em

emerillon on AO3 || PFP by @vanyamire and header by @paxopalotls Merlin, figure skating, Les Mis, Heated Rivalry and hockey. Screenwriter and fic writer. She/her ❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 (i don’t tag my queue)

[emerillons]

Most beautiful decomposition faerie I commissioned from my most beautiful server wife @azi-muthal 🍄🍃 Her commissions are open and her paintings are absolutely divine, go check her out!!

My 2024: Decomposition and composition are my affirmations. Remember that your body starts breaking down long before you die. Preservation is futile. Break down and transform. Don’t embalm yourself as you are. Rot. Grow.

[lilylikeswords]

@heatonice I have no self restraint and too much free time. I apologise...

[madeleineengland]

The Apocalypse painted by Italian artist Paolo Girardi (born 1974)

[tall]

[comingatthecottage]

re: ilya's terrible therapist

okay i think i'm obligated to say that although i am a mental health professional very obviously nothing i post on my heated rivalry tumblr is professional advice nobody sue me or anything. i should also probably caveat that i am coming from a very specific perspective: i'm a relational psychoanalyst; i have adjunctive training in several behavioral modalities but i believe very, very strongly in relational psychodynamic work as being THE thing. for patients with complex relational trauma (aka mr. ilya rozanov), i don't believe anything else can create lasting change. i also don't believe in the medical model of mental health. these are things about which reasonable people can, of course, disagree, so i'll try to separate out things i think she does WRONG vs things i think are missed opportunities to do well/what i would do differently

[comingatthecottage]

THINGS THAT ARE WRONG the biggest and worst: patient presents for therapy for first time despite significant treatment barriers. patient discloses that he believes he is depressed. patient has a first-degree relative who died by suicide. your next question, your very next question, is "are you thinking of killing yourself". you don't beat around the bush, you don't imply it, you don't wait until the patient volunteers. you must ask directly and you must do so before the patient leaves your office, because there is a huge and immediate risk that this appointment is someone's last cry for help before an attempt, and the odds of a depressed patient with a trauma history related to the suicide of a parent attempting suicide is fucking staggering. it is in my opinion malpractice not to even screen for suicidal intent at this first appointment ANYWAY, i do this for all patients and to not do it for someone with ilya's history is outrageously dangerous. life-threateningly incompetent care. lack of treatment planning: doesn't take a history or anything at the first appointment. jumps directly into talking about a horrific trauma (finding his mother's dead body). sometimes people do come in to a first session in an escalated state and have to begin directly with discussing whatever is happening at that moment, and then you meet them where they're at, but ilya arrives in a calm if slightly nervous state. she should have started by laying out what therapy would look like and beginning to build rapport, not immediately being like "so how about your mom's corpse". the way she makes the diagnosis of depression is bizarre. “I think you are depressed”. she doesn't clarify whether or not she's actually diagnosing him with depression under the medical model, explain what that means, or ask what it means to him to hear that. it's also MONTHS in, after he came in suspecting depression, that she makes this diagnosis (in the US it has to be in the first session generally for insurance purposes, different, also bad). no actual screening for symptoms, no psychoeducation about what it means to have depression, no sense of prognosis which clearly upsets the patient. it is so important to contextualize a diagnosis, both what the particular diagnosis is and what the act of diagnosing means. no differential diagnosis. she knows that ilya has experienced at least one criterion A trauma for PTSD (his mother's death) but does nothing to screen for symptoms. she doesn't ask how old his sexual partners he had when he was fourteen were to screen for sexual abuse. she doesn't rule out bipolar which is a must when diagnosing depression. she doesn't ask any questions about substance use or screen for potential neurodivergence or any of a million other things. she doesn't refer to medical for potential physiological contributors for a guy whose career is "getting hit really hard in the head".

