anyway good morning a crucial tenet of hollanov’s relationship is that they’re equals and they’re the only people in the world who could ever be each other’s equal. they were supposed to stand alone at the top but they’re there together. shane does not view ilya as a lazy useless inconvenience. ilya does not view shane as a nagging killjoy. they are equals and they both think the other is the best thing since sliced bread and they love each other but more importantly they LIKE each other. stop making them not like each other!
like ilya spends his entire life being told (by people objectively shittier than he is) that he’s not good enough, he’s lazy, he’s undisciplined, he lets people down. and then he meets the one person who would actually be in a position to assess whether ilya is any of those things, and shane just earnestly looks into his fucking soul and says no, they were wrong. ‘you’re an awesome player to watch’ ‘i don’t know that side of you at all’ ‘this isn’t what this is. me and you’
and it’s such a fucking tragedy that people are trying to push MyIlya back into a setting where he’s constantly being lectured about his inadequacies by the very person that canonically reminds him all the time that those inadequacies were figments of his dad’s imagination
