#ilya studies

[ticklefighthockey]

tonight I’m hurting my feelings thinking about how one of the first things Ilya says to shane after telling him about his mother’s suicide is I don’t want you to think she was weak. it kills me. shane’s obviously not sitting there judging ilya’s mother as weak! it’s so clear that ilya’s talking to someone else in that moment, speaking aloud the words he could never say to his father. ilya as a child in his father’s house, listening to his father lay into to his mother the way he does to ilya in sochi. too young and powerless to speak up for her or step in between them. you’re weak you’re contemptible you’re defective. how are you not ashamed? aghh it hurts my heart. the abandoned child still defending her memory. still guarding her from anyone who might judge her too harshly or try to pick her apart. she wasn’t weak. she was so funny and beautiful. I don’t want you to think she was weak.

[shanefixxedorally]

Thinking about Tampa All Stars Ilya day one. In his Aloha shirt down so bad he’s hyping himself up with a limeless beer at 11am to tell Shane Hollander he’ll be the other woman for free.

He’s so ready to be the the other woman. he was so ready to be Shane secret closet case affair. man cleaned cum out of his Rick Owen’s tried to be cool about it and let it go but, if Shane Hollander dressed like that is sitting next to him at the bar and said “yeah i’m getting married.. but do you still wanna fuck on the low?” he would have said yes and it would be pathetic. I think that is really important to my Ilya. Cause only after Shane is 1) single 2) out to himself/ilya 3) wanting to go back to pre cleaning cum out of rick owen’s moment, to discuss the bone breaking connection they share. Does Ilya wanna act casual. Act like he wasn’t gonna take the bare minimum. and be pathetically happy about it.

Anyway Ilya Rozanov i love you i’m so glad you have Shane Hollander in your life cause you’re a friend i worry about.

there’s another timeline where i am yelling GIRL GET UPPPPP at ilya in this scene.

[eonblueinmay]

From Holland3r24 on the 'gram

[ticklefighthockey]

I love the bathroom scene (bathroom scene my beloved) because yes ilya eventually handles the situation masterfully and regains the upper hand or whatever but you can tell how hard he’s winging it. second by second this man is flying by the seat of his pants. he’s not some suave sexy self-assured dom he’s like twenty-two and an idiot and he made shane cry which he genuinely didn’t know he had the power to do and now he’s scrambling to figure out what a suave sexy self-assured dom would do to fix it (while still seeming suave and sexy and self-assured of course). to me the beauty of ilya as a sexual and emotional being is that he is ALWAYS just making it up as he goes while simultaneously trying to project an aura of cool unflappable confidence. and he fools shane completely right up until tampa when shane is suddenly like ‘wait. hold on a minute. you have NO fucking clue what you’re doing do you’ and takes the reins.

[ticklefighthockey]

now you know I love the delicious angst of shane POV fic exploring the six month ghosting -> vegas subdrop domdrop we didn’t even kiss -> post-vegas sex montage arc. love the angst of shane slowly and painfully making himself internalize the rules. what they do isn’t special. it doesn’t mean anything to ilya. shane’s just convenient. and if he makes himself inconvenient—by acting too clingy, being too boring or predictable, wanting ilya to go slow/be careful with him—he knows now that ilya will drop him in a heartbeat. ughh it’s so good it’s so painful makes me want crawl out of my skin!!! but THAT SAID I think there is ALSO rich territory to explore here re: ilya ‘born loverboy’ rozanov making & enforcing rules that hurt them both. and because ilya is a creature of pure emotion who is always fearfully reacting to his own confusing feelings, the rules are totally arbitrary and constantly shifting and often frantically devised in the moment to tamp down an unexpected upswell of emotion. I felt too much when I saw him standing there in the doorway, so I won’t kiss him hello tonight, I’ll put him on his knees right away and get down to business. and ok I can praise him, I can card my fingers through his hair and tug in that way that makes him moan and tell him how good he is at sucking my cock, but I have to jokingly compare him to the girls I’m fucking or make it clear that his mouth is the only thing I find interesting about him. and yes I can let myself hold him close and tenderly kiss his shoulder while we’re fucking, but the second we finish I’m up and out of there, in the shower before the afterglow’s even faded, and if he gets dressed and leaves before I come out that’s good actually, that’s cleaner, that makes everything easier. ilya’s also trying to internalize the rules!!!!! but he’s making it up as he goes, just swinging wildly back and forth between attentiveness and withdrawal, and it’s making him just as miserable as shane. but he has to do it! he has to set the tone! if left to their own devices they’d be having emotionally intimate anal and cuddling in bed afterwards and kissing slowly & deeply in the stairwell while the uber driver waited outside every time. and that cannot happen. ilya doesn’t know why it can’t happen (guy who has made a lifelong practice of never examining his own feelings), but he knows that even thinking about it makes him feel a jolt of blind panicky fear. so he’ll do whatever it takes to make this thing between them Safe. ie he will emotionally terrorize them both for like three years. welcome to the ilya rozanov rollercoaster

[ticklefighthockey]

