because it IS that serious

z, she/they (?), 20s. f1, hockey. probably other stuff. temporarily a habs blog.

[oscarpiastrihq]

Facebook of Oscar: “Stoked with how my new merch turned out”

[kennyvparse]

I'm very serious when I say that everyone needs to become more jock right now. Because if you're not going to take the sports/athletes part in your SPORTS romance seriously then just leave the sports out of it.

[kennyvparse]

Woke up still mad, so here we go. Two things.

I'm not expecting people to be extra like me and learn an entirely new sport because of a book or show or comic or whatever. I've been playing/watching/coaching sports for a long, long time. They will always be interesting to me. So, you have to understand that when you involve a sport in your story, it has to be meaningful. If your characters are athletes, and good athletes, you have to understand how and why it's important. You can't be like he's the #1 draft pick in the NBA or this guy was a quarterback of a Super Bowl winning team or this guy just lost to his actual teammate in the championship of the World Classic and not want me to want to investigate that?

Do not make the sport a character's entire personality and then take the sport away for their happy ending. I feel like this is obvious? And I get the whole "this sport isn't everything" thing, but sometimes it is. Sometimes someone just trains their entire life to succeed in a sport and it becomes a part of them. And they're supposed to just be regular after you cut out a piece of their soul?

Sighs, three things, I guess. Everyone has to do a little work. Readers and writers. I'm not expecting everyone to know all the history of every sport before, during, and after writing or reading a story, but my goodness if you want to play in a universe, fictional or not, you have to learn about it. I'm not saying you have to become obsessed, but you have to learn the basics, at least. Learn what positions are. Pick a team and learn why they have a blood feud with his one specific tem. Learn what a captain does. You cannot wade into a sports universe and half ass it because it feels incomplete. If there is a dark-side to sports, and there usually is, it just gets footnoted. Or somehow the dark stuff just doesn't seem as bad as it actually is. You can still get that happy ending, if the work is done.

Oh well. Still mad. Which probably means this doesn't make much sense.

Anyway.

Everyone become more jock immediately.

[fujoshane]

mean dom mamdani is like. only the buses get to come fast and free

[crabussy]

it's normal and actually good for your health to see yourself in the most guilt ridden character you've ever seen in your life

[crabussy]

(imagining the guilt ridden character I relate to being comforted or feeling miserable) it's good for them.this says nothing about me

[veliseraptor]

i am terminally A Sucker for characters who have a towering and generally earned ego about their own ability and absolutely no self-worth about themselves as a person at all. intoxicating combo.

[omens-of-what-is-to-cum]

I know it’s been said to death but. God I love Shane Hollander and his autism.

I love that he’s allowed to be socially adept and funny and quick witted and sarcastic and empathetic.

I love that his autism is written into moments where he misses subtext, or speaks with a bit of a blank face and monotone.

I love that he’s allowed to be sexual. I love that he’s not just okay with sex, but actively seeks it out, absolutely loves it and is treated like an autonomous sexual being with internality and nuance with sex and intimacy.

I love that he’s not any clear cut, offensive autistic archetype. The closest thing you could assign him to is savant, and even that doesn’t really fit. Shane is so good at hockey because he devotes every day of his life to it, he’s not just magically gifted math hockey powers.

I love that Shane has an overpowering special interest, but it’s not the only thing in his life. I love that he’s fascinated with real estate, that he’s close with his parents and teammates.

I love that he’s allowed to have food or sensory restrictions that don’t manifest as a public breakdown but instead as a preference for ginger ale, soft clothing and a clean house to the casual eye.

I love that he’s shown to have restricted thinking sometimes (being unable to consider coming out, cooking the extra burgers) without him being reduced to a child, unable to communicate or compromise.

I love that his moments of autistic meltdown or overwhelm don’t just look like screaming and crying, but instead as a shutdown at his parents table, or a sharp exit from the Wrong situation, like after the tunamelt.

I love that his autistic moments (like folding the clothes before sex, cooking the extra burgers) are treated by both the directing and other characters as funny and adorable without being infantilised.

