Gonna put this under a read more cause I know it’s sensitive and also the post got long, but I feel like there is so much characterization to explore through the lens of Shane being passively suicidal about life after hockey
Just this idea that he doesn’t really see a future beyond hockey, that to him the best possible situation would be winning the cup a final time, seeing them raise his jersey, celebrating with his family and friends and husband, and then going to sleep and just not having to wake up after that. That’s it, the movie ends, credits roll, and he never has to watch himself lose the one skill he hung his entire sense of self worth on
And he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong because he’s not like Ilya who actively has dark thoughts about harming himself so it’s not a problem. He wouldn’t ever harm himself so it’s not a bad thing to think about. He doesn’t think about why he wouldn’t do it, which is mainly that it would hurt the people he loves, and that yes technically if someone offered a way for his life to just stop right as the retirement celebration ends without it hurting anyone he would say yes. That’s not important, don’t need to think about that bit
It takes a bit for Ilya to see it and really understand what’s happening. As retirement eventually gets closer the topic comes up occasionally of people asking what their post-retirement plans are, and Ilya notices that every time Shane just sort of laughs and says it’s not something he’s thought a lot about. Which is… Weird, right? They aren’t 20 anymore, this isn’t thinking decades in the future it’s thinking 5ish years in the future, how can he still not be thinking about what his life looks like in 5 years?
He gets advice from Galina on how to bring it up and one night asks the post retirement question and Shane says the same thing he always does, but Ilya pushes and is like “no seriously, what do you want to do, what plans do you want to make, how do you want to spend your time?” And Shane really doesn’t have much in the way of answers but he doesn’t understand why it’s such a big deal. So he doesn’t think about post hockey life, it’s not like he actually plans to hurt himself or anything
Ilya swallows down the panic that answer brings and tries to stay calm as he explains that yes ok he doesn’t plan on hurting himself, but what happens if it starts to really get close and Shane has a panic attack or a breakdown and the fact that he only sees this empty void of a future sets something off and, while freaking out and not thinking rationally, he did do something? Doesn’t it seem like spending years seeing time after retiring as meaningless with no plans for happiness would maybe cause a problem or be bad for him?
And Shane is just like. “Ah. Hmm. That’s. Hmm. Ok you may have a point.” And inside Ilya is just oh thank god thank god thank god because he was prepared for that to be a much harder sell and had analogies ready if he needed them
So now he moves onto part two of the Galina plan where every day Shane needs to say one positive thing about life after they retire to build up a bank of good thoughts so if and when the freak out happens he has that to fall back on rather than just seeing empty meaningless nothingness
And in a way it helps Ilya with his own mental health stuff when he gets in a bad way to remind himself “when I thought of Shane doing that I wanted to explode the entire earth” and that usually stops the spiraling
And when Shane starts to get anxiety attacks over it he knows enough about what’s happening in his brain to go to Ilya and talk about it and be held for a long time as Ilya tells him no matter what does or doesn’t happen they’ll be together and he won’t let anything bad happen to Shane because marriage means never having to go through anything alone ever again, and sometimes they both need to be reminded of that
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