MORE heated rivalry fics that are conceptually clever or unsettling or thorough. or all of the above
not all of them are aus . many are under 15k hits
put my hand on the stove (and the cross) - unseemlyndisturbed
(beautiful eerie prose, the religiosity holds substance and is hypnotic. Load bearing fanfiction)
“And there.
Through a break in the trees, there is a house. Wooden, old, the pale white paint of it greyed with age and dampness.
"I—" His voice comes out level, at least.
The man has tilted his head. "What? You want to sleep in your car?" He pulls his chin toward the dark interior of the house, a small gesture. "No. Come in. Is no trouble."
God hasn’t abandoned him yet, ha.
Shane Hollander's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. The man who answers the door is charming, warm, and just his type. Ilya Rozanov is a very religious man. He has a lot to say about repentance.”
HOLLANDER VS ROZANOV I - gone_girl
(i know nothing about boxing, but this conveys the world so clearly. outsider pov in chapter 1. knowledgeable clever cool character study)
“After nearly a decade separated by weight class, Shane Hollander has given up his cruiserweight title to challenge undefeated heavyweight champion of the world Ilya Rozanov. The following is a presentation of HBO Boxing.”
A Side Door Into the Dark - magnetica
(climatology physics scientists in antarctica. includes citations at the end. in a short amount of words the sense of setting is sooo strong. very endearing and cold)
“Amundsen-Scott Station, Antarctica
—
In grad school the only flirting he had mastered was the strategic deployment of phrases like ‘oh, really?’ and ‘is that so?’ It was brought to his attention by one of his more regular hookups in the kitchen of his apartment while they were cooking dinner, and he had said whenever Shane wanted to fuck he started talking like a coastal elite college girl who’d never had to ask for it outright. Now, in this strange point of contact with Ilya where it was obvious something vaguely carnal had passed between them, he thought about emulating his particular brand of assured charm. Whatever ideas he’d concocted devolved rather quickly into his own unintentional directness, and he said, “Does it scare you?”
“Does climatology scare you?” Ilya’s face was measured and calm, his foot still pressed against the curved joint above Shane’s heel.
“Yeah,” the word came out like a laugh, “it does, actually. A lot.””
decadent stress chamber - garagepaperback
(every word is intentional. frenetic. load bearing wall of a fic! buzzy. anything by garagepaperback is immaculate)
“Rush week confirms a lot of things. Ambitions, fears. Where do I fit? What if I don’t fit anywhere? Nervous freshman bitten-lip shit. Being an active, a senior, means having answers. Shane has no further questions.
–
Or, Shane’s in a frat. Ilya rushes.”
i looked over it and i ached - IsvsWorld
(very very good character study and exploration of shane’s japanese canadian experience. doesn’t shy away from the harder realisms.)
““I don’t really think about stuff like that,” Shane replies in interviews, his lips wooden at the words.
---
Shane and being haafu, 2nd gen, and Asian.”
helpless, tender, open - makomoris
(sexy and sickly and loving..)
“Shane gets an annual cold, Ilya notices, when they start to officially date. It happens when they're both on the road, and he calls Shane from his shitty hotel and hears him sniffling, nose all blocked while he grumbles about having to sit out a game. Ilya lets him whine, says I know, I know, sweetie, it doesn't feel too good, I am sure. He's imagining Shane a little helpless in bed, unable to move, struck down with fever. It stirs something inside him, seeing Shane, usually so whip strong, fastest skater he's seen, laid away to waste by the simple common cold.
or Shane gets sick, and Ilya still wants.”
HOLLANDER & ROZANOV ARE DEAD - eurydicees
(buzzy and heartfelt and nosy)
It is December, and Scott has been out for long enough to pretend to be used to it, and things are not perfect but they’re fucking good, and Ilya Rozanov is at his apartment for dinner—has been for over an hour—and he’s still waiting so stupidly hopefully to introduce a boyfriend who very, very clearly isn’t coming.
(Or: studies on coming out, learning patience, one-sided conversations, and other absurdist waiting games.)
got milk? i mean, got yoghurt? - unseemlyndisturbed
(fascinating mixed media storytelling…chapter 2 ending we still think about you. read the tags but also it’s sick (like crazy?) but earnest and emotional. sexy and comedic too! :P Also really well researched and realistic which enhances the reading experience so much)
“There was a small recoil, nothing Shane would consciously register as a recoil, just a slight drawing-back of his head and a micro-expression crossing the bridge of his nose.
