rereading snapped birch for the millionth time following this awesome new chapter and I am curious if metrosfansunited will return. It would be interesting to see how things are going in the camp where people aren't super taken in by hockey Romeo and juliet story/actively against Shane and Ilya. This new chapter has some very good rebuttals against the game fixing allegations so I am wondering what the response will be. And I am curious to see if the opinions of people we saw in the earlier chapters might evolve.
I was curious about your description of the playoffs game in the latest snapping birch chapter. Is real hockey actually like that?
Sort of.
When I was writing the hockey descriptions in snapping birch, I wanted to keep Shane and Ilya’s feats within the realm of human possibility, but I also wanted their skill to be far beyond the average hockey player’s.
Because Shane and Ilya are lightning strikes. They hit the earth at the same place at the same time in a way that defies probability. Both of them would be once in a generation talents if the other did not exist. They are operating at a different level than every other player in the league and it shows.
So to make any of their play by plays, I spliced together a bunch of my favorite hockey highlights. Shane and Ilya don’t just do one cool thing on the ice—they do multiple cool things at the same time.
Take, for example, Shane’s goal. He hops over a fallen Cliff Marleau to intercept Ilya’s shot and make his goal. I was basing that in part off this goal by Nazem Kadri where he had to jump over a fallen player and do a 360 spin to make a goal. Because I thought it looked sick as fuck. It’s one of my favorite hockey moments of all time and I thought Shane Hollander should get to do something similar. As a treat.
I didn’t have a specific moment in mind for the mid-air interception, because it’s happened more than once and I think they always look sick. I was mostly thinking of Sidney Crosby with that detail. He’s had a lot of really cool moments intercepting the puck midair.
Goalie goals are also real! But they are rare. They are stupid difficult. A feather in the cap of any goalie who manages one.
They also have pretty much have always happened on unmanned nets. Basically, sometimes hockey teams have their goalies leave the net unguarded so they have an extra attacking skater. When that happens, sometimes the other team’s goalie takes the chance to score on the unguarded net. Matt Brodeur is the only goalie to have recorded a goal on a “guarded” net, but frankly the goal was pretty empty it was just technically guarded because the goalie was on his way to the bench and didn’t make it back in time to stop it.
So, are you going to get these exact plays out of hockey? No. I made them up. But I made them up by stringing together a bunch of real moments in hockey,
Shane and Ilya’s achievements on the ice in snapping birch are meant to be slightly fantastical. They’re meant to be the one-in-a-billion, you-can’t-believe-your-eyes moments. Because Shane and Ilya are one in a billion players. The fact that they exist at the same time is borderline miraculous.
There’s always that one person that redefines what people thought was possible in a sport. The person who sets records and has a highlights reel that will be watched fifty years down the line. Ilya and Shane are both that person. Their plays are meant to reflect that.
And part of the reason for that in snapping birch specifically is to make it excruciatingly clear that the NHL’s story is pretextual. If these two assholes are trying to lose then what the fuck could it possibly look like when they’re trying to win.
They’ve both been out here redefining the sport in their games against each other. The NHL is out here like “*gasp* you were TRYING to lose” but the only plays they can point to as proof are plays every other hockey player alive couldn’t pull off with a gun to their fucking head.
You need to be able to see how unbelievable Shane and Ilya’s games together have been to make it undeniably clear that the NHL is simply making shit up. They are historical talents, both of them.
When I’m writing them on the ice, I try to have them do something a step beyond what’s happened in real hockey while still keeping it within the bounds of what is humanly possible. Because in my mind Shane and Ilya are meant to be better than every other hockey player in history. They operate on a level that no one else does.
Excellent chapter! Is there any chance of a sneak peek of what’s going on with jj before the next chapter? I feel like he’s getting a bit too much focus for it to be a straightforward jj being an asshole. That wouldn’t require so much buildup
one day marly is over and shane and ilya and him are playing like call of duty or some shit and marly is like “my mom would kick everyone’s ass at this game growing up and mami hated that we bonded over a killing game.” and ilya and shane stop and turn to marly at the same time who is just clicking away at buttons and shane is the first one to speak like “did you just say mom and mami?” and marly is like “yeah bro im adopted i got lesbian moms. mom is from boston, represent haha! and mami is from ecuador. roz never told you?” and ilya gives wide eyes and raised brows “marly you literally have never told me this.” and marly is like “oh my bad cap haha crazy.” and just goes back to playing the game
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander & Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander & Yuna Hollander, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry, David Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov
Characters: Shane Hollander, David Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, Hayden Pike, Rose Landry, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Roger Crowell
Additional Tags: Social Media, PR Campaign, Outing, Supportive David Hollander and Yuna Hollander, David Hollander loves his son to the point of compromising his data security, pov you make your famous son your password to everything and suddenly your iCloud data is released to the internet, Homophobia, Ableism, Racism, the siren call of organized labor movements made me write this, discussions of suicide/suicidal thoughts
Summary:
Shandry’s Third @shaneybaby
uhhh so im on r/shanehollander rn and some guy is claiming to have cloned shane’s dad’s phone and uploaded it to the internet?? has anyone else clicked on this link will it give me a virus if i do
okay I googled his dad and he’s a 52 year old forensic accountant who thinks fashion peaked with ralph lauren polo shirts. am I enough of a hollander simp to risk my laptop just to look through the phone of his dad who acts like sandals and bermuda shorts are a risqué choice. yes.
Post 4 (Ilya, the attorney’s advice, and who’s telling the truth in snapping birch)
Post 5 (Yuna’s love)
Post 6 (Yuna taking Crowell down and Shane’s panic)
Post 7 (Shane’s not going to go through the leak)
Post 8 (Shane the changeling)
Post 9 (Rules for writing social media)
Post 10 (Shane’s not. mad.)
Chapter Post 4 (Chapter 4)
——–
(Below here, these are uncleaned up links to the original posts, going through and editing and making sure I didn’t miss any soon)
——–
(JJ foreshadowing) March 26: Anon asked: Excellent chapter! Is there any chance of a sneak peek of what’s going on with jj…
(hockey games and talent) March 26: Anon asked: I was curious about your description of the playoffs game…
(the other side’s quiet) March 26: Anon asked: rereading snapped birch for the millionth time…
(how Shane’s doing) March 29: Shane really is in the torture matrix right now. Like God he really is in fucking agony.
(how does it ever get better) March 30: Anon asked: I love snapping birch! I think this fic does a good job of highlighting all the systemic issues
(Dave in a Greek tragedy) March 30: I’m so glad you said this because this is exactly why I decided it happened because he had an Objectively Terrible Password.
(Scott’s part of the machine) March 30: See I really loved writing Scott’s interview because it’s probably the most fabricated play
(structuring social media fics) March 30: I don’t know what I do i just hallucinate things and they end up on the paper in a fugue state
(Rose PR and child star crash out AU in the tags) March 30: Dave is the side character I latched onto this time but Rose is a close second in my heart.
