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?
I know you're not a heated rivalry blog so no worries if you don't wanna talk about it, but something I've seen people talk about wrt Shane being iced out of the team is that it'd actually be BECAUSE of the fact that the Canadiens carry more meaning than one player himself. I guess the theory is that because Shane made himself a story and stand out/bigger than the team identity, he had to go. Personally I disagree with this theory because I think his personal story and life being given precedence over what he did for the team's legacy itself with the cups would be worse, but I'd love your thoughts
i did watch the show, because it would be insane of me not to watch the hockey show made by certified guy who went to my high school jacob tierney, but tbh the fanbase was designed in a lab to get on my nerves, so i mostly stay away.
short answer: boooooo tomato tomato tomato that's mtl slander get out of my house
long involved navel gazing answer: first of all that absolutely stinks of people who want the storyline to be justified (for whatever reason they might want that) so they assume the conclusion and work backwards.
so obviously the closest real life comparison we have to shane's position is pk subban, who, being Black, was the constant scapegoat in certain elements of the press and the fanbase, but who (despite that attempted scapegoating) was and is utterly beloved by The City at large. like this dude was the non stop target of press guys like jack todd who still want every hockey player to be a cardboard cutout in public (lest they be accused of having "character issues"), but he was larger than life anyway, thrived in the spotlight, and regularly had his name chanted by the bell centre faithful. he "made himself a story" constantly, because he was electric and loud and expressive. like, the pk trade to nashville is probably what rachel was mad about when she wrote Villainous Montreal into the long game, let's be real. i personally think pk's been spending too much time being wealthy in the united states lately, and he's had some dumb takes about e.g. wayne gretzky's politics that i wish he hadn't said out loud in public, but all that aside, i am 100% confident that if he went to the habs game tomorrow and his face appeared on the jumbotron for 1.4 seconds, the whole crowd would stand up and delay the game for several minutes.
pk subban, for all his and (and carey price's) brilliance, won zero stanley cups.
and somebody wants to tell me that a three-time cup winning captain, a franchise hero, a man whose place in the rafters would be secured before the age of 27, could be dropped from the montreal roster--for reasons unrelated to hockey, mind you--without the city going so berserk that the book would have to change genres??
habs who win are canonized. we all know this. and the montreal canadiens' history being so intertwined with that of a literal political and cultural revolution gives us, frankly, an outsized interest in underdogs. we fucking love an underdog, man, we love fighting the english, we love overthrowing the catholic church. i am completely convinced that a three-time cup-winning habs captain getting outed against his will would activate a level of montreal-ness about said captain never before seen in the modern era. responding to the injustice of him being outed would be folded right into the franchise's whole identity instantly and without hesitation. a gm who traded him after that would be run out of town, pelted with rotting produce.
and the fact that none of these repercussions are handled in the books just tells me that rachel fully does not understand what the relationship between montreal and its hockey players actually is. obviously, randoms reading the books/watching the show can say whatever they want to justify the storyline, that's their right. but im gonna hate it and make fun of it because mfs are talking shit about my city.
"responding to the injustice of him being outed would be folded right into the franchise's whole identity instantly and without hesitation" this is absolutely it. it'd be folded into mythology. the captain who was outed against his will, the hero who brought the cup home three times who was made a target—god can you guys even imagine what would happen when they realized the commissioner was threatening him? montreal fans are like, practically desperate for a reason to get mad at the league and this would be the perfect time, even beyond the shane of it all
The amount of disbelief I’m willing to suspend is directly proportional to how entertaining the show is. If a show is barely able to hold my attention and has betrayed my trust before, fuck you, that’s not how cutting someone’s head off works.
If I’m glued to my seat every week and can’t stop watching, then yes, absolutely, the professional athlete in a blond wig is indistinguishable from the 17 year old lead actress.
Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience. The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.
He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.
When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.
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