no big secrets

just a lot of fandom stuff stef (he/him)  🏳️‍🌈

[melxbxbi]

good morning.. let’s all go back to bed

[tragicburnout]

i feel like there is a sleep in me that needs to be slept but each time i sleep i don't sleep that sleep

[bluegiragi]

long distance selfies

early access + nsfw on patreon

[ilya-sweetheart]

I crave more fics where shane Spells It Out about how he and ilya hid for years. i need his parents and hayden crying about it.

On his real estate career:

“i had to buy a whole other house i pretended to live in just so people wouldn’t guess we were secretly together. imagine if you had to do that with jackie”

On why it’s so important everyone knows they’re married:

“i’m almost thirty and my whole career i couldn’t have my parter being my next of kin, emergency contact, or power of attorney. instead it was my mum like i’m still a child”

On why he loves spending his time with ilya:

“did you know that in the ten years we’ve been together we’ve never even had breakfast together. everything we had was rushed, clandestine, kept under wraps so we didn’t loose our livelihoods and reputation”

Bonus Ilya explaining the russia of it all

“my father was high ranking military officer. my brother is police. we have connections in high places…it would be an embarrassment, for many people if my sexuality is out. probably they will not put me on trial, i am too famous, but they would make me disappear. block my bank accounts, revoke my passport. make me no longer citizen of russia. make me no one”

[blakeseptember]

It’s very interesting to me that when Ilya is giving them fake names, he derives them from their first names. Instead of going for something like Rose and Holly (though admittedly Holly could be read as a hockey nickname so I understand avoiding that one), he chooses Jane and Lily. At that point they’re only ever calling each other by their surnames, and will continue in that fashion for years to come. But in their phones, Ilya has given them names that stem from their first ones. It’s not quite as vulnerable as actually using their first names, and far more subtle, but it implies to me that Ilya was already seeking some deeper connection at that point, even if he wasn’t outwardly admitting it.

And I think it makes the tuna meltdown scene that bit more heartbreaking, bc Ilya has been wanting this for so long. Names carry so much weight for them, and while he couldn’t have Shane, at least he had Jane, not just Hollander. And then he didn’t have any version at all.

Anyway. Rachel Reid the woman that u are

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[nicolegendary]

the parallel drawn between ilya and his mom isn't meant to be subtle. she was so funny and beautiful. she was so sad. my dad was so hard on her. she would've loved you like i love you. so when ilya says he doesn't want shane to think she was weak, that line makes me want to scream. he has so much shame around his depression when it comes to shane. he doesn't want shane to think He is weak. (spoilers) he spends all of tlg keeping his issues secret from shane because he's determined to "fix" it on his own so shane never has to know, ilya never has to be a failure or an inconvenience to him. so in the end when he is finally in a place to come out and say listen if you're going to commit to me you need to know that i'm like my mom and i might always be - and for shane to just hear him and say well i'll be right here - is a massive release of shame for ilya

[paverics]

“my father is a boy and my mother is a girl so i’m mixed” is the funniest possible response to someone asking your gender and it came from 6’5 Viking footballer and notable weird little guy Erling Haaland on a Snapchat

[paverics]

comedians can only dream of writing something this funny

[shilyas]

condo stairway scene gets me every single time bc of the way ilya lingers. the way he takes way too long to tie his shoes & adjust his jeans, the way he stands for a moment even though his cab is definitely there & the way he teases shane as he slowly lowers himself to give the sweetest, most unhurried kiss goodbye.

[blackheartbiohazards]

➡️ Content warnings on fiction are a courtesy. 

➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.

➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.

➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.

➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.

➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. 'May contain peanuts!'

➡️ Writers are allowed to use 'Creator chose not to warn' for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is not the same thing as 'no archive warnings apply'.

➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you're reading that upsets you.

➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.

