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.
Okay justice for Ilya Rozanov, a man who notably managed his entire families finances and his dementia-having fathers caretaking since he was literally a teenager, while also essentially raising himself to be an elite, generational athlete by himself.
like what is this ‘Ilya needs the threat of a sex ban to pick up his socks’ slander or this ‘Ilya has terrible financial literacy’ misinformation or this ‘Ilya only eats junk food and needs to be forced to eat his veggies’ tomfoolery
#something very heteronormative is going on here…#<prev. and something very orientalist as well not to be the friend who is too woke.#there’s something to constantly writing the one non-western character as singularly in need of civilising in a way that like.#flies directly in the face of the character the canon has actually given us.#we’re all playing in our sandboxes &c. but the canon isn’t only a suggestion😭 not when the alternatives for it too often rely on bias
Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.
You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.
Just because what you wanted didn't happen, doesn't mean it's queerbaiting. It is now being used an excuse when the ship you want didn't get together. Queerbaiting has to do with marketing.
Queerbait: A cookbook that you learned about from ads with pictures of people eating tasty looking soups and the author's social media posts about how soup lovers are going to love it, proves to have no soup recipes.
Not queerbait: A cookbook has no soup recipes. You assumed there would be some based on vibes and wishful thinking. No soups were ever advertised or promised.
Also not queerbait: A cookbook that was advertised as containing soup recipes has soup recipes but not for the types of soups you like.
Also not queerbait: the author/chef of the cookbook is known for their soup recipes. You buy this book expecting soup, despite there being no mentions or promises of soup. You then go online and harass and demand the author to release soup recipes, claim the publishing company is silencing them, fine tooth comb social media presence looking for evidence of cooking soup and stalk and harass friends and family of the author demanding an explanation for why they don’t cook soup anymore. All the author wanted to do was expand their repertoire and share their skills to the best of their ability, and now are forever known as “the soup guy” no matter what they do
One of the things the time jump between Heated Rivalry and Long Game robs us of is seeing the effect coming out to his team has on Shane in real time. And that experience does a lot to inspire his anxiety and responses in TLG.
No one will ever convince me that there's not a connection between Shane coming out to his team, it not going well, and Shane volunteering to start an even more intensely restrictive diet than he was already on, that also punishes his relationship. Just like I will always view Shane's anxiety around Ilya coming out to the Centaurs/his friends as a trauma response based on how badly it went for him.
One of the most heartbreaking parts about Shane's performance diet to me, is how in both My Dinner with Hayden and TLG Shane and Ilya mention how they love to cook together, and it's like a fun couple thing for them. It's a point of connection, something they do together aside from hockey. And, unlike hockey, it's something they don't compete about.
Shane's performance diet robs them of this. There's a scene in TLG where Ilya has done a bunch of research to find a meal they can cook together that fits in Shane's diet. And Shane is delighted by this. But, notably, he puts no effort into finding other recipes they can do this with again. He tells Rose he likes the discipline of his diet, and I don't think he means just in regards to what and where he's eating, I think he also means in his relationship.
There's another major change we see in Shane between books. At the end of Heated Rivalry he's talking fairly optimisticly about both of them coming out to friends.
This is at the cottage. Very soon after they've decided they're in a real relationship. It's hard not to compare this with Shane's sheer panic in TLG when Ilya talks about coming out to Troy - not even about them, just about being bi - and also to the possibility of even meeting the rest of his team.
So, what's happened to Shane in the last three years that makes him go from joking around about coming out to his friends to rabidly controlling his relationship and protecting every small detail of it that he possibly can?
Call me crazy but I also think Hayden pike is partially to blame- I don’t think he is intentionally malicious, but the way that he treats Ilya is a bit gross.
By the time we get to TLG, it’s been a few years, and Pikes known about them for ~2+ years. They have dinners together. Pikes kids know Ilya. They work the camps together. And you’re telling me that in all that time he hasn’t been able to find a shred of respect, to actually treat Ilya as an important and permanent part of Shane’s life? That’s gotta fucking sting if you were Shane. And it screams that Hayden didn’t even try.