(comparing to pez) March 31: Shane Hollander wishes he had #leku problems.
(not seeing everything on purpose) March 31: I don’t plan on doing a companion piece at this time.
(Landry family dynamics) March 31: I loveeee the Landry brothers.
(Scott Hunter hates Ilya Rozanov) April 1: I haven’t actually read the books myself, just snippets of them…
(parasocial celebrity culture) April 1: I’m kind of glad to hear this because…
(Shane and privacy) April 2: Oh I LOVE that line thank you for sharing it with me.
(Raiders boys, Dave’s privacy ) April 2: I just really liked the idea that the Boston raiders have two brain cells…
(hypothetical The Magnus Archives crossover) April 5: The Eye, looking at this shit…
(sports fans) April 5: My hyperspecific lore drop of the day is that I started watching hockey as a kid…
(Ilya and Shane’s worst fears) April 5: Shane Hollander being trapped in his own personal hell without Ilya being able to save him is Ilya Rozanov’s personal hell
(Hayden v. Ilya and Shane’s pain in the tags) April 6: I loveeeee the Etsy witch bit.
(growing stories and corporate pr) April 6: Oh my god it is my Achilles heel.
(organizing posts and Ilya and Shane’s support/isolation) April 6: Literally so much time. Probably the hardest part about snapping birch…
April 7: Chapter 5
(Ilya’s visa) April 7: It’s not spoilers! I don’t plan for it to come out during the span of the fic.
(the timing of Ilya’s visa) April 8: Ahhhhh I was hoping people would notice it was the Day Before The Leak.
(Shane isn’t sleeping) April 8: Yeah they’re really having the worst fucking week of their lives.
(Ilya and language) April 8: That was my FAVORITE line of the chapter.
(Ilya tweeting about marriage) April 8: In my mind, yes. Like, a little bit.
(Shane and medication) April 10: If Yuna had her way they would have already shot that boy with the tranquilizer gun
(food and how Ilya’s acting around Shane) April 11: Yes because if he goes too long without eating Ilya will haunt his steps with a perfectly balanced meal…
(Shane and medication pt 2) April 11: Shanes earning an Olympic gold medal in mental gymnastics…
(Hayden’s going through it) April 12: Hayden Pike is the worlds unhappiest camper right now…
(Ilya’s danger and fears) April 12: Hi! I’m so glad you like it!! Thank you for your kind words!!!
(Ilya and Shane’s dream wedding) April 14: I don’t think Shane would have a problem, per se, with either of them being given away at the wedding
(Ilya’s reaction to the suicide story) April 14: TW: discussion of suicide, no actual suicide.
(skittles’ reaction) April 14: bahahahahaahah straight up in my mind the entire skittles pr department is sweating
(Kip POV) April 16: Kip’s so funny to me.
(where is Svetlana) April 17: I don’t plan on touching on this in the fic!
(Metros vs. Raiders reactions) April 19: Shane Hollander Is A Good Captain is a hill I will fucking die on.
(the metros decisions) April 19: No but this is exactly it. The metros fell into this so slowly …
(outing) April 19: Yeah that’s the one thing I’m just. Incredibly wary of with heated rivalry.
(race in HR) April 20: Thank you so much for sharing this with me.
(Patty’s husband) April 20: In my mind patty’s husband is terminally offline…
(patty’s husband and the internet jumping to conclusions) April 20: You’re supposed to! Part of the reason why I want the internet to be as wrong as much as possible
(internet judgement) April 20: Exactly!! Here’s an article from couch guy himself
(Shane and Ilya’s differences around coming out) April 22: No I totally get what you mean.
(Shane would like not to be perceived) April 22: Hahaha I’m so glad you liked it
(how they’re handling the sex angle) April 22: See I was curious if someone was going to notice that bit because Ilya 100% did
(Shane loved his team) April 22: I feel like that one announcer in canon called Shane unsociable
(dead puck era and press conference) April 22: Oh 100%, go for it!
(current scandals and the Austrian diagnosis) April 23: So I’m not gonna confirm or deny any like, scandals/drama
(Hayden on Ilya) April 23: I think I’m such a Hayden defender in part
(nfl players being shipped) April 24: the star nfl players who have been personally victimized …
April 24: They are completely untested elements of himbo chaos
April 27: Chapter 6
(where is Jackie) April 28: Like Svetlana, they’re trying to keep her out of it for the most part.
(Shane’s image) April 28: Some chapters I do decide “I’m going to be more parasocial in this chapter than in others”
(Shane’s line shifts) April 28: Interestingly enough, that wasn’t the outright goal
(Shane and vulnerability) April 29: Shane Hollander is a 26 year old hyper competent asshole
(shane and Ilya having to perform) April 29: I am a broken record but I will say it again: Shane is experiencing levels of parasociality
(IRL job) April 29: lol I’m an attorney I just know how the internet works
(Shane’s previous media problems) April 29: Oh yeah in my mind people have always been fucking weird about Shane.
(The audience as the problem) April 30: Oh yeah snapping birch is meant to make you feel fucking weird.
(Jackson Lee joining up) May 1: See I really wanted one of the first characters to join the strike…
(the NHL’s legal strategy) May 1: This is exactly it.
(real life parallels) May 1: Oh I am stealing egregiously from real life with this fic.
(Scott knowing about Shane’s locker room) May 1: He’d put it together based on Shane’s ice shifts.
(Rose and family) May 1: For approximately once a month over the last year Rose Landry has been waking up at 4 am…
(Ilya’s state of mind) May 2: Now that y’all have the context of chapter six…
(why the NHL is doing this) May 2: See the NHL is an absolutely fascinating microcosm of corporate America to me…
(baby Shane vs current Shane) May 2: One of my favorite details to add in snapping birch are the little clips of Shane as a child.
(internet tempting you with humor) May 2: thank you I am a clown
(Carter and JJ) May 3: It’s intentional. People should read Carter and J.J.’s appearances…
(deploying Dave & Yuna) May 3: Dave’s participation in the PR campaign
(impossible not to know about Shane now) May 3: It’s literally impossible to escape!
(underage teen treatment) May 3: I think the internet is uniquely weird about sexualizing celebrity teenagers…
(the legal avenues against page 6) May 4: The most likely suit that this would result in is a defamation suit
(Shane’s perception of Hollywood) May 6: Shane’s planning on inventing a new kind of witness protection program for himself.
(hockey legacy and future docs) May 6: I think Shane would really struggle with whether to participate in this project.
(Shane’s options if there’s a movie) May 7: Not really, no. You can’t copyright or trademark the facts about your own life.
(timeline clarification) May 8: We’re 10 months pre-Irina Foundation…
(internet) May 10: I feel like I personally am just so jaded about the internet
(Luca is watching) May 16: I will confirm that is Luca Haas.
(Shane’s history with autism (and Ilya & Hayden’s takes)) May 22: So I’m gonna confine this discussion to what’s already come out in snapping birch.
