I love fics that explore Montreal as a homophobic shit team that harasses Shane for being gay. I eat them up. There is something so delicious about the exploration of homophobia in that type of environment, where it’s like friends + workplace + high school locker room vibes all rolled into one. There’s so much fodder there for fanfic & I delight in reading it.
While I think Shane is often an unreliable narrator. And also willfully obtuse to how he is treated by people. I do think what I love a lot about the books is the implication that “it’s not that bad” in Montreal until they find out about Ilya.
Because “not that bad” is still bad. It’s just not bad enough for Shane to acknowledge.
It’s homophobia on a very insidious level. It’s not his teammates calling him slurs & beating him up & making threats. It’s not even them complaining to management about having to shower together or refusing to pass to him on the ice.
the way they used to tease him about hooking up with girls & now they just don’t tease him about hooking up at all.
the way they would talk about how Shane was destined to procreate the next generation of hockey legends & now they assume he won’t have children.
the way they still invite him out to celebrate after a win, but they don’t call him up to go clubbing with them on a random Thursday night anymore, because he probably would rather go to a gay club, right?
the way they all still talk about their wives & girlfriends but no one ever asks Shane if he’s met anyone, and how everyone except Hayden & JJ just assume Hollzy here will never be able to publicly date anyway
the way some rookie lets a slur slip in the locker room and a teammate corrects them by saying they don’t want to hurt Cap’s feelings.
the way they ask him if Yuna & David know he’s gay & then everyone chimes in about how they’d never tell their parents because they’d be furious or embarrassed or disown them.
But worst of all, it’s the way Shane convinces himself that this is coming from a place of friendship & respect.
He tells himself they stopped teasing him about hookups because they know he doesn’t like it.
He tells himself they don’t bring up kids anymore because they don’t want to rub it in his face that it would be more challenging for him to have children as a gay man.
He tells himself they stopped inviting him out to randomly go clubbing because they finally grasped that he doesn’t enjoy being in those situations.
He tells himself that they don’t expect him to have a boyfriend because they understand the NHL is a toxic place & his career would be in jeopardy.
He tells himself they are correcting their language as a way to be considerate of his feelings.
He tells himself they’re being supportive of his relationship with his parents.
Shane is 100% convincing himself these guys have his back. He lived in constant fear of losing everything for being gay, so when his team doesn’t openly express hatred for him, he sees it as acceptance. He knows how bad teams like Toronto treat people & he convinces himself that anything better than that is the best he can expect.
He also fully believes that the issue his team has with Ilya is that he’s an asshole. He truly, genuinely believes that the thing his team will struggle to understand is why he would date someone he supposedly hates. And so the solution will just be to convince them he never hated Ilya actually. Because they might hate Ilya, but they love & respect him, so surely they’ll come around on his partner eventually. Right?
But turns out, that’s not their problem. And that’s why he’s so shocked when his team suddenly turns on him when his relationship is revealed. Because it actually was “that bad” the entire time. He just didn’t let himself see it.