I love that Ilya loves Shane so much, not despite his autistic traits, but because of them. I love that Ilya thinks Shane is so adorable and sweet, without it ever compromising how much Ilya also sees Shane as sexy, competent and intelligent.

it’s just. It’s just so fucking important to me

[hr-rep]

Shane getting criticized for not using pride tape and he’s caught on a mic later that week saying I didn’t realize it wasn’t the sucking dick that made me gay but the rainbow . Which is how he comes out.

[hr-rep]

@persimmony-snicket EXACTLYYYY

[comingatthecottage]

re: ilya's terrible therapist

okay i think i'm obligated to say that although i am a mental health professional very obviously nothing i post on my heated rivalry tumblr is professional advice nobody sue me or anything. i should also probably caveat that i am coming from a very specific perspective: i'm a relational psychoanalyst; i have adjunctive training in several behavioral modalities but i believe very, very strongly in relational psychodynamic work as being THE thing. for patients with complex relational trauma (aka mr. ilya rozanov), i don't believe anything else can create lasting change. i also don't believe in the medical model of mental health. these are things about which reasonable people can, of course, disagree, so i'll try to separate out things i think she does WRONG vs things i think are missed opportunities to do well/what i would do differently

[comingatthecottage]

THINGS THAT ARE WRONG the biggest and worst: patient presents for therapy for first time despite significant treatment barriers. patient discloses that he believes he is depressed. patient has a first-degree relative who died by suicide. your next question, your very next question, is "are you thinking of killing yourself". you don't beat around the bush, you don't imply it, you don't wait until the patient volunteers. you must ask directly and you must do so before the patient leaves your office, because there is a huge and immediate risk that this appointment is someone's last cry for help before an attempt, and the odds of a depressed patient with a trauma history related to the suicide of a parent attempting suicide is fucking staggering. it is in my opinion malpractice not to even screen for suicidal intent at this first appointment ANYWAY, i do this for all patients and to not do it for someone with ilya's history is outrageously dangerous. life-threateningly incompetent care. lack of treatment planning: doesn't take a history or anything at the first appointment. jumps directly into talking about a horrific trauma (finding his mother's dead body). sometimes people do come in to a first session in an escalated state and have to begin directly with discussing whatever is happening at that moment, and then you meet them where they're at, but ilya arrives in a calm if slightly nervous state. she should have started by laying out what therapy would look like and beginning to build rapport, not immediately being like "so how about your mom's corpse". the way she makes the diagnosis of depression is bizarre. “I think you are depressed”. she doesn't clarify whether or not she's actually diagnosing him with depression under the medical model, explain what that means, or ask what it means to him to hear that. it's also MONTHS in, after he came in suspecting depression, that she makes this diagnosis (in the US it has to be in the first session generally for insurance purposes, different, also bad). no actual screening for symptoms, no psychoeducation about what it means to have depression, no sense of prognosis which clearly upsets the patient. it is so important to contextualize a diagnosis, both what the particular diagnosis is and what the act of diagnosing means. no differential diagnosis. she knows that ilya has experienced at least one criterion A trauma for PTSD (his mother's death) but does nothing to screen for symptoms. she doesn't ask how old his sexual partners he had when he was fourteen were to screen for sexual abuse. she doesn't rule out bipolar which is a must when diagnosing depression. she doesn't ask any questions about substance use or screen for potential neurodivergence or any of a million other things. she doesn't refer to medical for potential physiological contributors for a guy whose career is "getting hit really hard in the head".

[comingatthecottage]

