idk if this is quite what you were thinking w genderqueer ilya thoughts but i think one of the more interesting things about ilya (kind of buried under all the angst and hockey and stoicism of "i am fine fuck off") is that he's technically been wearing a woman's necklace from the moment we first met him. and to me the things he keeps from his mother don't actually stay static
at first it's very simple. grief logic. he keeps her necklace, he keeps small objects of hers, he doesn't think of it in terms of identity or gender or meaning. it's just continuity. it existed, she existed, i miss her so much it rearranges my lungs, therefore it stays.
but then it starts to expand in a way that doesn't feel as clean....
he likes the scarves she used to wear in her hair. and instead of putting them away as keepsakes, he starts wearing them, like around his wrist, tucked into his belt, sometimes just because his hand reaches for something and it happens to be there. and it stops being only "this reminds me of her" and becomes "this belongs on my body"
and then it branches out beyond her entirely. he gets his ears pierced. not as a statement, not as a reinvention arc, just because at some point he realizes he can, because there is space now, geographic and emotional and social, that doesn't automatically punish small deviations from sanctioned masculinity. grief gave him access to objects. exile gave him access to possibility. and his body just quietly stops respecting the old rules about what it's allowed to become. if that makes sense
and i think the childhood piece matters here too. he remembers picking out earrings with his mother before events, helping her tie her dress, matching the shoes. he spent his teenage years around svetlana and sasha. he was intrinsically invited into those spaces young, and i think that bleeds into his adult life once he's no longer living on red alert. in ottawa, secure, finally safe, married, an organism that's been on high alert for decades is allowed to put things down. so yeah. he likes tennis bracelets and diamond earrings and soft leather gloves with fur trim like his mother wore
the post-soviet context matters here more than it gets credit for imo. soviet masculinity wasn't just social pressure, it was structural. and then the state stopped existing six months after ilya was born, which means the men who raised him were performing those rules on inertia, with nothing left to enforce them. hockey adds another layer on top of that. two systems, stacked, pointing the same direction. the miracle isn't that he eventually wears the earrings. it's that the impulse survived long enough to meet the permission
and what i find most interesting is that the cross gave him the grammar for all of it without him knowing. it was the first thing his body just kept without asking whether it was allowed. and that taught him something: some things aren't punished. they're just outside the frame. unthinkable rather than forbidden. the scarves have less cover, there's no grief logic that requires him to wear them rather than fold them in a drawer, but by then his hands have learned to reach for things and keep them
not an arc. not a label. just a man who slowly stops respecting a border he never agreed to, in increments small enough that it never becomes an announcement. in a body that got very good, very young, at doing things without making them into events. this feels very ilya to me
Hi sorry it took me so long to answer this but this is genuinely fucking beautiful to me. Legitimately. I’m not sure I even have the words for it so I’m going to let this ask speak for itself, I hope you don’t mind <3
jbbartram-illu
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