Ive reached a new level of "Midwestern" and will be attending corn fest in about 2 hours.
Unironically there was a week last year where i insatiably craved corn on the cob and made buttered ears of corn at midnight for like 4 days. Corn has like no nutritional value, I craved connection with my roots.
You are now officially missing out on the funniest and most fun m/m romcom with plot, stakes, and a happy ending.
READ JOHN RICH & THE BIG PICTURE
by Ngozi Ukazu
I am the New York Times bestselling author of check please
You will laugh. Guaranteed. No one has not laughed.
You like m/m romance. You like pining. You like complex, fun, three dimensional characters. You like knowing about things years before #BookTok.
Free website that's easy to use!
Just fun!
More about it under the cut:
John Rich & The Big Picture is a very funny story about a very anxious man hurtling towards his soulmate at 200 mph.
At 28, John Rich is the youngest cover artist in the illustrious history of The New York Review. This means, every week, he draws a portrait of some notable person and this portrait becomes the cover of this very prestigious magazine. But when John is tasked with drawing the supposedly vapid (and obviously gorgeous) action movie star, Tyler Hughes, he discovers that Tyler is the one person he cannot draw.
Idiot enemies to idiot best friends to idiot lovers
Grumpy (he's anxious and an arrogant bitch)/Sunshine (he's actually just a people pleaser and class clown)
PINING!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Slow burn with "fuck yeah" payoff moments 😭🙏❤️
PLOT & WORLDBUILDING. aka other STUFF HAPPENS!
They have to work together
The purest nerd/jock romance ever, like we squeezed thousands of nerd/jock fruit for single drop of nerd/jock essence
So when I say Shane isn't a good person really I don't mean that he's like. Bad. Or malicious or evil. I just see so many fics that write him as this weird paragon of perpetual virtue, almost saintlike, where he's impossibly kind and an activist and sweet to Ilya like a little kitten and caring of his friends and I'm just sitting here thining....no??
Shane's canonically kind of a selfish guy! Not in a terrible way, he just doesn't really care about stuff outside of his direct sphere. He only gets into philanthropy when there's a direct benefit to him (laundering his relationship). He loves his friends but he's not super caring of them or all that invested in their lives (forgetting Hayden's baby's name is peak). Some of that is he's too wrapped up in his own shit and his secrets but I think a lot of it is just his personality. Shane's not selfish to the degree of it being a personality flaw (see: Shane giving up a day with Ilya to babysit Hayden's kids. I wouldn't have) but he's more selfish than selfless.
We don't hear about him sending signed pucks to sick kids or doing charity with the Voyageurs or that sort of thing. Maybe he's doing it in the background idk. Most likely he's got some assistant in charge of it. But that's not something he spends a lot of mental energy on.
He's not rude or cruel to people, but internally he's a bit judgemental. He sells himself pretty ruthlessly. He’s wealthier than anyone on this website can even comprehend. He’s a landlord.
To get to three cups in a decade Shane’s also got to be very locked in as captain. Like Theriault is this fandom villain (fair) but it just doesn’t make sense to have Shane constantly clashing with him and the Voyageurs and still winning over and over. We see Shane let homophobic comments slide in the locker room and I have to assume that’s his general approach to dealing with things in Montreal. Winning comes first.
I’ve said a million times I love Shane. I’m obviously obsessed with him, look at my many posts. But I just think he’s a grittier and more interesting than the fandom gives him credit for, they just turn him into like the anxious nagging wife who tells Ilya to pick up his socks and is Team Mom.
Hudson imbued Shane with a lot of gentleness, and the series centring the romance means we see a lot less of Shane when he isn't Ilyamaxxing but book!Shane is incredibly cutthroat. He's impatient, he might not ~showboat~ as much as Ilya does (and he judges him for it constantly) but he's just as much of an attention whore. He isn't just admired because he's Shane Motherfucking Hollander; he's genuinely a bro, he's inaccessible because of his routine and his diet (which gives him major 'you can't sit with us' vibes that he does precious little to counteract, both because he's too wrapped up in his Everything to notice, and he wouldn't care enough if he did).
He's the ice queen, not Ilya. As far as the league, and even his team, is concerned, all routes to Shane Hollander are through excellence, proximity, or work. Ilya and Scott Hunter get the time of day because they're good. Hayden is his friend and Assistant Captain. JJ is a teammate and is sort of the glue of the Voyagers. Rookies get Captain Hollander because he's responsible for them. That's all.
There is no 'Holzy'. His team feels a proximity to him because he's an indelible part of their careers. They're barely a footnote in his, and they know it. Shane does too; he does try to make their success about the team but even when he's thinking of his dynasty and the camaraderie of the locker room in TLG he's thinking of it as a transaction, as loyalty that is owed to him rather than relationships he can trust. Things imploding the way they do in TLG is predicated upon this power imbalance, and that's why the Centaurs are such a good foil.
