what is your beef with RR/the books? (sorry if you’ve talked about it before lol)
i mean, to be clear, i don't think rr is the devil or anything. a lot of my problems with the books are mostly a genre thing. they are intended as generic 'spicy romance books'. they're booktok fodder and that has mass appeal to a lot of people! the whole genre is designed for people who want to read fanfic-esque smut and a hallmark movie ending as escapism and/or porn, which is fine. but personally i don't read contemporary romance. i don't watch the gay hallmark-esque romcoms that occasionally come out. i know it was made with a lot of love but i also could not be less interested in things like heartstopper. what i love and read and watch are complex expressions of queerness and trauma and fascinating character dynamics with queer love at the centre of them. i like complicated relationships and stories that say something about the state of culture or humanity or the role of queerness and difference. so that's a taste and preference thing
what's unique about this show is that it took a source material from a very different genre and made it with so much care - partly due to jacob's directing, partly due to hudson and connor's skill and commitment - that it became something very tonally different from the source material. which is seriously rare and has created a lot of dissonance between the source and the product. because that complex depth is found in the show. ilya's relationship to russia, his family, his country, is given so much gravity even with limited screentime. shane's struggles with anxiety, his family pressure, his clear undiagnosed autism, actually play out in front of us. and especially in the last 3 episodes of the show (which are where i think the magic of it really lies), they hammer you with all of this in such a captivating way that it makes you see not just how well they did the things on screen, but also everything the show could have had with a bit less commitment to the source material and a bit more time (the show explores shane's race more than the books, but still not much; doesn't really have time to go into ilya's desire to have citizenship somewhere other than russia; there could definitely be more outright homophobia shown to build up the world of the hockey for people who don't already understand that environment. but it's all hinted at with enough gravity in the show that you get the feeling and taste of it even with minor details)
when looking at the books from the pov of someone who wants the dark depth of the story's potential, the main issues i find in the books are just how shallow they are. there's so many possible threads to pull on and it's not designed to pull on threads, so it doesn't do that. it gives you a really long scene about butt plugs to jerk off to and then a couple pages of angst - but described to you in easy-to-digest phrases, not actually manifested on the page - and then makes everyone get a puppy so you don't come away from your comfort-romance-read feeling sad. that's what the mass romance genre is supposed to do, but it's not what good literature is supposed to do, which is where they become frustrating if that's what you're looking for
a less subjective criticism is that they're also so rife with stereotypes. many people have said it better than i have, but mentioning shane being half-asian like, once, and then never mentioning it in any meaningful way except to be like 'oh he didn't look asian except he was so small short hairless submissive and well-behaved' is just gross. reid didn't seem to be interested in deconstructing any of the biases around shane's race in an incredibly white sport, nor did she reconcile the way she describes him sexually with either his race or his supposed role as a generational hockey talent - an extremely physically contact sport that he would need to be incredibly tough to play so well. she writes him like the 'girl' in the relationship, straight up, in a way that betrays a lot of unconscious bias both about gay relationships and the world in general
i think the books come across like reid designed these characters for their sexual roles, then put every other aspect of their lives around them like set dressing. sure, ilya is bisexual so he's a slutty playboy. he's the top so he's big and hairy and has tattoos. sure, shane is asian and gay so he's repressed and submissive and only likes to bottom ??? these things are fascinating parts of a character to explore if you actually dig into them, but in the books we never get more than surface-level descriptions of the characters so none of it is ever drawn out or explored
they're also so, so heteronormative. the sex is absolutely written like every ao3 work by someone in the fandom trenches for years who has not actually consulted any gay men on how sex between them works lmao. i view this as a sort of alternate-universe version of gay sex, like omegaverse. fanficverse. no real prep is needed for anal. the top/bottom dynamics are usually set in stone. the same phrases in this kind of smut are always parroted around ('let me hear you' 'it's too dry' 'i want to feel you' are some which always make me roll my eyes. jacob tierney said 'i didn't get why they kept mentioning 'the slit' so much, i guess this is a thing about being written by a woman' lmao). rimming feels like a woman getting oral would feel bc it's written by a woman using that experience. and i don't think we should like, ban people from writing about identities that aren't theirs, not at all! if she wants to write this sort of smut that's fine and it obviously appeals to plenty of people. but it is a valid criticism to have if you want to elevate the books above smut/mass-market romance, which the show is kind of making us do
the plot itself has even more heteronormativity and it makes me scream a bit tho. this is honestly the thing that irritates me most. the ultimate end goal of these characters seems to be 'marriage (big wedding with all our family!), house, dog (that we treat like a special little princess!), kids (probably biological, probably daughters, bc it's mostly straight women reading this and they find that cutest)'. shane and ilya are hyper-competitive, high-level athletes. they are on the road for over half the year. to play at their level, they have been skating since they were probably three or four years old and spent their entire lives chasing the nhl (mlh lmao). this is their lives. they've been severely injured and probably had multiple concussions from it. they've been trained since they were young teenagers in how to act with the media, the team, they've been drenched in toxic locker-room culture, they've been molded into faces of a franchise at cost to their own identities. you cannot be an athlete at that level without having an insane level of dedication and self-control that dominates your everyday life. i think that is fascinating. i think their commitment to the game - a difficult, violent sport - is fascinating. the way their love plays into that is fascinating bc it is fundamentally tied to hockey.
