There's an interesting trend in the responses to my Shane is kind of a selfish competitive asshole post to say something like "Yeah Shane IS this way, but Ilya isn't he naturally cares about people" and I mean sort of?
I think book!Ilya is just as selfish as book!Shane, though it comes out in different ways. Really Shane is more self-centered than he is selfish. While Ilya's more perceptive (and yes that word has been ruined for me by its overuse in fics but it's the canon trait so) and connects with people more easily but he's also self involved, especially to start out.
This is a major point of contention people are going to fight me on but No I do not think book!Ilya was happy in Boston. The Ottawa plan is still questionable but it's not as simple as "Boston exciting and good Ottawa boring and bad." Book!Ilya doesn't have any friends and crucially, has never had any friends. He describes his life in Boston as a whirlwind of partying and meaningless sex:
This is not the picture of a guy who was living a fulfilled life. Not that there's anything wrong with partying, but you know, not being able to name a single close relationship from a place you lived in for eight years is maybe not great. (And yes I know fandom has endowed Cliff Marlow with Ilya bff status. He very simply isn't this in the books. I can write a post about it, but book!Marlow is obviously just Ilya's most reliable party friend. Every conversation they have is about having sex with random women.)
As far as we know Shane is Ilya's first ever friend and their relationship is, you know, gestures. And even post-cottage Ilya denies himself emotional intimacy with Shane because he's afraid of it ruining their romantic and sexual relationship. Ilya's captain of the Centaurs for two full years before TLG and the strong implication is that he barely knows any of them. He's not doing a great job and everyone kind of knows it.
Ultimately Ilya has to be therapized into basic relationship building because he doesn't know how to do it, because his entire life up until that point has been living entirely for himself except for meeting familial needs out of obligation, not love. When he moves to Ottawa he makes Shane his whole world instead but that's not sustainable either.
It's easy to assume Ilya struggles in Ottawa because it's boring and the hockey is bad and that's not not true. But the bigger thing is that Ilya is undergoing a very serious shift in his self-identity and that's uncomfortable. Ilya's entire life up until like 26 was about escaping to America to be successful and rich and materialistic and to fuck beautiful women, and he accomplishes it. And then throws it away for Shane. That's a deeply destablizing thing.
Ilya's journey in TLG is about how to reconcile the person he understood/understands himself to be (Mr. Sex-and-Hockey) with the new person he actually is, who's the kind of guy to give up peak years of his career to be near his (gay! secret! monogamous!) lover. This is nicely shown in how Ilya's persona slips away over the course of his sessions with Galina.
Which is all to say I like the whole "existential horror of Ottawa" thing but I think Ilya would have had a very similar crash-out to the one he has in TLG even if he'd stayed in Boston. Maybe the timeline would have been longer. But the identity dissonance would still occur, and so Ilya would still compensate by fixating on Shane, which would still make him perceive their relationship as fundamentally unequal, which would lead to conflict.
