so i have settled on my shane/ilya/sveta poly throuple strategy.
it goes like this: by the time of his father’s funeral & just pre-cottage, ilya knows that he loves & wants them both, but truly does not believe that is “allowed.” regardless, he knows Shane wouldn’t go for it. and also that sveta breaks out in hives at the idea of being A Wife anyway. in his mind, it is not really a choice—not between shane or sveta anyway—because sveta is allergic to monogamy that isn’t serial, and ilya has confidence that in sveta’s case at least, he doesn’t need to give good dick to keep her in his life. (🥹)
so at the cottage, ilya takes two important steps: 1) he explains to shane who sveta really is in his life—his best friend, his family 2) he calls sveta (with shane’s permission) to tell her about jane/shane (she already guessed) and that he’s a taken man now (she always knew this day would come).
ilya did NOT know this day would come, due to self-esteem issues and because prior to now it has always been sveta’s decision whether they were fucking or not at any given time.
then sveta suggests that shane really needs to train with a specific skills coach in boston that summer, actually. before he knows it, shane is in boston getting fucked & cuddled & adored by ilya every night and wooed into friendship by svetlana most days. and ilya is so happy he feels like he could explode with joy. shane & sveta get papped together and there are rumors that they are dating but they never confirm or deny. they let people think what they want. the rumors aid the new narrative about hollanov becoming friends through a mutual friend. and shane gets to have his first queer friend he’s not fucking. (🥹)
years pass. hollanov get married. shane joins the centaurs. sveta starts working for the bears but visits her boys as often as she can. she becomes a familiar face at the centaurs training facility, bood’s barbecues, and monk’s. the boys make jokes about how she should be added to the wags chat because “the beautiful lady centaurs and harris deserve it.” sveta refuses on principle but a new “sveta’s canadian fan club” chat is created, which includes centaurs, centaur wags, some centaurs staff, and a stray voyageur or two. people in this chat are blessed with very embarrassing stories about ilya’s youth and also incisive vetrova hockey commentary.
then, the centaurs’ head of analytics retires and coach weibe pounces on the opportunity to poach svetlana from the bears front office. naturally, sveta stays with shane and ilya while she settles in and looks for a place. somewhere in here, some homoflexible group sex occurs involving shane’s taste for exhibitionism, sveta’s dominant tendencies, and ilya’s desire to be Of Service. shane is secure enough now in his relationship with ilya to be curious about sveta & ilya’s previous sexual shenanigans. he is shocked to be . . . not jealous hearing about their fumbling teenage first time, forays into pegging and light femdom, and how they used to pick up girls & boys together at the club. well. actually, shane is jealous of those anonymous people who got to be the meat in a hot russian sandwich before him.
there is also a lot of domesticity. shane & sveta do yoga together when she’s home. anya has fewer stays at the dog hotel because auntie sveta can dog sit during most road trips. sometimes sveta & ilya go out clubbing together—much to shane’s relief because he gets to have quiet nights alone to read his boring hockey books in peace without the guilt of feeling like he’s keeping ilya from having the kind of fun that shane hates. sveta goes away on scouting trips fairly often so keeps not getting around to finding her own apartment, but eventually she does start to look for a place in earnest. shane spirals for awhile before realizing that he really, really doesn’t want sveta to move out. he loves the little rituals & rhythms the three of them have accidentally created as a group and in various configurations thereof. it’s possible he’s learned about the concept of queerplatonic relationships by now. not that this situation is entirely platonic. he’s not sure if it’s because sveta & ilya are kind of like incestuous twins or what, but when they all have sex together it’s hot not in spite of svetlana’s presence but because of it. shane still identifies as gay, but is starting to think that maybe he’s like a 5.5 on the kinsey scale actually, and the real reason all of his previous attempts at sleeping with women failed so spectacularly was that they were expecting him to be straight—shane was pretending to not be queer before, but he doesn’t have to do that with sveta. he’s not sure if he would ever want to hook up with her without ilya there, but he thinks that ilya and svetlana could fuck without him and that would be ok as long as there are boundaries & clear communication. shane may be freakier than ilya but ilya has a higher sex drive. so does sveta judging by the number of nights she goes home with some woman or other. (“date night!” sveta texts to their household group chat. “for you two, i mean. one-night-stand night for me. have fun, boys! ))))
so shane makes a power point presentation on why svetlana should stay and keep building a life with him & ilya. he’s been reading about ethical non-monogamy. rules! shane loves rules & clear statements & agreements. once he’s sure that ilya & sveta are getting on board, shane sends them both links to reading material. (“hollander, what is this? i thought throuple would mean a lot more sex but so far it’s mostly homework!” “shut up, ilyusha. do not worry, sweet shanya. i will read your books.” “i will read them too—i will read them even better than you. i will take notes, use yellow marker pens, and umm sticky notes—how you say?—post-its. yes, i will be best student.”)
