see the thing is shane WOULD have mysterious powers and never know it because they just don't coincide with his hockey career. like i easily see him as being able to control the weather or something and he just doesnt gaf. the games are all indoors anyway so he doesnt care or know why it always happens to storm like crazy after the metros lose no matter where they are or what season it is. thats got nothing to do with him!
I'm certain that he has the power to turn water into ginger ale. But he won't do it in public of course, so it like never comes up. Until like 5 years into their marriage where Ilya's like oh no we're out of ginger ale and Shane's just like okay I'll make some.
He walks in with a glass of ginger ale and Ilya's like oh was there a can after all?
Shane's sipping and settling in on the couch like no I made it. Shh the game is starting.
I've remarked that Carter Vaughn isn't the perfect ally. He means well, and deserves credit for that. At the same time, it's important to acknowledge that it was problematic of him to automatically assume that Shane's figure skater friend was "probably gay" just because the guy was a figure skater. He has some stereotypes he needs to unlearn.
That said,
He called gay athletes brave, where his teammates could hear him, and he showed up to cheer for an athlete he believed was gay as a gesture of solidarity. That's way more than any of the other straight guys in the show were willing to do. That automatically makes him a better ally than Marleau or Pike or any of the other straight dudes who said nothing and did nothing to uplift queer people.
Not one single other straight character in the show made a point of verbally expressing support for queer athletes in front of his teammates/friends.
We can "headcanon" other characters as queer allies, but Carter Vaughn is the only canon queer ally.
Book!Hayden was quick to reassure Shane that he was cool with Shane being gay after Shane came out, but he had nothing to say on the subject before Shane came out. Maybe he never threw around the word "cocksucker" in the locker room the way J.J. did, but he never told J.J. to stop either.
The support Carter Vaughn offered may have been imperfect, but at least it actually was support, and not silence.
.
I just feel like it's sometimes a little too easy for people in fandom to project perfect allyship onto characters who haven't actually done any allyship at all, while simultaneously over-scrutinizing characters who make a real effort to be allies, just because they didn't do it perfectly.
It's a little too easy to pick apart characters like Carter Vaughn for not going about support in the right way, and then turn around and assume that characters like Marleau would do better in the same situation, when it's just as likely they'd do worse, or they'd do nothing.
So, I've been reading along with a reheat with my IRL friend who is also obsessed, trying to understand the choices Jacob Tierney made in his incredible adaptation, and to see if there are any patterns, and it's really interesting, because there are some very systematic adjustments he made to the tone of the story.
Here's what I've noticed:
There is a lot more actual rivalry in the book, and a lot more negative emotion in general. Both Shane and Ilya have inner voices rife with internalised homophobia, and Jacob did not bring that to his show. The rivalry never feels heated, and their sex scenes feel very pure -- two boys who want each other making each other feel good. They hide it because their world would not understand, but they don't seem at all ashamed of it.
He makes almost all the dialogue shorter, more conversational and more effiicient. It feels like it's exactly what you remember from the book, but it seldom is. It's enough to feel faithful, but it's much sharper, and in some cases, very different in tone. For example:
He cuts almost all of Ilya's dirty talk. Ilya is always saying things like "look at you" or "you love it Hollander" or similar while Shane is sucking his dick or something, and JT's Ilya does not say anything like that. His Ilya is gentler and kinder, and most of what he says is checking in with Shane, or expressing stunned disbelief at being desired so voraciously by Shane, and Connor's performance shows that Ilya is entirely disarmed by Shane. He has nothing to say -- he's too lost sensation and emotion.
The one scene where Ilya is a bit less careful with Shane is in Vegas after Ilya wins MVP, but even that, he changes to make it more emotional. Look at this:
Instead of Shane saying "You. Fuck me. Please." JT has Shane say what Ilya really, truly wants to hear -- not that he needs Ilya to fuck him, but that he NEEDS ILYA. "I need you" and "Fuck me" are very different things to say to that character, and in a scene where Ilya is trying to distance himself from Shane because he's starting to realise that his feelings might not be as easy breezy as he'd like, and he's going back to Russia soon is such a bigger gut punch.
