ok i'm having a lot of shane thoughts tonight and i feel like i need to pull together a few different posts into one place to help process them (because apparently to understand The Character we must first make him a fish)
thank you @castielchitaqua for freckle firefly squid shane
there’s probably something there about being collected by the fishermen and the way shane’s image is packaged to be sold through all of his brand deals and then plated up for consumption, still freckled but no longer glowing x
and thank you @castielchitaqua yet again for hollanov as transient killer whales
@eldritchazure lowkey shane does kind of have the vibes of an orca trapped in sea world and forced to do tricks and live in a glass bowl x
as much as he loves hockey and feels the most at home on the ice, as much as he's a fearsome and brutal and strategic apex predator on the ice, there's still everything else that comes with it. all the extra noise. shane's body and his image don't belong to him, they belong to hockey and his team and his brands. he lives on display in the boy aquarium with fans screaming and cheering and ogling and booing. and to him everything else that surrounds the hockey is worth putting up with because it means he gets to play hockey. i am so fascinated by the juxtaposition of him being one of the best players on the ice, completely in control, and then having little to no agency over things like his body that many people associate pretty strongly with their identity and sense of self. and the dissonance between who shane actually is and who he performs as for everyone else. it is so interesting!!
one more fish shane puzzle piece i wanna bring up (for now) - thank you @facelessoldgargoyle for mentioning this art and further explanation about the eroticism of gutting a fish in the context of all the shorca posting earlier
"Relax! You're doing this thing a favor! How lovely to be emptied out! To be clean! Really, to be transformed! To be used for another's satiation! How lovely to be gutted! How lovely! lovely! lovely!"
i was initially thinking about it in the context of fishmonger ilya gutting fish shane (bc i am simply human and that's hot)
but i'm also thinking about fish shane being slowly killed over and over again by all of his relationships (his team, his brands, his fans, even his family), "to be used for another's satiation," because he's forced to do tricks and live in a glass bowl, because he's packaged and sold and plated up for consumption, because the hockey is his but nothing else is
and ilya being the only one to do it with care, to do it for shane instead of just thinking about what he can get from him, to gut him in a way that's actually lovely because ilya loves him