[comingatthecottage]

no clear treatment plan or goals, and no sense of how therapy is going to work besides… talking? the only goal ilya really sets is "be good enough for my boyfriend," and although she (rightly) pushes back on that she doesn't help him identify an alternate goal. she also doesn't explain what therapy is going to be like or how it works or help him get on board with what the project of therapy is going to be. she seems unshaken when he misses five appointments in a row (if i had a passively suicidal patient miss five appointments in a row i would not be brushing that off, we would be having a good chat about what the barriers to treatment were). culturally incompetent care: they're part of the same minority group (Russian immigrants) across one axis of identity, but Galina is not a queer hockey player (or as far as we know queer at all). she minimizes and dismisses the discrimination ilya is likely to face in his career from coming out, including the fact that he could get deported to Russia, jumping to a CBT technique that asks him to imagine the worst case scenario without engaging at all with how it feels to be in this position or validating his fears. mental health professionals have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about their patients' identities and to listen first. "I could lose my job and be deported and jailed because of my sexual identity" is not a cognitive distortion, it is a terrifying reality. perhaps an unlikely reality, but it exists. trying to use cognitive therapies to "reframe" real experiences of discrimination is, flat-out, therapeutic abuse. she also should have explicitly responded to his fear that she would out shane when he's afraid to say shane's name, not obliquely implied that she knows they're both hockey players: "i want to let you know that confidentiality extends to anything and everything you tell me, except (reiterate legal carveouts). there are no circumstances under which i would disclose your partner's identity to anyone. if you want to use his name, i won't repeat it to anyone except when we're in this room" THINGS THAT ARE POOR THERAPEUTIC STYLE IN MY OPINION AND WHAT I WOULD DO BETTER #MYNARCISSISM lack of curiosity: she does not prompt him to reflect emotionally, even when there are very obvious entry points to do so to do so. i.e. ilya says he's glad his father is dead, which is a huge emotional disclosure that is very risky for a patient to make, especially in a first appointment because he might expect judgment. and she just… asks a factual question about the timeline, rather than engaging with the emotional content in any way (as a relational analyst what i would do here is ask "what does it feel like to share that with me?", but i do not think any good therapist would like, change the subject away from the feeling)

[comingatthecottage]

she regularly offers direct opinions about/interpretations of things ilya says, very early in their therapeutic relationship. "that must have been very hard" in response to his father's expectations of him (which he interprets as being about sochi--he seems to hear 'it must have been hard for you to fail like that', which is, uh, bad!), "it's good that you had that," etc. in spite of the fact that he's already indicated a complex relationship with his family and himself that mean he might feel quite differently than someone else expects! was it good that he had hockey, or did it just create another burden on him and his relationship with his father, or is it somewhere in the middle? did his father's expectations feel hard? traumatizing? was he proud that so much was expected of him? when did he notice those feelings? just some questions i might ask. describing how ilya must feel about things closes off conversation. her affect and presentation in the session: ilya repeatedly notices her masking her reactions to things, like the fact that he became sexually active so young. i guess technically you're still allowed to be a blank slate style therapist, even though i don't know anyone who still does this. but if you're a blank slate, be a blank slate. don't let patients notice that you're hiding your reactions to things. so for instance i would approach that conversation by having whatever reaction i had and then saying, "you might notice i had a reaction to you saying that," and either asking the patient how they interpreted my reaction or asking them if they'd like to know what i'm thinking (and then how does it feel to know that i'm feeling concerned, etc, the relational field goes on forever). my way isn't the only way but if you're visibly swallowing reactions it's bad. she doesn't check in with ilya about how he's feeling about therapy and dismisses his fear that it's not working. tbh the only thing she says that i like is "i'm good, but i'm not that good," which IS something i might say. but she doesn't go from there, it becomes a way of dismissing his fears. i would have asked what it's like to have to tolerate such a slow and uncertain recovery process. does he think therapy can help? are there ways in which it has helped? how does it feel to talk about it? how does it feel to talk to me about it? bizarre attitude towards self-disclosure. she gives ilya next to no information about herself, which, again, is an old-fashioned but not per se wrong way to do it. just because i'm the relational yapper machine 3000 doesn't mean that every therapist needs to tell their patient anything about themselves. but she does self-disclose twice. she tells ilya that she's watching their season/is a hockey fan, and makes a weird comment that she also enjoys shopping as a coping mechanism but that bedsheets are more in her price range than sports cars. even though i'm the yappatron 3000 i would not choose to make these particular disclosures! admittedly if i had a famous patient and i knew about their career i would probably tell them that directly in the first session, i would not however make asides about it because now you're kind of creating a dual relationship. the bedsheets thing is weird bc you gotta keep a wiiiide birth around anything even quasi sexual, like don't invite a patient to imagine what your bed is like you weirdo. also finances are usually an inappropriate thing to self-disclose, because therapy is also a financial relationship! i would never joke about how a patient has more money than me (even though most of my patients have a lot more money than me), it seems likely to induce guilt and also to disturb the therapeutic frame around money which is hard to manage anyway