Imagine the first person you reveal your relationship to, a person you love and respect and care deeply for their opinion, and they have to be scolded by their wife to even be in the same room as them. Idk I can’t help but feel that their whole dynamic just fed Shane’s anxiety
I live in the US and one of the things that really reframed the way I think about animals was when someone I knew in Brazil posted a picture of a marmoset hanging out outside their window and I realized that monkeys were to them what squirrels are to me. Recently a friend in Hungary sent a picture they took at the zoo of a raccoon and it was like my worldview was being shifted all over again because what was to me the mildly annoying, somewhat cute, critter that makes weird noises behind my house at night was a wonder to someone else. They have little hands and bandit masks. They wash their little hands. How is that NOT a wonder? All animals are cool I’m just used to raccoons.
i mean, obviously i have a bias towards marine animals (common octopus, velvet swimming crab, green shore crab, blue lobster, norway lobster, by-the-wind sailor, angel shark, catshark, bull huss, starry smoothhound, etc), but that doesn't stop the not quite so marine animals and the terrestrial animals being cool! we have puffins! gannets! have you ever seen an avocet? i have once and theyre such funky little birds. im quite partial to a great crested grebe as well, with their funky crests. theres adders that like to hide in the heather, beavers, a multitude of different bats, pine martens, otters. all of them living really close to wear i grew up. everywhere has cool animals if you learn to see whats up with the common ones, if you look a little closer than just the ones you see everywhere and easily.
everywhere is full of wonder if you just learn to look.
I just know that Shane has a deep and primal fear of clowns that he has hidden far in his mind for fear of relentless chirping from his team. And the the day after the tuna melts, he sees the news talking about killer clowns
The entire time Shane is dating Rose, he is seeing all of these reports of killer clowns chasing people with machetes and he is so fucking afraid. He says no to a date because there was a report of a clown in the area the day before. One of the rookies come into training talking with glee about being chased down the road by a clown, and Shane breaks into a cold sweat and has to focus on his breathing.
However, it’s died down by the time they break up, and has completely stopped by the All-Stars game.
This leads to deeply superstitious and anxious Shane Hollander clinging on to Ilya the teeny tiniest bit tighter than he usually would because “what if I break up with him and the clowns come back?” And he knows it’s so fucking stupid. Like seriously he isn’t being hunted by clowns because he is ignoring his homosexuality, don’t be ridiculous. But like, what if? Ilya can never know
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
I am pro-accredited aquariums and zoos. My posts critiquing the animal rights movement are blowing up right now and I just want to come out and say definitively that I appreciate zoos and aquariums allowing the public to view wild animals without potentially disturbing them in their natural habitat or resorting to the illegal exotic pet trade. It is valuable for conservation purposes and many aquariums/zoos take unreleasable wildlife and host breeding programs for endangered species. They are not just institutions for human amusement, they are integral to maintaining public interest and studying the ecology and biology of the animals contained within.
Ilya Rozanov’s Impact As Representation of Queer Russians
alright here we go
this isn’t really structured as an essay, but is a detailed analysis
first of all, i need to establish that a lot of my points come directly from personal experience — i am a mixed race kid born in kazakhstan, half-russian and half-kazakh, raised primarily in russia. i am also queer myself, although i was raised as a woman (i am now agender). this analysis will heavily focus on cultural elements, because they are crucial for understanding the depth of ilya’s character and why he acts the way he does.
i was quite apprehensive about ilya initially — western film loves to portray russian people as a caricature and use them for tasteless gags without really examining anything in depth (I’m looking at you stranger things, yes, you). i was concerned heated rivalry would remain surface-level about ilya’s background and portray him as a stereotypical, cold-hearted russian dude. i was also concerned about his accent being too caricatural, concerned about the potential dialogue in russian (as a linguist, russian dialogue in western film is infamously stiff and unnatural. looking at you again, stranger things), so you can imagine my surprise and delight when all of those concerns ended up being unfounded.