no clear treatment plan or goals, and no sense of how therapy is going to work besides… talking? the only goal ilya really sets is "be good enough for my boyfriend," and although she (rightly) pushes back on that she doesn't help him identify an alternate goal. she also doesn't explain what therapy is going to be like or how it works or help him get on board with what the project of therapy is going to be. she seems unshaken when he misses five appointments in a row (if i had a passively suicidal patient miss five appointments in a row i would not be brushing that off, we would be having a good chat about what the barriers to treatment were). culturally incompetent care: they're part of the same minority group (Russian immigrants) across one axis of identity, but Galina is not a queer hockey player (or as far as we know queer at all). she minimizes and dismisses the discrimination ilya is likely to face in his career from coming out, including the fact that he could get deported to Russia, jumping to a CBT technique that asks him to imagine the worst case scenario without engaging at all with how it feels to be in this position or validating his fears. mental health professionals have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about their patients' identities and to listen first. "I could lose my job and be deported and jailed because of my sexual identity" is not a cognitive distortion, it is a terrifying reality. perhaps an unlikely reality, but it exists. trying to use cognitive therapies to "reframe" real experiences of discrimination is, flat-out, therapeutic abuse. she also should have explicitly responded to his fear that she would out shane when he's afraid to say shane's name, not obliquely implied that she knows they're both hockey players: "i want to let you know that confidentiality extends to anything and everything you tell me, except (reiterate legal carveouts). there are no circumstances under which i would disclose your partner's identity to anyone. if you want to use his name, i won't repeat it to anyone except when we're in this room" THINGS THAT ARE POOR THERAPEUTIC STYLE IN MY OPINION AND WHAT I WOULD DO BETTER #MYNARCISSISM lack of curiosity: she does not prompt him to reflect emotionally, even when there are very obvious entry points to do so to do so. i.e. ilya says he's glad his father is dead, which is a huge emotional disclosure that is very risky for a patient to make, especially in a first appointment because he might expect judgment. and she just… asks a factual question about the timeline, rather than engaging with the emotional content in any way (as a relational analyst what i would do here is ask "what does it feel like to share that with me?", but i do not think any good therapist would like, change the subject away from the feeling)

[comingatthecottage]

she regularly offers direct opinions about/interpretations of things ilya says, very early in their therapeutic relationship. "that must have been very hard" in response to his father's expectations of him (which he interprets as being about sochi--he seems to hear 'it must have been hard for you to fail like that', which is, uh, bad!), "it's good that you had that," etc. in spite of the fact that he's already indicated a complex relationship with his family and himself that mean he might feel quite differently than someone else expects! was it good that he had hockey, or did it just create another burden on him and his relationship with his father, or is it somewhere in the middle? did his father's expectations feel hard? traumatizing? was he proud that so much was expected of him? when did he notice those feelings? just some questions i might ask. describing how ilya must feel about things closes off conversation. her affect and presentation in the session: ilya repeatedly notices her masking her reactions to things, like the fact that he became sexually active so young. i guess technically you're still allowed to be a blank slate style therapist, even though i don't know anyone who still does this. but if you're a blank slate, be a blank slate. don't let patients notice that you're hiding your reactions to things. so for instance i would approach that conversation by having whatever reaction i had and then saying, "you might notice i had a reaction to you saying that," and either asking the patient how they interpreted my reaction or asking them if they'd like to know what i'm thinking (and then how does it feel to know that i'm feeling concerned, etc, the relational field goes on forever). my way isn't the only way but if you're visibly swallowing reactions it's bad. she doesn't check in with ilya about how he's feeling about therapy and dismisses his fear that it's not working. tbh the only thing she says that i like is "i'm good, but i'm not that good," which IS something i might say. but she doesn't go from there, it becomes a way of dismissing his fears. i would have asked what it's like to have to tolerate such a slow and uncertain recovery process. does he think therapy can help? are there ways in which it has helped? how does it feel to talk about it? how does it feel to talk to me about it? bizarre attitude towards self-disclosure. she gives ilya next to no information about herself, which, again, is an old-fashioned but not per se wrong way to do it. just because i'm the relational yapper machine 3000 doesn't mean that every therapist needs to tell their patient anything about themselves. but she does self-disclose twice. she tells ilya that she's watching their season/is a hockey fan, and makes a weird comment that she also enjoys shopping as a coping mechanism but that bedsheets are more in her price range than sports cars. even though i'm the yappatron 3000 i would not choose to make these particular disclosures! admittedly if i had a famous patient and i knew about their career i would probably tell them that directly in the first session, i would not however make asides about it because now you're kind of creating a dual relationship. the bedsheets thing is weird bc you gotta keep a wiiiide birth around anything even quasi sexual, like don't invite a patient to imagine what your bed is like you weirdo. also finances are usually an inappropriate thing to self-disclose, because therapy is also a financial relationship! i would never joke about how a patient has more money than me (even though most of my patients have a lot more money than me), it seems likely to induce guilt and also to disturb the therapeutic frame around money which is hard to manage anyway