[comingatthecottage]

therapeutic interventions: i mean the biggest problem is that she doesn't really seem to have a consistent style or approach or anything. they just kind of chat. the things she does say are… weird. she directly gives advice about what he should do in his relationship with Shane repeatedly. She doesn’t otherwise tell ilya what to do, which would actually be more appropriate--there's a place for giving depressed patients clear instructions imo. but she doesn't do that, she tells him what to do with his boyfriend which is far riskier because she's never met shane! the worst bit is that she also directly predicts what the outcome of one of the conversations she tells him to have will be, which is… bad, because she does not know Shane, and this is like their fourth session, and she could be wrong. That’s how you destroy a therapeutic rapport forever btw, is make a promise you can’t keep. i have never in my career assured a patient that a conversation they were gonna have with someone else would turn out well, because i don't know that person. maybe shane is an abusive asshole who is going to say "well if you're depressed just kill yourself already". she doesn't know this man!

her ideas about how to treat depression seem limited to pills and exercise. which is crazy because the man is a professional athlete. and she's like "well maybe go on a bike ride." because rachel reid clearly doesn't know how therapy works or what the mechanism of action is! she doesn't lay out the many, many possibilities ("i recommend speaking to a psychiatrist, options might include ssris or snris, other antidepressants, mood stabilizers, etc. there are also interventional methods like intravenous ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or ECT. i mention those only so you understand that there are a lot of options, and a lot of hope). she doesn't actually offer psychoed about lifestyle interventions--why exercise? what does nutrition look like? sleep? she tells him he needs to come out to his friends but doesn't offer anything to help him actually understand how social isolation and depression interact. she doesn't look at any of his strengths, notably the fact that he has a partner who adores him, that he has survived a lifetime of immense trauma, that he has a brilliantly successful career, etc. there's a stab at one CBT exercise but otherwise no concrete skills (again not my thing but it would be something). and no information about different therapy modalities and how they could potentially help him. okay that's the end of my essay sorry to anyone who doesn't care and had to watch this get reblogged like 8 separate times becasue tumblr was mad abt how long it was if anyone wants to know My Case Formulation of fictional character Ilya Rozanov and how i would Fix Him let me know @stunkbug here is the essay!

[expressions-of-nature]

Lake Tekapo, New Zealand by Glen Sinclair

[emerillons]

The flowers pictured are invasive Russell lupins, introduced to Aotearoa in the 1940s and fairly contentious. Lupins flourish out of control here, crowding out all but weeds and clogging waterways with their deep roots, driving native animals from their habitats. They can grow over a metre high, and almost too densely for even a person to push through. Ecologists and conservationists advocate for stronger efforts to control their spread, for stricter rules on their pest status. Every year they spend hours of hard work controlling lupins along our waterways, attempting to claim back land for our native birds to nest and our native plants to grow. But downstream, farmers are given permission by the government to plant them as forage feed for sheep. They are also very beautiful.

[emerillons]

ok well i’m all for growing the game but PERSONALLY the 1pm games are WORSE for me 🙄 thanks a lot GERMANY

[lainnielaps]

people starting to ask about the pwhl schedule, have u met the pwhl? we're getting that schedule a good 1 week before the season starts if we're lucky

[pchelostas]

"He is half of my soul as the poets say"

[lavenderprose]

what are the people saying about my girl sveta??

honestly it's less specific things and more, like, this very weird vibe that I get from some people who talk about Svetlana. The girlboss of it all, if I'm being honest. Or the way that they tie her life so completely to Ilya despite there being a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Or even the assumption that she would be willing to do certain things for Ilya that would limit her own autonomy--marry him for citizenship, carry a child for him and Shane, just to name a few.

I know that Ilya says that thing about Svetlana being willing to help him in the case of the citizenship stuff and it's not really challenged in the narrative, but I have my issues with it. Svetlana has a great deal of love for Ilya but I don't know. Knowing that Svetlana in the show is Black, that her mother is specifically a Black American woman (I believe that this is implied given the Svetlana having American citizenship thing) and knowing how that would inherently change her character versus Book Svetlana, I just...feel like that should have been changed or addressed in some way. Or at least it should have been made clear that that's a symptom of Ilya himself having blinders about Svetlana and her race. Which would make sense, but I think that's something that people would be REALLY mad about me talking about so I won't.

