top/bottom discourse crawling in my walls again & i don't have time to write out all the intricacies that i'd like to here but a significant reason so many people are into hollanov versing/shane topping/ilya bottoming outside fanfic subculture (which is motivated primarily by trope biases + personal kinks/curiosity) is a result of breaching the mainstream, and the curtailment of the sex scenes as novel titillation
most viewers struggle to comprehend the sex sequences as plot-relevant, much less construe interiority, characterization, subtext, and narrative writing. they can hardly concede that fictional sex is writing, itself. hell, they barely notice hudson williams's acting in scenes without sex sometimes. of course the only opinion of how hollanov should fuck in the canon text is what is personally gratifying. and versing has majority rule
that's understandable in wish fulfillment frameworks, obviously. and i'm not talking about what's better (though the politics of top/bottom/dom/sub biases obviously intersect with majority rule), or maligning versatility. but diminishing hollanov's canon sexual relationship to its ornamental appeal for the voyeur clips the meticulously tended wings that have made this story so stirring
the sex matters absolutely. its narrative relevance is not diluted to an abstraction, the specific sex acts the characters are doing matter. devil in the details. shane being a bottom & a sub matters. ilya being a dom & a top matters. shane grabbing ilya's hair, ilya putting his fingers in shane's mouth, what names they use, all of the details hold water (if with varying volume). shifting these characteristics around shifts the narrative. we can discuss those shifts and their relevance in canon and should, but anything which fails to contend with these characteristics as an established part of the narrative, ie more than provocative gauds, fails to respect the sex as writing