I know it’s a romance novel so ilya has to be largely Cured of his avoidant tendencies by Love. but for fic purposes I’m just saying: I’ve said I love you to three romantic partners over the course of my life and every time I’ve enjoyed like 24-48 hours of feeling like I’m a new person I’m reborn I’ve been transformed by the healing light of love and then I wake up on the second or third day absolutely certain that we should break up. and then I have to Deal With That. not to project (I say projectingly) but I just think a two-week vacation from the self at the cottage is not going to fix what’s fucked up inside this man… guy who gets dropped off at the ottawa airport and discovers that wherever you go there you are

[ticklefighthockey]

the way virginity/vulnerability/trust are erotically entangled for Ilya is crystallized for me in the moment he tries to laugh off the Emotionally Significant Penetration with his little “worth the wait” quip only to be hit with the world’s tenderest forehead kiss and realizes he could be in Big Trouble… it would be so easy for him to get addicted to Shane’s vulnerability. but if Shane lets his guard down around him than he must trust Ilya, and Shane would only trust someone he thinks is a good person, and Ilya cannot accept that categorization of himself and so must force a distance between them

yum!!! I read this similarly but maybe with a slight twist? I like to headcanon that both post-forehead kiss and in vegas, ilya has this uneasy moment of realizing that like… shane doesn’t know how to do this. shane has no idea how to have casual sex with a near-stranger that doesn’t mean anything and isn’t going anywhere. shane trusts too easily… and, as you said, has put his trust in a guy who fundamentally feels like he’s a piece of shit nobody should be trusting deeply. I think that for ilya, those little realization moments (ESPECIALLY in vegas) trigger this feeling of like… ok so I have to be the one to model for him how this is supposed to go. I have to teach him how to keep it all on the surface. I have to shut things down and shut him out when he tries for deeper closeness or intimacy or wants to trust me with something he shouldn’t. that attitude is what, for me, drives all the angst of episode 2 and the ep 4 sex montage. and what is MOST PAINFUL about that attitude is that I think it’s a deliciously warped extension of ilya’s desire to care for shane!!! in the first time scene ilya’s like I know you haven’t done this before so I’m going to take such good care of you and show you how it’s supposed to feel. and then in vegas/ep 4 sex montage it’s like… I know you don’t know how to take care of yourself in this kind of casual closeted sex arrangement, I know you’re going to get yourself hurt by loving with your heart wide open, so I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to show you how it’s supposed to feel. and that’s how I will protect you.

[ticklefighthockey]

Who is more jealous Shane or Ilya?

oh this is fun... i think it's gotta be ilya, right? like, shane definitely has his little flashes of jealousy (the "with who?" in vegas) and he clearly does NOT appreciate that ilya will not. stop. talking. about marrying svetlana. but idk in general shane just doesn't seem all that bothered by ilya's promiscuity or torn up inside over the fact that ilya likes sex and has had a lot of it with people who aren't shane. he's happy when ilya reveals in ep 6 that he hasn't slept with anyone else since they last saw each other, but shane clearly wasn't expecting ilya to stay celibate, and i think his delight comes more from the fact that ilya is obviously kind of embarrassed about it because It Means Something. it lays ilya bare emotionally in a way that mr. "we get together, we fuck, it's simple" has strongly resisted being laid bare up to that point. i think on some level shane is aware that sex means something different to ilya than it does to him. for ilya sex and intimacy are two very different things and the only two people he's experienced both with are shane and svetlana (which i think is why shane instinctively feels more threatened by svetlana than anyone else in ilya's life).

ilya, on the other hand... i think ilya gets hotly, ferociously jealous of anyone who gets to touch shane. it makes him act in extremely foolish ways sometimes (see: the club scene...), to the point where i think even ilya is embarrassed by the intensity of his own reactions. the whole tampa bar scene in ep 5 cracks me up like that is a man who indulged himself in THEE most epic crashout in front of his ex and now has to see that ex again (while wearing his dumb little hawaiian shirt!!) and act like he's chill and calm and normal and casual like sooooooo casual it's nbd oh was shane at that club? was shane at that club with his girlfriend? ilya completely missed that he was kind of doing his own chill calm casual thing. or in ep 6... this man KNOWS it's not rational to be jealous of rose landry!! she and shane had mediocre sex on two occasions and it was so mid that shane emerged from that brief relationship Assigned Gay by Rose Landry. idk the club scene was not a great look for ilya but i do kinda appreciate that his basic energy is ughhhhhh i know i'm not being chill right now ughhhhh i know i need to manage myself better and be an adult but also ughhhhhHhhhh i like him so much i'm just having BIG FEELINGS about it!!!!! mm and i do think that, while ilya's jealousy is so deliciously hypocritical, it's rooted again in that shared understanding that sex means something different to shane than it does to him. shane doesn't do casual sex. (most of the "casual sex" he's having with ilya starts with a passionate makeout session and ends with shane earnestly asking about ilya's home life. guy did not get the memo on how the whole fucking your Hated Rival thing was supposed to work.) so if shane is dating someone publicly it's a five-alarm emergency in ilya's head because ilya has SEEN how that sweet earnest dweeb loves and it's with his heart wide open!!!