[shanehollanderilyarozanov]

shane hollander moments that break my heart

[imgonnaeditstuff]

What a comeback story this year for Ilya Rozanov. The captain did absolutely everything in these playoffs, leading his team in blocked shots and shots against.

ilya proving his dad wrong

[ravenclairee]

HUDSON WILLIAMS and CONNOR STORRIE Behind The Scenes of Heated Rivalry Season 1

[comingatthecottage]

re: ilya's terrible therapist

okay i think i'm obligated to say that although i am a mental health professional very obviously nothing i post on my heated rivalry tumblr is professional advice nobody sue me or anything. i should also probably caveat that i am coming from a very specific perspective: i'm a relational psychoanalyst; i have adjunctive training in several behavioral modalities but i believe very, very strongly in relational psychodynamic work as being THE thing. for patients with complex relational trauma (aka mr. ilya rozanov), i don't believe anything else can create lasting change. i also don't believe in the medical model of mental health. these are things about which reasonable people can, of course, disagree, so i'll try to separate out things i think she does WRONG vs things i think are missed opportunities to do well/what i would do differently

[comingatthecottage]

THINGS THAT ARE WRONG the biggest and worst: patient presents for therapy for first time despite significant treatment barriers. patient discloses that he believes he is depressed. patient has a first-degree relative who died by suicide. your next question, your very next question, is "are you thinking of killing yourself". you don't beat around the bush, you don't imply it, you don't wait until the patient volunteers. you must ask directly and you must do so before the patient leaves your office, because there is a huge and immediate risk that this appointment is someone's last cry for help before an attempt, and the odds of a depressed patient with a trauma history related to the suicide of a parent attempting suicide is fucking staggering. it is in my opinion malpractice not to even screen for suicidal intent at this first appointment ANYWAY, i do this for all patients and to not do it for someone with ilya's history is outrageously dangerous. life-threateningly incompetent care. lack of treatment planning: doesn't take a history or anything at the first appointment. jumps directly into talking about a horrific trauma (finding his mother's dead body). sometimes people do come in to a first session in an escalated state and have to begin directly with discussing whatever is happening at that moment, and then you meet them where they're at, but ilya arrives in a calm if slightly nervous state. she should have started by laying out what therapy would look like and beginning to build rapport, not immediately being like "so how about your mom's corpse". the way she makes the diagnosis of depression is bizarre. “I think you are depressed”. she doesn't clarify whether or not she's actually diagnosing him with depression under the medical model, explain what that means, or ask what it means to him to hear that. it's also MONTHS in, after he came in suspecting depression, that she makes this diagnosis (in the US it has to be in the first session generally for insurance purposes, different, also bad). no actual screening for symptoms, no psychoeducation about what it means to have depression, no sense of prognosis which clearly upsets the patient. it is so important to contextualize a diagnosis, both what the particular diagnosis is and what the act of diagnosing means. no differential diagnosis. she knows that ilya has experienced at least one criterion A trauma for PTSD (his mother's death) but does nothing to screen for symptoms. she doesn't ask how old his sexual partners he had when he was fourteen were to screen for sexual abuse. she doesn't rule out bipolar which is a must when diagnosing depression. she doesn't ask any questions about substance use or screen for potential neurodivergence or any of a million other things. she doesn't refer to medical for potential physiological contributors for a guy whose career is "getting hit really hard in the head".

[comingatthecottage]

no clear treatment plan or goals, and no sense of how therapy is going to work besides… talking? the only goal ilya really sets is "be good enough for my boyfriend," and although she (rightly) pushes back on that she doesn't help him identify an alternate goal. she also doesn't explain what therapy is going to be like or how it works or help him get on board with what the project of therapy is going to be. she seems unshaken when he misses five appointments in a row (if i had a passively suicidal patient miss five appointments in a row i would not be brushing that off, we would be having a good chat about what the barriers to treatment were). culturally incompetent care: they're part of the same minority group (Russian immigrants) across one axis of identity, but Galina is not a queer hockey player (or as far as we know queer at all). she minimizes and dismisses the discrimination ilya is likely to face in his career from coming out, including the fact that he could get deported to Russia, jumping to a CBT technique that asks him to imagine the worst case scenario without engaging at all with how it feels to be in this position or validating his fears. mental health professionals have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about their patients' identities and to listen first. "I could lose my job and be deported and jailed because of my sexual identity" is not a cognitive distortion, it is a terrifying reality. perhaps an unlikely reality, but it exists. trying to use cognitive therapies to "reframe" real experiences of discrimination is, flat-out, therapeutic abuse. she also should have explicitly responded to his fear that she would out shane when he's afraid to say shane's name, not obliquely implied that she knows they're both hockey players: "i want to let you know that confidentiality extends to anything and everything you tell me, except (reiterate legal carveouts). there are no circumstances under which i would disclose your partner's identity to anyone. if you want to use his name, i won't repeat it to anyone except when we're in this room" THINGS THAT ARE POOR THERAPEUTIC STYLE IN MY OPINION AND WHAT I WOULD DO BETTER #MYNARCISSISM lack of curiosity: she does not prompt him to reflect emotionally, even when there are very obvious entry points to do so to do so. i.e. ilya says he's glad his father is dead, which is a huge emotional disclosure that is very risky for a patient to make, especially in a first appointment because he might expect judgment. and she just… asks a factual question about the timeline, rather than engaging with the emotional content in any way (as a relational analyst what i would do here is ask "what does it feel like to share that with me?", but i do not think any good therapist would like, change the subject away from the feeling)

