let’s do that hockey

hr side blog

[inawordcold]

the whimsy would be so wonderful if The People imagined as much fun for svetlana as they do for that boston hockey player named marly. i think she calls people bro, too! and might be immortal. or messy. or whacky. she's got a skateboard i'm sure she doesn't know how to use but she feels like she can. confidence, feigned or otherwise, opens so many doors.

[forgotten80sfilm]

jane hollander and her unironic collection of carabiners vs. her girlfriend lilya rozanova insisting that makes her gay.

[inawordcold]

i also think a sapphic ilya and shane would be less willing to be open about their queerness than is imagined for these characters' female versions. the gender expectations are transgressed more in women's sport but they're also still enforced in a lot of ways. calling all female athletes dykes has frequently been a way to dismiss them by the larger audience. their relative non-femininity is always policed, in so many different ways.

it's a toss-up whether two people taking their game and themselves that seriously and with that much personal sacrifice would be more or less willing to open up another part of themselves for scrutiny.

[inawordcold]

the appeal to me of hollanova is that woman-shane and woman-ilya, in this era of women's hockey, have a kind of grittier devotion to the sport (diff in kind, if not diff in degree). they're waiting tables with busted lips and bruised ribs in order to support the thing that they love. they're barely making ends meet, they're careful with all their gear, they're hollowing out themselves on the regular to give and give and the wider world does not care. and it's ecstatic, painful ecstasy, to meet someone who cares as much and in the same way and is just as good and thinks about it just as much.

[mina-logan]

Jane + Lily ⭐️

[inawordcold]

based off this video, i'm thinking about the idea that creative and brilliant athletes run scenarios over and over in their heads, priming their minds to make a play and act and react quickly enough and creatively enough in the moment in order to beat an opponent. and using that for ilya and shane:

as the top players in the league, their mental creativity and imagined-plane is like a queering of the calculation of possibility in the game. they can imagine something other plays haven't or can't and they are muscled up and strong in the mind through this constant imagining. creating a way forward because they've pictured it a million times, every possible variation of getting out and winning, is the mental strength needed to also re-selve themselves in what only appears to be a restricted position with a limited number of options. they don't just recognize the winning option, they make it. and they're in love.

[inawordcold]

the tv show and books resolve mostly outside a sports-story-win. the story isn't about the sport. it's about the relationship. it's romance. i think fans wanting to read these romantic heroes as needing/wanting less competition is a reasonable take on the text, which uses the sport as a way to introduce tension to a romantic relationship and not as a way to explore the topic of the sport itself. obviously, introducing an element of sports-narrative or sports-realism into the story is a fun thing to do as a fan, but saying it's definitely an incorrect interpretation of the text to say that a character is not-that-competitive really or needs-to-learn-to-relax because "of course they wouldn't they're pro athletes" only works as an argument if we're supposing these characters are real and not substantively dependent on the form of their narrative. they're representations of athletes and their sport is a representation of a complex structure bringing them together or keeping them apart which makes for a narrative.

imagining them as characters in a different form is interesting, though. it opens up a lot of material to explore and adds dimensions to their love and relationship that otherwise might be set aside in service to a different kind of narrative. i just think you're not an idiot for reading a popular romance novel about two queer athletes in a restrictive setting as people who might not care as much about the sport they play--they're not real athletes. they're romance characters. that's their substance. i think it's a valid read of romance story to use the form structure to interpret them as less realistic than an actual pro-athlete. and i am speaking completely as someone who doesn't even like popular romance as a genre that much and would genuinely prefer this whole series got more of an espn flavor to it, as a matter of personal taste.

[mina-logan]

[inawordcold]

i think playing on the same team means shane and ilya are not showering after the game. shane saw a bead of sweat drop down ilya's temple and knew, in that moment, that ilya's body was his body. he couldn't let any part of it escape unconsumed. they have to work out the perfect gymnastics that allow each other to put their noses and mouths directly into the other's armpits. they are each other, simple as.

[inawordcold]

i like this video (and this youtube channel) a lot because of how tight the focus is on how to think about the game as a player. it really gives great insight if you're trying to put yourself in the head of imagined hockey players ilya rozanov and shane hollander. (it also links up a lot with how offensive playing works in many other sports, which is just neat.) this is how one can imagine ilya and shane's on-ice chemistry working both when they're opponents and when they're teammates. also, what an intimate relationship he's describing between offensive player and defensive player. metaphysical true love.

some parts that are fun to think of in a hollanov context:

"he's not married to one outcome here"

"the most advantageous ice is the ice with the least defenders, not the ice you decided to go to beforehand"

"it's an active communication"

"cascading set of an advantages"

"scouts are not looking for players who win one-on-ones in the same way every time"

"create a reactive response you can use"

"players can create an advantage not just recognize one"

"rebellious players...ignoring coach's negative restrictive advice"

the actual skills are not that hard, it's deciding how to use them

"visualize scenarios over and over"

"rewires your instinct so one-on-ones stop feeling chaotic"

"body queue recognition ability"

"speed at its core is a simple mind mechanic"

"react to their [the defender's] reaction" "let the defender tell you what to do"

[inawordcold]

going back and forth on whether svetlana actually likes hockey. like, does she just know it because she needed a way to connect to her father and her friend? is there a game that speaks better to her soul? is she profoundly devoted to it? does she just know it by osmosis? her confidence when she explained how the rest of that season would play out would suggest it's more than a passing familiarity from growing up around it. she thinks about it. but does it bring her joy? either way, i think she has a complex relationship to it, with its masculinity and her father and her father's position and her famous friend and the sport's nationalistic, frequently propagandistic, relevance in her father's country.

