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cw: disordered eating, cw: eating disorders, cw: food, cw: eating, cw: orthorexia. spoilers for The Long Game.

I... would like to talk about "disordered eating" Shane.

Firstly: as much joy as this general narrative and the show have brought me, I think it may be helpful to acknowledge at the start that these books are just not that well written, in the sense that most characterization questions and most complex issues are not fully explored, and so we're all (as transformative works people do) pulling at strings as we try to find and make meaning in this text. I should also say that if I’d written some fun romance novels and then people started deep-diving as if I’d been intending to write Ulysses, the way I mean to do now, I’d find it pretty fucking rough, so I also accept that. But I think these things are important, and a lot of people have written really intelligently on the shallowness of both Shane’s and Ilya’s characterizations, particularly as it relates to their racial and ethnic identities. Here is one such person!

With this context: I should also say that if you are reading this and your own absolute sense is that Shane is struggling with disordered eating—hey, not to kick it back to the 60s, but death of the author, man. We've created different meanings as readers while engaging with this text, and I respect that.

I personally, however, do not really believe this. And this is not a hill I would die or even comment on, except that I think this question intersects with two other things about the books that are worth exploring or are challenging/worth challenging (I will resist using the word 'problematic' not because I'm being wishy-washy but because I think that word is expected to do an awful lot of heavy lifting these days, which can make it unclear). I think considering these things more deeply can help flesh out how we understand the book, the narrative, the question of Shane's relationship to eating, and Shane himself. This is helpful for writing, I think! Or at least it has been for me.

These two things are:

1. Limited understanding of/interest in portraying certain aspects of hockey and a life in professional sports, which is tied to the (logical) choice to structure the books entirely around the Ilya-Shane relationship (it's romance!) and the way in which there is (I think) a general expectation on Reid's part that you will suspend your disbelief on these matters for enjoyment's sake.

2. More importantly, the limited and restricted (and restricting) ways in which Shane is conceived of and presented as an Asian, gay character by Reid, and how he is perceived by us, the readers.

Okie dokes, here we go!

Let's start with limited/partial portrayals of hockey, and limited interest in portraying certain aspects of hockey and professional sports in more detail. This is relevant because a “performance diet” is one of these aspects.

Firstly: valid to do this. Most people come for the HEA, not to find out at which angle you need to flex your stick against the ice or how you want to shift your weight for a good slapshot.

The books portray all kinds of things—road travel, the NHL awards show, the All Star Game—in a pretty loose and fun way that is often not overly concerned with accuracy, but rather seeks to propel the romance forward. These depictions are good enough for government work, but often do not represent either the events/games/circumstances or the way the average NHL player would approach them super accurately. This is mostly in service of the romantic narrative. (The show does this too! I promise you on my life no hockey player would ever turn his head the way Shane does to smile at Ilya while handling the puck. I PROMISE YOU. But that look is also a great moment (one that is, incidentally, more realistically portrayed in the books)).

Here's one example of what this under-exploration of hockey and athletes looks like in the books: Shane and Ilya are drafted #1 and #2 in summer 2009, play in World Juniors that Dec-next Jan, and then join their professional teams for the 2010-2011 season.

Sometimes people are drafted and return to junior leagues or foreign leagues before going to their teams. Sometimes they go to the AHL to develop. But it's highly unlikely that this would be the case for the #1 and #2 picks, who are picked first and second because they are exhibiting a level of play that means that the expectation is that they can go into an NHL team and start producing meaningfully, immediately, and will do so unless they're having issues getting out of their KHL contract (it happened to Evgeni Malkin and could happen to you!).

So where the heck are Shane and Ilya in 2009-2010? Is Ilya playing for the KHL? Is Shane in the OHL? After being drafted?? Why? How? As for World Juniors, teams holding contracts think carefully about whether they will allow players to participate in international events at which they could get injured, perhaps seriously, while not even securing points for the team that is paying them/has invested in them. This is always a conversation. Where are the Bears/Raiders and the Voyageurs/Metros organizations in this, given that Shane and Ilya are already drafted? Who the hell is in charge of these two soon-to-be-multi-million-dollar-players? (What capitalist is making the calculations about investment versus risk when it comes to these humans??)

I'm not saying Reid doesn't have answers to these questions; I am saying that they're not in the book, probably so that people wouldn't fall asleep. But because nothing about the book's narrative suggests to the reader that there is any information missing or that anything is unusual, it's easy to read Reid's portrayals of all of these things as comprehensive or representative when they're not, or to take her writerly bias, or the things that help keep her narrative moving—guys really care about presenting at (or even going to) the NHL awards, really!—as fact. This is particularly true if you came to Heated Rivalry without caring about hockey beforehand (hello! Welcome! We are so so so so glad you are here!)