[comingatthecottage]

she regularly offers direct opinions about/interpretations of things ilya says, very early in their therapeutic relationship. "that must have been very hard" in response to his father's expectations of him (which he interprets as being about sochi--he seems to hear 'it must have been hard for you to fail like that', which is, uh, bad!), "it's good that you had that," etc. in spite of the fact that he's already indicated a complex relationship with his family and himself that mean he might feel quite differently than someone else expects! was it good that he had hockey, or did it just create another burden on him and his relationship with his father, or is it somewhere in the middle? did his father's expectations feel hard? traumatizing? was he proud that so much was expected of him? when did he notice those feelings? just some questions i might ask. describing how ilya must feel about things closes off conversation. her affect and presentation in the session: ilya repeatedly notices her masking her reactions to things, like the fact that he became sexually active so young. i guess technically you're still allowed to be a blank slate style therapist, even though i don't know anyone who still does this. but if you're a blank slate, be a blank slate. don't let patients notice that you're hiding your reactions to things. so for instance i would approach that conversation by having whatever reaction i had and then saying, "you might notice i had a reaction to you saying that," and either asking the patient how they interpreted my reaction or asking them if they'd like to know what i'm thinking (and then how does it feel to know that i'm feeling concerned, etc, the relational field goes on forever). my way isn't the only way but if you're visibly swallowing reactions it's bad. she doesn't check in with ilya about how he's feeling about therapy and dismisses his fear that it's not working. tbh the only thing she says that i like is "i'm good, but i'm not that good," which IS something i might say. but she doesn't go from there, it becomes a way of dismissing his fears. i would have asked what it's like to have to tolerate such a slow and uncertain recovery process. does he think therapy can help? are there ways in which it has helped? how does it feel to talk about it? how does it feel to talk to me about it? bizarre attitude towards self-disclosure. she gives ilya next to no information about herself, which, again, is an old-fashioned but not per se wrong way to do it. just because i'm the relational yapper machine 3000 doesn't mean that every therapist needs to tell their patient anything about themselves. but she does self-disclose twice. she tells ilya that she's watching their season/is a hockey fan, and makes a weird comment that she also enjoys shopping as a coping mechanism but that bedsheets are more in her price range than sports cars. even though i'm the yappatron 3000 i would not choose to make these particular disclosures! admittedly if i had a famous patient and i knew about their career i would probably tell them that directly in the first session, i would not however make asides about it because now you're kind of creating a dual relationship. the bedsheets thing is weird bc you gotta keep a wiiiide birth around anything even quasi sexual, like don't invite a patient to imagine what your bed is like you weirdo. also finances are usually an inappropriate thing to self-disclose, because therapy is also a financial relationship! i would never joke about how a patient has more money than me (even though most of my patients have a lot more money than me), it seems likely to induce guilt and also to disturb the therapeutic frame around money which is hard to manage anyway

