i am so with you re: end of tlg and was wondering if you have any more thoughts on how that realistically should’ve gone down for them? like how do they grapple with that? how do they deal with yuna in the wake of that, with hayden, with troy barrett, with shane losing his captaincy? i just feel like there’s SO MUCH potential here.
i love fics where troy is a human person trying to be better but shane is also like: ilya i cannot be friends with the guy who called me slurs on ice, especially after i lost everything bc of people like him, no matter how much you love him. i think especially the race element, and ilya’s own desire for forgiveness for Bad to always be possible, make this extra messy idk and would love your thoughts
& of course the mess of shane losing his captaincy to ilya, when he loves ilya having control over him but also - but also - he earned that!!
the biggest thing to me (and the reason i am hopeful for season 2, bc i believe hudson and connor will give us this regardless of what the words on the page say) is that shane and ilya need to be a team. they don't need to be on the same page or in agreement all the time, but they need to act from a place of love. they need to want to understand each other.
when shane is publicly disgraced, loses most of his friends, and is demoted, ilya cannot be happy about it. maybe a little, privately, he's glad that they'll be able to live and play together. maybe he guiltily tells shane this, and they fight, even! i'm not saying it can't be part of it, that he's not allowed to want his husband nearby and be glad that he's out of a toxic and homophobic work environment. but his primary feeling cannot be "here comes ilya's happy ending". he has to be worried about shane and absolutely motherfucking furious.
i want to see ilya rage out on shane's behalf. i want yuna holding him back by his shirt collar so he doesn't drive to the centre bell and start punching every metro he sees. i want him telling every journalist who'll listen that Thee shane hollander would never throw a game and anyone who says otherwise is a homophobic idiot. and maybe they fight about this too because shane is embarrassed and ilya has to rein it in, has to learn how to comfort shane privately at home while he figures out how to rebuild. but i think his initial reaction is like "my shane, i shall gather all your thousands of loyal fans and we shall wear your jersey and march through the streets of montreal in defense of your honor. do you mind if we set fire to the stadium". like he would want DRAMA he would be ANGRY he would want to defend shane's honor (and his own!)
and then that simmers into concern, because shane has to be allowed to not do well, is the other thing. there has to be space for the pain that this story is putting him through. which is (checks notes) so much. literally all of this man's worst fears are coming true.
i think there's something juicy too in that maybe this is a happier life for him in the end. maybe he's overall better off away from the pressure cooker, playing on a team of friendly and mostly queer people, and most of all finally getting to share his life with the man he loves. maybe this compromise, where he plays hockey on a slightly less elite professional level and still gets to have ilya, does make things better for him, overall, after some time. but grappling with that would have to be excruciating. the relationships he's lost! the sunk cost fallacy of it all! literally all of his worst fears are coming true and the only thing worse than that is that now he has to survive it, now he has to build a happy life on the other side and he almost doesn't want to. he almost wants to lie down and give up and become a hermit at the cottage because it's too much, and ilya is the one (always) who catches him and reminds him who he is and builds him back up again.
not someone who mocks him for what he's lost and dismisses his fears about his reputation as overblown. that's not them.
i mean if it were up to me none of this would happen because the centaurs-as-queer-utopia would not exist, ilya would continue to play for boston, the primary conflict would be their long distance relationship, they would come out by choice rather than by getting outed, and the treatment of depression, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and eating disorders would be allowed to unfold slowly and subtly on the page rather than beating the reader with a bunch of incoherent sticks. i understand that can't be what happens so this is how i would change just like, the last three chapters
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