i’m really overwhelmed thinking about hudson saying “he’s never had a sexual experience (before ilya) where he wanted to be there or had even a flint of desire.” and shane feeling the lust and the shame and the carnal desire and the rejection towards ilya all at once. sitting on that locker room bench after giving ilya his room number and trying to choke it back. not just feeling the feelings but not being able to name the feelings either. not knowing where to put them. what to do with his hands. he’s so good at everything including pushing it all down. he’s not good at this and his body won’t let him push it down. never feeling a flint of desire to the flames of it swallowing him whole. if it’s bad and it’s wrong then why does ilya pushing him against that wall and kissing him for the first time feel like absolution. shane has never absolved himself of anything. what is he supposed to do with that.
thinking about connor storrie saying ilya is overcompensating a little with his whole cocky jock act because yeah, he really is. his scenes in russia and with his family are so interesting because he acts COMPLETELY different. his body language is tight and boxed in, his face is trained into a perfectly neutral expression.
it's so obvious he grew up in an abusive household where having any emotions at all was punished. he won first place in the draft and there's a sponsor praising him but there's not even a trace of a smile on his face. his father dishes out insult after insult and he just takes it. he only tries to defend himself once after losing to latvia in sochi but even that is met with more hostility from his dad so he just shuts up.
compare this with shane at the restaurant with his parents in ep 4. he's in a mood and he's a little brash with them during the conversation. he's talking back even and he's clearly upset, but he doesn't look scared to do it. i just can't picture ilya ever talking that way to his dad because he always looks scared of his father. the only time he doesn't is when his dad's memory is slipping.
my point is most of the asshole act he does is just overcompensating. the recklessness and the "I like trouble" is all just rebellion from his terrible home life where he has to be disciplined and perfect. but he'll never be perfect because his father views him as inherently flawed
since i'm on the subject Also. idk maybe i am just a domtop and exhibit too many similarities to ilya as a whole to relate or be compelled by this personally but the emotional arc of ilya Letting Go Of His Need To Control bc it's Bad For Him, through becoming more sexually submissive (or him being surreptitiously sexually submissive at all) is so confusing. one part bc i never saw anything to imply ilya has Control Issues but more so. that's literally shane. you're talking about shane. that's like, the nucleus of the character. closeted & confused high intensity poc male athlete control freak with autism and likely ocd who copes with highly masked perfectionism & fetishizes self-harm as self-discipline needs subbing (+ bottoming) like he needs to breathe, and falls in love with the man who shows him this about himself
I'm thinking about your conception of Ilya as resigned to be kind to the unkind, and I lovvvve it!!! I'm also so glad you talked about the internalized oppression versus external oppression. It's something I feel so strongly in the series.
I do feel like Ilya has to have some measure of shame fueling his desire for Shane, though. What else is the thrill of despoiling Captain Canada, Golden Boy of hockey? But maybe if I think of shame as a logical emotional reaction to powerlessness.... Ilya does not have the power to make his family love him, so he will both reject and internalize their hatred for him to a certain extent in order to keep loving them. Ilya is powerless against his orientalization as a Big Bad Russian, so he will embody those racist stereotypes as best he can in order to get the fame and money that will keep him safe.
I also am thinking of the sense of...corruption or innate badness that abused children often exhibit, which we often categorize as shame. But I could maybe see that as a logical emotional reaction to being forced to carry a truth that society has decided is unacceptable to acknowledge - that child abuse is baked into the concept of childhood as we currently define it, both legally and culturally. For Ilya to be 17, speaking in his second language, already planning his escape/exile and to have the man who has been posited as his exact opposite show up to watch him with his ever-present (apparently loving!) mother-manager.....