May 24: Chapter 7
(Tumblr apparently limits posts to 100 links a post, so here is PART TWO)
Forever thinking about “Boston is nice too?” and wanting to throw up about it. Just sitting on the floor of a gym across from the stranger who would be the Shane of his existence like.
I am so far away from home. I am so afraid but I cannot show it. I’m going to be all on my own out there and people are not kind to me. I’ve always been alone, but never this kind of alone before. I don’t really know you, but you seemed kind. And earnest. You would not lie to me. Is it safe? Will I be happy there and safe? Boston is nice too?
Ougghhhhgg. My brave little bug I’mgping to be sick
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 4/?
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander & Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander & Yuna Hollander, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry, David Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov
Characters: Shane Hollander, David Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, Hayden Pike, Rose Landry, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Roger Crowell
Additional Tags: Social Media, PR Campaign, Outing, Supportive David Hollander and Yuna Hollander, David Hollander loves his son to the point of compromising his data security, pov you make your famous son your password to everything and suddenly your iCloud data is released to the internet, Homophobia, Ableism, Racism, the siren call of organized labor movements made me write this, discussions of suicide/suicidal thoughts
Summary:
Shandry’s Third @shaneybaby
uhhh so im on r/shanehollander rn and some guy is claiming to have cloned shane’s dad’s phone and uploaded it to the internet?? has anyone else clicked on this link will it give me a virus if i do
okay I googled his dad and he’s a 52 year old forensic accountant who thinks fashion peaked with ralph lauren polo shirts. am I enough of a hollander simp to risk my laptop just to look through the phone of his dad who acts like sandals and bermuda shorts are a risqué choice. yes.
How long until Shane stops freaking out enough to tell his family that HE TOLD THEM to delete everything even remotely related to ilya and you know what shane too in the process
Honestly everyone wants him to because what he’s doing instead is so much more worrisome to them. After the locker room incident leaked he Locked All Of His Emotions Into A Very Small Box That Is Rattling With The Force of a Thousand Suns. Hayden Pike has spent the last 17 hours making eye contact with Scott Hunter like
Shane’s the least involved in the social media war out of anyone because they all know that if he has to spend longer than three minutes reading the shit people are saying about him online then he’s going to shut down his own organs by sheer force of will because social media isn’t his strong suit. And everyone else is like “heyyyyyy bud do you want to maybe just go lie down in the bedroom or you know. scream at us at the top of your lungs.” And he’s like No No I Am Going to Go Talk To The Agent On The 7000 Open Fraud Cases We Now Have And See If They Need Any More Information For That or I’m Going To Go Talk To Andrea About Ilya’s Asylum Application And Then Maybe I’ll Go Check In With The Data Security Firm We Hired To Figure Out How My Parents Will Ever Have A Secure Bank Account Again Because Haha, Every Security Question They Could Ever Use Is Now Public Knowledge. Can I Get Anyone A Crisp Ginger Ale Sorry I Can’t Offer More I Didn’t Know My Life Would Be Destroyed Yesterday So I Didn’t Get Groceries. And they have to let him do it because if they don’t he’ll find something to do. They forced 4 melatonin pills down his throat on his 39th consecutive hour of being awake in an attempt to get him to sleep and still found him in the driveway at 3am changing the oil of kips car because haha, the oil light was on and he just thought he’d do it since he. He won’t be playing hockey ever again probably so it’s not like he doesn’t have time on his hands.
And then there’s Kip standing there holding the light for him and staring at Scott like
He’s bringing a weird fucking energy to the room right now. Everyone’s worried and they just want him to let himself feel what’s happening and Shane Can’t Do That Because If He Does Then He’s Going To Freak Out And Haha The Last Time That Happened It Ended Up On The Internet Like Everything Else Thats Ever Happened To Him. But There Is Still A Secret Place And It’s Inside Of His Head.
The locker room video leak was just. It took a lot from him. He was actually incredibly grateful to Scott for helping him preserve the dignity he had by forcing him to walk out like nothing was wrong and then the smoke cleared and they finally got new phones with new everything because the ones they had were suddenly as useful as rocks
And oh.
Oh so it’s already happened again.
He’s a private person. He’s an intensely private person. And he feels like he’s suddenly flayed open for everyone to inspect and he hates it. And then right after the leak happened in the one moment where he let himself feel afraid the guys he gave everything to posted it on the fucking internet.
I don’t want to like, compare how fucked Ilya and Shane are because they are both dealing with two very different beasts right now. I have a whole legal analysis about why but the short of it is that Ilya almost definitely is in America on an O-1 visa (and he’s probably in Canada rn on a tourist visa which is even more tenuous) which is tied to your employment. If the NHL successfully forces them out, he’s going to lose his visa and be deported. They’re trying to salvage his immigration status on the fly before hes forced on a plane to the country where his homophobic corrupt cop brother is waiting with a fucking gun. He has a great asylum claim but nothings a guarantee it’s all so uncertain about how to navigate it in the long term because he doesn’t even know what country he should expect to be in. And, on top of that, he also has to deal with the turmoil of being outed and being forced out of the NHL. Ilya’s got a lot of problems right now.
But if you’re just talking about what’s happening online right now, it is so much worse for Shane.
Ilya’s been in Dave’s contacts for maybe six months. He’s just not a big presence in Dave’s phone. And he wasn’t exactly texting his deep dark secrets to his boyfriend’s dad. Beyond the whole “bisexual and dating Shane Hollander” thing, Ilya lost maybe one or two pieces of personal information to this but past that was mostly unscathed.
Meanwhile Shane has to be the disastrously gay and medically depressed pro athlete son who he’s been asking Reddit about for years. People know everything from when he was bullied in childhood to what his heart rate was at 2:34 a.m in 2012. There’s just so much of him exposed suddenly. The huge brunt of the public’s attention is focused on him because he was the one they got the most information about and they are using it to tear him to pieces.
It’s also a little worse for Shane in the sense of public perception.
Ilya is the one who everyone’s clapping on the back for this. He’s the one who bagged Shane Hollander, cosmopolitan’s hottest man in hockey, who had such a straight laced public persona before this that a significant portion of the internet assumed Rose Landry took his virginity.
Ilya was The Hockey Guy Who Fucks before this. He had a party guy reputation. Yeah, people are shocked he’s bi, but it’s not his previous image was totally destroyed by this the way Shane’s was.
Like. For one, Ilya’s image is just way more built to withstand scandal. He could have woken up and robbed a bank and some people would still be like “haha classic Rozanov he does such crazy things.” He’s the bad boy of hockey. The cocky competent womanizer who’s known for throwing you for a loop.
Shane is Mr. Canada. Mr. Never Parties Never Drinks. Mr. I’ve-Been-With-One-Woman-And-She-Was-The-Most-Beautiful-And-Desirable-Woman-Alive-And-Even-After-We-Broke-Up-We-Stayed-Best-Friends-Because-Im-That-Unproblematic. And he was fucking Ilya Rozanov this entire time??