other things will happen! polyamory will be a more difficult thing for yuna & david to comprehend & accept than their son being gay or gay for ilya rozanov. (luckily, they will already love svetlana by this point, however.) some shippers online will definitely suspect the truth but no one actually believes them. very slowly, hollanovetrova will let more people into their circle of trust, but svetlana notably does not tell the women she sleeps with on the road because she has to protect their secret from the public. (“oh the irony that you are our big heterosexual secret, sveta.” “how can we have a heterosexual secret if none of us are straight?” “yes, thank you, professor hollander, for the correction. i meant our big bisexual secret. the elephant vagina in the room. whatever.” “you’re an idiot. but you did use the word ironic correctly, so. gold star for rozanov.”) sveta is less bothered by being a secret than shane & ilya are about it, or at least thst’s what she tells everyone including herself. until she develops a real, undeniable crush on the star forward for ottawa’s pwhl team. (“our sveta is hockey-sexual!” ilya crows. “maybe you are too, shane. this is why you both love me—i am best hockey player in the world.”) but sveta can’t actual date someone if she’s lying to them. dun dun dun dun! there will probably be an accidental pregnancy to thicken the plot.
ugh. now i have to write this in actual narrative prose. bah!
i have already rewritten ilya’s russian phone monologue from episode 5 tho:
. . . I have no one now.
Well, not no one. I have Svetlana. She loves me. And I love her.
But Sveta—she cannot love me the way we are supposed to. She will never settle down.
That is okay. Even if we do not fuck any more, Sveta will not leave me.
I want both of you. But that is not allowed. Not if it is for real.
I am not allowed to love you at all. But I do. I’m so in love with you, and I don't know what to do about it.
In the background of the video clip, posted by a fan at the hotel breakfast just before Christmas 2018, Shane Hollander is talking on the phone. He looks tired but he's smiling, pushing scrambled eggs around his plate with a fork. "I saw, baby," he says. "No, definitely, no way that was slashing, I'm with you. You'll get them next time, though. Beautiful goal you got in the first, that was so fucking sexy. I can't wait to see you tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Love you."
Which leads to a bit of an uproar because omg Shane Hollander has a girlfriend?? who plays hockey???? that's so on brand for him like. okay who was playing last night and got a goal in the first period, we need to find the woman who has Shane Hollander crooning into his phone like a lovestruck teenager. and the consensus lands on an unsuspecting and entirely unrelated CWHL forward who has never even been in the same city as Shane but the Internet is running with the story and there's journalists harassing her and Shane has to get his agent to call her agent so he can apologise for this mess and she's like, dude, I know it's not your fault, but Shane feels so fucking bad about it, you know?
And unfortunately it doesn't really let up as quickly as they thought because it's right before Christmas and isn't this a great story, fucking Hallmark movie shit, so a very unimpressed Leila (her name is Leila) has to look a reporter in the eye after her team just played a really good fucking game of hockey and everybody wants to talk to her about some fucking guy, you know? so she looks him in the eye and says, no, I am not dating Shane Hollander, I have never dated Shane Hollander, I will never date Shane Hollander, I am literally a lesbian. I have a whole-ass girlfriend. She plays for the Blades.
And Shane Hollander is so consumed by jealousy he almost chokes.
Image sequence created at 24fps. Processed with Starstax mode: lighten (comet mode)- save after each step. New image sequence reassembled at .01 seconds per frame and aligned with original scene audio.
genderqueer!Ilya is a wonderful playground to me because I get to Reconcile being a guy while also really enjoying ‘feminine’ clothing and makeup (none of that shit is actually gendered but we’ve got a long way to go) and I know there’s a lot of other people who feel that way too, or who get joy from transmasc Shane. I just think Ilya should get to wear Sparkly stuff and feel pretty and for it to not actually really mean anything to him. I don’t think he thinks about it too deeply, he just knows he feels joy when another queer person calls him she and ‘girlll’ and he can feel included in a community he was forcibly disconnected from for so long. Idk I just love him so much I’m getting emotional
I think the first time Hollanov watch brokeback mountain (Harris has been getting on their ass about it) they have to stop it halfway through because it’s too painful and relatable.
They don’t talk about it, but they just go to bed and hold each other for hours, talking about small things, things that don’t matter. They don’t need to address the elephant, they know it too well, and they know each other. Just lying there breathing each other’s air is enough.
i think a part of ilya truly believes that when god created shane god took one of shane’s ribs and used that to create ilya. sometimes when theyre laying in bed together after having mind blowing sex or whatever ilya catches himself feeling around shane’s ribs like he’s trying to find the gap
@fruitbatman holy shit i love your tags???? they are wonderful and beautiful and so very precious to me <3
yk how people are always saying that ilya stretches out shane’s shirts because he’s always putting his whole upper body under them while shane is still wearing them? ilya does that because he’s trying to burrow his way back to His Spot
I do think it must be suuuuuch a journey for Shane "sex with women is supposed to be an endurance event" Hollander and Ilya "I started having sex at 14 with anyone and everyone" Rozanov to learn what healthy sexual boundaries are
Nothing takes me out more than Ilya OR Shane being insta-trained on healthy BDSM like these guys barely understand what they've done to themselves let alone to each other
Nothing has ever (or will ever again) make me feel the way SKAM made me feel in 2016.
