She/her, forever obsessed with drarry but i'll post whatever strikes my interest. Fuck JKR. Trans women are women, trans men are men and if you have a problem with that go away.
My writing
Minors DNI
the other thing ill say is it could have been very interesting for reid to address the rapid and inexplicable changes to shane’s personality at the end of the long game (immediately overcoming his disordered eating, not wanting to watch the stanley cup finals, passively forgiving everyone offscreen, being excited to play in ottawa without complications) as like……. shane is experiencing a severe dissociative episode.
shane — who at this point has spent the entire book being told by literally everyone that he needs to be less mopey and anxious and to support ilya’s life more — fully compartmentalises everything and pushes all of it down. he’s never been happier, truly. yes he’d love to host the centaurs at his new house without warning. he’d love to do a photoshoot. he’d love to post a video on instagram. he’d love to be the butt of the joke. look how much fun he’s having. this is great. he just needs to be less worried about everything and it’ll all work out. ilya will take care of it. he just needs to go to the back of the line. yes, he wants another slice of chocolate cake please and thank you
ideally i think. ilya and his parents would perhaps slowly catch on that the bizarre stepford wife act is in fact a coping mechanism and shane hollander the person is in fact grieving in total freefall. itd be nice for other characters to objectively look at the situation and think. man i can’t believe we were mad at shane for getting threatened by the commissioner of the nhl or being outed twice over or being accused of cheating and losing both his professional career and his reputation. but in the meantime shane is doing just awesome thanks for asking.
I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
anti abortion propaganda that tries to like scare you into feeling guilty by reminding you that the fetus has body parts are so funny. "uwu please don't abort me I have eyes at 4 weeks old 🥺" nice try sucker I don't care if you see it coming
also. i find it odd that reid spends so much time in the long game refuting shane’s perspective. shane ‘doesn’t know the dark side of hockey.’ shane is ignorant to the problems of others. shane is too obsessed with hockey. shane’s anxieties are insipid and selfish when compared to ilya’s righteous trauma. shane’s definitely not an eating disorder is a topic of ridicule. shane is sulking after being outed again instead of helping with dinner. everyone — ilya, his parents, rose, hayden — tell shane that he’s being ridiculous and small minded, that he isn’t considering others feelings, that he doesn’t appreciate what he has.
but then everyone else is wrong and shane is right. everything he predicted comes to pass. he is outed by his best friend. he is hatecrimed and ostracised by his championship team. his fiance fails to defend his integrity to the press. he goes to another team for less money and is stripped of a letter. like. it’s just so unbelievably bizarre. i understand that reid wrote this as the ‘comeuppance’ and punishment for shane quote unquote ignoring all of ilya’s more important problems, but then why prove him right? why not make him so passively ignorant that the ensuing horror is a total surprise?
reid has spoken about getting upset when people dislike ilya and his actions, so then why write an entire book where the explicit conclusion is that ilya was wrong, and then try to frame it as shane’s fears — while ultimately correct — simply weren’t worth the hassle? and why, at the end of that, is shane still the only one to apologise?
the only explanation here is that rachel reid has unintentionally reinvented cassandra of troy from her own beautiful mind
this technically is true but I think this also perfectly encapsulates why I am inherently distrustful of like. “”cozy”” “turn your brain off” fiction lmfao. like okay WHO gets to turn their brain off and who has to suffer through bigoted caricatures of themselves while everyone else is having cozy silly no brain time 😐
the "ilya chose shane over hockey by leaving boston/signing with ottawa" narrative has already been debunked like ten different ways. (it's been pointed out that he was already going to leave boston and sign with a canadian team, that he could have signed with montreal to be teammates with shane earlier but he didn't want to take the pay cut, etc.) but has anybody talked about how the text itself asserts that the centaurs should, on paper, be a great team? in theory, they're not supposed to be a "sacrifice," they're supposed to be good. great, even! in chapter 7 of TLG, ilya himself is confused about why they're losing all the time
i'm no hockey fan, but my reading here as someone who casually follows professional basketball is that the text, filtered through ilya's confusion, actually does provide an explanation for why the centaurs are underperforming: all the pieces are there, they just haven't clicked yet. the team is having chemistry issues, which is pretty important for a team sport! wyatt has to block an insane number of shots per game, which is only necessary because the cens' defense is letting an awfully high amount of shots through (and defense isn't merely a matter of talent and size, it's also about constantly putting in effort and applying pressure and being in the right place at the right time, which requires seemless coordination between teammates). and lastly, ilya is "still scoring plenty of goals," but "he couldn't be a whole team."
this is where the reader connects the centaurs' poor teamwork with where ilya's character arc is currently at. he's lonely, he's not communicating his mental health struggles with his boyfriend, he's cut off his friends in boston whom he's afraid of coming out to because he thinks they might reject him, and he's not as close to his new teammates as he wants to be.