Ilya gets to have this perception of someone who Came In And Conquered. This is almost viewed as a win for him in a way it isn’t for Shane. It’s still horribly dehumanizing for both of them, but it’s in different ways.
And in the end, Shane’s the one who everyone ends up talking about like he spread it for half the nhl because if he let Ilya Rozanov fuck him—
There isn’t a woman in the relationship. But the internet wants there to be one, and they’ve decided it’s Shane. The internet thinks Ilya’s the bro they high five for this in the locker room but Shane’s the slut who’s blowing an entire hockey team that’s l not even his team. Again, horribly dehumanizing for both of them, but Shane’s involves a lot more people talking about him bouncing on it for Scott Hunter.
He’s just. He’s soared past the point of existential destruction and is at whatever point is past that. He can’t play hockey. He’s getting torn to shreds. The entire world suddenly knows about shit he has never, ever told anyone.
He so desperately does not want to be angry at his dad right now. He just doesn’t. He doesn’t want to be anything because he doesn’t want to feel the enormity of what’s happening. He just wants to handle whatever’s physically in front of him in that moment and if he has to think more than seven minutes in the future he’ll lose his entire mind so he Won’t Do That Right Now.
The best way I can describe it is that he doesn’t want it to mad, he wants for it to have never happened. And not in a “that’s what your mom says in the car ride home after you get suspended and she’s OBVIOUSLY mad but she’s being passive aggressive about it.” Shane doesn’t want to be mad. He doesn’t want his dad to feel sorry. The only thing he wants is a time machine.
what's your secret to making a convincing socmed fic?? i feel like yours has this sort of flow to it that feels both real and entertaining, and it's definitely a balance i feel people tend to struggle with (myself included)
be mentally ill
I have vague rules that I follow whenever I’m writing them? But writing is a very vibes based process for me so the answer for me is always a little bit “idk I just do it”
GENERAL RULES OF SOCIAL MEDIA FICS FOR ME:
RULE ONE: THE INTERNET IS A DINOSAUR.
Do you know that scene at the end of Jurassic world where the corporate lady uses a flare to lure the T-Rex over so it can fight the fuck-off angry bio engineered dinosaur?
That’s how you treat the internet.
It is big. It is dangerous. If it is at your back you should fucking run. But sometimes you can attract its attention to fight your enemies for you.
Social media and the internet is just. an inherently unhealthy space to in my opinion. You have put almost every single person in the world into one room and given them a fucking ski mask. If you have a large part of internet attention focused on you, it is going to be bad for you.
I am not saying everyone on the internet is bad. I’m not saying that I have bad experiences on the internet. I love the little friends that live on my phone. But I am also a middling fanfiction blog benefiting from the veil of total anonymity. No one knows my name. Only a tiny tiny tiny tiny portion of the internet knows I exist. An even tinier portion of it cares that I exist.
It’s a numbers game. If you are writing a social media fic, I’m assuming that whatever it’s about has become famous enough to have a major social media movement about it. That is going to be an inherently painful experience for whoever is experiencing it because if you get enough people into the same room you will find someone that disagrees.
I see a lot of social media fics that have overwhelmingly positive reactions to Whatever It Is that’s happening. And those are fun to read!! But it won’t be something I ever write.
One, I just don’t find that realistic. Again, if you lock every single person alive in a room and give them a veil of anonymity, someone will use it to punch you in the face.
I just don’t think the internet is structured in a way that encourages people to be their best selves. I have definitely said shit on the internet that I’d never say to someone’s face.
You’re anonymous. You’re speaking into a void. Who would think that the person you’re talking about would ever even see it??? You’re one voice in a mob and sometimes that makes saying hurtful shit not feel so bad because it’s hard to believe that anyone is even listening to you.
As a result? Even if attention is positive, it is still bad.
Take snapping birch—Shane gets a lot of attention in this in his favor. They want the nhl commissioner’s head on a stick because of what happened to him! That attention is absolutely vital to him ever getting to play hockey again.
A lot of the posts are still horribly invasive.
So, for example, I had one commenter in chapter one of birch that picked up exactly what I was putting down with this point. There was one fake silly little tumblr poster in chapter one was very worried about Shane Hollander and had a tag that referenced his fitness logs because they suggested his body was fucking shutting down with the stress. And it’s not bad per se that they’re worried about him. They’re worried because they in some manner care, albeit in a parasocial kind of way.
But if they’d really cared they wouldn’t have gone through his fucking fitness logs.
Shane Hollander does not want fucking strangers combing through his fitness logs. That’s a horrifically invasive thing that he does not ever want to happen. He does not care if you “care” about him—do not fucking do it.
This is the kind of attention that could help him take down the nhl commissioner. But it’s also the kind of attention that causes him unimaginable emotional anguish. Every sword is double edged, the public eye comes with teeth, and the internet is a dinosaur. If it chases you, it will try to fucking swallow you.
The other reason why this rule is important is because conflict is where your narrative lives.
Stories need stakes. There needs to be something on the line. If the internet is a happy place to be where everyone says the Correct Thing, you eviscerate the conflict. People get invested if they’re worried. If social media is in the mix, then you can drop a fucking dinosaur in the middle of the plot and let it start biting. Do not turn your dinosaur into a puppy by letting everyone on the internet be nice.
RULE TWO: EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET IS A LYING TO YOU.
People on the internet lie! They’re lying or they’re mistaken or they’re exaggerating or they’re joking! The vast majority of the fake posts you draft should be in some way wrong!
Here’s an example. In snapping birch, you get this fake tumblr post:
porcupinedaydreams
the sheer panic around Shane Hollander’s wellbeing that was tearing through this hellsite for the past 48 hours like the iceberg that took out the titanic is UNIMAGINABLY FUNNY now that we know he was totally fine he was just so busy getting put through a mattress by his hot Russian hockey player boyfriend that he didn’t even know that people thought he was dead
59,101 Notes
#hollanov #HE WAS GETTING RAILED #seeing the Ilya/shane top v. bottom discourse on Twitter is so funny #GUYS WE KNOW WHOS ON BOTTOM #do you think Shane Hollander knows that he has been impregnated by the entire nhl on ao3
This post is objectively straight up wrong. 1) we know Shane knew that people thought he was dead bevause Ilya told him when he showed up at his house in a panic thinking he was fucking dead and 2) Shane straight up says (in a professional way) “guys it’s been less than 24 hours and my dad was experiencing every type of identity fraud at the same time. I have been busy TALKING TO THE POLICE.” He wasn’t so busy having sex that he didn’t know that people thought he died. I think the fake tumblr user that wrote that knew that wasn’t what was going on.
But it was funnier to write it that way. So they did. I don’t think the poster even thought of it as a lie or misinformation—it was just a joke to them.
