THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
ONLY THE MIXED PEOPLE ON THIS WEBSITE UNDERSTAND WTF IS UP WITH SHANE OH MY GOD
THE AMOUNT OF NONSENSE THAT CONSTANTLY WADE THROUGH.......TRULY UNBELIEVABLE
THAT MAN IS NOT JAPANESE HE IS CANADIAN I'M SORRY
like listen rachel reid also wrote him in such a deeply uncomfortable way but none of you guys are helping. hudson williams playing him and clearly understanding that part of his experience did help. the people of tumblr don't get him though. people keep trying so hard to make him Not White but there are many ways to be Not White and sometimes the way you are culturally and the way you are perceived racially do not line up. and sometimes there are many aspects to them. there are many ways of being mixed race and i promise you shane exactly as is in this show is one of them. i keep going into the tag by accident and wanting to kill people for many reasons but this is number one on the list by a long shot.
Yeah 😭 RR's descriptions of Shane were... very bad, and that's basically the only way Shane being mixed & Japanese Canadian gets explored at all, but so many people's "suggestions" for how to fix him are so much worse lmao.
And I don't want to begrudge other mixed people, Asian people, PoC, etc, who want to make fanwork where Shane has a different relationship to Japan/Japanese Canadian culture etc. They can do what they like, and people can use fiction to explore what feels interesting or true to them. But I take issue with anyone, white people most of all but frankly anyone, claiming that Shane or Japanese diaspora rep in general has to look a certain way.
Shane Hollander exists in a specific way already on the TV show and is already ripe for an exploration of how racial assimilation + tokenization can create an even more horrific situation for a closeted superstar athlete. That adds so many additional layers to the anxiety and fear that already exists in Shane!
Two scenes that I really enjoy are Ilya watching Shane's French interview and Ilya's Russian monologue. There's a literal language barrier—Ilya doesn't understand what Shane's saying, doesn't see or understand why his face falls when the reporter asks if he has similar struggles to Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, two other athletes who face racism and the pressure of being the best, of being PoC in white-dominant sports.
And Ilya mentions that he doesn't know if his family sees him as an enemy. The fear of being perceived as an enemy by your family is certainly a queer one, and I don't know if it was intentional on the show's part, but the fear of being seen as an enemy by your country, your friends, your neighbors, is also a common Asian diaspora one and especially to the Japanese diaspora that either was or had family who was interned.
The fear that being too noticeably unCanadian, too gay, too in love with his archrival, too bad at hockey could make him an enemy in the eyes of his teammates, the league, the fans? That'd make Shane crazy lol. And that personally feels like more meaningful to me than what food Shane eats or whether he speaks Japanese or not. The food, the language, those change from person to person, and I don't think they make us any more or less who we are.
#shane hollander is incredible rep for second generation wasian diaspora through what i assume is no work on rachel reids part. completely by accident by writing a character who's just sort of half japanese for flavor text you CAN stumble upon a legible experience
Yes lol, although he's third-gen in the books and maybe the show, but your point still stands!
Even in the books it was pretty obvious to me how easily Shane being Japanese Canadian could inform him, RR just didn't seem to. Do. That. Lol. But it means with the benefit of hindsight or whatever, the show was able to bring in text and subtext to make it more intentional.
The same thing happened with Shane being autistic and his TLG disordered eating tbh, and for those, I don't really fault RR (I'll fault her for other things lol).
Getting off topic a bit but to those points, it's very common for writers, maybe who are undiagnosed autistic or have autistic family members, to unintentionally write characters who could be interpreted as autistic, especially since autism is a wide spectrum and many combinations of traits feel familiar. Autistic + ADHD people make up a large portion of Fandom and so are likely to recognize these types of things maybe before writers do lol.
And as someone who has a restrictive eating disorder, Shane in TLG did remind me of a lot of stuff I heard in recovery from other patients and from doing my own research into ED experiences. He might be more classified as having disordered eating as opposed to an Eating Disorder, but still. Diet culture is very pervasive and institutionally-supported, especially in the fitness/wellness/athletics world. A lot of people are very ignorant about it and I can't fault them when so much money and "legitimacy" goes into perpetuating it.
I don't think she actually handled it too terribly all things considered. Disordered eating/eating disorders are basically never explored at all in fiction and extremely misunderstood in the real world. I'm interested in how the show will handle it and I'm glad that this very popular show will at the very least bring up the topic in wide conversation.
But anyways yeah lol so many people seem to accidentally make characters that feel so transparently understandable to a certain experience lol.
2087
jacobvanloon
dededos
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