Maybe it’s because I was a 16-17 year old teenager watching other teenagers my own age go through daily struggles such as sexual harassment, sexuality crisis, loneliness, and depression, making me feel less alone with my own problems.
Maybe it’s the way the show is formatted, feeling the dopamine rush every time a new clip dropped instead of completely bingeing a new season as soon as it comes out, only to be left feeling empty after you’ve finished.
Maybe it’s the way we felt so connected to the characters. We didn’t change points of view. We got to know these characters on such a personal level, it felt like they were genuinely a part of my life.
Whatever it was, nothing has ever made me feel more at home than SKAM.
ilya is shane’s baby headcanons PART 2 since you guys liked the last ones
when shane learns to write the cyrillic alphabet he’ll trace Я тебя люблю (I love you) letter by letter on ilya’s back when ilya’s lying face down in bed. just in general shane loves spending a late night or lazy morning spelling out sweet nothings on ilya’s bare back with his index finger
sometimes he’ll also play connect the dots with ilya’s moles while ilya’s resting
they usually don’t buy plants during the season because they’re never home enough to keep them alive but shane always gets a bouquet of lilies for ilya on their anniversaries and occasionally buys a potted plant like a fern for ilya after reading that plants are mood boosters for humans
shane still hates social media and doesn’t post himself and ilya on there that much BUT to make up for so many years of discarded photos he gets a polaroid camera and takes a little selfie polaroid of them whenever he can and then leaves it in a little place for ilya to find: once in the utensils drawer, one in their night stand, one in ilya’s equipment bag, in his suitcase, his pockets, etc.
shane’s sub tendencies do bring him to his knees in a non sexual way sometimes, like at the cottage in s1, but while he’s down there he eventually develops a habit of tying/re-tying ilya’s shoelaces which leads to him always wanting to put ilya’s shoes on for him or massaging his feet or some kind of task that can ground him—or, on very rare occasions when shane’s had a bit to drink
shane isn’t big on PDA but before every game he’ll bend over to tie his own skates and then drag a finger on the length of ilya’s inner shin just to check in and say good luck
ilya’s depression insomnia is a huge concern for shane so shane records like a two-hour voice memo of him babbling softly about absolutely nothing so if they’re ever apart and unable to call each other ilya can listen to the recording of his voice and fall asleep easier (he also gets ilya to do this for him to help ease his separation anxiety at night which he absolutely gets being away from his baby after they’re married)
ilya is shane’s baby like he is in love and obsessed with that man downnnnn and we don’t talk about that enough so here are some corresponding headcanons:
ilya has a knack for pissing off every single bee, wasp, or hornet at the cottage. shane is constantly sucking a stinger out of ilya’s foot after ilya steps on a bee or gently applying calamine lotion on like twenty different stings at the end of a day even if ilya insists he can do it himself
OLIVE THEORY: ilya claims to love all food and not be picky but he hates black olives and will never admit it so shane pretends to love them and pick them out of ilya’s meals for him at restaurants
if ilya ever gets too deep into a depressive episode to do basic hygiene things shane will let ilya sit up in bed and just go limp while shane brushes ilya’s teeth for him, shaves him, clips his fingernails, even puts a teeny bit of pommade into his curls or dry shampoo if he hasn’t showered. he’ll blurt out a command every now and then (“open wider I need to get your molars” or “rinse”) and if it sounds dirty ilya will smile or laugh a bit but if he tries talking shane will just shush him because his only job is to relax and feel better
shane does NOT tolerate any ilya slut jokes, especially after ilya can finally articulate to him that sex was a big coping mechanism for him amidst his grief. hayden makes a “hoe into a housewife” joke once at dinner and shane just gets up and goes “kitchen. now.” and scolds him HARD
the first time they go on a plane together (for their honeymoon) shane reads the emergency protocols five times and rests his head on ilya’s chest to listen to his heartbeat amidst any bit of turbulence
hungover ilya gets EXTRA baby privileges and ilya loves it. shane makes sure to get ilya’s disgusting mcdonald’s breakfast delivered and warmed up before ilya wakes up, but also insists ilya drink a ton of electrolytes and keeps the lights turned off and the noise to a minimum all day, lets ilya pick a movie for them to watch and strokes his hair all morning, and still strokes it if/while ilya throws up
city boy ilya is SUCH a baby about the snow so shane gets up at the crack of dawn in the winters and uses the snow plow on the driveway, then brushes off all the cars and starts whichever one they’re taking that day so that it’s warm by the time ilya’s ready to go
BONUS: shane also shovels a little maze of tunnels/pathways in their backyard so that anya can run around out back in the winter without being up to her belly in snow because she’s shane’s little princess too