Some posts I write are very confidentially wrong. Some are actively malicious, some are just mistaken, some just stretch the truth, some are just goofing around. But if you make everyone a little wrong in different ways, it makes it feel more realistic. Suddenly you have a bunch of people saying different things and they’re wrong in different ways. It feels like you’re reading multiple distinct voices instead of the same person ghostwriting every single post.
I will on rare occasions have a “voice of God” poster who says what I personally think and makes my points for me. And yes, in pez that is lemillions2ndbiggestfan. But this should be the exception, not the rule.
I feel like posts that are a little wrong make for a more engaging experience with the reader. It’s frustrating to see so many wrong people on your dash!! You know they’re wrong because you know the source material and you want to go correct them and you can’t!! It’s frustrating in a way that gets you invested. Let people be wrong.
RULE THREE: DIFFERENT SOCIAL MEDIA SITES ARE DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. YOU DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE.
Different social media sites attract different types of people. They have different communities. They have different insider jokes, different social norms, different everything. I model every single different type of social media to reflect the source material.
I was so dedicated to it in pez that I would legitimately count the characters used in each fake tweet to make sure it was under Twitter’s actual character limit. I don’t do that in snapping birch because 1) there’s way more fake twitter posts to write and it’s exhausting and 2) apparently Twitter changed the character count to give you more??? I don’t know, I don’t have twitter and never will (I’m not fucking calling it X), so I’m unclear on how many characters you get now or if you have to pay for more characters or what. I do worry that my fake twitter posts are the least realistic because I’ve never had that social media.
I’ll get weird about it though. I will count my fake tumblr tags to make sure they don’t go over 30 because that’s when real tumblr kicks you off. I will open up the real social media to make sure the design is as closely modeled as I can make it. If I’m writing for a fake brand, like fake Calvin Klein or whatever, I will try and pull real things they’ve posted to model them closer. (Which is such a pain for the twitter ones because, again, I refuse to get it on principle, so I am on Google images searching “Calvin Klein Twitter post” hoping I get something). When I wrote pride tape’s social media statement, I pulled an actual statement pride tape released when the NHL banned pride tape as a model. The little rainbow hockey decal in the corner that was present in the fic is there because Pride Tape had one on their social media statement already.
Having the fake social media feel like the real social media makes the entire fic sound overall more realistic, but it also helps with tonal shift. Readers want variety! They want to hear from different voices! So consistently switching between sites gives them that.
People on tumblr do not sound like people on twitter or Reddit or Instagram. Change what you do to reflect each site and it will feel like your world is real.
RULE FOUR: YOU DO NOT GET TO TELL THE REAL STORY. YOU HAVE TO TELL THE STORY OF WHAT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS HAPPENED.
In law school, one of my professors told me that his friend was a criminal defense attorney who would walk into every client interview and say, “do not tell me what you did. Tell me what they are going to say you did.”
If I write social media fics, I’m not writing about what actually happened. I’m writing about what the rest of the world says happened.
If you’re doing a pure social media fic like in snapping birch, it comes at a loss. You never get to see what really happened. You never get the full story. The full story never ends up on the internet.
There’s a lot of emotional scenes that I love happening in the background of snapping birch. Never gonna make it into the fic. You never get to see it. Because the internet would never get to see it. Ask yourself how something got on the internet before you let it get there. Have a reason for everything. You do not have to necessarily share that reason with the audience every time. But you need to always ask yourself the question of “how did this end up on the internet” and accept the fact that sometimes the answer is “it WOULDNT end up on the internet.”
Look at another example from snapping birch—the Raiders in the bar. That scene almost never made it in there. The conversation happened in my head but it wasn’t going to be something the audience was going to find out about.
Because I couldn’t figure out why these guys would have a sensitive conversation in a bar when they could do it at one of their apartments/houses. Yes they’re himbos but they’re not recklessly stupid. They’re not doing it because they just really wanted to be at a bar. They’d sit on the floor of cliffs living room cradling bottles of Russian vodka in a paper bag and staring despondently at their phone as if they were trying to summon the spirit of Ilya Rozanov to their hockey seance.
Then I decided that they’re at the bar bevause they can’t be at their houses—because the NHL/team management sent people to their fucking houses to try and get them at that game and prevent a strike. They went to a bar that (they thought) had zero other people because they desperately needed to talk and had all very suddenly found themselves with no place to do that at. It was the most secure environment they had, and it just wasn’t enough.
I’m not gonna fucking say that in the fic. That’s too heavy handed. It feels like I’m bringing it up just so the reader knows I thought about it and have an answer. It just feels contrived to me.
You need to know what actually happened so that way what you’re putting out makes sense. It keeps everything internally consistent and logical. And then once you have your beautiful, emotional story about what really went down, you have to sacrifice it on the fucking altar of unreliable narration.
Snapping birch is not the same story as What’s Actually Happening In Shane Hollanders Life Right Now. But I can’t tell the story of What’s Actually Happening without sacrificing what snapping birch is meant to be.
It’s meant to be a fractured view of events. It’s meant to be a twisted version of reality. That’s what social media inherently is. And that point wouldn’t be nearly as visceral if the reader got any kind of relief from the perspective of a real character. The outsider pov is a prerequisite to the point the fic is trying to make.
It’s about what kind of story you want to tell. In pez, I wanted to show the outside pressure to be the next perfect symbol and reject his old identity that was weighing down on Izuku while he was directly confronted with his old identity. Having a fusion of both social media and narration was the best way to do that. For birch, I wanted to show the sort of tragic love of a parent that wants to save their child but doesn’t know how—after they’ve seemingly doomed them. I wanted the fractured messiness of only knowing these people through years-old messages of questionable honesty. I couldn’t have gotten that same messiness if a character was present. You have to figure out what you want to do with a story and then you can figure out how social media can get you there.
RULE FIVE: YOU STILL HAVE TO TELL A STORY.
Legitimately one of the hardest parts of this is just the order that you present information in to make a coherent story.
Everything’s non linear. Posts reference things that you haven’t seen for yourself. The audience has to drink from the firehose in the same way that a real person does whenever they go on social media. But, at the same time, you don’t want the reader to be totally lost about what happened.
I try to anchor past to the present thematically, if that makes sense. Take chapter 2 in snapping birch.
In the present, you got to see the raiders rally around Ilya. You had cliff dropping their resolution to strike online. You get them in the bar. That chapter has them prove beyond a doubt that they’ll be unified with Ilya.
But then that’s paired with excerpts from Dave hollander’s phone constantly dividing Shane from the metros. You get Hayden’s intervention. Shane getting lectured in the past by his mom about how he’s not like his teammates. Shane feels all the more isolated because he’s held up against all the ways Ilya isn’t. The story stays coherent and tied together because it’s not just a random deluge—the content for each chapter has something unifying it thematically.
There’s no exact formula for it. It really is just vibes based for a lot. Just try and think about what each chapter or arc needs like, emotionally. snapping birch opens with a random video of Shane and his dad because Dave’s love is meant to be the one constant in this fic. It needed to be there from the first moment. That wouldn’t still be true if I’d opened with like, the press conference. So there’s definitely a better order for the presentation of information but there’s a lot of factors that go into deciding the exact presentation.
