People keep forcing me to realize these things, so if you haven't realized this yet, sorry, i love you, pain shared is pain lessened, incoming brick, spoilers for TLG
🧱 🧱 🧱
At the end of Heated Rivalry, the boys are discussing telling a few people they're close to.
At some point between HR and TLG, Shane comes out to his team, and its common enough knowledge that Troy Barrett has heard rumors.
In TLG, Shane is terrified of meeting the Centaurs, to the point that he and Ilya have a huge fight about even attending a team party as friends, depsite the widespread knowledge that Shane and Ilya are in fact friends, running a charity and hanging out occasionally.
We don't know how Shane coming out to his team went.
But we're gonna find out. Jacob Tierney promised us that. And he said his favourite scene is the Boxing Day fight.
JT is a great storyteller, he wants a good throughline.
Shane coming out to Montreal is going to fucking huuuuuuurt
Look. I am not going to argue whether Shane has a eating disorder or not. Orthorexia is extremely real and often endorsed by nutritionists so you know...
But Shane is a pro hockey player. He plays 82 games a year (not counting playoffs) and each game burns 1800-2500 calories, depending on how many minutes you're on the ice. Not to mention the workouts: strength training yes but cardio is incredibly important for hockey; SKATING IS HARD.
Hockey players aren't trying to keep weight off during the season, they're desperately trying to keep weight ON. And they're eating an absolute fuckton of carbs. That's the most real part of Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.
Shane's on a macrobiotic diet in the show. He would be eating just so much rice. So much quinoa. So much OATMEAL. Whole grain pasta with pesto. Unbelievable amounts of fish. Sure, salad, but like, COBB SALAD. Almond Butter on whole grain bread.
Avoiding refined sugars is not the same as living on salad. You need carbs to play pro sports, not just protein.
Like. SO MUCH FOOD. He might never not be snacking. They're all always fucking eating. Constantly. Endlessly.
The biggest suspension of disbelief in the show is that two hockey players bulking up in the off season couldn't pack away four burgers each.
Check out Sidney Crosby's cottage doc. Nate McKinnon is chonky af in it because it's the off season. You pack on weight to prep!
An analysis of Ilya’s wardrobe in Heated Rivalry, season one (I just went through and double checked every single scene in the show for this lol)
I haven’t seen anyone talk about this so perhaps I missed the boat or it’s so obvious no one feels like talking about it, but literally my favorite #cornplate moment to think about is how Ilya is almost almost always wearing all black in the show. If not black, on a handful of occasions a shade of gray.
Yes, a couple times it’s a black or dark blue suit and/or transition to white dress shirt with black slacks (Russia, Vegas). But that still tracks the motif.
Just seven or eight times out of dozens of more outfits, the strict black/gray motif is broken:
At the cottage, he wears Shane’s plaid shirt.
And of course he has the white with leopard print shirt and red with white hibiscus shirt on special occasions (when I believe he is trying to project a certain image that does not reflect what he feels internally, but would like to). Honorable mention to the bright red shorts he wears briefly at the cottage with a black shirt once again. This is the one single time in the entire show that he wears colorful pants. What do they mean? Do they mean anything? I think probably not but they’re still interesting.
The two or three times he wears primarily white is 1. the white tank top out with Svetlana, 2. the white with black accents sports shirt while texting Shane, and arguably 3. the Vegas hookup, which is frankly shocking to me and I am very much so being insane pondering the implications of this, as well as the one time he wears a maroon shirt while caring for his father. Does the white represent a fragile hopefulness?A hidden fondness? A desperate reach for an image he wants to portray? And the maroon— God, I sound crazy, but to me it’s his bleeding heart.
In my personal opinion Ilya is better at fashion than Shane, but in contrast, Shane has a much greater variety in color— and still his staple seems to be a white t-shirt or tank top. I like this yin and yang thing. Shane’s biggest motif is, of course, blue and white.
Interestingly, Ilya’s jerseys are primarily red, black, and white, which are pretty much the only colors we see him wear in the entire show. Red can mean a number of things, of course— for Russia, for love, for heart, for anger, for pain, for resentment, frustration. The black and white and gray is much more plain and dour.
But also ugh I think I’m just a sap for Ilya’s clothes representing his internal world. Because I believe this is more intentional than just the Raider’s colors or that he doesn’t like to wear colors.
He’s mourning his mother, constantly. It never goes away.
He hates going back to Russia, he feels pinned in and never good enough with his father and brother, he can’t escape the cloud that is his family and country looming over him.
And I believe it represents his depression which manifests from all of this, too.
I think it also reflects/projects the harsh exterior he shows to the public and at many points Shane in order to protect himself from vulnerability. I think, at the same time, the black and gray doesn’t draw much attention to itself, or Ilya for the matter, demonstrating how he can blend in and disappear at times, or maybe would like to.
I think it foreshadows how his depression will get worse in season two and I’m very curious what his wardrobe will look like then.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my ted talk. I wonder if anyone else thinks about these outfits as much as I do. It’s fun to read into things and interpret. My other main corn plate is the ridiculous distance Shane and Ilya sit apart from each other on the tuna melt couch and how that foreshadows the moments before disaster.
Three weeks late but eh, who's really paying attention?
We have laid out Shane Hollander's Five Step Plan to Make A Hook Up Into A Husband.
A thorough, extensively researched, well thought out plan.
So now we ask the million dollar question: Is this plan a good plan?
Short Answer? Yes. Its a very good plan.
Long answer: Welllllll....
On paper? This plan is perfect. It's a perfect 10 year plan, the softest of soft launches. It is an excellent long game.