I love how that scene ends with Ilya dissociating with an unlit cigarette in his mouth -- a nice callback to the way his lighter only sparks in the first scene in Ep 1 when Shane arrives to introduce himself -- while Shane mourns the fact that they didn't kiss.
I love that he moved "Please fuck me" to the scene when Ilya knows Shane loves him, knows he needs him and wants him, for real, and forever, and that it's in that context that Shane asks to be fucked.
That whole scene at the cottage after they tell each other they love each other is entirely rewritten. The sex they have is really gentle and intimate and all about eye contact and emotional nakedness, but in the book Ilya's being more dominating and sceney.
In the show, it's Ilya who asks Shane how they let this happen, and Shane who says they were both very stupid and irresponsible, and it's Ilya who asks Shane if it's real -- who can't believe Shane loves him. More importantly, though, I feel like Jacob's adaptation threads that emotion through every scene in the show.
Ilya does say "She would have loved you", but he doesn't say "Like I love you." I think it's so moving the way love is linked to their mothers in the show -- Shane saying to Ilya "I love you so much" which is echoed by Yuna, when she says to Shane "Oh, I love you too. So much" and this line which tells you that Ilya, whose treatment of Shane from the start has been so tender and so loving, also learned that from his mother. I love the loving, gentle role of the women in HR.
All of Jacob Tierney's women are full characters with their own motivations and lives and all of them are so kind and important in the journey. A lot of people cry misogyny just because it's a story about men, but it's a story about men that is very much in the interests of anti-patriarchy, and they way JT improved on how Rachel Reid wrote the women deserves its own whole post.
It's fascinating to me that HR's TV show is often praised as such a faithful adaptation when to me there is a monumental difference in that TV Shane and Ilya like each other right from the start. They're rivals in a playful, exhilarating, joyful way (as you say, OP). In a different world, they would have been friends. Whereas for book Shane and Ilya, the vibe is more, "Ugh, I can't believe I'm into this guy." I just find it fascinating that on one level an adaptation can be so faithful (in terms of preserving exact scenes, lines, and details) while on another level, in my opinion, transforming the heart of the story.
Imagining up a story where Shane DOES go to Wimbledon. And there's a Swedish princess sitting on one side of him, but on his other side is the son of a Russian oligarch. Ilya is there to be a handsome face and create good PR in advance of his father's company's expansion into Canada
Neither Ilya nor Shane gives a shit about tennis so they end up sipping champagne while whispering to each other and then texting increasingly judgy remarks about other people. Their little secret. In the evening they go back to Ilya's fabulous hotel room where Ilya drunkenly tells Shane about how he hates his father's company and would do anything to escape his life. And then they hook up of course and Shane has his flint of desire
Shane goes back to Montreal but can't forget this blazing bright memory. Ilya says it's not safe to text while he's back in Russia but once Ilya has come to Canada for preliminary meetings, they see each other again . . .
That's all the clear ideas I have but of course in the end Ilya ends up preventing his dad's company from expanding into Canada and they get married 💖
This is a series of posts about Boston locations that might be interesting to readers of my Heated Rivalry fic Influential Men! This one might also be of interest to any HR writers with stories focused on the Boston Bears/Raiders.
This post is about the Boston Bruins practice rink, the development it's in, and the phenomenon of luxury apartment construction in Boston in the time period of this fic (2018-ish). There are no spoilers for the fic in this post.
From Chapter 14: "Boston Landing is a strange place. It was meant to be a luxury development, with luxury apartments much like all the others that are springing up around the city. Shane guesses there was more supply than demand, though, because there’s usually nobody else around on the streets, and most of the boutique shop fronts are empty. Some of the guys frequent the single fancy coffee shop that’s open on the road toward the rink, and then in summertime there are sometimes yoga classes on the grass in front of the arena facility. The whole development is pretty, modern but with some greenery, waiting for people to come.