It does also help to have “weight bearing” posts, for lack of a better term? But I try to not give myself more than one or two of these per chapter.
It’s the big tumblr post right the first chapter of snapping birch. Or the interview with the “hockey historian.” The first time lemillions2ndbiggestfan appears in pez. They’re huge data dumps of information that help the reader orient themselves and contextualize all the smaller posts. It keeps the story coherent and engaging because there’s ideally no point where the reader is like “what the FUCK are you talking about now”
And the last rule is the most important rule I have for any of my writing, which is
RULE SIX: FUCK IT WE BALL.
there are no rules. Do whatever you want all the time without fear of consequence or failure. writing is whatever the fuck you want it to be and any rule can be broken at any time for any reason. be the most mentally ill person in the room and try to make every sentence fuck hard
I am very curious about why you chose the name snapping birch
It’s because I was fucking around on the Wikipedia page for changelings for like an hour and that’s the name I liked the best.
I hate naming things so I typically just hop around words that have the vibe I want for the fic. Here, I really liked the imagery for changelings. This was almost called changeling’s dirge but that didn’t feel quite right for what I was going for.
As you probably already know, changelings come from this idea in folklore that your real baby was stolen and replaced by a fae’s baby, leaving you with this Thing that is Wrong in some way. It’s mostly just faded into folklore nowadays, but historically, there’s been more than one person that’s Actually Murdered Their Baby and raised the defense that they thought they were a changeling child.
Notably, “changeling” children from history were most likely people who were autistic or otherwise differently abled.
There’s a lot of lore about how to get your “real” baby back if you discover the child you have is a “changeling.” A weird number of them involve eggshells. An alarming number of them involve shoving that thing in a hot oven and sealing the door.
One of the ways to get your “real” child back—according to Wikipedia—is to take the changeling child to a midden (a really old waste dump) and whip it with a birch stick while chanting “Take yours; give mine back.” Which was frankly one of the nicer remedies. The vast majority of ways to rid yourself of a changeling child was to treat it with such cruelty that the fae felt bad for it and returned for it.
But, of course, there was no changeling. There’s no real, better child out there that’s actually yours. The real child is the one you just beat.
In this fic, Shane is the changeling child. He’s the same person he’s always been, but now the world knows there’s something different about him and they’re punishing him for it. The backlash he faces is a manifestation of the irrational anger the nhl and the public feels towards him for not being the “real” Shane Hollander that conforms with their mental image of him. They’re beating him with birch trying to get rid of the changeling child, but there is no changeling child. It’s just shane.
You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of someone you keeps. you don’t get Shane Hollander the hockey god and get to excise his gayness. In trying to get back the “real” image, you kill the actual person.
But, critically, this fic is named snapping birch. It’s not about beating shane with a birch branch.
Yuna needs to be in a room with the NHL people and i need to be a fly on the wall. I NEED to see what's going down there. She's going to rip their throats out
Live footage of when Yuna finally gets Roger Crowell fired and replaced with a highly qualified lesbian
Shane would not go through that thing with a gun to his fucking head.
He gets physically ill at the thought. He’s scared of knowing just how much the world knows about him now. At the same time, he’s scared of not knowing it. He has to go through life now wondering just how much of him the person he’s talking to has seen. And, considering he’s spent his whole life associating privacy with safety, it’s fucking with him severely.
Even if his dad was fine with Shane going through the full leak, Shane wouldn’t want to. He just doesn’t want to ever learn about someone by combing through the things they did in the place they thought was just for them.
I think of phones as uniquely intimate objects. They just know so much about the person they belong to.
What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever googled? What’s the text you sent that you really, really regret? What’s the mean bitchy shit talking conversation you had with your best friend about your boss, who was never supposed to see that? What’s the slightly embarrassing porn you googled at three in the morning?
That’s all out there now. All of it. The stuff about shane is just the stuff getting the most public attention.
Shane doesn’t want to know if his parents ever bitched about him over text when they were all fighting and in bad moods and hadn’t slept enough the night before. He doesn’t want to know the stupid questions his dad was googling because no one was ever supposed to see them. He definitely does not want to know if his dad was googling embarrassing porn at 3am.
If his dad wants him to know something, he can tell him. Even with permission, Shane is not ever going to look through the leak.
I do think david gives him the letters he wrote in therapy.
That’s different. Those were always meant for Shane, in a way. They’re just… letters that got a little lost in the mail.
Everything in them was something Dave wanted to tell him. He just didnt know how. So Shane would read those.
Yuna needs to be in a room with the NHL people and i need to be a fly on the wall. I NEED to see what's going down there. She's going to rip their throats out
Live footage of when Yuna finally gets Roger Crowell fired and replaced with a highly qualified lesbian
asdfghjkl; ilya blowing of the attorneys advice and then offering to buy her a briefcase about it
You will NEVER catch me portraying ignoring the advice of counsel in a positive light Andrea knew he was gonna say that in advance and okayed it that was a strategic white lie
For anyone new to my tumblr the rule is that I will gab incessantly about background info for ongoing fics as long as that info will never make it into the fic itself. If it will make it into the fic itself, then I won’t answer at all or I’ll sit on it until it comes out during the fic.
One of the reasons why I liked snapping birch enough to write it is because of how fundamentally unreliable all of the “narrators” are. At no point do you get inside the head of someone with actual firsthand knowledge. Absolutely every single piece of information you get should be taken with a grain a salt. The fic is designed to be unreliable in the way that I find the internet to be inherently unreliable. So if you’re reading it, you should really question the veracity of what people are saying, because a lot of them are wrong, mistaken, exaggerating, or outright lying.
I try to weave in little clues that’s something’s not quite right whenever there’s a piece of information that isnt quite reliable. Time stamps are one big way that I do that.
The only other multimedia fic on my roster is pez. In that fic, I don’t include date/time stamps on my faux Twitter posts. This is, in part, because bnha never reveals how far into the future canon takes place, and I didn’t want to decide a date on my own. But I could have just blown off adding the date/times to snapping birch even though we know when heated rivalry takes place. I don’t think anyone’s super attached to those. I don’t think most people even read them. And the time/date thing is honestly such a huge pain in the ass to format that I would have dropped it in a heartbeat if I could. But I didn’t. Those are there because they’re narratively important.
Here’s an example: The biggest piece of misinformation to appear in snapping birch so far are the Shane Hollander suicide allegations. Those were totally fake. But how could anyone tell?
For one, the conflicting timestamps. The tweet where Page Six reported he had attempted was issued just before midnight on 1/12/18. But there were a bunch of other timestamps that suggest that Shane Hollander was active after midnight on 1/12/18. There was a news article from the 13th claiming that Shane had a meeting with the commissioner’s office that same morning.