thematically, it makes sense to interpret this excerpt as implying that part of the blame for the centaurs' chemistry issues rests on ilya's shoulders as their star center and captain. ilya is good enough as an individual player to force goals through on his own, so if you check his points total you get the impression he's carrying the team. but when it comes to the parts of the game that need more communication and coordination with his teammates, the less flashy details that transform a collection of talent into a well-oiled machine, such as defensive positioning and playmaking, the team is struggling. ilya is struggling, as their leader and star player.
this doesn't make ilya a bad hockey player by any means, but the description TLG gave here reminds me of plenty of other offensive machines (not naming names) in team sports whose heroball (or, in this case, heropuck?) tendencies can end up hurting rather than benefiting their teams. and ilya isn't noted for having a high hockey IQ either, so this interpretation and his inability to understand why the cens are losing don't contradict his established competence or intelligence. he's a great hockey player and a good captain and like any other athlete he has his flaws. it's just unfortunate for him that in TLG those flaws are exacerbated by his depression.
and to cement the subtext that ilya's leadership earlier in the book had failed to reapond to the moment (if months of losing and arguably being one of the worst teams in the league can be called a singular "moment"), the centaurs' post-emergency landing winning streak starts with ilya giving a locker room pep talk that his own narration admits is rare.
we don't see the game itself, but ilya's newfound openness revitalizing his team's confidence is narratively significant. it's the beginning of their upward swing. he's finally starting to communicate with them and the implication is that this change is reflected in their chemistry on ice too
so where was i going with this? oh right. it's that the "ilya chose shane over hockey" narrative is just patently false. ilya's self-perception that signing with ottawa instead of staying with boston (which he was never going to do in the first place, why did TLG just completely forget this?) and winning cups (which is never a guarantee in a sport, hello???) was a sacrifice he made for shane is incorrect. sacrifice implies he signed with ottawa expecting to lose a lot, and he didn't. sacrifice implies that losing a lot was part of the plan, that it was a trade-off he willingly made, and it wasn't. it just happened because that's how sports are! a team underperforming relative to its talent and roster construction because of chemistry issues—which they later overcome with the power of friendship!—is not making a sacrifice, it's a skill issue.
where it gets confusing to me is that the text shows us that ilya's self-perception is incorrect, it tells us through galina that he shouldn't have to choose between hockey and his boyfriend. but when it comes to shane, the book hammers in over and over again that he does need to choose between hockey and ilya. it tells us that he needs to make career sacrifices for ilya (taking a pay cut, losing the C and his position on the first line) that ilya already refused to make for him (we know this because at the end of HR he straightforwardly rejected that option, and at the end of TLG the idea of giving up anything to make shane's move to the centaurs smoother and less of an optics nightmare doesn't even cross his mind. he doesn't even go hey maybe my extremely overqualified and underpaid husband should at least have the A, and the fact that nobody else does either is so crazy!).
there's just this deeply uncomfortable double standard in the way these two characters are written. it's meant to convey that shane is a selfish partner who needs to repay his perfect sad white boyfriend's alleged sacrifices, and we know this for a fact because rachel herself calls shane selfish (while ilya's supposed greatest flaw is his fear of being hurt ijbol), but that's not what's happening here at all. that narrative falls apart so fast under the gentlest of scrutiny. like if anything, the exact opposite of that narrative is happening?? how do people read this and not go, wow this story is so weird to its protagonist of color
Oh, so the entire Game Changers series is set in a fictional hockey setting where several things are different from Real Life, and that's why you should accept how it is. Okay.
However, one sentence from a post that @teddywesworl made me really understand why I could never do that. Jas says in a March 25 post that "The obvious problem is of course that when you bring real world events into your fictionalized NHL, you are now open to continued comparisons that you may never have intended, in particular for a very old club with deep roots in a marginalized culture to which you, the author, do not belong."
So this is going to be a long rant, gays, girls, and squirrels. Continue when you have time.
SO, in this setting, the cap exists, and Montreal (the gay hockey capital of the world) doesn't give a shit about the Shane Hollander (gay hockey Jesus) being run out of their team, and in HR Ilya purposely doesn't consider going to Montreal because he wants to be paid what he's worth and keep his captaincy and have his career + citizenship, while in TLG that choice is rewritten as if he did it for "love" only. The first time that Ottawa is brought up as a terrible team is in My Dinner With Hayden, by the way.
And when Shane does the same thing with wanting to stay in Montreal for his career and keep his captaincy - well - you are such a selfish pos for that, ofc; how could you not choose the man you love over being seen as a diversity hire who got too diverse and needed to hide behind your boyfriend, haha.
