i understand that reid wrote this as the ‘comeuppance’ and punishment for shane quote unquote ignoring all of ilya’s more important problems
i’m sorry, she fucking W H A T
like unfortunately it’s mostly pointless to critically analyse these books from a watsonian perspective because the literal author is out here saying she needs to punish the character for the decisions she chose to write for him
i think that by virtue of rachel reid writing ilya’s martyr complex as something noble — to both vilify shane and make ilya’s actions unquestionably selfless in the narrative — she only flattens ilya’s character. firstly, despite the long game insisting otherwise, ilya does not choose hockey over shane. he doesn’t want to go to montreal because that would mean a pay cut (‘they can’t afford us both’) and a demotion from star centre. he needs a canadian team for the passport. he is up for free agency before shane, meaning from a practical geographical perspective ottawa is the option. additionally, at the end of heated rivalry it is discussed that ottawa ‘desperately needs a star centre.’ there is no mention of ottawa being an objectively bad team, and ilya has no concerns about moving there.
i digress. if the long game had been written with any intention to show equal complexity and empathy between shane and ilya’s struggles, then the move to ottawa would have been the perfect time to showcase the emotional consequences of ilya finally making choices for his own life now that his father is dead. at best, grigori was an emotionally abusive authoritarian who had substantial control over ilya’s career. ilya’s decision to cut off his family, go to the cottage, then move to ottawa, is all in direct opposition to how we are shown he was committed to his family and russia. ilya, for the first time, decides his own relationships, his own priorities, his own team.
and it doesn’t go the way he wants. he feels isolated and alone. he feels disconnected from shane, and his hockey suffers as a result. it is very common for people with PTSD or depressive disorders to be fully functional during turbulent emotional periods, and then suffer severe ‘emotional inertia’ once they have achieved a sense of safety, as everything they were suppressing resurfaces when they no longer have to psychologically protect themselves. ilya is now loved unconditionally and supported by shane and his family, but practiced behaviour from a lifetime of abuse — that he had spent a lifetime ignoring — can no longer be ignored. all of this, feeling guilty and upset that the choice he made didn’t work, feeling depressed and unable to fully accept his feelings. all very interesting things that might inform his combative and often unkind behaviour towards shane!
his martyr complex — the idea that he has to sacrifice for his loved ones because that is what ilya is supposed to do— isn’t fair. he is projecting his family’s expectations onto shane, and not reflecting on his own actions. shane has not asked him to do this, and ilya’s anger when shane fails to acknowledge the sacrifices he never asked for could be an extremely interesting conflict in their relationship! ilya does not believe he deserves happiness, and often chooses to hurt himself rather than communicate his hurts, which in turn hurts shane! and as he continues to hurt himself and shane, i dont think its unreasonable that — while spiralling — he’d start to look for any solutions to try and immediately fix this problem and prove that he, ilya rozanov, made the right choices for himself. could that reasonably manifest as potentially self destructive behaviours like wanting to publicly come out with your boyfriend when you don’t yet have your canadian passport? possibly.
does this make him a bad person? of course not. but i think if reid had any interest in tangibly exploring his flaws and how they affect others, it would make for a much more interesting and emotionally complex narrative. ilya’s flaws aren’t that ‘he’s afraid of being hurt’ in the same way shane’s flaws aren’t ’that he’s selfish.’ to me at least, it’s just an extremely shallow and ill thought plot that leaves both shane and ilya worse off than when they started.
I love the sochi outing au for so many reasons (like omg it has Obama rpf and hollonov are having their everlark plot) but my favourite thing about it is that Shane's ending is so much better than canon. He gets to keep his dream of staying at montreal!! He's going to retire there!! That's his city!! This version of Shane is probably more traumatised then Canon and yet the ending is so much better that it really goes to show just how bad the tlg ending is. For so many reasons but also bc it ruins the hr ending for me. The reason shane brings up ottawa is bc they can afford to pay ilya what he's worth, he can be captain there, and he can be the first line centre. The fact that apparently none of this matters to ilya when he suggests Shane moves to ottawa just makes him look like a massive dick and also makes me think that ilya should just have gone to montreal at the end of hr. "Oh but the rivalry means - " if people found out Shane got Ilya to come to montreal they would be high fiving him on every street in the city. Ahhhhhhhh thank you for writing aus that are saving me from this dog shit ending that I pretend is not real
YOURE SO RIGHT THOUGH
In the books, when they’re talking about Ilya switching to a Canadian team, Ilya proposes leaving Boston for a Canadian team himself. It is brought up explicitly because America is bad for Russians at the moment, and he wants non-Russian citizenship. And during the conversation, Ilya has this moment where he can tell Shane wants him to come to Montreal, but Ilya doesn’t want to because Montreal could never afford both of them. Ilya says “Not Montreal,” and Shane immediately understands. He proposes Ottawa as an alternative because it needs a star center and has the cap space for Ilya.