I really like you pointing out how distant and inaccessible Shane is. He lives alone immediately, which is very unusual in hockey, being housed by older players during your rookie contract is almost seen as a guardianship or part of your training. The older players teach the younger guys how to sleep properly and cook good meals and such. Shane doesn't need any of that, he's already locked in. And he's very aware of the distance his talent and routines and diets creates between him and his teammates:
"all routes to Shane Hollander are through excellence, proximity, or work"
Yeah, exactly. Shane is so transactional---he thinks about his diet and routines as input / output. He doesn't eat red meat so that he skates better. He doesn't drink so that his muscle control is tighter. He's obviously an endorsement whore---and in the book it's HIM doing this, not his mom. He wants to be THE Shane Hollander, hockey phenom, and he sees this as a thing he can buy with his effort, his restriction, his repression, and his body. He didn't trip his way into being the greatest of all time, he planned it, piece by piece, and worked his ass off:
And yeah as to the friendships with Hayden and JJ, man. I don't know. I really feel like Ilya is the only person on the planet who gets Shane's platonic intimacy until very late into TLG, when Shane has a sweet moment with JJ. But like even his TLG convos with Hayden are very stilted. Shane makes a super rare vulnerability bid by admitting how he's thought about how tough it would be for him and Ilya to have kids and it flies right over Hayden's head.
These guys are friends because Hayden's his winger and because Hayden doesn't have much of a hockey ego and doesn't get insecure around Shane. That's what's happening there.
People adding in nicknames for Hollander is always funny to me because it feels very deliberate that they don't exist in the book. I think the fans call him all sorts of things, but I don't think a single person in that locker room is calling Shane Hollander by a nickname.
Honestly I think this is a hard thing for people to think about with a character which is why depictions of Shane file it away. Most of us have never had the experience of being the most important person in the room, the once without whom the room would not even exist. But that's Shane's day to day. Ilya (and Hunter, on the outside) are pretty much the only equals he ever interacts with. Everyone else is buying his time in various ways.
clark kent ticking the organ donor box on his drivers license automatically out of the goodness of his heart and then panicking because what if he actually dies somehow and some human gets a super heart what would even HAPPEN like he can't have his kryptonian retinas with laser vision donated to a random eight year old and so he has to awkwardly go back to the DMV to get it changed to not an organ donor but he's so embarrassed the whole time because the DMV employees will think he's a bad person that by the time he's done he has to go cry in the car
plot twist he's so clearly distressed and sad about doing this that the dmv folks just quietly assume he must have received some kind of awful medical diagnosis that makes him ineligible to donate and the first clerk that helped him immediately takes a smoke break and sees him crying in the car and that's how Clark gets at least 3 rock solid anonymous sources at the dmv and a free off-brand coke from the break room fridge.
i feel like shane would wait and think SO hard and extensively about new things he wanted to try because he would want to fully explore it from all angles in his head before he committed to saying it to ilya
but also he would then want to drop it at a time in which ilya would then not be able to discuss it with him fully in that moment because it already took working up to saying it so he would need a cool-down period before he was ready to actually Talk About It (and, to him, it's polite to give ilya a good reason to wait before he has to return with his opinion about it!! he's being nice!! ilya has a built-in excuse for the delay in having to give an answer!! shane would appreciate that if the roles were reversed!!)
with the end result that poor ilya just gets fucking. guerilla warfared with kink exploration ideas.
man is about to go to a dentist appointment and shane kisses him at the door, goes "also, what would you think about fucking me but gagged and blindfolded? just something to have on your radar. i don't need an answer right now. okay, bye." and shuts the door and ilya is just. what. the fuck was that.
a game's about to start and shane's like "you know how we get three days off for Christmas? what if I was naked running through the woods and then you chased me and caught me and fucked me" and then Ilya has to give a little pre-game captain speech and act like he's not about to ask Shane a million questions
shane, completely unbothered now that he's checked off the "tell ilya what I'm thinking about" task on his to-do list today and is now ready to focus on the game: :)
ilya, has taken critical damage psychologically, 50/50 on if he's having a stroke: we-winning is-we are going out there-and fucking- not FUCKING fucking, but we are-
the team picks up strange energy between them during practice one day even though they played fine and think they're having a fight or something, but the truth is that shane had an early meeting about a sponsorship and left typed, annotated notes about his research on consensual non-consent next to the coffee maker for ilya's convenience with a sticky note going "sound interesting? Y/N?" and now ilya just has to Act Normal About It
#i love the idea of shane reinventing kinks with his own beautiful mind #but this is the man who hires a professional for EVERYTHING to make sure he's doing it right #so i posit that this man does RESEARCH before he brings things up #but also just assumes that of course ilya would know about it to the same degree #ilya has had All The Sex Ever #so poor ilya is just getting flashbanged by Professor Fuck Me NASTY over here and having to pokerface his way through it
(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy
One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable
"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."
everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing
post cancelled I've been told the term i used already exists in english and that it means something Very Much Different. english is a wicked language that i regret learning
now i don’t know enough about omegaverse to say anything definitively but from what i have seen it certainly looks like it emulates insects much more than wolves.
please eat enough and drink enough water and get enough sleep. this is so that you have enough energy. because we need you to be writing and drawing porn on the internet
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