to be completely fair here, ilya does sport some stereotypical character traits — he’s brash, confident, distant and unafraid to offend others. but in contrast to other russian characters in western film, ilya has a warm flirtatiousness that i haven’t really seen before. and most importantly, his characterisation doesn’t end there.
at first glance, it seems that ilya doesn’t face any struggles with his sexuality at all. he is experienced, confident, the leading man to shane’s anxious discovery of himself. in reality, ilya’s understanding of his sexuality is directly tied to his personal conflict with his family and his culture.
said conflict is introduced in the very first episode of the show. during the scene where he is being drafted as the new all-star player for the boston raiders, he is being watched over by his father, grigori rozanov. grigori is portrayed by an older actor, and sports a number of medals attached to his suit, which likely implies that he is a war veteran. it is also established later on that he is ‘police’, which, culturally, means that he’s very friendly with some big heads in the government, not that he is literally a police officer. it is a man with trauma, powerful and influential. even without external cultural context, you can already see the toxic and abusive power dynamic this creates between him and ilya.
in the scene, ilya’s facial expression is one of discomfort — he’s smiling very awkwardly, chewing at his lip, his eyes are darting around. this immediately stops as soon as his father speaks; he puts on a cold, serious mask. grigori dismisses his son’s achievements and insists that he needs a lot of discipline, otherwise he will become ‘lazy’ (he means this in a ‘he’ll start slacking off’ kind of way). afterwards, he addresses ilya directly, in russian, using a very condescending tone of voice, and instructs him to listen closely to what he’s being told. the exact phrasing he uses is best translated as ‘understood?’, which might sound more neutral in english but in russian has a slightly aggressive connotation. i’ve seen quite a few people expressing surprise when reacting to this scene and being confused as to why ilya’s father isn’t showing any pride. i regret to inform you that this dynamic is, unfortunately, very common for the culture, especially between a father and a son.
to explain it further, i’ll have to talk about the way i was raised a little bit. russian (or post-USSR region) parents are typically very strict, demanding and authoritative. they are often emotionally distant, neglectful or even outright abusive. i will require you to put your nuance caps on here, because this behaviour is not necessarily a product of malice, and more a product of cultural norms. showing emotion, whether positive or negative, is seen as a weakness. more so for men, but for women as well. you are taught very young that you have to keep your emotions to yourself — nobody wants to see it. i was scolded and punished very frequently for intense emotional displays as a child. Mother and Father would scold me for crying. Grandmother would scold me for laughing too loudly. looking too happy. your parents are your caretakers, perhaps, providing food and shelter, but you definitely aren’t expected to lean on them for more than that. in my experience, it wasn’t very common. what you are expected to do, however, is be productive. be successful. provide. this is your duty as a son or a daughter, and if you fail, you are no longer of any worth to these people. it is your duty to take care of your parents and siblings, not the other way around. because of that expectation, whether you are achieving something grand or not doesn’t matter — after all, you’re just fulfilling your duty as a human being. no matter how hard i worked, i don’t think my parents ever genuinely said they were proud of me. because there is nothing to be proud of, really. it’s what you have to do.
with this cultural context, grigori rozanov’s characterisation immediately lands as extremely accurate. all of those norms and expectations are expressed in a few sentences and we are immediately shown the way they impact ilya.
ilya is desperate for his father’s love and acceptance, but he knows he will never get it. because they do not exist.
i have more to say about grigori, but now, let’s focus a bit on ilya’s queerness.
ilya is initially portrayed to be very at ease with his sexuality — he leads shane during their encounters, he’s not afraid to flirt and come on strong. but there’s a lot of pain and repression lurking underneath, only it’s not as obvious to the naked eye.