Shane was either in a hospital bed/dead on the morning of the 13th or meeting with the NHL commissioner. Those two things are pretty mutually exclusive. You think if the attempt claims had been true, Roger Crowell would have made it in past Shane’s psych hold? Absolutely not. Odds are that Shane was either meeting with the Commissioner or he had attempted, but both couldn’t be true.
But that just means one is fake. Which do you believe?
The commissioner’s office claim has more indica of reliability. For one, it is partially corroborated by the official NHL account tweeting out about the suspension, so we know something happened with the Commissioner’s Office. Two, we get way closer to getting a source of information about the commissioner’s office claim than we ever do about the suicide attempt claim.
The news article identified an anonymous source in the commissioner’s office. While they were anonymous, and while that person was still capable of lying, that’s still a source. We don’t ever get that with the suicide claim—just a vague assertion that “insiders” had reported it.
Okay. What insiders?
The only people who would conceivably be with Shane right now are the ones who he can trust absolutely. Who the fuck is leaking that, Hayden? The hospital? They’re gonna risk HIPPA consequences for fucking Page Six?
But hey—maybe there’s some neighbor who saw Shane get loaded into an ambulance who called it in.
It is very likely that it would be way more widely reported if that was the case.
In my mind, Shane Hollander is an A-list celebrity. He is the Tom Brady or Messi or Michael Jordan of hockey. Even if you don’t watch hockey, you know Shane Hollander’s name. Especially after he dated Rose Landry.
Like. I do not watch sports. I do not know major sport stars. But I know who David Beckham is. If a sports star gets big enough, I feel like they enter the public consciousness in a way that most professional athletes do not. For me, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have both reached such levels of celebrity that they have entered the public consciousness.
As a result, there is a ludicrous amount of attention around this leak. This is the in-universe equivalent of like if Michael Jordan famously hated Kobe Bryant for their entire careers and then almost ten years into them hating each others guts we all found out that they were secretly fucking the whole time and intended to be wed. Like. People cannot reconcile what just happened with their worldviews and so everyone is talking about it.
So say there’s credible reports that Michael Jordan attempts after it’s revealed he was kissing Kobe Bryant in the moonlight this whole time. That shit would be everywhere. It would not be one or two newspapers suggesting it while everyone else, including Michael Jordan’s loved ones carry on like he’s alive.
The only news station that directly claims Shane attempted suicide was Page Six. The only other papers that reference it are way more careful about it—saying it’s just a suicide watch or just that his condition was “unknown.” It would be one of the biggest stories of the decades, but the sharks don’t rush into a feeding frenzy.
There is absolutely no way that the other papers in this world didn’t see Page Six break that story and look into it. They would have had reporters combing every hospital in his area hoping to catch a bereaved Ilya Rozanov in the waiting room. Other news stations aren’t jumping on the story too. They’re issuing a lot of articles about this mess and they don’t even bring up the fact that Shane Hollander may have committed suicide. There is something about this story that is making everyone else way too wary to report on it.
So. Why did anyone report on it?
It could just be clickbait. I feel like there’s always at least one tabloid crazy enough to publish absolute bullshit like “Tiger Woods Abducted By Aliens, Insiders Say” or some shit. Maybe they were making shit up wholesale.
Is that Page Six though?
I picked Page Six for this because it was a celebrity gossip magazine that was known for being a little bit sensationalist, sometimes wrong, but, for the most part, reliable.
Google them. A lot of the news reliability sites give them a pretty high factual rating. There’s more than once that they’ve been the ones to break genuine celebrity news.
But 1) they have a notable right-wing bias and 2) more than one fact-checker has accused them of reporting on unconfirmed rumors.
Page Six is not the National Enquirer. I don’t think they would genuinely risk making up an article wholesale. But I do think that they would report on a tip they hadn’t fully confirmed. Especially if they are staring down the barrel of the biggest story in a decade and it’s about Shane Hollander.
Again, this is Shane Hollander we’re talking about. It is canonically not his first time finding himself on the cover of a tabloid. And I do personally read canon to suggest that Shane Hollander is the most famous hockey player currently alive.
Ilya is a close second. Their names are so closely tied together in the public eye that it’s hard to know one without knowing the other. But canon suggests that Ilya’s brand is not as developed as Shane’s. Because Yuna Hollander is running the thing like the fucking navy. And, critically, Shane Hollander ended up on the cover of more than one tabloid during his relationship with Rose.
To tabloids, Shane is a known element. He’s Mr. Canada. He is clean, professional, polished. If you falsely report on him, you are going to get a denial issued on official header in times new Roman font. Or you are going to get a passive aggressive phone call from Yuna Hollander demanding a retraction. Sure, you’ll have been wrong, but it won’t sink your magazine like the titanic.
I think if Page Six got a tip from someone who seemed like they could conceivably have gotten this information, someone who seemed to be on the inside, they’d run it without fully fact checking. I think they’d take the gamble. Because even if they were wrong, the momentary gain in attention would outweigh any consequences Shane Hollander would inflict on them.
They were not counting on Ilya Rozanov.
Ilya Rozanov just walked into their offices and set off a fucking nuke. This is “Editor in Chief Gets Fired and Blacklisted So Thoroughly That A High School Paper Wouldn’t Touch Him” levels of disaster. If they were wrong, they were expecting Mr. Canada to issue a polite statement of “oh by the way I’m alive” if he even acknowledged the article at all. They thought they were going to get to quietly retract this if it turned out to be a lie. They were not expecting one of the two most talked-about people on the planet right now to come out fucking swinging with an extended rant about how he had to spend an hour thinking the love of his life was fucking dead because of them. Page Six just had a close brush with being the fucking Friar Lawrence of hockey Romeo and Juliet and the entire world knows it. This is nuclear holocaust levels of disaster for them.
Ultimately, Page Six was the paper chosen to imply that there was in fact a so-called “insider” giving out bad tips, that they were someone close enough to the situation that a major publication would gamble on them, and that for some reason the lie they chose was that he had tried to kill himself.
What would anyone gain from that lie? Especially when it’s so blatantly false?
Fundamentally, snapping birch is supposed to simulate the public receiving two competing social media campaigns. Shane is the main subject of an aggressive smear campaign right now. The claim that he attempted suicide is part of that.
In my mind, the NHL Commissioner’s office views this leak in a much worse light than Shane’s outing in canon. This is not “oh shit Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are secretly gay which we only know because we caught them kissing one time.” This is “Shane Hollander, the most famous hockey player alive, was in such a homophobic environment that his fucking organs were shutting down from the stress. And his dad? He blamed the NHL Commissioner Roger Crowell specifically for that.” This is not a two second kiss caught in the background of the window. It is pages and pages and pages of texts between two concerned parents who were terrified that homophobia was fucking killing their son.
And it is coming right on the tail of Scott Hunter coming out with the most public declaration of love imaginable.
Full disclosure, I have not read the books yet, but I did read up on their timelines. I know I moved up the timeline on Shane coming out to his team and their dynamic going to shit. I did that because I wanted it to be right on the tail of Skip having the hardest fucking launch in the history of the world.
