yes alexei is so chewy have you considered: https://www.tumblr.com/unmooredonasundayevening/823340115193675776/its-a-common-headcanon-that-alexeis-daughter-is?source=share
"And so when he hears his niece's name for the first time it's a bit of a shock to him because obviously yeah she was Alexei's mother too but maybe on a subconscious level Ilya believed her memory belonged more to him than to his brother."
I DO think Ilya is guilty of this. If someone told me they thought Ilya and Alexei were only half-brothers, I would not blame them, because there is like zero narrative overlap between Alexei and his mother. It's all Ilya-Irina-Grigori-Ilya. We don't even see Alexei on screen with Grigori, only vaguely alluded to in convos with Ilya. Granted, it's not like there's a lot of storytelling real estate to work with, but still! The narrative itself almost treats Alexei like he's not also Irina's son, and approx. half the narrative is filtered through Ilya's perspective (the other half being Shane's and he'd probably gladly not think of Alexei as his in-law even).
On a separate note: I headcanon his daughter's name as Alina personally! It seems to have been a really popular girl's name around the time she'd have been born, and it's almost like a combination of her father and grandmother's names without being too obvious.
Hello yes can I share my agenda with you? https://www.tumblr.com/unmooredonasundayevening/823381284552376321/i-wonder-if-sasha-and-svetlana-have-both-looked-at?source=share
I think that's definitely an interesting reading of the trio! Sergei certainly seems fond of Ilya despite the humiliation by Latvia, and I can't imagine Ilya would have done so well if his coach, Sasha's father, didn't like him at least a little. Also, just such a common sensation - the friend or cousin or whoever that you suspect your parents want you to be like - as well as a great irony, considering Ilya's dynamic with Grigori.
Thinking about the Ilya/Alexei/Alexei's unnamed daughter dynamic. Turning it around in my brain. Ilya's really just watching the cycle of trauma repeat itself before his eyes but he is geographically so far removed from the situation and emotionally so unequipped to handle it all he can really do is throw money at the problem.
Oh I have definitely thought about how geographically removed Ilya is from the situation back home. As well as the sheer social constraints on his input.
(long post below the cut)
Tbh I'm not super knowledgeable on Russian norms around childrearing (I know in some cultures it is way more normalized for other adults even outside extended family to discipline children), but Alexei doesn't strike as someone who is at all receptive to Ilya telling him shit what to do with his kid. Ilya may hold the purse strings (technically) in the family since Grigori retired, but he's younger than Alexei, lives abroad most of the year, and doesn't have any children of his own to speak from experience. Unfortunately, I think Ilya would be very much stuck not being able to say a word even if he saw Alexis blatantly fucking up as a parent right before his eyes. (Probably not outright physical abuse (save for spanking, which is still very normalized in a lot of households)? But there's a range of ways a parent can fuck up without lifting a finger against their child.)
But it's also hard to tell what type of patterns Alexei is repeating without venturing into pure speculation / fanfic. I get the sense from canon that already his family dynamic with his wife and child can't be an exact mirror of what he grew up with, because, well, Grigori by all appearances never dealt with substance abuse issues and didn't have to rely on a relative to bankroll his lifestyle (when the boys were young). We get the sense Grigori was oppressive but never that the family lacked for anything material under his control. We don't even know for certain whether Grigori was ever physically abusive with either Irina or their sons. It well could have been purely verbal/psychological/financial. Alexei may be much nicer overall to his daughter for all we know, but one thing we do know is that the stability of his household basically relies on Ilya. Alexei is scared when Grigori dies for some reason.
We have next to nothing on what his wife is contributing to this dynamic. The show seems to imply Alexei's marriage was a gunshot situation? So he and his wife may be in a pragmatic arrangement, like Grigori and Irina, at least.
The thought that Alexei and his wife are actually nice and sweet with their daughter is the more bitter idea to me. Because then it's a matter of Alexei thinking he's doing much better, because he doesn't yell at his daughter or hit her or do whatever the hell Grigori was doing, and maybe he and his wife are in a loving relationship, just their timeline sped-up by a contraceptive mishap. But Alexei is unstable, and his instability may end up as damaging to his beloved child in the long-run as what he and Ilya experienced with Grigori. (It might even verge on similar experiences with Irina...)
And the idea that each generation thinks they're doing well because at least they're not giving their child the same upbring as they had is also something I've toyed with wrt Grigori.
Heated Rivalry as a "period piece" is so interesting. On the queer storytelling side of things, many people have pointed out gay marriage was only legal in Canada a few years before Shane and Ilya met, and then it wasn't legal in the US until 2015, and then you have the politics of Sochi and Putin's anti-LGBTQ crackdowns in-between. The fact that Shane and Ilya are Millennials (and hockey players) is important to understanding their story.
With regard to Grigori, even just guesstimating his age, I think there's something to him probably being born in Stalinist Russia, either during or directly after WWII, which was incredibly brutal for the people of Eastern Europe to put it mildly. It would not be out of place to conjecture Grigori grew up with traumatized parents at a minimum. Throw in the fact many modern medicines like the polio vaccine weren't widely available until he was an adult and the threat of Nuclear Armageddon hanging over his military career during the Cold War, and I think you get a guy who maybe thinks the fact his sons are well-fed, educated, and successful in prestigious and socially recognized jobs (pro athlete at the highest possible level and police officer) is him doing a good job in his patriarchal role as Father.