despite what the russian government will have you believe, there are, of course, plenty of queer people in russia. how dangerous it is to be queer there has fluctuated over the years, but it has never been truly safe. it’s a part of yourself you’re forced to hide for years, if not forever. the physical aspects of queer sexuality are often discovered early on — boys fooling around with boys and girls fooling around with girls — (ik this is a little contrived but just for the sake of the point) but later on dismissed as one grows up. even if there is no shame, there’s an unspoken understanding that it can never become something more. you’d never be able to emotionally commit to each other, because it’s not simply dangerous, it’s life-threatening. it can only be this — heat and bodies and mouths clashing.
we learn in the first episode, first hand from ilya, that back in russia, he was regularly sleeping with his hockey coach’s son. he brushes it off as nothing serious when explaining to shane, but most likely, he treats most of his sexual encounters with other men as such. because how is he supposed to know that it could be something more? i find it really intriguing that he establishes this to shane, because it implies ilya is so drawn to him he almost unconsciously considers pursuing him more seriously. otherwise, he wouldn’t have said anything and proceeded with the hook-up regularly. there’s nothing to explain, because it can never be real, can it?
a lot of ilya’s emotional avoidance later on in the series is rooted in this unspoken belief. he runs from shane not because he doesn’t love him, but because he believes it can never be real. that they can never be a couple. this is something people do behind closed doors, in secluded corners, in secret. it’s not something to commit to, not a real, tangible possibility.
ilya is in the closet not because he’s necessarily afraid, but because he doesn’t expect to have other options. in russia, there weren’t any other options.
in addition to this, ilya is also emotionally repressed because of the way he was raised. there are many things on the table that he cannot knowingly treat as real possibilities, including expressing his true emotions, which makes it very difficult for him to be vulnerable with shane. the intimate and genuine side of him comes out mostly during sex, especially at the beginning, because it is the only time that it can.
this is why ilya only accepts shane’s invitation to the cottage after witnessing scott hunter kiss kip on national television — he is actively being shown that there are other options.
all of these feelings are incredibly familiar to me, as a queer person who grew up in russia. a lot of my own repression wasn’t always rooted in shame, but hopelessness. the knowledge that this was something you could never really have. it took years to deconstruct, the same way it took ilya years to be brave enough to chase after something he really wanted.
now, I’d like to talk about the concept of ‘duty’ that i introduced earlier some more. for this section, queerness and ilya’s personal trauma will overlap.
in russian culture, the concept of ‘duty’ doesn’t simply involve your family. it involves your entire being — your duty as a citizen of russia, your devotion to the country, to the collective entity. an example of it is the scene at the end of episode 1, where grigori tells ilya to ‘apologise to russia’ after losing his game. i’ve seen quite a lot of people say that this moment was exaggerated, but once again, i regret to inform you it is a very common phrase. because of the concept of duty that overlaps our entire lives, our personal failures are deemed as overarching disappointments to the country. we are not good enough to serve it, therefore we should apologise to it.
this abstract concept of duty affects multiple areas of ilya’s life. he feels obligated to keep giving money to alexei, because it is his duty to provide for his family. i’ve seen many reactors be confused as to why ilya was even entertaining him, but this is the piece of context they were missing. it is unthinkable to cut him off. you’d be betraying yourself, more than anything. ilya unquestioningly obeys his father (at least in his presence) because of the same sense of duty. he avoids his feelings for shane out of the same sense of duty — he couldn’t possibly leave russia to be with shane. he’d be betraying himself and his duty.
in episode 5, when shane attempts to have an open discussion about their feelings for each other, ilya is dismissive. he doesn’t want to be, but he sees no other way to go about it — duty, hopelessness and fear are all crushing him. shane, however, is able to reach through to him and ilya allows himself to be vulnerable. this marks the definite shift in their relationship, because shane’s love and gentleness overpower, if temporarily, every cultural bias poisoning ilya’s life and preventing him from reaching for his own happiness.
the scene of grigori’s funeral that comes later in the same episode cements that shift and is absolutely masterful. there is a lingering shot of grigori’s numerous medals, from ilya’s POV. the medals are a very clear representation of duty, and now, with the man supposed to be wearing them gone, the duty is as well. this allows ilya to consider never coming back to russia, because there is no longer any duty to uphold. alexei’s behaviour later on only drives him further to cut ties — the abstract duty has lost its meaning and no longer holds weight for ilya. he can pursue something he really wants, even if he’s terrified. svetlana’s reassurance also helps this a lot.