when you suddenly go 'oh but also now their priorities are a cute little puppy and their wedding and wanting to have babies' at the cost of everything else it strips away all the motivation and interest and conflict of the characters for me. i saw another post describe their dog in the long game as 'a sitcom baby' and that's really how it feels. it's just a cute thing to add in. she's a girl, of course, and has a human girl name, to make her extra cute and appealing to the people who want them to have a daughter they dote on, obviously. if shane and ilya got like 5 huge scary dogs that treat their house like a wolf pack's territory and chase them when they go on runs, i could be into it. but anya is something to dote on and baby and ultimately remove the edge from their lives; designed to make them more wholesome and content. that's just not what interests me about these characters !!! having a wedding - they spent a decade hiding this relationship, to the effect of huge personal trauma, and their whole lives hiding their sexualities. i don't personally buy them enjoying standing up in front of everyone and doing a traditional wedding ceremony. i think shane would have eighteen panic attacks. i think ilya would find it saccharine and belittling. you could sell me on them going to the courthouse with yuna and david because they're worried about legal stuff and citizenship; you could sell me on probably a lot of versions of marriage that look more queer, but i just don't understand the desire to make them fit into every possible mold of 'normal' society as soon as they come out
i am very gay. in real life all my friends are gay/queer/trans people. me and my partner are probably the most traditional couple out of all our friends, bc we have been living together for five years and want children. we have separate bedrooms and will never have a wedding or change our surnames. our bi friend in a 'straight' relationship will never get married or have kids. our only friend with kids is trans and co-parents with an ex. our oldest gay friend, in their fifties, is single and never wants a longterm relationship but has lots of exes they're on great terms with and dates regularly. none of that rlly means anything except that there are SO SO SO MANY WAYS TO BE QUEER and it's so glorious and the best part of being queer is getting to write your own place in the world. pick and choose which parts of 'expected' adult life you want to apply to you and disregard the rest! if you don't explore any of what it means to be queer and make your own path in the world, why are you writing queer characters with traumatic relationships and complex backstories? just to ignore all that and make them do exactly what a conservative straight person dating their high school sweetheart would do? obviously, i know there are millions of queer people irl who do all those things and really love their lives, but it's just not interesting to me narratively and i think in fiction it's a waste of a potentially fascinating dynamic to slap them into a cookie-cutter ending
outside of the content, my final issue with the books is basically: i studied writing for 5 years. i have 1st class bachelor's and master's degrees in it, am published in literary journals etc. so i'm not talking out of my ass when i say these books are not well written. they'd get a 2:2 if you submitted them for an assessment at one of my degrees. and again, that's not a unique criticism against reid! anyone who's pumping out a dozen-book series in a handful of years designed for this kind of market is not trying to write high literature. the people who these books are aimed at will enjoy this because it's what they've come here for - lighthearted romance with a predictable ending and smut. but i just cannot stomach reading 'shane thought about ilya. he always felt horny when he thought about ilya but sometimes he also regretted not kissing him more. the tall strong russian was really hot but shane also loved him but he didn't want to say that.' for more than a couple pages before i just wonder why i'm spending my time on this when i could get it from a sparknotes summary lmao. the prose doesn't add anything to the plot of the books that you couldn't get from a summary and therefore you never get into the internal lives of the characters in a way that matters, which leaves it feeling like you're trying to grab smoke when you try to examine their pasts, histories, friendships, family dynamics, or anything outside of the scenes written on the page
i didn't mean for this to turn into suuuuch a long thing but i haven't really explored why i don't like the books before so i figured i'd just write it all out lol. again, i'm not shitting on anyone who likes them because i completely understand they are built to fit genre conventions for a genre i just personally don't like. they are clearly built for a purpose because reid has had a lot of success that i don't begrudge her !! i'd never write out a big long criticism of them like this if it weren't for the show existing -- unfortunately it's just that i think the show elevated the characters so well, and kind of shifted the story into a different conversation and a different genre, so really the dissonance between the show and book tones is what feels frustrating to express sometimes
it almost feels like the book is a handful of building blocks scattered around thoughtlessly and the show took them and built them into something stunning that still contains those bricks, but rearranged them in an unrecognisable way. to me. personally. just my opinion don't kill me thanks