Whenever people talk about Svetlana I think about my Black wife and my Black MIL and my Black extended family and I find it hard to think that the things that people are saying about Svetlana are nearly as nuanced as they think they are. Like, oh Svetlana is so strong! Svetlana is the sensible one! Svetlana would do anything for Ilya! She has no romantic feelings for him and never has and in fact Svetlana isn't interested in romance at all! That last one specifically bothers me and it is EVERYWHERE in this fandom. That's not to say that you can't headcanon a character as aromantic but why Svetlana specifically? Why not Rose? Why not, like, Luca fucking Haas? Why the only Black woman? These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.

For contrast, I see people giving Rose so much more internality than they give Svetlana and it bothers me a lot. Even I'm guilty of this at times, I fear. This is a reason why, frankly, I'm a little bothered by the Roselana stuff. At times it seems like people are trying to 'soften' Svetlana by pairing her with Rose, or else that they are trying to make her...I don't know, less of a threat to Shane? By pairing her with Shane's girl bestie? It feels dismissive. Not to mention I've never been fully satisfied by any of the portrayals of Roselana as a couple that I've seen. The realities of being in an interracial relationship, ESPECIALLY with a Black woman, are much more complex than anyone is willing to recognize. And these are things that you absolutely NEED Black people in your life to even begin to understand. I have been with my wife for nearly eight years and I have learned so much in that time and I am still constantly improving myself.

The things that I see people say sometimes just completely dismiss the context that Svetlana in the show is Black and treat it as something to be ignored or as some sort of inconvenient truth. Almost the only time I ever see it addressed is in anecdotes about Svetlana being bullied growing up in Russia. Which like. That's not fair. At LEAST as much attention should be paid to the ways in which being a Black woman have shaped Svetlana for the better. I've had the privilege to be around the culture that my wife grew up in and it's so rich and nuanced and special to the people who cultivate it. Black women are the driving force behind so much good. Sometimes it seems like this fandom only wants to talk about the characters of color in the context of how much they hate being people of color. Which is. Not good!

Idk, I'm maybe not expressing this well.

[aaaangel444]

[pharmersonly]

me when i engage with something that i know is gonna piss me off: wow that pissed me off

[murphyatthemagpie]

"The dynamic duo ✌️ Best friends @laila_edwards and @kkharvey got glammed up together for the ESPYS."

[just-a-small-town-gay]

My favorite duo, taking on the wild together ❤️🐘

[pmamtraveller]

By Daniel Arthur

[dilftanger]

can i say something

[dilftanger]

many people give the nfl a lot of shit for the injury and concussion rates but like. the nhl has a very comparable rate of injury and concussion and doesn’t acknowledge it + has a much worse culture around it. the nfl is by no means perfect but they are working to improve the gear to help players (see the guardian helmets for example, as well as helmet designs per position) meanwhile the nhl doesn’t seem to give a fuck about it’s players’ safety at all as we’ve seen time and again.

now think very carefully about why the nfl may be viewed as more violent and injurious as a sport..

[gayshowpig]

I fully agree 1000% with this message, but the NFL deserves absolutely no credit for caring about players safety. They very publicly denied the existence of CTE for over a decade and did a lot of work to discredit/silence Dr. Omalu, the doctor who discovered CTE in the early 2000s. It wasn’t until the movie where will smith played him came out in 2015, when it became a mainstream news discussion, that the NFL acknowledged the existence of CTE for the first time publicly. And this was only after Goodell was forced to testify in front of congress.

They don’t care about players they were just forced into a corner and had to do something. Without a doubt in my mind they would’ve continued to ignore it if it hadn’t become a hot topic. If anything the players union deserves the credit.

[userfish]

Aanya specifically said "the NFL is by no means perfect". so what's all this for then?

and the NFL absolutely deserves SOME credit for caring about player safety. you're being disingenuous when you say they deserve none. yes, you're correct that they didn't do anything about CTE and concussions until ~2015 but there's so much more to player safety than concussions. and EVEN SO, wrt concussions, they've invested money and research into better helmet designs (as Aanya stated), have restructured their concussion protocol, have independent neurologists at every game. they've banned helmet to helmet hits and punish players harsher now for them. this isn't NOTHING, this is work done by the NFL. every season there's some new research about injuries and player safety. it's not NOTHING.

[emerillons]

[butdarlingthestarrs]

Connor Storrie | Vogue Adria | March 2026