And, critically, I cannot find a single mention of the fact that Ottawa is a bad team in Heated Rivalry itself.
Like. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember any mention of the fact that Ottawa is terrible. I pulled up the pdf of the book and searched couldn’t find a single mention of the word “Centaurs” in it. I searched every mention of the word “Ottawa” and couldn’t find a single mention discussing how Ottawa was a bad team. The closest we get is Shane saying that they need a star center, but still needing a star for one position is a very different thing than it being the shittiest team in the whole league. And you’d think that Ilya would maybe bring up the fact that that team is absolute ass and would destroy his career if he went there if that was a legitimate concern. The Long Game rewrites its own canon to victimize Ilya and make Shane the villain in the Ottawa move. Its claims are fundamentally and irrevocably inconsistent with the explicit text of Heated Rivalry.
The entire dialogue around Shane being selfish in the Ottawa move drives me absolutely raving insane because it is fundamentally based in revisionist history. Shane is at no point in the conversation a driving factor in Ilya’s decision to leave Boston. Ilya decides he wants to be on a Canadian team before he even talks to Shane. The fact that he wants to come to Canada specifically is because of Russia, not Shane. And picking Ottawa is for the sake of Ilya’s career.
Signing with Montreal is outright considered and rejected by Ilya so he doesn’t have to take a pay cut. The explicit reason why he doesn’t want to sign with Montreal is the fact that Montreal cannot afford both of them. And that decision is later recast entirely into Ilya picking Shane over hockey. If Ilya wanted to pick Shane, he would have just taken the pay cut in heated rivalry and they would have been playing on the same team since fucking 2018–and it would have been on a team that Ilya himself describes as “the most legendary team in the entire league.” He would have had a great team and been tearing it up winning Stanley Cups but he didn’t want to take the pay cut or hit to his captaincy and his position and Shane fucking understood that and found him an alternative that wouldn’t require him to sacrifice his own position.
They explicitly pick Ottawa so that Ilya’s career doesn’t have to suffer and then the Long Game revises the entire narrative to turn it into how Ilya sacrificed his career for Shane. It is absolutely nonsensical when read in light of their conversation around the move itself. They outright reject playing on the same team so Ilya doesn’t have to sacrifice his own career.
And then!! All of the reasons why Ilya shouldn’t have to sign with Montreal suddenly do not matter at all when it’s Shane who has to suffer them. Shane has to take a pay cut? Laugh it off. Hubby will provide. He loses his entire career as narrative punishment for “making” Ilya sacrifice his career, but signing with Ottawa was explicitly so that Ilya wouldn’t have to sacrifice his career. Ilya actually does what Shane is accused of and villainized for in The Long Game, and Shane never did it to begin with. I feel like I’m being gaslit by an entire fucking fandom. Can anyone hear me hello
Shane gets to keep his team in the Sochi outing au. He gets to retire there. I put him through so much shit in the sochi outing au, but he gets to keep his team. I am building him a dream team in my mind and it will be so fucking narratively fulfilling so help me god
goshhhh I love that hudson plays show!shane as way more emotionally vulnerable than book!shane. show!shane is always rolling over and showing ilya his soft underbelly (often without even realizing it) and ilya is always like AAA AAAAAAAA YOU CAN’T DO THAT YOU CAN’T LET PEOPLE SEE YOU FEEL and then shane’s big brown eyes start getting all shiny/wet with tears and his bottom lip wobbles a little and ilya is like well now I have to kms. or take care of you forever. AGH
What truly pisses me off about TLG is tripgate. I just. why would you write it like that. And fine. Fine. You've written it like that, how are you not dealing with any of its consequences. It just feels like the most targeted, convenient plot point to make Shane want to leave Montreal of his own will. To turn that fanbase against him via accusations of cheating. It is so so stupid and I hate it so much. (It's also supposed to somehow??? minimize the loss? He's supposed to feel empowered walking away? I need. I need to give him a gun.)
