I don’t do crack ships for the same reason I don’t do self insert ships and that reason is I am too serious about true love. “I ship things for fun!” Not me the stakes are too high. I only ship true love.
I’ve been consuming so much content I need a refresh/break I’ll be back on June 21st for the Rhaenicent show and maybe before because I’ve never been good at staying off here
(Shoutout to whoever made this! I can’t find who because I saved it while high, please take credit if yours)
i love Not to jump the gun here but with rozanov’s permission…? i think shane in that scene was feeling fiercely protective over another person for the first time in his life. so bowled over by the intensity of his own emotions that he stumbled back to his hotel room in a daze and immediately jerked off in the shower about it. “what if rozanov got arrested and i had to use my immense hockey wealth to bail him out of jail and it was winter in boston. so he had hypothermia. and he had to live with me while we sorted out the legal situation and i yelled at journalists for him and helped him with his paperwork and hired the best lawyer in the world and nursed him back to health and he was like “hollander……..you saved my life 🥺” and he fucked me soooo hard every night for stress relief (obviously he couldn’t fuck other people. due to the lawsuit) and we fell asleep in each other’s arms afterwards. because there’s only one bed in my apartment and he’s too tall for the couch” stuff like that. normal fantasies
• holding ilya’s hand while they cross a busy street full of hazards (potholes, roadworks, etc)
• rescuing ilya from kidnappers (he kicks down the door)
• rescuing ilya from a burning building (bridal carry)
• fighting in a gladiatorial ice hockey arena for ilya’s hand in marriage
• massaging ilya’s bad knee and ilya says with wonderment “wowww wow. shane you’re so good at this… you are better than every physical therapist on earth probably”
• saying “he asked for no pickles” to the mcdonalds cashier
• carrying ilya’s bags
• washing ilya’s hair
• applying o’keefes working hands cream to ilya’s calluses
Sharing this w permission of the asker who did not want their handle attached - this says everything i wanted to much better than I am capable of articulating at this juncture.
I think Shane Hollander would use his hometown superstar hockey powers to rent out the Ottawa stadium for one night maybe for like one of their anniversaries so he and Ilya could be completely alone and maybe they actually suit up and play 1v1 for awhile (hard and fast of course. like the golden age) and maybe it is actually too cold to fuck on center ice so instead they feel each other up in the actual Sin Bin bc Obviously but Shane stops it from going too far so they go to the locker room bc Shane wants to roleplay the first time in the showers after the commercial except this time he actually gets to do what he really wanted to do and suck Ilya off right there in the middle of the shower and he doesn't have to worry about anyone there but maybe they pretend they will get caught a little bit...
I obviously love the "You're the one, Buffy" speech with all my heart, but there is something so special to me about "As daft a notion of soulful Spike the killer is, it's nothing compared to the thought that another girl could mean anything to me."
That! That line hits so hard every damn time, because it's him saying "I don't care if the whole world thinks of me as a monster even now that I have a soul, but I can't stand the thought that you'd ever believe that I don't love you anymore. That you could think that you'd ever stop being the most important person in my life. Because that hurts more than all the hate and judgment I could get from anyone."
And that is just poetic cinema. It's Spike in his core.
Ok so here's the thing. I get annoyed by the feminization of either Shane or Ilya because like. It's masc 4 masc it's masc 4 masc why are we doing this.
But then the genderswap version I keep seeing this thing where the implication is oh fem!Shane was always this perfect fem princess but then in Tampa when she embraces being gay she goes futch and fem!Ilya goes wild
Uh, if you want to keep the dynamics from Hollanov into Hollanova, they're both femme. They'd be femme for femme that's the poiiiiiint. The actual translation to Shane's Tampa transformation would be fem!Shane is lazy about her femininity while still very much being attached to it, she just wears exclusively athleisure and never bothers to get anything tailored or paint her nails or wear jewelry or anything.
And then the walk into Tampa she's suddenly in tailored designer clothing and perfect accessories and she's got her (still short!) nails in a beautiful French manicure and her hair's been low-lighted and she just looks so poised and beautiful. She already looked beautiful, obviously, she looks gorgeous in leggings and a sweatshirt too, very Flashdance, but this is...yeah. This is like a brain melting combination of attention to detail and feminine perfection and all fem!Ilya wants to do is smear her lipstick
(Sorry am I getting too horny. On main.)
