So Role Model begins after Troy has gotten traded because his coach took Dallas Kent's side, and all I can think about is how that happened before the events of the book, isn't even part of the story itself, and the toll being traded abruptly takes on Troy is given so much attention and empathy immediately. Troy is allowed to feel rage and despair over what happened even past the day he's traded, whereas in tlg, though Shane is allowed to cry and feel "sick" and "furious" directly after his team accuses him of intentionally tripping, he's already planning his transfer with Ilya the next day, and is depicted so much less seriously:
This takes place the morning after. It's not even from Shane's pov. Everything about it is so casual. This happens on page 387, and we don't hear anything about it again after this conversation until 398, and it's this:
Here he's depicted as having essentially made peace with it. What's even more absurd to me, is that this all happened specifically because Shane tripped. Specifically because the character who believed he had to be perfect or his whole hockey career would implode, made a mistake, and he made a mistake because he couldn't, of course, be perfect. In what world would that result in Shane being "done with fighting the future, and with trying to be perfect." How could he skip from his worst nightmare coming true, the very nightmare that dictated his every behavior down to standing on balancing balls and refusing to eat a cookie on Christmas, to just accepting he can't be perfect?
But there's something else that's just even more offensive to me - So far, at no point in Role Model (which I am only five chapters into, to be fair) has Troy's loss ever been trivialized. In fact, what he has lost and the toll it has taken on him is repeatedly emphasized.
But when Shane is talking to Ilya about hypothetically transferring to Ottawa the morning after the fallout with the team he's been with since day 1, captained for the last decade, and won three cups with, she included this on page 388:
So first of all, there's Shane saying that he's going to "calm down" as if 1) he doesn't have the right to be however angry he supposedly is, and, more over, 2) as if he is in any way being depicted as something other than calm here? Both Shane and Ilya are talking in this scene like they're deciding what they want for dinner and not whether or not Shane is going to uproot his entire career to transfer to Ottawa and Reid had Shane say that he was going to "calm down." It's just so condescending to me.
But then, in the next paragraph, Ilya thinks that he doesn't want to get his hopes up because it would take "a lot more" than negative public reception to make Shane leave.
That on its own would be fine except for the fact that that's almost literally all it took to make Shane leave!
Because again, this isn't brought up again until 398 when Shane literally thinks the words "The media in Montreal had been vicious to Shane, and he didn't think he could ever feel good about representing that team again."
We don't even see any of what happens between when Shane and Ilya first talk about Shane transferring and Shane officially deciding to transfer. We don't see any further interaction with his team or his coach. We don't see JJ apologize to him. We don't see the media's response to him. We don't see Shane grieving, Shane expressing his rage - anything. We don't see fucking anything. As far as we know, Shane pretty much literally decided to leave the Voyageurs because they didn't apologize to him and because the media was vicious to him and "he didn't feel good about" representing them anymore. It is all treated like this inconvenient and unfortunate happenstance that has no further effect on him beyond having to make the difficult decision to stick to his principles and leave the team.
You know who else was treated viciously by the media? Troy. And can you guess what we get to see, and have repeatedly emphasized to us right away?
I mean it's not like I didn't know it was going to be like this but it's so glaring I just don't understand how anybody can read these books and come away thinking that Reid ever treated Shane with as much empathy as any of her white characters.
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