Do you think that in TLG Ilya thinking that he “was more aware of hockey's flaws than Shane was" because "he'd been paying more attention to the darker side of his sport” was meant to paint Ilya as a unreliable narrator due to his depression, or an oversight on Rachel Reid’s part. I know ppl go back and forth on this?
No, he's not being an unreliable narrator. I've said this before, but neither Ilya nor Shane are unreliable narrators. That term refers to a specific and complicated narrative device that Reid is not attempting in these books, nor would she succeed if she did, because she is not a sophisticated enough writer to even be writing reliable narrators lmao.
It seems to me that majority of this fandom believes that an unreliable narrator is when the character has opinions and points of view and sometimes doesn't notice things, or worse, can be imagined to not be noticing things. I have seen this fandom justify absurd interpretations of the text by pointing out that the reason it's not present in the text could be because Shane/Ilya "is an unreliable narrator" and just didn't notice. That is not how it works.
If you want to write an unreliable narrator, you still need to find a way to make it indisputably clear that your narrator is unreliable, and virtually every instance of them being unreliable will be undeniable, because some other aspect of the narrative will be demonstrating that.
If Reid intended for Ilya's depression to be making his internal monologue unreliable in that moment, she would have needed to have done something to make it indisputably clear that was the case in that moment, or in surrounding moments. For example, she could have written that scene the exact same way and then when she switched to Shane's pov, had him thinking about, well, hockey's flaws, lmao. She could have had Shane voice something in that moment to demonstrate he knew about hockey flaws that directly contradicts what Ilya was thinking. She could have had Ilya verbalize his thought at some point that Shane is oblivious to hockey's flaws, and had Shane be offended and the two of them fight about it. There are many ways she could have revealed to us that Ilya's internal monologue was unreliable in that moment - but she doesn't ever do that.
But you know what she does do? She proves that Ilya's perception of him was accurate:
When Shane and Ilya go out with Fabian and Ryan, it's from Shane's pov, and when Fabian brings up Ryan retiring and his perception of hockey changing, Shane thinks that he "couldn't imagine hockey ever making him feel bad."
Now, this would have been a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the reader that Shane actually is aware of hockey's flaws, so that we would understand that when Ilya assumes Shane doesn't know, we shouldn't believe him. But she didn't. She made it perfectly clear that Ilya's perception of Shane was accurate because Shane himself reiterates the belief.
And again, the way these books are written, it is clear that Reid isn't even attempting to do unreliable narrators. She rarely even attempts to show how these characters' own personal worldviews and life experiences shape their points of view, much less attempts to make them unreliable. She is constantly switching between limited and omniscient without meaning to because she is that incapable of conveying anything happening in these stories through these characters themselves. Her books are frequently obnoxiously straightforward in how reliable these internal monologues are, I can't emphasize that enough. So reliable in fact that the characters' own perceptions of themselves are often impossibly objective. Reid couldn't write an unreliable narrator if she tried. She does not even have a grasp on showing and not telling. If she tried to write an unreliable narrator her head would explode.
In my opinion, every single instance of the fandom debating whether or not a character was being "unreliable" in any given moment in these books, is them being unable to cope with the fact that Reid wrote something phenomenally stupid without realizing it. A fair amount of this fandom would rather twist and tangle every interpretation of every scene in these books into something nonsensical than admit Reid is just a seriously ignorant and shitty writer. They want her to be a genius and so they find ways to interpret the text to suggest she could be, but she's not.