(Anyway the comp here is Andy from Devil Wears Prada. She's not butch at the beginning she's just not putting a ton of effort into femininity)
Anyway if I can be salty about all this as a femme4femme lesbian myself I feel like this comes back to the weird biases against femme4femme (and masc4masc) but I will say no more on this
hear me out.... shane the vampire slayer and his boyfriend ilya the vampire. obviously. but specifically compared side by side to buffy and spike is sooo delicious.
buffy summers’ sense of extremely reluctant responsibility paired with the weight of the world she’s been forced to bare is something canon shane hollander would easily relate to.
her skills are undeniable, she is always either loved or feared, sometimes both at the same time, because she’s the best. she’s unbeatable (except not always). every day slayage is also fun!! to her. she loves the adrenaline rush, ‘chirping’ the vampires, the physical movement of it all, and she looooves the satisfaction of a good slay (win).
buffy is the chosen one - the golden girl. she has to be perfect, something put on her not only by herself but also by those surrounding her. the impossibly high standard is ever present, ever pressing. she can’t fail. it just can’t happen.
she’s also kind of….. off putting to most people. buffy is the kind of hot that people notice right away, she has close friends, she has good instincts. but "she’s peculiar." buffy never quite fits in, she always feels othered and/or IS othered, people don’t quite understand her, and they want her to be who they imagined her to be instead of who she actually is.
enter vampire spike nolastname (or william pratt, in another life) who is the first person who truly SEES buffy. she feels exposed, scared, vulnerable and kinda violent about it. and he’s not particularly happy about it either.
spike is supposed to be a bloodthirsty vampire. and he is. he’s personally killed not one but TWO slayers - and these were slayers that he hunted down. he wanted the rush of the best fight of his life, to have the bragging rights, know what it felt like to win the un-winnable. and now he’s hunted buffy down.
but for whatever reason - they just can’t kill each other. before they even have any kind of positive relationship, there are several times where if they actually really tried (wanted to) they could have killed the other. but they just…… didn’t. it almost feel like a high stakes game between them. buffy becomes an obsession for spike. his girlfriend (at the time) tells him ‘you’re all covered with her.’
spike is walking around town trying to be the Big Bad and sometimes he is, but after a while he’s mostly just playing kitten poker, having reckless dangerous fun because he can, abusing substances + cigarettes, and showing up to ragebait and piss off buffy. maybe throw a wrench in her plans for the bit, maybe help on the off occasion so that she’ll keep putting up with his presence.
and don’t get me wrong, spike is a dick. he’s done some terrible awful things - he’s a vampire without a soul, ok - and he loves to make things more difficult than they have to be. but at his deep core, he’s a good person. before he was turned, william pratt was a loverboy. a sappy awkward terrible poet who loved deeply. just after turning, his mother, his number one person in the world, died traumatically, and it changed him. he let himself BE a vampire.
it takes a life changing event (microchip in brain prevents him from inflicting physical pain on humans lol) for him to start fighting on the side of ‘good’ and he realizes he’s into it. he realizes he never really cared about doing evil deeds (he helped buffy STOP the world from ending one time years before the chip even!!) he just loves the adrenaline of a good fight, of kicking ass, the rush of the possibility of loss but being the last one standing.
and now he’s spending time around buffy and hers, trying to be helpful. trying to exist purposefully. and his and buffy’s dynamic has been….. different for a while now. they’ve always had tension between them, and maybe it’s evolved or been replaced or there’s something additional there now, but it’s kind of sexy. kind of heated. kind of addictive.
he’s the only person that really treats buffy like buffy, especially at this point in time where she’s dealing with absolutely horrifying ptsd and depression. her friends are assholes to spike which sure okay, but worse, they’re assholes to buffy herself right now. they don’t understand her, don’t support her, just need her to be Okay for them to feel better about themselves.
and eventually buffy and spike start secretly fucking. one time they fuck so hard that they literally bring down a house. it’s kind of everything to spike - he doesn’t even realize he loves her and he feels it like it’s everything. and he still doesn’t even have a soul btw!!
buffy, on the other hand, is disgusted with herself. spike, yes, represents everything she’s been trained to hate in the world, he is her literal sworn enemy. but more than that, it’s just Wrong. she shouldn’t feel like this, she thinks she’s broken, that something inside of her is wrong and disgusting and she deserves to be punished for it.
but no matter how much she tries, buffy just can’t stop acting on the draw she feels towards spike. save your discourse I don’t care maybe it wasn’t love buffy ever felt towards him, but either way - it was Strong. undeniable, not able to be ignored, full of passion.
for his part, without even having a soul, spike is in love with buffy. “I know I’m a monster, but you treat me like a man.” she sees him in a way that nobody else is able to - maybe has ever been able to. and so he leaves on a self imposed quest to get his soul restored. he wanted to be a better man for her, closer to humanity for her. he Wanted not just her, but also FOR her.
also slaying together is basically foreplay, there’s canon jokes about buffy ‘domesticating’ spike, the only people in buffys life who really like him are her literal family and he adores them right back, buffy is uptight and spike helps her have fun and let loose, buffy is bossed around by old men who can't even throw a punch who think they know how she should do her job better than she does, oooooh I could go on forever.
and yeah okay yes absolutely they are a complicated ship with extremely valid critics to be had. but also tell me I didn’t basically just draft up an honest to god ‘this is soooo them’ Hollanov AU. you can’t!!!!
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