[comingatthecottage]

therapeutic interventions: i mean the biggest problem is that she doesn't really seem to have a consistent style or approach or anything. they just kind of chat. the things she does say are… weird. she directly gives advice about what he should do in his relationship with Shane repeatedly. She doesn’t otherwise tell ilya what to do, which would actually be more appropriate--there's a place for giving depressed patients clear instructions imo. but she doesn't do that, she tells him what to do with his boyfriend which is far riskier because she's never met shane! the worst bit is that she also directly predicts what the outcome of one of the conversations she tells him to have will be, which is… bad, because she does not know Shane, and this is like their fourth session, and she could be wrong. That’s how you destroy a therapeutic rapport forever btw, is make a promise you can’t keep. i have never in my career assured a patient that a conversation they were gonna have with someone else would turn out well, because i don't know that person. maybe shane is an abusive asshole who is going to say "well if you're depressed just kill yourself already". she doesn't know this man!

her ideas about how to treat depression seem limited to pills and exercise. which is crazy because the man is a professional athlete. and she's like "well maybe go on a bike ride." because rachel reid clearly doesn't know how therapy works or what the mechanism of action is! she doesn't lay out the many, many possibilities ("i recommend speaking to a psychiatrist, options might include ssris or snris, other antidepressants, mood stabilizers, etc. there are also interventional methods like intravenous ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or ECT. i mention those only so you understand that there are a lot of options, and a lot of hope). she doesn't actually offer psychoed about lifestyle interventions--why exercise? what does nutrition look like? sleep? she tells him he needs to come out to his friends but doesn't offer anything to help him actually understand how social isolation and depression interact. she doesn't look at any of his strengths, notably the fact that he has a partner who adores him, that he has survived a lifetime of immense trauma, that he has a brilliantly successful career, etc. there's a stab at one CBT exercise but otherwise no concrete skills (again not my thing but it would be something). and no information about different therapy modalities and how they could potentially help him. okay that's the end of my essay sorry to anyone who doesn't care and had to watch this get reblogged like 8 separate times becasue tumblr was mad abt how long it was if anyone wants to know My Case Formulation of fictional character Ilya Rozanov and how i would Fix Him let me know @stunkbug here is the essay!

[butdarlingthestarrs]

Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov | Heated Rivalry | Season 1 - Episode 5

[your-cab-is-definitely-here]

I'm about to be controversial! (I think.) At the outset I have to say I love Svetlana. She's such a distinctive character who owns every scene she's in, is obviously a huge support to Ilya without ever losing herslef in the role of that support, she's terrifying, she'll eat you for breakfast in the daintiest most menacing way possible and you'll thank her for the privilege afterwards. I'm preaching to the choir, we all love Sveta.

But! I do think her particular place in the narrative and who she is to Ilya opens up some interesting avenues wrt her feelings about Shane. I've generally seen her in fic as being aggressively supportive of their relationship, though I've read a couple where she is uneasy about the move to Ottawa (reasonably so!) and one fantastic one where she straight up dislikes Shane because she doesn't think he's doing enough for Ilya.

There's plenty of jealous!Shane, but what I'd love to see more of is jealous!Svetlana. Not jealous in the romantic sense--we see pretty clearly that Ilya's not like that for her--but Svetlana reckoning with the presence of Shane in Ilya's life and what that means for her place in it.

The scene with Sasha in Sochi is fascinating to me. She tows Ilya along like he has no say in what's happening, she tosses Sasha at him like she's ordering for Ilya at a restaurant, and then even with Ilya's old squeeze in the room splaying his body out for Ilya in the exact way that she clearly wanted, she still monopolises Ilya's attention. There's a benevolent peremptory presumptuousness to her behaviour that I love: she's clearly used to having to muscle him into things that are for his own good because he won't reach for them himself, and I think it's so juicy that she's used to having the sole right to do that for him.

How would she react to having that exclusivity taken away? Ilya very obviously lets only her behind his walls, until Shane bulldozes his way past them in Tampa. I think it's interesting to examine how Svetlana would react to losing that primacy with Ilya--it's not jealousy in a romantic or sexual sense, but Ilya's never had anyone like Shane before,and that would be an adjustment for Svetlana, I think. She's not just going from being Ilya's first call to his second call: she's going from being his only call to his second; from being the only one behind the wall to sharing that space for the first time. From having the surety that she can walk into Ilya's house to surprise him, in whatever way she wants, to having to reckon with Shane or even having to check with him first. Especially given the much closer relationship in the show--I can't imagine that show!Svetlana meets Shane the day before their wedding, and given their closeness, Shane forbidding Ilya from telling Svetlana would be a lot less excusable than it was in the book.