And also, circling back to Alexei's daughter, if he really is doing his best by her, it kinda makes the possibility that she's going to grow up with Alexei's prejudices more tragic? Like, it's so easy to write off his influence entirely if he's just a bad or abusive father. You might even hope that him being awful would somehow make her rebellious toward Alexei's implied views or incline her to her estranged uncle's perspective. But if Alexei is a good or even just okay dad, it makes it so much harder for someone like Ilya (perhaps especially Ilya) or anyone really to ever try telling her "your parent who you love holds flawed beliefs about X" without immediately triggering defensiveness. Ilya probably loves his niece, but there's a good chance she is going to grow up to hate him for personal and perhaps even ideological reasons.
Shane shortly before waking Ilya up at the cottage: ‘Hmmmmm, I can’t trap him with a baby. wait let me google……okay i definitely can’t get pregnant. Hold on…..sea-horse dads?…..nevermind…..can i adopt a baby-trap?…………no I’d just have a kid……………………okay wait what if we like coached some kids? Like they wouldn’t be ours but like- we wouldn’t be able to break-up because of the kids. Am i fucking on drugs? What the fuck am i thinking……..wait………..like a team of kids but it’s like charity…………cause men leave their children all the time but it would be a really bad look leave a charity……………….i can make a charity and it’ll have kids and we’ll help the kids……..and Ilya likes kids…………and he likes me………..and he’ll wanna stay with me forever….so he’ll be baby trapped AND we’ll be doing a good thing.* “Ilya wake up i have an idea.”
As someone who's been in Ilya's niece's position, in fact I still am; one thing I'm certain about is that she'd hate Ilya's guts. There's so much complication that comes with knowing that your rich and capable uncle just isn't here, as your grandfather wastes away, as your father bears the brunt of it. It's ridiculously easy to forget the sins of a sick man. It's not that clear-cut and dry, but more often than not it feels like it. It's easier to think in black and white, to villainize your uncle for trying to lighten a mood that you've been suffocating under the weight of for years, when all he does is dip in every once in a while, distinctly more American each time, takes a little bit of the load off before you're being crushed under it all over again. I imagine it's not much better with Alexei's likely berating of his brother, and the fact that Ilya's Niece is likely to be surrounded by this environment 24/7. She wouldn't be mad at Ilya for betraying her at all. It's more likely that she'd hate him blindly until she sits down and thinks about it, and it's less and less rational even in her own head, how she perceives him. Personally, I took to seeing my uncle as an outsider, regarded with ample mistrust and irritation. It wasn't fair, but it wasn't like he was going to be there very long at all for me to suffer the consequences. It would get even more annoying when he'd offer to take me with him, 'respite' cleverly twisted to sound like 'vacation'. Also, man, accepting any sort of gift felt like receiving charity. Even if your father is a piece of shit, in times like that it's easy to write it off as stress. I bore witness to several times my father deliberately held information back from his brother, definitely about their father's condition. I know that at those times I felt vindicated more than anything.
tl;dr, Ilya's niece and her uncle's dynamic would be fraught and complex. I've always thought that, if anything, if they ever met again outside of Russia, it'd be so she could throw the trust fund in his face. She wouldn't hate him for being queer (might be my own perception of reality marred by me projecting on her, and headcanoning her as queer herself), or for defecting, really, but I doubt she'd grow out of the mindset of the little girl who loved her dad watching as he crumbles under the pressure of taking care of his dying father while her uncle just isn't there-- except to throw money at them, of course.
The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is, to a modern audiences, what classicists have called “boring as hell,” but I can’t help but think that if you were watching Homer recite it it would have been more like when comedians go, “anybody here tonight from Chicago?” and the Chicagoans in the back start cheering
Homer’s like, “and there were forty black ships from… LOCRIS” and the Locrians in the crowd start going absolutely nuts
Whenever I see someone refer to "Victorian era-" for places outside the UK I'm tempted to start saying shit like "Han Dynasty era Rome", "Soviet era Australia" etc
Okay yes we laugh and joke about Ilya never winning an argument in that marriage, but we have proof IN THE SHOW that Shane will not stay mad at him for ANYTHING.
Shane got ghosted for 6 months and after yelling at him for 20 seconds folded under NO PRESSURE and was giggling and cheesing when Ilya came near him. STAND UP
in modern day it's very easy to look at batman and be like "WHAT was this guy doing. Insane choice. You do NOT have to fight crime this way" but then you learn literally anything about the US in 1900-1939 and you're like "oh a batman terrifying people would have actually for real improved the situation"
my misfortune is that I do think Grigori and Alexei can be very chewy characters if employed as more than one-dimensional antagonists in Ilya's life story
so I end up thinking about stuff like Grigori probably fully expected Irina to outlive him by many many years, maybe even to remarry after his death
He would have been born somewhere in the 1940s, sure life expectancy improved over the years, but in Grigori's experience it would not have been all that unusual for a man in his 60s to pass away of natural causes
Grigori was close to 50 when his sons were born. He might not have thought he'd live to see his grandchildren. I don't think it ever occurred to him that Irina, decades his junior, wouldn't ever see her grandchildren.
It’s so tragic that half man is one of the best shows in modern memory but recommending it to someone means you have to explain what it’s about. I don’t want to do that.
I resent the fact that Ilya is obviously an Ovechkin stand in and so many fanfic authors really just write him as like always obviously behind Shane when I really think the point isn't that one or the other is the best, but they are in a constant push-pull for who's best. And Ovechkin is like the only player who ever score more than 900 goals over his career so Ilyas character is clearly not meant to be That Dude Who's Obviously the Worse of the Two at Hockey