i don’t think ilya was genuinely considering committing to shane then and there. after all, you can’t just shed years of your upbringing in one day. but the seeds are all planted in that scene, and masterfully so.
ilya’s russian monologue to shane is my favourite scene in the whole show. I’ve written about it before on this blog, saying how the composition of the shot reminded me a lot of the subway station tunnels near my home in moscow. he’s encased by walls covered in graffiti, laying his heart out in what is essentially a box made of concrete. the overhead lights are reddish in tint (they’re usually bright clinical white), painting the scene with a sense of danger and tension. ilya can only confess his feelings to shane in a language he doesn’t understand because he is still scared and has little hope. he looks out at the scrap of city in the distance before gathering his courage to even say it in russian and we see a brief flare of a police car’s siren — doing this is still incredibly dangerous. but he goes through with it. other things ilya says in this monologue also directly correlate with my previous points — he talks about his duty for his family choking him, draining him. he gave them everything, like he was supposed to, but there was never any gratitude, never any warmth. because there wasn’t supposed to be. he feels guilt for betraying his duty by not being able to take care of his father on his deathbed. and it kills him. he wishes things were different. he wishes for genuine connection. but it was never going to be found there. that feeling, i know all too well…an incredible, character-defining scene for ilya. I cry every time I see it.
in the finale, ilya’s character development is incredibly cathartic and powerful. I cried (again) when I heard him confess first, whispering ‘ya tebya lyublyu’ into shane’s skin. for context, ‘i love you’ is not something we say very often. i don’t remember my parents saying it to me much, if at all. ‘i love you’ is reserved for extreme situations. it must have taken such strength of character for ilya to say it then and it hit me really hard. ultimately, what made him be able to express his genuine feelings was shane talking about plans for the future — together — something ilya previously thought impossible. hearing and seeing shane be willing to commit to him must have been so grand. did I already say i sobbed my eyes out for this?
in conclusion, i absolutely adore the way ilya’s character was portrayed in the show. his cultural background was respected and directly influenced his character’s choices. his conflict with his family was layered, complex and realistic. i really saw myself in him. he wasn’t at all a caricature. he had tangible growth and was able to leave behind the harmful biases of post-soviet culture. i’ve already seen a couple of people in the russian fandom express gratitude and satisfaction with ilya’s portrayal, and i couldn’t agree more. i didn’t expect it at all, but it was masterfully done.
if anyone has further questions, please leave them in the comments, i will gladly answer.
tagging you bc u said u wanted to read about it @torntrianglesleeves @two4dashow @voidcrumbs
I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!
Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.
If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.
Let your likes guide you.
(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)
Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych
I know people like to joke that Hollanov could’ve at least had chairs at the wedding but the standing wedding is actually so important to me. Like, culturally and historically, so many gay people have had under-planned standing weddings because being formal and organized and having chairs means knowing who will and won’t be there. And for queer folks, you don’t always have the privilege. Having chairs requires a headcount. And it means risking staring out at all the empty chairs if your loved ones don’t support you. So instead, you make it casual so you can focus on each other instead of all the people who decided you weren’t worth showing up for.
Shane and Ilya had an aggressive and unfortunate coming out and their wedding is smack dab in the middle of a deeply uncertain time. Shane just lost his entire team and he and Ilya are still figuring out who is on their side. Of course their wedding feels unorganized as a result. The event itself doesn’t hold the same weight or occupy the same niche when outside of a heteronormative context. Because at the end of the day, it was never about the wedding. It was about being married. It was about them finally being together in the open. It was about their love persevering despite all the obstacles they faced.
read this and remember it. read this and remember that she is going to use the profits of her fucking ego-stroking reboot to decimate trans rights. read this and remember that every time you pay into her IP, you are emboldening her to hurt us more.
our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
trans lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