Also. The irritating thing this fandom does is giving watsonian explanations to doylist conflicts. Like. When we're criticizing Ilya's actions, we're criticizing RR and her butchering of both Ilya as a character and as an MC in a romance novel. Ilya isn't real. He's a narrative device, he's a vehicle. The one driving us off this fuckass cliff is Reid. Gods.
Tripgate legitimately cannot be salvaged unless you write an entirely new story. It is just such a bad plot point that undercuts the point of even the most generous reading of tlg, and it creates so many problems that the narrative never had any intention of solving. Like it’s one of the worst goddamn plot points in a narrative fucking choked with bad writing decisions.
I very often see tripgate defended as being an important part of Shane’s heroic arc. And this interpretation just. Could not possibly be more wrong.
Shane’s “heroic arc” in tlg is picking Ilya over hockey. It is the question he is directly confronted with and the one he answers in the affirmative during his conversation with Crowell. And I’ve seen a lot of people construe the fact that Shane signs with Ottawa as him once again picking Ilya.
But that’s objectively not what’s happening. A character does not get the benefit of saying that he made a choice if the only reason why he makes that choice is because all other choices are taken from him. Shane does not get to look at his decision to move to Ottawa and say to Ilya “I left Montreal for you babe 😘” because he DOESNT. He leaves Montreal because he’s forced out by a hostile work environment and public vitriol. He leaves Montreal because he can’t stay. And this does in fact devastate his career to the point where he is afraid that no one will sign him. He doesn’t sign with Ottawa for Ilya and so we cannot reasonably claim that it’s the completion of his arc. He didn’t pick this willingly.
Which, as a note, is the same reason why I refuse to give Ilya any credit for the claim that he picked hockey over Shane. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, he presents the idea of moving to Canada to begin with for the sake of his own immigration. He explicitly states that America is bad for Russians and he wants to move to Canada. Shane wants to him to come to Montreal and Ilya says no because they can’t afford him. He picks Ottawa explicitly so his career won’t take a hit, and then we retconn it in later books to make Ottawa into some terrible team that Ilya only went to because it was convenient for Shane. Like. This idea that Ilya sacrifices hockey for Shane is laughable because when he was presented with the choice of “will you take a pay cut and sacrifice your captaincy for Shane” he just straight up says “no” and they do Ottawa instead. Like he legitimately picks hockey over Shane. These books drive me absolutely bonkers because I personally think that the entire narrative of “will you pick your love over X” is overtired but, to be clear, that’s a personal preference and not a legitimate criticism. Some books just aren’t for me and that’s fine.
The legitimate criticism is that in practice both Shane and Ilya’s actions substantively answer that question with “NOT REALLY NO.” Ilya picks Ottawa over playing in Montreal with Shane and Shane only picks Ottawa because he loses all other options. Like oh my god that book undermines its own message at every possible turn. The books display an alarming lack of confidence in the fact that Shane and Ilya will pick each other when it comes down to it, and it’s shown in the fact that they repeatedly end their stories with them either not picking each other or only picking each other out of lack of other options. It simply does not accomplish its own message.
If you accept as a premise that Shane and Ilya are best on the same team which I don’t but let’s assume for the sake of the argument you should be able to get them there without putting a gun to their head. The entire point of a character’s arc and specifically a heroic character arc is to have your character become the kind of person who makes the right choice. They should be able to bring about their own ends. And tripgate completely robs them of that agency. Shane’s “happy ending” is just a bad thing that happens to him and that he never receives an ounce of justice or healing for. Ilya’s happy ending is to be a guy whose happiness comes at his partner’s cost and who frankly does not seem to recognize or care that his partner is hurt. It cheapens both of them. Like. This is one of the most bizarrely punitive and fundamentally miserable “happy endings” I have ever seen executed in fiction. Her editor should be taken out back and shot like what were they thinking letting an ending like that get to print
I think with books like these it’s very important to recognize when a literary analysis is watsonian and when it’s Doylistic. If you are analyzing a work within that work’s universe, then you are taking a watsonian approach. But Doylism demands you look at the real world influences underlying the writing choices. A watsonian analysis accepts the events and the rules of the universe and tries to find meaning within them. But a Doylistic perspective is meant to critique how the work was actually created.