Victory Ice Arena is pretty nice too, especially given that the general standard of ice rinks is to be fairly spartan at best. Leaking roofs, melting ice, moldy changing rooms—Shane’s seen it all. In contrast, Victory Ice Arena is sleekly modern, exuding an air of expensiveness, and it weirdly still smells of new plastic several years after its opening. The rink is on the second floor, up a flight of stairs, which is also unusual."
Why we don't practice in TD Garden
So, TD Garden is where you'll go to see the Boston Bruins play games. But it's also where you'll go to see the Celtics (basketball team) play. So, your Boston Bruins/Raiders/Bears are not going to practice in TD Garden.
Instead, they'll go to a new practice facility across the city. In real life this is called Warrior Ice Arena, but for some reason I felt that if the Bruins were the Raiders then their practice facility should also have a different name. So it's called Victory Ice Arena in my fic.
Warrior Ice Arena
I keep saying that the practice facility is weird, and it IS! First of all, it's up a flight of stairs which is so odd to me. I've been to a LOT of ice rinks and while I have been to others that are not on the first floor, it's still weird to me. Isn't the ice heavy? Isn't it easier to just build it on the ground?
Anyway, from the street, Warrior Ice Arena looks like this:
From the street where you'll approach to walk in, it looks like an office building. Why are the doors side-facing? (In my fic, I have the players enter through a back/staff-only entrance because that's just what I feel they would do.)
And if you're wondering what that diagonal line is in the background of the above photo—it's a massive hockey stick sculpture. Of course.
In the view of Warrior Ice Arena from the Mass Pike or the commuter rail, they're a little less shy about what the building is:
As you can see, one wall of the rink area is all windows, which I've seen in other rinks too but it's nice.
All practices at WIA are open to the public. You can also skate there, but it's expensive. But on the other hand, it's sooo nice inside. A lot of skating facilities that are open for public skate are pretty grim inside, but you can tell they spent money on WIA. Very sleek and new-looking.
The ice at WIA is good quality, some of the best in the area—very smooth, as you'd expect. However, for a figure skater, it's still not ideal because this is hockey ice, which is colder and therefore slipperier than figure skating ice.
Boston Landing
In 2017/18, when Influential Men begins, Boston Landing was a new development. It's very long and linear because it's squeezed in a thin sliver of land next to the Mass Pike and commuter rail lines. It has a a very modern, sleek feel to it and contains sports facilities, the New Balance company headquarters, apartments, a hotel I think, and shops and restaurants. I can tell you I was going to Warrior Ice Arena a lot in 2017-18 and Boston Landing was almost always weirdly empty back then. Definitely not a lot of foot traffic or cars either.
"Luxury apartments"
So, from about the mid/early 2010s up until maybe now or maybe the early 2020s, I guess depending on how you ask, Boston went through a process where there was a lot of construction, and a lot of what was being built was "luxury apartments." That definitely included condos that cost millions of dollars, but it also included more normal apartments that were new, modern, and expensive with some fancy amenities. The bottom line was that most average people couldn't afford what was being built.
When I wrote this chapter of the fic, I was thinking of the apartments in Boston Landing as being a part of this phenomenon, and I think that's probably fair-ish, although they don't refer to themselves as luxury on their website. Part of what I wanted to do with Influential Men is portray the vibes of 2018 Boston, what it really felt like to be walking around and living in Boston in that particular time period, and the luxury apartment phenomenon is definitely a part of that experience in my opinion.
I'm by no means an authority on this—again, the fic is just capturing the vibes of how Boston felt to me at the time. But you can learn more about most luxurious of luxury apartments in Boston in this free-to-read Boston Globe article, "Reckoning with Boston's towers of wealth."