There are many other examples of this phenomenon in the books, but I'll move on to the relevant one for the question of disordered eating: Shane's performance diet, which is referred to using that specific term three times in The Long Game. Even though it's referred to this way—this term has an established meaning in sports!—the way Shane and others talk about it is very unusual (more on this later). It's like everyone keeps saying "performance diet" in scare quotes, except that... a performance diet is a thing? It's not a "thing." It's a thing athletes do!

I hate everything about this! This is the 2020-2021 season! We are living in a post-Tom Brady world! Why is Shane awkwardly explaining, "For, like, performance"? NOTED ACTOR Rose Landry knows what a performance/occupation-focused diet is—as she implies in the line immediately below this. Why is Shane saying it sheepishly? Why is he embarrassed? Why is he calling them "forbidden foods," like there's a moral element to this, instead of “foods not on my nutrition plan”? (On another note: Rose eats tacos all the time? Get out of here, Pizza Jennifer Lawrence!)

I get that for many people, the obvious answer is "because he’s struggling with disordered eating," but gentlepeople of the jury, given that Reid says that he doesn’t, I want to propose that this is just sloppy writing, and that Shane is being portrayed this way because he is generally portrayed in ways that set him apart from other NHL players in the books, in ways that consistently Other him or exoticize him, in ways that Reid herself sometimes doesn’t seem to perceive.

I think Reid writes Shane engaging with a performance diet badly for the same reason we learn he is hairless or short or half-Japanese even though the only thing we know about Shane being half-Japanese is that... he's half-Japanese. I think she’s trying to write a guy who has a complex but healthy athlete-specific relationship to food and who is also neurodiverse and uncomfortable with change or deviation, but because of the biases she has, she ended up writing him like he’s a hot mess around food (“hot mess” not meant to be dismissive of disordered eating here—I’m talking about the inconsistencies in how he relates to it). To my mind, this is supported by the fact that no one he interacts with seems to be worried about it; they seem either annoyed that he makes getting dinner difficult or eager to tease him.

Here's more of why I think this:

In 2020-2021, Shane is in his tenth season in the NHL. He's almost 30. He's had a concussion and a broken collarbone that we know of, but if he's anything like the player he is loosely based on, Sidney Crosby, I guarantee he's had a lot more and possibly a lot worse. He has been, essentially, a high-value target for other players on the ice, in a contact sport, for almost twenty years, ten of them playing against the best players in the world. Ilya plays with bruised ribs in the book, showing just how much you're expected to push through this pain and damage throughout your career, and let me give you a real-life example of what that looks like: Patrice Bergeron of the Boston Bruins once played in the playoffs with a punctured lung. That’s right: he played with a hole in the thing you use to draw oxygen into your body. People hold sticks and shoot with broken hands (Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, looking at you) and high-grade separated shoulders, when their ligaments have been severely damaged or even torn, and this is glorified. Reason: playoffs gonna playoff.

It’s important to understand the damage a hockey body takes, because it means that by the time you are 30, the end of your career could be around the corner. Many players retire in their late 20s or early 30s. A star player, and his team, are doing everything possible to extend that player's career. This very often includes a stricter diet and shifting conditioning and maintenance regimes to make longevity possible. In The Long Game, Ilya tells us "Shane only ate extremely healthy food now" (my emphasis), suggesting that this is a change that took place later in his career, as it often can for competitive athletes, as they age and their bodies deteriorate and they have to fight harder to remain elite.

I mentioned Noted White Man Tom Brady earlier because he was famous for attempting to extend his playing career by fine-tuning his routine, his sleep, all kinds of other stuff, and his diet, including by drinking 25 glasses of water a day and avoiding, among other things, condiments. I'm obviously making fun of him—it's Tom Brady—but my point is: this is an established thing. Tom Brady famously worked with nutritionists and researchers at universities to try to engineer an anti-aging-decline advantage for himself. And Tom Brady played a contact sport that had 16 regular season games and 4 playoff games. Hockey has 82 regular season games and potentially as many as 28 playoff games, played nearly back-to-back.

How big of an edge did Brady create for himself with the “patented TB12 method"? Who knows! People used to ask this question on sports shows: does any of this even work? (The answer was often "I guess yes," because Tom Brady kept playing and playing and winning Super Bowls.) It's the same with Shane! Ilya tells us he "wanted to say something obnoxious about how all of Shane's food restrictions and self-sacrifice translated to exactly point one three seconds' worth of athletic supremacy" when Shane wins the fastest skater competition at the ASG in 2021. And yet Shane is the fastest skater in the NHL at 30 and an incredible player, so... hey, maybe it's working, kind of, maybe? Shrug kaomoji.