[comingatthecottage]

therapeutic interventions: i mean the biggest problem is that she doesn't really seem to have a consistent style or approach or anything. they just kind of chat. the things she does say are… weird. she directly gives advice about what he should do in his relationship with Shane repeatedly. She doesn’t otherwise tell ilya what to do, which would actually be more appropriate--there's a place for giving depressed patients clear instructions imo. but she doesn't do that, she tells him what to do with his boyfriend which is far riskier because she's never met shane! the worst bit is that she also directly predicts what the outcome of one of the conversations she tells him to have will be, which is… bad, because she does not know Shane, and this is like their fourth session, and she could be wrong. That’s how you destroy a therapeutic rapport forever btw, is make a promise you can’t keep. i have never in my career assured a patient that a conversation they were gonna have with someone else would turn out well, because i don't know that person. maybe shane is an abusive asshole who is going to say "well if you're depressed just kill yourself already". she doesn't know this man!

her ideas about how to treat depression seem limited to pills and exercise. which is crazy because the man is a professional athlete. and she's like "well maybe go on a bike ride." because rachel reid clearly doesn't know how therapy works or what the mechanism of action is! she doesn't lay out the many, many possibilities ("i recommend speaking to a psychiatrist, options might include ssris or snris, other antidepressants, mood stabilizers, etc. there are also interventional methods like intravenous ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or ECT. i mention those only so you understand that there are a lot of options, and a lot of hope). she doesn't actually offer psychoed about lifestyle interventions--why exercise? what does nutrition look like? sleep? she tells him he needs to come out to his friends but doesn't offer anything to help him actually understand how social isolation and depression interact. she doesn't look at any of his strengths, notably the fact that he has a partner who adores him, that he has survived a lifetime of immense trauma, that he has a brilliantly successful career, etc. there's a stab at one CBT exercise but otherwise no concrete skills (again not my thing but it would be something). and no information about different therapy modalities and how they could potentially help him. okay that's the end of my essay sorry to anyone who doesn't care and had to watch this get reblogged like 8 separate times becasue tumblr was mad abt how long it was if anyone wants to know My Case Formulation of fictional character Ilya Rozanov and how i would Fix Him let me know @stunkbug here is the essay!

[g0alieglazer]

just putting it out there but if this ends up being Something you’ll be seeing me on the evening news

[etheltempest]

they are trying to cancel hank green for saying what ALL hockey fans have been thinking

[kolurize]

[cynids]

nhl offseason in a nutshell so far

bottom ten team: we have just paid a player that no one has ever heard of TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS

jason robertson: no i dont want to be paid 15 million dollars by YOU. who want me tho? no fr who want me?

ducks: we HATE our group

canes: we LOVE our group

half the league: captains? anyone want to be the new captain? no?

kings: i am going to pay a random 40-year-old 8 million dollars a year. yes this is getting us a cup

kraken: well fuck me i guess. worth a shot

connor bedard: i am going to KILL MYSELF

mike grier: well they dont call me big money mike for no reason. you get 8 mil and you get 8 mil and everyone gets 8 mil except for the guys who were alr on the team!

panthers + also gleb for some reason: i am going to KILL EVERYONE ELSE

habs: oui oui puppies! and kittens! and rainbows! and every one of them gets a choco chunk cookie (reasonable contract and term).

danny briere to his ex situationship: "hey... time to run it back... no fr tho... u still want me?" *crickets* "ok watch me money spread. you want me now?"

everyones goalies for some reason: "bye"

elliotte FUCKING friedman: your favorite fourth liner just got sent to HELL for future considerations

dylan larkin: hey so about that trade

[washedupkam]

HAS YOUR GENERAL MANAGER PLANNED A THREE+ YEAR LONG PROCESS TO FUCK OVER THE ORGANIZATION OF THE KID THAT REFUSED TO PLAY FOR YOUR TEAM?