[inawordcold]

genuinely pour one out for svetlana growing up with a male-athlete father and a male-athlete best friend and knowing the sport they both play intimately but knowing her place in it would always be deeply unstable.

[inawordcold]

svetlana gets a girlfriend who's a wnba player and she brings her to a double-date with shane and ilya and shane and ilya are genuinely weirded out by this woman but they can't tell why (it's because they've never spent so much time with a bare-faced woman in public--also she's taller than both of them at very cute 6'4'' because she's a power forward with the best midrange stats in the league). anyway, beautiful bball player wins shane over by challenging him so thoroughly on his understanding of ball that she accidentally taps into his "there's something new to win at" hunger. she doesn't win over ilya because she doesn't think he's all that charming which he's a little offended about the whole lunch until they're leaving and he's realizing the last time he felt this stir of frustration was when some dork told him he was smoking in a non-smoking area. so he's dragging sveta aside to apologize for almost starting to lust after her woman and sveta is like "it's okay to lust after her. you are only human." shane doesn't overhear any part of this conversation, too busy grilling beautiful-bball-player about bball strategy books, but he did spend the whole lunch suspecting what was going on with ilya and adding That to his new "i must learn how to win this" personal task.

beautiful-bball-player doesn't particularly like sveta's friends shane-and-ilya, even if she respects the hell out of their game. this is the thing that tips sveta into full-neverending love with her. a week later they're getting couple tattoos.

[ilyahoellander]

my controversial hollanov take is that the two of them retire at exactly the same time. none of that ilya retires first to take care of the kids bs no sir. they retire at the same time. because both of them are just not interested in playing without the other to push them and the thought of doing long distance for even a week makes them start shaking crying screaming staring into the distance.

[inawordcold]

chewing on a thought that ilya was a part of the collective chorus and pressure around svetlana when she was turning 13 (a woman now) that discouraged svetlana from pursuing hockey because ilya, not a conscious sexist, unfortunately got his already existing women-are-fragile-beautiful-creatures-to-be-physically-protected strain emboldened by his mother's death and svetlana has always been enraged by this attitude but never felt like she could be properly angry about it given ilya's immense grief and troubling home life; so it's just been sitting there, quietly.

[inawordcold]

on the one hand: want to see svetlana play the hockey she seems so insightful about.

on the other hand: growing up with a famous hockey player father, probably constantly surrounded by the bitter oligarchs and bureaucrats of a post-soviet government, using big famous faces like athletes to promote stability and greatness again, like svetalana's father, where hockey is so clearly a tool: lotta baggage; so now i'm also picturing svetlana leaving russia behind fully, too, so she can continue her friendship with the publicly queer very famous russian man ilya, and embracing a new kind of sport, one without all that personal baggage, just to test herself. field hockey leads to soccer, which she's always really enjoyed for its fluidity, but then she goes to wnba game and she's hooked by the incisive style of play, the perfect swiftness of attack, the drive into bodies for a layup, the grace of a 24 ft three, and she's in it. this is game for a mind like hers. and when she plays at the park with shane, she dribbles over him and he falls on his face and breaks his nose and it's ironically the first time he's broken his nose despite the illustrious hockey career. sveta is extremely proud of this, shane is mildly put out but otherwise indifferent, and ilya laughs about it for five months straight. he's making a sandwich three weeks later and just tearing up in hysterics bc he randomly remembered shane's face plant.

then svetlana buys season passes for the golden state valkyries (i've decided she moves to california) and one of them recognizes her (a real hockey head, little nuts) and sveta gets to be reintroduced to loving the sport she knows so so well.

[inawordcold]

maybe there was a point in their childhood, when svetlana was pressured off the ice and ilya was really getting into his special proto-superstar training, when svetlana has not been able to get stronger and ilya has, and ilya just keeps beating sveta in a one-on-one game, and ilya doesn't remember this moment but svetlana swallowed the exact feeling of that surprise humiliation and kept it like a little gem in her chest and it's fueled her studying and her emotional distance and her devotion and her sports-intelligence and she can't tell ilya about it ever because that would be more humiliating, like: "the moment i realized you, one of the most elite hockey players in existence, were better at hockey than me broke my heart in half and it still hurts", embarrassing. but she does confess this to shane after he and ilya have been outed and by the logic of racialized misogyny/homophobia shane is getting a real sharp edge of the hate.

"i know what it's like," she says to him.

and he's like "what the fuck you do not."

and she spills her little gem of a flame and then she starts screaming about how lucky he is that he gets to beat ilya anyway! he gets to beat all the best hockey players in the world! and shane is like "oh okay i know what this is" and then he's taking her on the ice in private because sveta is still bitterly embarrassed about ilya seeing her fail at this but shane gets it, a little bit. he's hard and cold and strict and perfect as a trainer and it feels like being taken seriously.

ilya asks what they do when they're hanging out and shane reads off a card sveta game him: "making amends for forgetting my male privilege."

anyway, at some point sveta is able to unclench a little and get on the ice with ilya again. and they reaffirm their friendship in sight of the frozen hockey gods. and ilya also makes amends for forgetting his male privilege.