His brows pulled together for one second, and he pulled the carton away from his face, examining the opening.
Ilya Rozanov has seven cameras. Ilya Rozanov has a blog.
His gay roommate doesn't know about any of this”
hockeybot - hiljainen
(gratifying. mixed media)
“Here is what everyone thinks of you. It’s exactly what you feared. It might actually be worse.”
Thirsty Little Flower - anonymous
(like ok i guess we’re getting into the pervert section of the fic rec list. i really like the shane characterization and the representation of finding out you’re a freak on the family computer and running from it forever. very charming seriously.)
tag i love: “think of this like an erotic expansion pack. the base game has plenty of smut already.”
“Fuck, something was really wrong with him. It was one thing to jerk off in the shower thinking about a hot guy. So maybe it was kinda gay, whatever. It happens. It's really another thing to jerk off thinking about your rival. Who beat you in *two* competitions today. A guy who, in all likelihood, didn't even mean to brush your fingers like that. That's kinda pervy, right? But plenty of other guys are also kinda pervy.
It's really definitely not normal to jerk off thinking about a guy telling you to stay hydrated.
Fuck. Shane Hollander is a freak.”
welcome to the family - pressuretoparty
(so satisfying and makes me flinch. whole house mad❤️. really honest ottawa hollanov depiction.)
“"We are actually so fucking washed," Shane bitches. "I'm never getting better and you are stuck on a losing team that sucks. Everyone is going to forget about us."
"Don't make me trip you," Ilya says, calmly. "Let's do another lap."
"No," Shane barks. Ilya raises his eyebrows.
Shane refuses to accept this. This perpetual cycle of suck. When he invited Ilya to his cottage almost four years ago now, he didn't expect their relationship to turn into their fucking burial ground.
Shane finds himself grounded in Ottawa for the foreseeable future. With his newfound free time, he hangs out with his family, eats Costco Rotisserie chicken, and whips Ilya Rozanov back into a champion.”
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
Reblogging to drag this project over here, this is killing my notes on main so I'm giving it its own URL. Follow over here for updates on the star system generator and only the star system generator, and not on my Star Wars bullshit.
Will go through and tag interested parties when things calm down below 100 notes an hour.
I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
ilya is smart and can do anything in the world but i actually think he would be the worst plumber ever. Shane would be like hey! great you’re here theres a clog upstairs i’ll take you there… and ilya would be like is Stinky in here.. will see if i fix. can you order me Jimmy Jonathan’s
"[Shane] just looked so happy. He was beaming and his eyes were crinkled and his cheeks were flushed. ... Ilya kissed him, hard, on the cheek. He was sure, to the crowd, that it looked like Ilya's usual obnoxious shenanigans, that the kiss was just another way of annoying Hollander. But the truth was he simply couldn't help himself."
“I don’t mind,” Shane says, hovering awkwardly in the doorway, “Um. You staying over. I mean, obviously. I’d be an asshole to kick you out.”
Ilya is used to him, by now; the way it can sometimes take a few seconds or minutes for Shane to get to the fucking point, mincing his words and dancing around whatever it is he’s actually trying to say. In anyone else it would be unbearable, but Ilya is finding it harder and harder to begrudge Shane anything.
It’s a scary thought, so Ilya schools his expression into something close to nonchalance, and shrugs. His bare shoulders brush the fabric of Shane’s fancy headboard. “If you want me to stay, I stay. If not, I go home. I’m not homeless, Hollander, I have my own bed.”
All of Shane’s peculiarities, all of his strange quirks and habits, have made a home in the back of Ilya’s mind. The old-fashioned alarm clock on the nightstand so he doesn’t have his phone around the bed, now blinking just past 5AM. The dimmer switch in every room because he hates overheard lights, the way he’ll transfer $500 to Ilya’s checking account every Friday because aren’t college students supposed to have fun on Fridays?