i kid you not this offer sheet is a long time fucking coming and danny was sitting there watching the dominos perfectly fall into place before handing that paper to leo carlsson.

catalyst may 2023: c*tter refuses to sign with the flyers

domino zero, september 2023: the flyers hire bob murray to the front office. murray worked for the ducks from 2005-2021, was gm since 2008.

domino one, january 2024: c*tter and jamie trade. danny had his eye on trevor since then, too

domino two, june 2025: trevor trade. let me take this "problem player" off your hands, ok? look, this is also in consideration of the c*tter trade, so it's fine that our return is low, right? now you don't have to deal with him anymore :)

domino three, entirety of the 2025-26 season: verbeek does not sign his star, pending rfas (carlsson and mintyukov) before july first. bedard, fantilli are not signed either. the rfa contract slate is completely blank. danny has a time crunch, but the stage is his.

domino four, june 2026: mason mctavish gets traded. another moment that cements verbeek as someone who will throw out young players if they underperform. you don't think all the young guys aren't seeing this trend? zegras drysdale mctavish used to be the gauthier sennecke carlsson, in a way.

domino five, june 2026: vladar and foerster contracts get squared away. they both agree to lower aav, but longer term. saves the flyers a couple million they need to add extra spice to the offer sheet.

domino six, unspecified time: jamie and trevor do not fuck with the ducks. danny does not need to worry about them signing an offer sheet from the hands of pat verbeek. we know about trevor for sure, but i would bet everything that jamie hates his ass just as much, perhaps even more. he's just quiet about it.

domino seven, unspecified time: trevor is good friends with leo carlsson.

domino eight, june 2026: the ducks ship out so many players. they prepared for the young stars to come off their rfas and had contracts going accordingly like gudas, carlson etc. it was all too predictable and thus all too easy to throw a wrench in their cap allotment plans.

domino nine, june 2026: the random usamerican captain exodus is enough to cover the rumor headlines. and a good excuse on why trevor zegras' contract is taking long.

domino ten, june 2026: the rumor seeds danny let spread for a little bit about carlsson getting offer sheeted reached verbeek and annoyed him enough to make a statement about it. now danny gets to really play his bluff.

domino eleven, july 2026: other teams do not have the cap space or cap freedom to beat the offer sheet the flyers handed carlsson. it's a no brainer for him to sign this. and it's built perfectly to piss the sameuli's off, because of bob murray

domino twelve, july 2026: carlsson signs the offer sheet.

danny briere was a man who played for the flyers for six years. he met the love of his life there. he saw the extreme highs and lows of 2010's flyers hockey. the organization the city the fans whatever it was, was so enthralling he returned to work in the flyers front office. he was directly a part of the front office that was involved in the c*tter debacle. the fact that we assumed he kept it strictly business was an error on our end. what's the quote, revenge is a dish best served cold?

[mints-tea93]

lane hutson watching the habs prospects with the scouts 😭 youngest bossman ever

[vingtcoeurs]

i often think of floridian gator changing his mask's design to feature a québec Je Me Souviens license plate after a handful of NHL starts when it comes to finding a way to explain the mtl players' current mindsets.

[vingtcoeurs]

like i'm sorry but do you understand the MEANING of this? he debuted this thing shortly after his second call-up to the habs this season. the devotion.

[habsmyheart]

AND AND AND!! He changed it shortly before we played T*mpa. If I remember correctly the first time a lot of us noticed it and freaked out about it was a game IN T*mpa, if it wasn’t even the first game he wore it. That timing made it even more impactful in my opinion. Florida boy changing the Florida plate despite the achievement of being the first nhl goalie from his home state because he is THAT committed and in love with Montreal.

[rpfofficial]

i like your platonic friendship do you mind if i view it through a lens that might support a homosexual reading of your relationship? you don't need to change anything and this doesn't belittle or undermine or ignore your real feelings for each other. i just think it would be cool if you fucked

[whirlpool-blogs]

my favorite nhl combine questions

[unoqlo]

i think they should just let laila and schaef do the entire draft tbh