Shane flirting w Carter Vaughn really is such a juicy little subplot of the whole show.. he loves a charisma magnet w curly hair and 1 Stanley cup that's his gay kryptonite
Like no he really does light up every time Carter talks to him or squeezes him except for that one time when Carter emotionally shot him w a gun in sochi but even then he still makes sure to sit next to him in the stands (NOT dinosaur Scott hunter) and yk there's even a part of Shane that's like "omg he likes gay people😍😍😍😍" and ALSO that part of Shane really was 25 and flirty and thriving in tampa
An extremely important thing to know about skates is that they have two edges per blade. Like this (poor drawing I did in 10 seconds in Word):
The edges are super important—you want to have deep, clean edges, meaning (roughly) that you are able to lean your body to the side and balance on one edge rather than both. So I don't think people who skate conceptualize of their skates as "knife shoes" at all, because it's simply not a knife-type blade.
2. Keeping your blades dry is very important
When you're done skating, you dry your blades with a towel/microfiber towel. (I suppose if you are a professional hockey player the equipment team does this for you? Idk.) Then you can put something called a soaker (pic below) over the blade to absorb any remaining moisture or any condensation that could gather on the cold metal. Basically, wet skate blade = rust = disaster.
There are also plastic blade guards that you can wear over your blades to walk around.
3. You cannot really borrow another skater's skates
Okay, so I know that at most rinks you can rent figure skates/hockey skates/both. But it's not easy to skate well in them because skates are really supposed to fit close to the foot, much closer than a normal sneaker. That's necessary for you to have control over the skate's movement and balance your body in it. And this need to have a snug fit is why most skaters have their skates shaped to fit their individual feet, so that everywhere is perfectly snug without being too tight. That is gonna be hard to achieve with a rental skate unless you are in the tiny minority of humans who have a foot shaped exactly like a standard size whatever, in that particular brand of skate.
So, most figure or hockey skaters are going to get skates that are heat molded to their feet. The person selling the skate to you will put the skate in a special oven and then you can put your foot in it while it's toasty warm, and then the person squeezes the boot so that it conforms to your foot shape. Skates can also be punched out (stretched) to fit in specific places, like over the ankle bone.
For pro hockey players like Shane or Ilya, certainly they would have custom-made skates shaped exactly for their own feet.
So I can't really see any pro player borrowing skates from another pro player because firstly, a boot that's perfectly shaped to snugly fit someone else's foot would probably rub their foot wrong. It would be somewhat like wearing someone else's Invisalign or mouthguard. And when you're a pro hockey player, you're not going to want to take risks with your feet like that. Secondly, the skate would probably get stretched out of shape from having the wrong foot in it. Plus, not all brands of boots work for everyone, like, a person with wide feet might not be able to wear a certain brand of boot at all.
So maybe two skaters could do this if they happen to have exactly the same size and shape of foot, but it would be unlikely.
4. I'm not sure anyone would want another person lacing their skates
I guess this is all a matter of opinion, but people can be picky about how their skates are laced. They need to be tight enough that the skate conforms to the foot, without being so tight that you're obstructing blood flow. So, in my opinion, you probably want to be lacing your own skate so that you can judge the right level of tightness, or else you could literally be risking injury from a) falling over from having a loose skate or b) cutting off blood flow to your foot. Plus, people have different methods of lacing up, and then they might lace their skates differently depending on how old/stretched out the boot is. You'll often want it tighter in a certain place, like around the ankle, and looser in other areas . . . idk I just think this is something you have to do yourself, really, especially if you're operating at a professional/competitive level.
5. You can't take off your skates super-quick
I know this is annoying in fic, but because of the above details, taking off skates is usually not super quick, because your boot is gonna be laced up tight, which typically requires loosening laces in sequence down the boot, rather than only untying the knot as with sneakers. And remember, your foot is in a boot that is either exactly heat-molded to its shape or custom-made, so it's pretty snug in there.