It’s Saturday morning, now. Shane is pulling a T-shirt over his head, sweats to cover the hickeys on the inside of his thighs. Ilya blinks once, twice, then looks away.
“I know you’re not homeless,” Shane scoffs, but it’s not mean, or mocking; if anything it sounds closer to fond, which only adds to the creeping, sickly feeling of anxiety growing in Ilya’s chest. “There’s a keycard on the counter in the kitchen, and you know the door code, so come and go as you want while I’m gone.”
“You can be an asshole,” Ilya says, biting down on the urge to snap at him. It’s not Shane’s fault if he’s never had this kind of arrangement before, not his fault if he thinks he has to be kind and charming for Ilya to sleep with him. “You barely know me, Hollander. You shouldn’t let strangers just come in and out of your apartment.”
Shane shrugs again, seemingly unwilling to take the bait. The more he resists, the more Ilya feels the itch, the tickle under his skin begging him to pick a fight. A big one. An excuse to say awful, hurtful things; maybe then Shane will understand who he’s dealing with, here, and why the kindness and the blushing and the thoughtful gestures aren’t necessary, or deserved.
“You have finals next week, right?” Shane asks, rhetorical, because Ilya saw it marked on his fucking calendar. His physical fucking calendar. ILYA - SMALL ANIMAL DENTISTRY FINAL on Tuesday, and ILYA - DIAGNOSTIC IMAGING FINAL on Friday. He has more, obviously, but those are the two he mentioned to Shane. The ones he’s worried about, because they’re the classes in which his grade is the lowest. Probably because he goes straight from hockey practice to class, and he’s usually exhausted by then. Shane keeps talking, pulling his jacket on and pulling Ilya from his spiralling thoughts. “It’s a quiet place to study. Housekeeping will keep kitchen stocked, so, y’know. You can help yourself.”
It’s fucking obscene. Shane Hollander is the captain of a Stanley Cup winning NHL team, and they’re headed to the playoffs in a month, and he’s wasting his fucking mental space on Ilya’s finals and his practice schedule and the fucking quality of his study space.
This week will be good, he thinks. Some space, while Shane is in the US on his roadie, and Ilya will absolutely fucking not be in this apartment. He’ll be in the library, or at his apartment with Svetlana. Anywhere he doesn’t have to think about Shane’s smile, or his glasses, or the way he’s so infuriatingly kind and thoughtful and treating Ilya like his equal.
“I don’t need your apartment, Hollander.”
Shane shrugs again. Asshole. “Well, it’ll be here. If you want it. And I, uh— Look, don’t be mad, but you’re gonna break your ankles in those fucking skates, so I—“
“Always with the skates! Is fine, scholarship covers the equipment, and—“
“And they only pay out for the shitty stuff,” Shane frowns. His broad hands are on his hips, now, sweeping back the hem of his jacket. Ilya can see a sliver of smooth, tan skin peeking out from beneath his T-shirt. “Seriously. The scholarship is great, I’m sure, but I’ve watched your tape. Those skates aren’t the right brand, you need better ankle support or you’ll keep losing your edges.”
“Oh my God, you are so fucking boring,” Ilya groans, covering his face with his bare arms, hoping the flexing of his biceps will be enough to distract Shane from the stupid, dizzy smile on his face. Fuck. Fuck Shane Hollander, what a fucking psychopath. He watched his game tape. He bought him better skates.
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve told me,” Shane grumbles. The mattress dips when Shane sits down, and Ilya can feel one of his hands sliding up his chest. “Tomorrow, go to the CCM offices in— Ilya, are you listening? Go to the CCM offices uptown, and they’ll fit you for something better. Custom, if needed. Ask for Laurie, she’s expecting you.”
“You are not very good at this,” Ilya says, lowering his arms. Shane is so close; he can see the threads of grey in his ink-black hair, the smile lines around his eyes. “Thanks for the fuck, Ilya, here is $500, see you next week. This is how you are supposed to do it.”
He expects Shane to recoil, or look hurt, or react badly. That’s the point. But he doesn’t; Shane just smiles, small and fond, and rubs his thumb across Ilya’s jaw.
“I’m very fucking boring, remember?” Shane reminds him, quietly, “I’m supposed to be bad at this kind of thing.”
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
janainaart
snowghoul
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
