of your argument, and that’s that this would be just some performative emotional bandaid meant to soothe Shane’s pride. I agree, this would be solely directed towards lifting Shane’s emotions, especially if Ilya was the one to take the cut.

Why would caring about Shane’s emotional health ever be a bad thing?

I want Ilya to be the kind of character that gives a shit about his partner’s emotions. I want the Centaurs to be the kinds of characters that care about their teammates’ emotions. Emotions are important.

After the trip, canonically, everyone Shane has been playing with save Hayden completely abandons him. They reject him in the most insulting and degrading and homophobic way possible. Only J.J. ever reestablishes contact. Ilya has all of his teammates at their wedding, and Shane gets two fucking people. And the media? It’s eviscerating him. His name is mud in the home he’s lived in and loved since he was 18.

That is not minor. People are put on suicide watch over less. Something similar happened to David Beckham during the World Cup and there are entire documentaries about how it almost fucking killed him.

Emotions matter. I care about the emotions of the people I love. And if someone I loved went through what Shane just went through? I would move heaven and goddamn earth to alleviate that. I would do absolutely anything I could to show them that they were still valued and loved. Call it performative, call it a bandaid, but I call it showing someone that I love them enough to want them to feel happy and welcomed and appreciated. I do not want the people I love to be publicly humiliated. And I would never in a million years let my poc partner who was just dragged through hell go through the public humiliation that is going for fucking gay discount if I had the power to do something about it.

The most common explanation I hear for why the game changers books are they way that they are is that the author decided to just glaze over it because it wasn’t what she wanted to focus on or its just a romance book, it’s not that deep. That’s the explanation Rachel Reid herself gives. It’s just a romance book, she never thought it’d be analyzed with this depth, it’s not that deep.

Whenever I hear something like that, I think to myself “that sure is a lot of words for saying, ‘I am a bad writer.’”

I harp on this so much, but it’s because I truly believe it: You cannot escape the consequences of your own narrative. You do not get to introduce something and then pretend it isn’t there. If you are not willing or able to address those consequences, do not bring it up.

If you are the writer of a story, the world is your goddamn oyster. You do not get the excuse of “oh, well, I couldn’t really deal with that conflict properly” you are the one who introduced the conflict to begin with. No one has a gun to your head, girl. Just don’t bring it up.

I can think of thirty goddamn ways you can resolve the salary cap thing that takes five sentences or less. The easiest? Again, just literally never mention the salary cap. Boom. Done.

She could have had them take pay cuts. She could have had there already be room in the cap because it’s much higher in the game changers universe. She could have written two sentences in the beginning about how there’s a veteran player on the Centaurs who is about to retire and free up cap space, foreshadowing the fact that Shane would be able to move there soon. There are so many ways to solve this that does not have the frankly racist connotations of having a gay Asian man be paid pennies on the dollar but it’s fine because he has a rich white husband to take care of him.

Like, the fact that she did not consider how deep the rabbit hole was before making her main character a marginalized individual in a racist and homophobic system is exactly what I am criticizing her for. She chose to make him half-Japanese and then never once think about the actual experiences of Asian men. She chose to drizzle in her representation without making actually it representative in the fucking slightest. And I am saying that makes her a bad writer.

[radialarch]

do you guys think they went skinnydipping in the lake at the cottage

[radialarch]

scream @hellotheblackframe this is perfect

“Oh my god, Ilya, the Morrisons have, like, a dozen grandchildren. What if they—” “Do not have panic attack, Shane: all good Canadian children are asleep in bed, not spying on neighbors.” “They sold me this land, the Morrisons. When they heard I wanted to build. They know my parents.” “So they are one hundred years old then, like Scott Hunter? Probably blind like him, too. They do not see us in the dark.” “Scott Hunter’s not—” “Shane, let us not talk about Scott Hunter now, yes? If you are scared, if you are frightened like little chicken, I will understand. You can just say, ‘Ilya, I cannot be so brave like you, I am—” “Shut up! I said I’d do it, didn’t I? But I’m leaving my water shoes on.” “You look at me like I will fight you about this Hollander, but you wear socks to bed and I do not complain. Ugly plastic shoes are not so sexy like little socks, but still—” “My socks are not—whatever. Keep your voice down. It’s just that the lake bed’s all...squishy.” “Squishy is real English word?” “Yeah, it means—oh, fuck! Jesus, Ilya, it’s freezing! Holy shit! You said it wasn’t so bad all the way in.” “Maybe I lied about this, a little.” “Yeah, no fucking kidding. What are you…?” “Warming you up. Is okay?” “Oh. Uh, okay. Oh, wow: look, you can see Cassiopeia. Like, the whole thing!” “Where is?” “Well, that’s the north star, above that big tree, and then if you a little farther over—uhm, hey, did you actually want to learn? Or just kiss?” “Tonight? Just kiss, I think.”

[handsywoman]

HOLLANOV weekly schedule