We don't know much about Svetlana outside of Ilya, so we don't know how strong her support system is without him, but there's room to wonder how crucial his availability for her, for lack of a better phrasing, is, and how she'd grapple with no longer being his first priority. To be clear, she knows, and we know, thst the worry is baseless and that Ilya would drop everything for her. But there's a security in being First and it's interesting to wonder how Svetlana would deal with losing that, and how that would affect how she interacts with Shane.

There's also the hockey of it all--Ilya is surrounded by it, but for Svetlana, he's very likely to be one of the most hockey-intelligent people in her life and they're clearly accustomed to constantly talking puck with each other. Now, there's Shane: famously high hockey IQ but can also engage directly with Ilya as a player and is probably the only person in the world who can, who has access to Ilya's hockey brain in a way Svetlana never will. This is kind of a mirror of my headcanon for Hayden's jealousy of Ilya: being supplanted as the best friend's First Hockey Person.

Honestly I just like to think about what it would look like if the completely baseless jealousy went both ways. I think they would eventually grow to like each other, and of course they're both ultimately grateful for each other's presnece in Ilya's life because it ensures his well being and happiness. Any possessive feelings would be subsumed by their love for him, but Shane obviously has some jealousy to navigate through to get to that point and it would be an interesting dynamic for Svetlana to have to navigate that as well.

[chocolate-smash]

okay I can’t keep it in anymore. Shane may be autistic, but he simply Would Not have a problem with things being too bright or loud. This boy plays HOCKEY, he is a SENSORY SEEKER, there is NO SUCH THING AS TOO BRIGHT AND LOUD. In my HEART OF HEARTS I know that this man used to stand in the middle of arcades as a child and soak in all of the different sounds and lights and flashy bits and finally feel like he’s getting enough sensation to settle into his own skin. He sleeps under 2 weighted blankets and preferably also another giant 250lb hockey player. He’s not having a problem with too much noise and stimulation. He plays recorded crowd noises from other sports games to focus on stuff. He’s fine sitting in wet clothes for an hour if that’s how long it takes to finish sexting before he gets changed. He’s a SENSORY SEEKER. LET HIM SEEK.

[chocolate-smash]

hello yes I have more thoughts on this. 

It is key to my personal #myshane that he does not have an autism diagnosis. As a kid he was maybe brought to a specialist, and they looked at him and diagnosed him with Rambunctious Little Boy, because it was the 90s and he wasn't experiencing any significant delays! He was just throwing himself in puddles constantly, and he never stopped wiggling, and his favorite game was Toddler Rave Chamber, in which he shut himself in the bathroom and flickered the lights off and on for as long as it took for his parents to find and stop him.  

Wrapping small child Shane in heavy, sweaty hockey gear was an unexpected lifeline in the ongoing battle he's been waging against his body. Gear is heavy. It pressed him into himself. Any sweaty feeling was a bonus, because wet fabric against skin is A Distinct Feeling and that feeling also helped him get the minimum sensory input needed to function effectively. Underarmor would also be a favorite. 

(For context: my brother is an autistic sensory seeker. Aside from the ongoing sensory stuff he has very low support needs at this point in his life. I am pulling from Life Experience living with him, I am not spouting autism stereotypes out my ass)

I don't know if monkey bars were a playground staple for Canadian kids in the 90s, but the proprioceptive input from them is GREAT for baby Shane. He's too socially aware to do any visible repetitive motion stims, but sports and playground equipment that involve flinging himself around in space are the best. If there's a convenient puddle on that playground, you'd better believe be is sticking his feet in it. Wet shoes are heavy and heavy things on his body Feel Nice.  

The one other sensory thing that I believe in my heart he is doing (and he is NOT growing out of) is chewing. The hoodie-string-sexting shot is foundational for me. He's bitten through a dozen pens. He's chewing off his fingernails. If he had long enough hair, you'd better believe it would be in his mouth. He's chomping on his mouthguard like it's a chew toy. Somewhere in the depths of his juniors teammate's myspace page is a pic of him straight up biting a beer can in half. It's played off as a joke, but if something looks like a nice texture it WILL go in his mouth. It's a matter of when, not if. He’s a biter because Oral Sensoru Input Very Good, and he will never be stopped.