And obviously Shane didn't go through any actual terrible homophobia from his team until the tripping incident; that's why we don't get a Shane POV of him coming out to the team, or anything about how his coach took it, or the staff in the entire Montreal organization. If there wasn't any big problem, then why is Shane so jumpy about being outed? Well, it's just because he is such a high-strung guy and a bad boyfriend, ofc. Shane doesn't have trauma; only Ilya does (RR said it!), which obviously means that racism and the entirety of Canadian junior hockey doesn't fucking exist in this universe, haha.
It's really not important, after all; Ilya is going through such a terrible time with depression, guys. Shane is holding out on him on purpose to make sure Ilya is suffering as much as possible!! You don't understand; it's not like Shane actively dissociates to ensure that he is able to Get Through the Hard Times. It's not like he believed his boyfriend when Ilya lied to his face and made Shane doubt his own intuition that the signs of his depression were actually a big deal haha.
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RR's list of character traits for Ilya and Shane also contributes to how disgustingly TLG is written btw.
An excellent blog that talks about the sheer insanity of what happens to Shane (and Ilya's characterization) in TLG is @polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup
from one of Syn's posts:
["One of the many Rachel Reid controversies around the writing of these books is that she posted a list of character traits that were the core guidelines of writing Shane and Ilya. Most of shane’s traits were just defined as like, the absence of whatever Ilya’s trait was. “Ilya is cool, Shane is not. Ilya carries grief and trauma, Shane does not. Ilya is very intelligent, Shane is not,” etc.
Shane got a few actual traits though. One was that he was obsessed with hockey, whereas Ilya was not. He was described as being very private and cautious about letting people in, whereas Ilya seeks intimacy from everyone. And Ilya is extremely perceptive, whereas Shane barely notices his own feelings."]
So, all the signs that Shane was observant enough to catch in HR & TLG whenever Ilya couldn't explain his feelings out loud, but RR needed Shane to figure out how Ilya was feeling, apparently don't matter enough to his characterization because in the second half of TLG, Shane randomly turns unobservant and "stupid". Because Shane is not intelligent, Ilya is. And Shane is not cool; Ilya is. Shane is not selfless; Ilya is. Shane is not white or neurotypical or the author's special little sad boi.
Shane has so few characteristics that are just about him, and not just that he is the absence of Ilya's traits. He gets: love of hockey, love of privacy, being cautious with his trust (which makes it more precious that he gave Ilya his trust - and annoys me when RR uses Hayden as a conflict starter for no reason), and he is characterized as a person who, once he understands exactly what he wants, makes sure it happens.
So in total, we have: hockey lover, privacy lover, cautious dude, go-getter. This is Rachel Reid's Shane Hollander, everybody.
So in a Watsonian analysis: TLG is a fucking mess.
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And Harris being with Troy and doing all that cute PDA together in TLG. How cute it is, especially in front of all of their coworkers and in their professional lives. But ofc Hollanov would be the ones who need a PDA jar in fanfic. right. right. And Shane, Mr. Professional, Mr. I Do Not Want Others To Perceive Me Or My Relationships, would be so not embarrassed of this and super comfy with his husband's team he had to sign with after his entire professional career was blown up because it's his HEA. right.
And also, Troy Barrett definitely never said or agreed with anything racist said around him because it was never written into the books; only homophobia exists in this universe, DUH... which ofc means that there is no reason for Shane to be a little wary of Ilya randomly coming out to Troy in TLG. He is just a jealous little guy haha.
Because Troy (white + rehabilitated image like crazy style) and Harris (white + the one who dedicated his time to rehabilitate Troy's image crazy style) get their HEA after Troy comes out and Harris is promoted.
Because Scott (white + rich) and Kip (white + educated) get their HEA where they are The Gay Couple of hockey.
Because Ryan (white + retired) and Fabian (Lebanese-Canadian + "glamourous") get their HEA after making up and escaping hockey.
(Also, Fabian barely gets any attention to his race either; it's mostly an excuse to have him be “beautiful” and “golden-skinned.”)
Because Eric (white + retired) and Kyle (white + non-hockey) get their HEA after figuring out how to trust each other.
So happy ever afters that are kind to both halves of a couple exist.
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Ilya Rozanov (white with a background apparently excellently researched and written + a known, successful captain who led his former team to the Stanley Cup once and rebuilt Ottawa to proper playoff contenders in 2-3 years) helps each of these couples understand themselves or sees their struggles in a crucial moment several times, as he is characterized as an empath.