I would argue that a lot of these performance diets definitely involve disordered eating or are even synonymous with it, by the way. But I think when people in our spaces say Shane has disordered eating they don't mean, "Wow, he's engaging in a highly sophisticated, team-approved kind-of-alchemical exercise to boost his performance, and that shit is disordered!" but rather, simply, "Shane has disordered eating." In fic, I’ve seen depictions of Shane as fragile or helpless, unable to care for himself. And these are two very different things when it comes to understanding/writing Shane, so I think it matters which we think it is.

A final (and key) thing to say about this Tom Brady comparison is that in the real world, when people were asking these questions of a straight white dude's eating choices and routines, no one wondered if Tom Brady had disordered eating in the latter of the two senses I outline above, and very few people even discussed the first. That was not a conversation. I think it is... quite interesting that the way Reid has presented this makes it impossible for us not to wonder this when the athlete making these choices is a gay Asian man. We'll come back to this!

I also mention the Tom Brady real-world example because it helps us see that the likelihood that Shane has established his own diet is VERY LOW. A team nutritionist/doctor/trainer/all of them is/are supervising and fine-tuning this with him. He's being weighed and he's having blood tests. He's eating many meals with the team, in the company (and, indirectly, supervision) of his teammates and coaching/training staff.

Hockey takes so much energy. That's why shifts are short (30-60 seconds normally)! Propelling yourself around the ice, generating enough speed and force to check while continually pushing off and redirecting yourself on a frictionless surface, uses so many large muscle groups in your body. (This is why Hockey Ass.) When a guy can't get to the bench because of what's happening in the game and he's been out there 100 seconds, the commentators will say, "Hockey McHockerson really looking rough out there! Man's been out there an eternity!" Hockey takes it the fuck outta ya.

This is to say: I promise you Shane Hollander is eating carbohydrates. And that Shane Hollander is eating 5000 calories a day! That he's eating farro and quinoa and whole grains instead of Ilya's sausage McMuffin, I do not doubt (that he doesn’t eat pasta, as Reid seems to think is possible, I do doubt).

But Shane Hollander is not starving himself, or eating fewer than twice the calories of the average man per day, because if he were, it would be obvious in his play, and I guaranfuckingtee someone on the Voyageurs/Metros would be all over that.

There's a scene in The Long Game when Ilya, whose approach to nutrition is... laxer, shall we say? finds a recipe for something they can cook together that fits Shane's diet:

I... also hate everything about this!

"This is not bad," suggests not that Ilya is surprised that this is enough food for Shane or for him, or that it's nutritionally appropriate and sufficient, but rather that he, as written by Reid, is kind of a man-child who does not like vegetables (with a BEAR for RUSSIA tattooed on his CHEST and a voice like a CARTOON VILLAIN).

The way Reid chooses to write the scene above, with the dreamy list of delicious fats and carbs followed by the stark, "But garlic bread wasn't important. Winning was important. Playing in the NHL for as long as possible was important," can definitely be read as Shane being overly fixed in his thinking about food/orthorexic/disordered: I absolutely get this. And Shane is under a huge amount of stress from being closeted and anxious about his game and about Ilya and about a million things. The elements are there.

AND YET Red has also been explicit that she did not intend to write Shane as having an "eating disorder."

Now, maybe Reid didn't mean to write disordered eating and accidentally did. But what I actually think is this: Reid knows performance diets are a thing, and she wrote one in. Firstly, I'm not sure she entirely understands what that would look like for a hockey player, just as a matter of factual knowledge (she might! I don’t know; the book doesn’t give me that impression). Secondly and much more importantly, however, we know her characterization of Shane is sort of... shallow and skewed all over, and always oriented toward furthering his romance with Ilya (again, valid). I think the way she wrote him engaging with the performance diet is another example of that, and not of an intention to portray him as struggling with disordered eating. This is a little bit of Reid telling on herself, in my view.

The things Shane does in the book are not out of line with what many professional athletes do, at all. There's a version of this scene in which Shane does the same thing and then thinks something like:

"I have anywhere between none (if I'm injured) and ten years left to play this game. I have, as yet, developed no other skills in my life, making retirement terrifying. I know many guys who have lost their shit when the time comes to make the shift, and are super depressed, and I can kind-of-recognize that I am even more in love with hockey and more fixated on it than the average player, which means it might be even harder for me. I therefore want my career to last as long as it can possibly last, because I want to do this thing I love as long as I can. Because I LOVE IT! So I'm making trade-offs every day, and by GOD I wish I could eat a burger, but for now, I'm going to prioritize the thing that science says may extend my career, because (some) data suggests this may give me an edge."

(Shane is not that well adjusted or self-aware, I know: what I’m trying to say is that there is a way to write this in a way that doesn’t make it sound like Shane is the only athlete in the NHL for whom a performance diet is a tragic life circumstance.)

