I think Ilya would be delighted to take the Canadian citizenship test and see that Shane is a question on it.
Although he probably still feels pretty weird about how weird Canada is about Shane.
Oh definitely.
He’s delighted by the fact that Shane’s such a bad bitch that it’s historically and culturally significant. He’s writing MY HUSBAND SHANE HOLLANDER into that little blank. He’s getting a copy of his test so he can frame it after. Ilya is fundamentally Shane’s number one fan (and vice versa). He loves that Shane’s accomplished so much. He’s so so proud of him.
But he definitely has mixed feelings about Shane’s level of fame in Canada and how it affects him.
Ilya’s exact feelings around Shane’s fame and notoriety in Canada varies based on au. I think he cares the least about it in the child star crashout summer au. Like. Shane spends pretty much the entire fic in America. Canada and Shane’s relationship with it are more nebulous and theoretical to Ilya because it’s a much more remote force.
I think Ilya’s actually got the worst feelings around it in snapping birch, with the sochi outing au as a close second.
Shane’s fame and particularly his fame in Canada/in Montreal is a much more directly antagonizing force in snapping birch, at least in Ilya’s mind. Shane’s got a much more complicated view of it than Ilya. He genuinely loves Montreal. He genuinely wants to stay on the team. And Shane’s been fighting for that.
But Ilya has wanted Shane off that fucking team for months by the time the leak happens.
Ilya just wanted Shane out of the line of fire. That was his number one priority. He has been bodily fucking terrified of losing Shane this entire time. He knew why Shane didn’t want to leave and why he was fighting so hard but his priority has always been Shane’s survival. The Metros were trying to kill him, and so he wanted Shane off that fucking team.
Ottawa is the team that they settled on for the trade request. But I don’t think it would have been Ilya’s number one pick for a dream trade team for Shane.
Ottawa’s an untested element. They don’t know how the team’s going to treat him, and they don’t actually think it’s some happy safe land of the gays. They can’t negate the likelihood that the Metros just out him the first second he’s out from under their boot. They have no idea if Ottawa’s going to pan out any better for them. Ottawa was a gamble they decided to make.
They picked Ottawa because it was a failing team. Maybe management would agree to send Shane there as a sort of exile, so at least it would make the trade happen. And maybe it’s such a failing team that they decide they can’t afford to hate crime their best player and their only hope for a rebuild.
But if Ilya actually got to pick where Shane was going, I think he’d want him to go to the Admirals.
Ilya would have sent Shane off to be with Old Man Hunter in the land of rainbow capitalism in a fucking second. Scott Hunter kissed his boyfriend in front of the Stanley Cup and the New York Admirals made it a feature in the goddamn gift shop. Ilya wanted the reassurance that Shane wouldn’t be targeted wherever he went and the Admirals were the closest thing they’d get to a tested element. They didn’t hate crime the old dinosaur man when he hard launched his child bride. Shane should be safe.
I also just think Shane is very popular in New York City, which would add to his level of safety. Someone else pointed this out in a comment on one of my posts, and I cannot fucking find it again to give them credit, but one of y’all pointed out that Shane is likely very popular in cities with a large Asian diaspora like NYC, analogous to Jeremy Lin’s own popularity during Linsanity. I really agree with that analysis and I think Shane’s probably got preexisting fanbases in cities with large Asian communities. Shane already does numbers in NYC. It would make him even safer in Ilya’s eyes, because the Admirals’ management has already shown that they mostly just care about selling rainbow jerseys for $300 pre tax. Shane could sell so many goddamn jerseys for them. Do not hate crime his man.
Ilya just wants Shane to be safe so, so badly. He’s so sick of being afraid every time Shane’s on the ice. The New York Admirals offer the least risk, at least from an outsider’s review. Ilya would have had Shane on that team in a goddamn heartbeat.
Shane’s never getting a trade to the fucking admirals.
The Metros want to punish him. They’re not going to send him to the last fucking Stanley Cup champion team. Though, the fact that they’re recent champions means they have some very valuable players who they could trade in a somewhat equivalent exchange for Shane. I still think their desire to punish Shane would win out during the deliberations—if they were making smart business moves, they wouldn’t be hate criming their star player—but you could at least maybe sell a trade with the Admirals as a slightly better business decision to the public? People would still riot, don’t get me wrong, but it wouldn’t be as obvious of a one-sided trade as sending Shane to fucking Ottawa would be. They could say they were getting valuable players in return.
But I do think the public backlash to sending Shane to an American team would be extreme.
Shane’s the hockey prince of Canada. He grew up in front of the Canadian public. And not only did he just end the Canadian Cup drought, but he did it with back-to-back cups. Shane is a very well-established Canadian national hero at this point. He is Beloved. Sending him to an American team would be taken as an act of fucking treason.
And I think Shane feels a certain degree of duty and loyalty to Canada. He doesn’t want to play in America. He doesn’t want to be driven out of his own goddamn country by this. He wants to stay. Ilya does not share those same concerns.
The fact that Shane is so beloved by Canada has been hanging over Ilya as a very negative factor in the months leading up to snapping birch. Shane was refusing to leverage that love into a way to fight back against his team, so it didn’t give them any options that they could actually use. All it did was take options from them. They couldn’t try to get Shane a trade to an American team because he’s Canada’s most special boy and someone will call the prime minister himself to complain if they try to ship him off to the fucking States. Ilya had to be extremely careful when he flew up to see Shane because of the constant threat that one or both of them would be recognized. And Ilya didn’t want to be fucking careful in those moments. He was scared, and he was angry, and he wanted to be in the hospital room holding Shane’s hand and asking the doctor too-many questions about the tests they were running to make sure that Shane didn’t have untreated internal bleeding when his entire side ended up fucking purple. Ilya thinks of Shane’s relationship to Canada in snapping birch and thinks of all the ways it made this situation so much fucking harder to handle.
And now they’re in this devil’s deal where they have to exploit the public’s love for Shane—and especially Canada’s love for Shane—to get them both back on the fucking ice. But it’s when Shane has literally never been worse in his entire life. He is being fucking flayed alive right in front of Ilya’s eyes. It’s killing him to see it.
Ilya in snapping birch views Shane’s fame as one of the biggest sources of Shane’s pain. He is on a hairpin trigger for people being fucking weird about Shane right now and that’s. Everyone. He wants everyone to fuck off and leave them be. He’s never been less willing to view Shane’s relationship with fame and the Canadian public in any kind of positive light.
It’s a little better in the Sochi outing au. Ilya definitely has misgivings about it, but he’s first introduced to Shane’s relationship with Canada when it’s the biggest thing protecting Shane. Shane gets a lot of leeway with the Canadian delegation because no one wants to be the guy who got Shane Hollander killed on foreign soil. It’s only in the aftermath that Ilya starts to see more of the negative effects of Shane’s relationship with Canada. As a result, his view of it is more mixed.