And yet, he suddenly lost all of that empathy when he said he was happy his husband's, Shane Hollander (Asian-Canadian + very successful captain who led his team to 3 Stanley Cups), career was blown up, with several jokes being made about it. What the actual fuck happened in RR's fingertips for this bullshit to be written and brushed off because "its just a romance book" & "you shouldn't take things so seriously in this genre."
No. I'm going to take it seriously.
If this book is supposed to be escapism, then who can escape when Shane is hatecrimed and gaslit, Ilya becomes a terrible partner, Hayden is just a plot device to make you think that Ilya has a terrible reputation that no one can use their brain to look through, Galina is a plot device to make Ilya look like he's trying to get better & to put the "would Shane choose you over hockey" question into his head, and JJ is a black man who apparently doesn't understand why his Asian-Canadian captain doesn't want to put more diversity into his image???
And @lesbianroselandry had a great July 4 post where they said TLG "...includes multiple passages in which rachel reid posits that a bunch of white queer people understand bigotry in hockey culture better than a qpoc in hockey (because he's, like, too autistic to get it or something??),..." which also brings me back to Ilya for some reason (*cough* RR *cough*) thinks that Shane doesn't understand the dark side of hockey.
Pardon? Shane Hollander, who grew up as Canada's golden Hockey Jesus, doesn't know the dark side of Canadian Hockey? Just fucking kill me already.
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Shane Hollander did not get a HEA by the end of TLG, and no one will be able to brainwash me into thinking that he did. He can be written to tell himself to accept that what he got is the best he can get in the book-universe, but he is not a person - he is a character. I am a person who can read everything in that series and think critically about how the minority character - who is in a rivalry and relationship with the white man who benefits from his slashed career - is the one who got cheated out of a HEA. Because even in a fucking unrealistic universe where hockey doesn't work like that, racism fucking prevails. He is the one who had to settle. He is the one who didn't get what he wanted (his jersey in the rafters, his team supporting him, and Ilya as his husband). He gets a paltry fate as a second-liner, with a rookie and Tanner Dillon (who has been said to suck as a winger). He gets jokes about how he'll never get the C, even though he will always have more Cups than the fucker who laughed at that joke. He doesn't even get the A. Are you kidding me? His pay is cut. "Good thing that your husband can take care of you as the breadwinner 😂" No. Absolutely not. Shane is literally being forced into the wife role. He is being destroyed in his career, moving to his husband's gay utopia where they laugh at him too, and whenever he brings up feeling a bit sad, his empathetic husband talks about fucking the bad feelings out of him. What the fuck.
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Also?
SHANE IS A GREAT CAPTAIN. No, he isn't written as someone screaming speeches at his team to hype them up, but you know what he did do? He is trusted and liked by his team, so he is invited out again and again, despite however many times he declines. He is a hard worker, diligent, particular, and a great hockey player who elevates the game. He put together a team of large egos, mostly white teammates who undoubtedly gave him a hard time, dealt with an old-fashioned coach, and dragged them to the playoffs every year he was a captain. He is Ilya Rozanov's equal on every level, at minimum, not just what people want to pick and choose from.
No, the fact that Shane's teammates turned on him doesn't mean he didn't cultivate enough good-fucking-will in the locker room. It means they were homophobic enough to betray the person who toiled over their progress and work ethic and brought them to a level of excellence that got them 3 fucking Cups. Stop blaming the gay guy for the homophobia of the people around him. Parents will abandon their children on the streets, send their children to conversion camps, and allow their children to be raped or tortured because of homophobia. The Montreal Voyageurs loved Shane Hollander when they thought he was a great leader and straight. They allowed their homophobia to destroy that. If loving someone enough could stop homophobes, then the fucking closet wouldn't be a thing. Stop acting like Shane was in the wrong for any of that, including trusting the men he loved like family for 10 years.
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I have so much more to say (not even including side character 😭, and especially about how Yuna is also turned into a plot device to make Shane look super selfish after Ryan Price catches Shane & Ilya, but I'm actually steaming right now, so I'll reblog this with more when I can.
A final word would be that @ravenbytes had a great take in her March 26 post (you can tell just how long I've been chewing on this idea lol), where she said that, "We can’t simply forget that the Doylist perspective exists, and it is crucial that we consider that perspective before ripping a character to shreds for their mistakes. As such, the author has a responsibility to their story to ensure narrative clarity, consistency, and coherence in theme, tone, and character alongside plot progression."
The book can be fun and/or impactful for any reader who isn't bothered by the bigotry or implicit biases of the author. For me, this is like talking about Harry Potter and how JKR very obviously names her POC characters with the most racist option "on accident." If RR isn't racist, then she can at least admit that her subconscious is driving the wheel and crashing her writing into every fucking racist stereotype.
Sure, Jan. Keep enjoying the crack fics and sucking on the grand cock of racism and all the other ism/phobia's.
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