Reid has chosen not to go that route. Her writing choices, the things she has Shane think, the language she has him (and others) use: these all actually do lend themselves to the interpretation that Shane may be engaging in disordered eating. So if she wasn't intending to write someone struggling with disordered eating, then what's up? And how might we make sense of this on our own terms, as we figure out how to write Shane?

Ordered along the spectrum from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil:

The differences in their approaches to eating, conditioning, and the sport are part of the "odd couple" dynamic that Reid has set up for these two men in the romance context. Ilya SMOKES! Shane won't EAT BREAD! How will they EVER LIKE EACH OTHER?

Reid has stated she has a preference for writing Ilya, and it shows: in The Long Game, Ilya is undergoing a relatively complex emotional journey, healing from trauma and depression and learning to assert himself in his relationships with loved ones to get what he deserves. Shane is... apparently almost totally unaware that the man he is in love with is in crisis. And... he’s not eating bread. Before they are outed, that's it. That's Shane's journey. No awareness and no bread. (I am partly exaggerating for effect, but I think Reid’s preference means Shane suffers as a character, that he is more outline than man.)

Quite frankly, I think that this is yet another example of the way Reid's bias shows in her portrayal of Shane as a gay Asian man. Here's the thing, folks: I bet Scott Hunter is on a performance diet. Scott Hunter is going to drink warm milk out of the Stanley Cup, and he is 100,000 years old. THAT MAN HAS A PERFORMANCE DIET, but that man is based on Steve Rogers, and when dudes like Steve Rogers have performance diets, we just call them performance diets, and we don't linger over it, and we don't talk about them like they're on the cover of a 90s tabloid and we're wondering if they are TOO THIN or TOO WORRIED about eating donuts.

I also think it's really important that we as a fandom grapple with this same thing. Are we more likely to pathologize these behaviors in Shane because we also do not think of him—partly as the result of Reid's portrayal—as the "average" hockey player, but rather as someone different and apart? Because gay woobies can't have a performance diet that isn't tragic? Because he's small, hairless, more likely to have weird hangups?

Because the thing is, we're doing this independently of Reid, too: if I come across one more fic in the wild where Shane Hollander, three-time Cup champion and NHL/MLH captain, doesn't eat for two days, I'ma LOSE MY GODDAMNED MIND.

Shane could be trying to figure out and grapple with the intersection of all kinds of things: the stress of being closeted; figuring out how to treat a neurodiverse brain with as much kindness as possible while having a lot of his movement through the world defined by that neurodiversity; trying to figure out what ‘discipline’ means to him or why it feels good (Rose Landry actually directly makes the joke that maybe Shane enjoys discipline on his plate and in the bedroom, and Shane then thinks about how he does like it in the bedroom); fear of the end of his career and the uncertainty that engenders.

I’m not saying what is going on isn’t complex. I just think “he has disordered eating” doesn’t dig deep enough, and I think we gain something when we really interrogate how Reid’s bias plays a role here. I also think there are more interesting ways to explore this, in a way that would have enriched rather than diminished our sense of who Shane is. Reid could have had him have a performance diet that included no rice and could have told us about whether rice was a staple in his home as someone with East Asian heritage in a culture that traditionally treats rice as a staple. Yea or nay? If so, what does he make of that? We could have found out things about him!

To recap and clarify some final points that I think are important:

-I wholeheartedly believe it's possible to struggle with disordered eating as a professional athlete, and as a person of any identity. Disordered eating can affect anyone. I am not saying otherwise.

-You can eat a perfect amount of calories (which are fake, by the way) and a great combination of nutrients and still have disordered eating. I do not dispute this either.

-Many of Reid's writing choices suggest that Shane is struggling with disordered eating.

-But Reid has said he does not, and that she did not intend to write him as having disordered eating.

-If we accept the two points above as true, we're forced to ask: what the heck is going on?

-What's going on is sloppy writing, which is fine; we have all done some sloppy writing in pursuit of a happy ending. This is not a crime.

YES TO THAT LAST, AND:

-Understanding more about hockey and athletic performance diets may help us contextualize what we see in the books and/or challenge certain interpretations of the books

-Most importantly, some of the sloppiness is really important to think about, particularly as it relates to Shane's identity and Reid's portrayal of him and that identity, which has real issues, as well as when it comes to interrogating our own biases

-Thinking about these things has been helpful to me, which is why I wrote this long post

-Transformative works are about doing transformative things, so if exploring Shane's disordered eating is what calls to your creative spark, may you live long and prosper, and if the fic is well written, I may have to eat some of these words (absolutely no pun intended).

But perhaps this post may inspire you to write fic about how Shane’s two nutritionists and his personal phlebotomist figure out he’s with Ilya before anybody else because of his meal requests and how far up his butt they are about that diet (which is not the result of disordered eating). Reader, I’d read it.

Because there's always more than one way of interpreting a text, and that's what makes it fun.

The end!

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