And frankly, I don’t find watsonian analyses for the long game to be very helpful. There is no compelling in-universe explanation for how that book ends. If you look at it in-universe, the analysis is “Shane should hire a divorce attorney.” Like. Ilya shows a mind-boggling lack of compassion towards the man he’s supposed to love more than anything in the world throughout that entire book, but particularly in how it ends.
I go after Ilya so hard in the long game but that’s because I really like Ilya as a character and I’m upset at how much he was butchered by the end of it. The ending of the long game is a discredit to both of them.
In all the other books, Ilya is presented as a compassionate and empathetic character. That’s one of the reasons why I like him so much.
But the empathy displayed by the version of him we see in the long game is non-existent. Like. The most he does is look concerned after the game. He doesn’t even call Shane until the next day. When he does, it’s to complain about how the media backlash against Shane is actually insulting to him because it implies he needed Shane to trip for him to win. Shane points out that he only won because Shane tripped and Ilya’s like “Not now Shane.”
Every single thing he says with respect to the trip is some kind of backhanded and insulting joke. Don’t worry about the pay cut, your rich husband will provide. His captaincy? Prima fucking donna, you know you don’t get a leadership role. Get to the front of the line with the rest of the plebeians. He cracks jokes about how Shane doesn’t have any playoff games to get to at one point. The closest he gets to displaying anything close to sympathy is when Shane is worrying about whether anyone would sign him now and Ilya asks him if he needs Ilya to fuck his self esteem better in his trophy room.
And the trip is very much presented as a good thing that happened to Ilya. It is the day after it happens and Ilya’s like. Yeah, there’s a huge number of disgusting opinion pieces and angry tweets directed at disparaging the love of my life. It may be so bad that he quits the job that’s been his long-held dream to work until the day he retires. I’m so excited at the idea but I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high.
If I was going through something as personally devastating as my career dreams being lost, my reputation being trashed, and my name being dragged through the mud by the public at large, and my partner responded by getting excited and trying not to get his hopes up too high about how good this could be for him, I would be in prison.
When Shane signs with Ottawa and ends up with a new jersey, Ilya describes his joy as “overwhelming” and asks if he can fuck Shane in bed with it on. There is no recognition whatsoever about how this must be painful or bittersweet for Shane, who, again, has just been dragged through the mud so hard that he went from the most respected player in the League to being worried no team would sign him. The empathy is absolutely non-existent. That ending is an insult to both of their characters. Like it is so poorly written and inconsistent with their every preceding representation in the novels. And that is a Doylistic critique of the book. I’m not saying “Ilya is a bad person,” he’s not a person at all. I’m saying he is written poorly.
You need to either excise tripgate entirely or you need to write an entirely new narrative dealing with and addressing its consequences and its aftermath. It is just such an ugly and poorly written ending as it stands. It completely undercuts what’s supposed to be the outright message of the book and it diminishes both of those characters.
You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
my hot take of the day is that ilya actually runs a tighter ship than shane, not like as captain or anything i mean in the household.
1) afraid of being lazy 2) military son 3) slavic. shane has certain preferences for things sensory wise which is why he is neat abt his stuff, ilya will kill himself & everyone in the room there's a Difference. iykyk
Shane had to hire a stylist for basic things like a linen suit and some throw pillows and people still want to insist he's a prissy prima donna who obsesses if his wardrobe is organized. He's a lame jock, he doesn't care about if his drapes match his sofa or if his dishes are color coded, only that his diet is optimized for peak performance.
shoutout to the words "overmorrow" and "ereyesterday". english losing these words was stupid. "the day after tomorrow" "the day before yesterday" clunky-ass constructions. revolting. i'm bringing overmorrow and ereyesterday back in my idiolect and there is nothing you can do about it
11 pm thought: unfortunately the sad but logical reality is that he is straight and just kind of a weird freak and also a misogynist but it's still beautiful how romantic his obsession with his best friend is and how its psychosexual nature haunts all his creative work
2 am thought: he's gay and he wants to fuck men and i know this for a fact. and also a misogynist