It's even reasonable that these two doorknobs think this is sustainable. After all, they managed to survive the last eight years, what's ten more?
Realistically, they are 26. They're in their prime, definitely, but 10 years is probably what they have left of hockey, and that's if neither of them has a career ending injury. The time they have left to play is not significantly longer than the time they have already played.
But they aren't taking into account something very important.
This:
(That's the "I love you" scene for those who are normal and can't identify every still of the show)
What neither Shane nor Ilya realize is being in love, having more time together, being more connected and in more of a relationship is actually going to make things significantly harder.
This is no one's fault. Neither has been in a significant long term romantic relationship; Shane has the girl he dated before the draft, and Ilya has Svetlana, a relationship that is friendly, not romantic.
Their situationship was casual and non-connective, and the NSA nature of it meant neither allowed themselves to really consider a future beyond the occasional random thought - thoughts that are unwelcome in the book.
The problem with a plan for the future is, it allows you to think about the future. And the more you think about the future, the more you want the future to happen now. And the more nights you spend holding each other, the more nights you'll WANT to spend holding each other.
The problem with a relationship is the possibilities are boundless, and you want them all. Waiting gets harder and harder, and the things that you use to distract yourself become less and less effective.
This will become a very real problem faster than they realize.
SPOILERS FOR THE LONG GAME FOLLOW
By the time TLG rolls around, Shane and Ilya are three years into their ten year plan, and both of them are struggling.
We see more of Ilya's struggle; Ilya is generally more connected to his own internal dialogue, and most of TLG is told from his viewpoint. He hates that he has no one talk to about Shane. He hates that he can't touch Shane at all in public. He hates that he has to do a career retrospective that features their rivalry and not tell everyone how he really feels about Shane.
Ilya of course shares very little of this with Shane due to his fear that his needs are a burden.
Shane is struggling too, though I suspect that neurotypicals don't see it. However there are two very significant tells: Shane is strongly committed to this plan, and Shane is strongly committed to his diet.
Shane is as filled with yearning as Ilya is, but his response is to deny what he wants and follow something that is rigid and dependable and easy to control.
This is a common neurodivergent response. Be uncomfortable. Be controlled. Be quietly unhappy. Allowing himself to actually feel all these feelings is going to lead to a meltdown, so he distracts himself because he has a plan, a very good plan, and all he needs to do is follow it, and one day it will all be worth it.
Thank god for the plane crash, because Shane might actually have collapsed under all this pressure without that sudden brutal reminder that there are things you cannot plan for.
Its very interesting how all three of the notable instances of someone trash talking ilya to shane have sexual connotations someone else has probably already pointed this out before
But yunas "fuck him in the but" jj "if he fucks you I'll fuck him back," and of course jj calling ilya cocksucker during the cup watch party are all sexual phrases whether the speaker intended that way or not
This is to further drive the point that sex and the hollonov rivalry are inherently linked
Okay big stretch time one could argue that all three of those instances have a sliver of casual homophobia. the idea of being fucked in the but being inherently bad admitted big stretch stay with me possibly bigger stretch the idea that JJ doesn't get that what he said was sexual because the idea of two men having sex is absurd. And no stretch at all calling someone a cocksucker is homophobic
Again someone else probably noticed all these things a long time ago
Absolutely fucking crazy to me that Rachel Reid really said “Ilya looks at the fact that he can’t come out and comes to the conclusion that obviously it’s his boyfriend’s fault he can’t come out and so he feels frustrated and sad and angsty and it’s all shane’s fault because Shane is selfish and mean and stupid” instead of the reasonable and sane perspective that any actual queer person grounded in reality and surrounded by a culture of inherent homophobic and racist ideals would come to. Which is, if course, “wow society sucks and I fucking hate how deeply homophobia is tied to the sport I play and more importantly my home country’s absolute hatred of my mere existence as a queer person (which is central to my reasons of staying in the closet that the author totally doesn’t completely abandon because it doesn't serve her weird racist narrative anymore) and if I continue to want to live a peaceful life with my boyfriend I will have to sacrifice my freedom if having my relationship known and expressed publicly in a romantic sense and that is horrible and not my boyfriend’s fucking fault are you kidding me who in their right mind would blame my beautiful wonderful jock autistic Asian boyfriend (who is pretty much the same height as me and not baby smooth lil bottom btw because that would be pretty fetishistic wouldn’t it) for being terrified of being outed because as a Russian man in love with another man from a completely different country I too am terrified and that is a reasonable feeling to have within the world I live in.”
Rachel “Shane is stupid and selfish and Ilya is a sad lil bean that deserves all the sympathy” Reid vs people with critical thinking skills and basic understanding of neurodivergencies and racism
this is not particularly new or insightful, but something that bothers me about the whole "shane is stupid" or whatever thing is that the acknowledgment that he's highly technically skilled and intelligent in his field (aka hockey, which isn't the stereotype but stay with me), but not emotionally or otherwise observant/expressive/smart, absolute IS a stereotype asians occupy in the american racial imagination (as 'subby', unemotional, robotic, asocial, subdued, etc)
the whole point of a model minority is being 'beneficial' to american society and quiet about their oppression/emotions - essentially, they're good/useful in their field, but their personhood doesn't threaten whiteness because it's inherently lacking
imo, it would be absolutely fine if it were an isolated incident and it's a completely valid character flaw, but considering how shane is otherwise written, i think it's relevant (especially in juxtaposition to ilya)
i'm not articulating well, but i think it's worthy of discussion through this lens, and i'm open to doing so since i'm sure others could give a better perspective:)