Anyway anyway, sorry for random rambles in your inbox. Thank you for your analysis, I look forward to more!
the kind to the unkind resignation is sooo central to him, i'm so excited you think it's good!! i have sm to say that i started responding to this and recognized i'd just end up writing an ilya thesis lol
i'll give some zoomed out thoughts. i enjoyed your rambles a lot, don't apologize. i'm glad i made you think, sorry i can't comb everything
like i said in those tags, shame shapes us in abstract ways if not directly. the concept of "should" is something everyone has a relationship to, including ilya. my point isn't that shame doesn't exist in his inner world. just that it's not part of him as a narrative device & it's misguided to define him by it
there's a measurable, and remarkable, difference between the internalization of shouldn'ts and of shoulds in trauma that's relevant here I Think
shane internalizes should, building the Shame Torment Nexus that cradles him in a vice. "this is how i need to be, and my failure to makes me lesser. i have to live up to it, and do/be better" (but i can't so i should suffer)
shouldn't creates a cage. it shapes an animal pacing in its enclosure measuring its territory. the emphasis is on hate or solemnity that you want something you can't have. it fertilizes an inward assessment of monstrosity for desiring it. "this is how i need not to be, and my failure to makes me suffer. i can't escape it, but i have to live with it" (so i have to do/be better)
this can play out many ways but in ilya/shane it's resignation and resentment, respectively
ilya isn't free from the psychological tolls of abuse & cptsd. but those tolls aren't univocal. i think ilya's response is just different from normative low/bad self-esteem (as in that abuse survivors experience), due to an intrinsic sense of personal authority. he experiences himself as immutable, juxtaposed to shane experiencing himself as mutable. for people like that reproach (/shame) shapes us differently
+ for brevity, i'm not mentioning that ilya is exceptionally kind & forgiving at his core n how it interacts here (or shane's latent bitterness). but it's really important to these dynamics
anyw if i had to describe what i think ilya's inner monologue looks like at his worst it's this, give or take
ilya actually really admires shane as a person btw. he downplays it by calling him boring and whatnot but he does. when he tells shane "but you are brave" in the cottage, he MEANS it.
because he knows if it weren't for shane INSISTING that they address their feelings fr each other, despite ilya trying to brush it off, they never would've done it.
sure, ilya was the first one to initiate anything more than a hookup with the ginger ale and tuna melt but he was still doing that under a stoic, casual facade of "I'm not done with you yet". and that backfired real quick so he probably wouldn't have been brave enough to confess to shane even though he's known for a while that he's in love.
shane on the other hand yes he ran away after the tuna melt BUT once he realizes he actually is gay and he WANTS ilya he's set on that, he's stubborn about it. shane is only ever tangentially aware of his needs & wants and he had to be directly confronted with the fact that he simply doesn't like women and he doesn't like anyone else other than ilya, it had to be practically spelled out to him before he realizes (its the tism, really). THAT'S WHY HE COMES OUT TO ILYA IN TAMPA. HE LITERALLY JUST REALIZED IT FULLY. and because shane is stubborn and brave and he fights for what he wants he told ilya. and ilya admires that quality a lot.
and i think all of this plays into why ilya asks shane in the long game if he would choose ilya over hockey. because yeah shane wishes they could be out too but it doesn't feel like he's FIGHTING for the relationship like he once did and that's understandably upsetting
no tlg shane hate tho i love him and its not entirely his fault
kills me that shane spends the entirety of heated rivalry afraid of his queerness and the entirety of tlg afraid that even if people accept hes gay, they won't accept the only man hes only ever been in love with. how he calls himself "depraved" for wanting what he has with ilya. hes so afraid that he'll be reduced to a gay guy fucking his arch rival. and then, of all people, the FUCKING METROS do it to him
the rose lesbian/wlw foreshadowing is unreal specifically bc it's the kind of thing that can only be laid with purpose but we have no indication from extraneous material from the team/cast so far as i'm aware that it was purposeful. "god, i wish" and 80% of her boyfriends being gay men and narratively embodying shane's queer spiritual guide but she's supposed to be a cishet woman with no queer subtext in the queer subtext show. could not make this up if i tried