All this is to say that if your player is wearing skates and they need to run off the ice and go somewhere ASAP, I would suggest having them simply keep their skates on. They can put a plastic blade guard on to protect the blades to some extent, or in a situation where they can't even pause to do that, I would have them simply walk outside with their skates on. Yes, this will utterly fuck up the blades, but if it's a serious emergency, I think our multi-millionaire main characters in Heated Rivalry won't mind ruining their blades.
This is a series of posts about Boston locations that might be interesting to readers of my Heated Rivalry fic Influential Men!
This post is about Allston, a neighborhood that's at the edge of Boston. The only spoilers for the fic are the location and architecture of Ilya and Shane's homes and how they could get from one to another. :)
From Chapter 10: "Most of the drive to Ilya’s place is, as Ilya had said, the same as Shane’s drive to the Raiders practice rink. The difference is that the journey ends in the broad streets of Allston rather than in the Boston Landing luxury development.
Unlike Shane’s stretch of Beacon Street, which is pretty much all brick homes, Ilya’s neighborhood mainly has houses with vinyl or wood siding. Typically, the buildings are two stories high, with multiple doorbells and other indications that they’ve been divided up into apartments. There are small yards, too, often with low chain-link fences around them. Away from the noise and traffic of the city center, it’s peaceful here, especially with flurries of snow blowing around over the streets. ...
Ilya’s home looks like it’s probably a foursquare that had several extensions added to its sides and back. His door is at the left side; Ilya has explained that his apartment is the second floor of the house, the top floor, while a lesbian couple lives on the first floor. ...
Shane takes a deep breath, puts on his reading glasses as a layer of disguise, and walks up through the snow up the concrete side path to Ilya’s door."
Here are some key locations:
So, as we can see, for Shane, most of the journey to Ilya's apartment is the same as his trip to the practice rink (Warrior Ice Arena in real life, Victory Ice Arena in the fic).
Now let's go more in depth . . .
Boston Landing
Boston Landing is the new development that contains the practice rink. It also contains apartments, a hotel, another sports facility, and a street with some boutique-type shops like a coffee shop. I'm going to talk more about Boston Landing in a different post, but this is "luxury" in the sense of being new and modern-looking, not in the sense that millionaires would live there or anything. Maybe I should change the text to say "boutique" instead of luxury, but more on this later.
Allston
Allston is a vibrant neighborhood that has a lot of students and people in their 20s, as well as music venues and restaurants. I really like it personally, which is one reason why Ilya lives there, in addition to the fact that it's close to the practice rink. :)
Actually there are a lot of three-story buildings in Allston, but we'll just say that Ilya's particular street tends to have more two-story buildings because I really wanted it to have a cozier vibe. Either way, what you'll see is often a vinyl- or wood-sided home that dates from maybe between 1900 and 1930, that's divided up into apartments. There's also a good proportion of three-story brick apartment buildings in Allston.
Ilya's location puts him at a 15-minute walk from the old Skating Club of Boston rink up by the river (which was open at the time this fic is set in, but is now closed 🙁), as well as close to the Bruins/Raiders practice rink, so it's more or less ideal for someone who wants to skate a lot.
Foursquares
I absolutely love foursquare homes, which is why I wanted Ilya to live in one. I've seen a few foursquares in Allston although admittedly they're not the predominant home type. They are a very American type of home, which is interesting for Ilya. To me, a foursquare is perfect because it is spacious without being oversized like a McMansion or elaborate like a Queen Anne home. I wanted Ilya's home to be modest, fitting for his income, yet really cozy and homey, a safe place, especially with the pride flag on the porch.
Here's a typical foursquare home from Wikimedia (Wikipedia tells me this is considered two and a half stories . . . WHATEVER). To learn more, see this McMansion Hell post on foursquare homes. Again, Ilya's apartment would be in a converted foursquare, where he gets the top floor (and attic, I suppose) and enters from a little extension on the side, while his neighbors get the first floor.
That's all for this post! Thanks for reading (to anyone who has made it this far) :)
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