Rainbow capitalism is going to be a huge driving force in this fic. There’s been more than one person who’s said “uhhh didn’t the nhl accept Scott Hunter? Why should we think they’re suddenly discriminating here?” And part of the answer to that question is “because it was fucking profitable to accept Scott Hunter.”
The LGBTQ+ community loves to show up and support its people. The NHL probably saw a huge fucking spike in public support—and, ergo, profits—by waving a little rainbow flag and saying “yayyyy Scott :) yayyyyy love wins 🌈🏒” and then enjoying their cut of the profits from the sold out Scott Hunter jerseys.
Scott Hunter is a guy on the way out. He’s on the last leg of his career and everyone knows it. The NHL doesn’t need to crush that man—he’s halfway out the door. They are going to shill rainbow jerseys with his name on it and pause for the applause and behind the curtain the wizard’s still just a regular guy in an ugly fucking hat.
This leak rips that fucking curtain down. The greatest hockey player alive came out to his teammates and they reacted with so much hostility that his best friend was bodily terrified that they were going to fucking kill him over it. Team management was in on it. The NHL is still a den of homophobia, and Roger Crowell specifically is a source of it.
How the fuck do you spin that?
You discredit him.
Shane Hollander wasn’t anxious because he was exposed to absolutely fucking lethal homophobia—he was anxious because he had a medical grade anxiety disorder. He’s unbalanced. He’s unwell. It’s all irrational. He hid the relationship to hide the cheating and all that stroke-inducing fear he was experiencing? Unrelated to being gay. He was medically depressed. He was clinically anxious—so much so that he was a legitimate suicide risk.
They know it’ll come out as false. But it will plant the idea in your head. Now you’re googling “Shane Hollander suicidal?” Now the algorithm is pushing all those screenshots of private text messages between family members worrying about his mental health and a worried dad’s letters to himself and his fucking medical records, all of which suggest that Shane Hollander was medically unwell and maybe that wasn’t the NHL’s fault after all. Most people are not going to read all the leaked files. The are going to see what lands on their social media feed, so make sure that the overall impression they walk away with is that maybe Shane Hollander just wasn’t okay in the head.
Defamation suits are worth so much because you cannot kill an idea. Shane Hollander canonically is viewed as a calm, emotionally reserved guy who is cool under pressure. An announcer fucking brings it up when discussing him. They need to fucking kill that image of him and replace it with the idea of a paranoid, neurotic mess whose fears of homophobic retaliation were borderline delusion. After all, the NHL welcomed Scott Hunter with open arms.
They won’t convince everyone, but they don’t need to. Public attention span is short. Most people will move on and find something new to be angry about as long as they survive the initial reaction. The NHL wants the public to walk out of the fallout with an initial impression that Shane Hollander was probably unstable and leave NHL Officials to conduct a rigged inquiry into their integrity that they were never, ever going to survive. And even if Shane Hollander insists later that the inquiry was discriminatory, who the fuck cares anymore, that was so long ago
But this is two social media campaigns. And Shane’s camp has fired the opening shots of theirs.
Ilya did not reveal that tidbit against the advice of counsel. Yuna Hollander is running this shit like the goddamn marines. This is her Everest. Absolutely no one is going rogue here. No, they have closed the fucking ranks.
We’ve only seen a little of what Shane’s camp has released, but canon suggests that they’re also selling a story. Their story is much, much closer to the truth—but it’s been sanitized. It’s been spun.
In canon, Yuna asked Shane and Ilya if they’ve been in love for seven years and the immediate response was “no no we were just… ohhhhhhh I don’t want to explain fuckbuddies to my mom”
That same explanation is fucking nowhere in their social media response. No, if anything, they’re inflating the number of years they’ve been in love. They’ve loved each other in secret for almost ten years. Because “ill-advised fuckbuddies who fell for each other” does not fucking sell the way that “star-crossed lovers who couldn’t live without each other do.”
Fucking Scott Hunter is coming out the gate like he’s best friends with these guys and they have a long-held relationship of respect. He’s nothing but complimentary towards them in his statement. Why? Because secret nhl gay club sells way better than “I think Rozanov’s an asshole and my relationship with Hollander suffered after that one time we tried to beat each other’s asses on the ice.”
I’m sorry but there was no gay nhl slumber party in the Canadian wilderness. Shane and Ilya were at the cottage and Scott and Hayden were at his parents house. They would not have shared a wall with those two if you put a gun to their fucking heads.
But the public wants gay nhl slumber party. They want Scott Hunter, the gay guy everyone loves, to be doing hockey queer club with Shane and Ilya. Gay nhl slumber party is a story they can sell. It’s a trending tag. It’s what people will fucking talk about instead of the awful shit the NHL is selling.
I don’t want you to think that everything is fake. I think the public is uniquely good at sniffing out when a story is wholly fake. They’re good at finding holes in a pr launch and ripping the shit out of them.
You see it every day. Random assholes on TikTok amass more attention and more publicity than an entire conference room of pr executives. Genuine emotion, genuine humanity resonates in a way that can’t be replicated.
In my mind, Yuna Hollander handed Ilya a fucking gun and told him to start shooting. She knew his brand of brash, unfiltered dialogue could change the tides in a way Shane never could. Shane is Mr. Canada, Mr. Times New Roman font, and he cannot come out swinging without making that seem like his entire image was a lie. But Ilya Rozanov? All he fucking does is swing.
Yuna trusts Ilya. Shes a pr expert. She knows that this guy’s managed to keep neck and neck with her son’s meticulously engineered brand just with his fucking personality. She gave him his phone and set him lose to say all that unbridled shit that Mr. Canada could never say.
In my mind, he really did go to another property to do it. He didn’t tell them what he was going to say in advance—fuck, he didn’t know what he was going to say in advance. He just opened Twitter and started scrolling. His emotional outburst towards Page Six was 100% genuine.
In my mind, Shane really did insist on giving him sole control over how he came out and nixed the idea of Yuna screening it in advance. And yeah Yuna would have ideally liked a heads up before he announced that he fucked her son so hard at the 2011 all stars that Scott Hunter heard it through the wall, but you know what? He went viral.
Shane did not share her positive outlook. That boy is genuinely in crisis over how much information about him is now publicly available and did NOT need to add Fun Facts About The 2011 All Stars Game to that list. He really did drive over there to confiscate Ilya’s phone.
A lot of Shane’s camp’s posts are genuine but in some way spun, and the audience does not get to know how much is real, just like the public doesn’t get to know how much is real on their social media feed right now.
So how does Andrea and her terrifying briefcase fit in?
That was a preexisting white lie that Yuna Hollander settled on, because they wanted an explanation for why they don’t just say what happened outright. They are not sitting on this to let lawyers negotiate. They are sitting on this for the same reason that movie companies release teaser trailers for months before opening weekend.
When they finally release it, they want the entire world’s eyes on them.
