pretending that you're making it but are beholden to others and can't stray too far and abandon the source text completely, what adaptation changes would you make for a HR season 2? I like the ideas of splitting tlg in half, and expanding on the stuff mentioned in the epilogue of HR. But are there any other changes you would make? Things you would expand on or leave out/gloss over? Things that you would outright replace?
I mean, is this like a genie situation where I have a limited number of wishes? Because otherwise the answer is, "Yes, more changes than I could possibly count."
Even if I have to stick relatively close to the source material, yes. Rose is getting cut. Anya is getting cut. The kid wedding is getting cut. "That's why your my favorite son," cut. The trophy room scene is either getting cut or heavily changed.
It would take Ilya a long time to open up in therapy and he would end up realizing therapy isn't working for him, not because I happen to be personally against it, but because it doesn't even really work in canon (lol) and because everything related to his family and mom ends up being entirely irrelevant to the larger story. What's really making him miserable in tlg is being closeted, and so it doesn't really make any sense for therapy to help him. It would also explain why the therapy arc kind of just falls off in the middle.
I would also make Russia more relevant - yes, Ilya's thing would still be wanting to come out, but his resentment wouldn't be directed at Shane. It would be directed at his citizenship status and the NHL. Their boxing day fight would go very differently, without Ilya giving Shane the "Would you choose me over hockey" ultimatum. I'm not exactly sure how I would change it, but this would not be a story about Shane trapping Ilya in the closet. There'd be no epiphany scene between Shane and Yuna in which Shane realizes all the ways he took Ilya's ~sacrifices~ for granted, either.
The plane crash would actually make Ilya realize he's okay with staying in the closet, because he's just grateful to have Shane and all, and this would move Shane and make him decide to come up with a new plan to come out as soon as Ilya can become a citizen, and then (thereby, albeit hastily, making it so that it's not the plan crash that pushes Shane to propose, and Shane kind of gets to develop internally).
We'd see Shane coming out, we'd see more scenes of him with his team, we'd get at least one scene of what he looks like as a captain, and we'd get more scenes of him with JJ and Hayden. JJ would be angry that Shane didn't tell him about Ilya, but would not question him when he tripped. We would also see them make up. Everything with Hayden would go more or less the same way, except that Hayden would be framed a lot less empathetically, and Ilya and Shane would be allowed to absolutely lose their fucking shit on him. Obviously, if I'm staying true to the book more or less, they'd have to make up, but first they'd be allowed to lose their shit.
It would also be made clear that Shane's team is only accepting him on the surface, and over the course of the season we'd see their facade crack more and more, such that when they find out he's with Ilya and they act like they have a problem with Ilya specifically, we the viewers would understand no, it's because he's gay, and this has been brewing for a while. Them turning on him would also be much more explicit, and it would truly feel like Shane had to leave. When Shane refuses to give in to the commissioner, it would be after the fallout with his team, and it would be rage from them turning on him that develops him into someone who can basically say fuck you to the commissioner.
The outing would happen a lot earlier, to make room for processing the fall out for both of them - Ilya never being able to go home again, Shane losing his team. They'd process their grief, find comfort in each other, Shane would realize that between his legacy with the Metros and Ilya, it's Ilya every time, and at the first opportunity, they'd go to the cottage, and there Shane would propose to Ilya the same way Ilya once said he'd propose to Shane. As an epilogue, we'd still get the wedding, and it will have been made clear that Ilya obtained citizenship or sought asylum or something in the time since the outing first.
That's probably not even everything tbh.