tripped laces

throughadoor on AO3

[shanebug]

do you think that if shane and ilya were to start hanging out with more queer people sometimes ilya would have to be like "by the way dont mention being a landlord in front of these ones. i know the rich art collector gays we met the other week at that gala talked to you about property investment but i dont think this queer birdwatching club will take it as well"

[trippedlaces]

The question of whether all landlords are bastards is a little more nuanced than you might always think, but we also gotta keep remembering that (book) Shane is something even worse and more evil than a landlord: he takes existing housing stock off the market to redevelop into luxury condos, and then he lets the condos sit vacant for five years so he can get railed. I mean the last part ... I get it. But it's guillotine behavior.

Empirically housing is a human right and no one should be able to profit from providing shelter to another person. In our current lived reality, it is unfortunately true that 1) being a landlord has historically been a path to economic mobility for POC (especially immigrants) who have been excluded from other avenues and 2) show me the biggest scumbag landlord you have ever met and I guarantee you that they have at least one tenant who would be sleeping under a bridge if that dirtbag wasn't renting to them. But all landlords are probably bastards. And large property owner corporations should obviously be burnt to the ground.

P.S. I just realized this might read like I'm ragging on the original post for calling Shane a landlord and I am not! Original post was very funny! But my diseased brain saw another opportunity to talk about my current special interest: Shane Hollander Property Redeveloping Monster.

[trippedlaces]

So, like, unfortunately you already know what I’m going to say.

[trippedlaces]

Trying to figure out a way to torment Shane Hollander because I’m being tortured by the orphan-grinding factory and Shane is, as we unfortunately already know, canonically supportive of orphan-grinding. 

Anyway, thinking about how Shane gets annoyed wondering what he’s supposed to say back when a straight person says, “Happy Pride Month!” Because, like: “You too? I sound like that person who says ‘You too!’ when the gate agent tells them to have a good flight.” And I cannot emphasize this enough, so many straight people are wishing him a Happy Pride Month. Just … so many.

“Here are the blueprints for our new orphan-grinding factory!” they said. “Grinding orphans is still very important to us. It’s important that you know that. But perhaps as a surprise twist we will wait until December to tell you how many orphans we’re going to try and force you to send.”

[ilyarozanovgifs]

HEATED RIVALRY | 1.05 I'll Believe in Anything

[trippedlaces]

The thing is that he looks like he’s watching the moon landing. Like, Scott Hunter was an astronaut.

[ivviannaa]

i think one half of shane would resent luca haas and the other half would want to protect him, and both of those halves are rooted in the fact that he sees himself in luca.

he resents him because luca is literally just what shane was as a rookie but white. shane was begrudgingly accepted because of his talent, but there was always the underline there that you aren't one of us. luca has always been deemed lovable, partially because he's shy and partially because of his skill. but shane had that shyness, and shane exceeded that skill, and he wasn't lovable. he was weird. shane didn't have anyone to look up to in his early years, and he didn't have anyone else to fall on if he wanted his team to be good. he had to do it, and he had to do it by himself. luca had himself and everyone else.

at the same time, though, shane can't help but notice the fear in luca's eyes whenever he's asked too personal of a question. he sees how luca immediately looks to wiebe after making a good shot, begging did you see that? are you proud of me? shane knows he did that too. shane knows how it feels to need that validation. before he even realizes he's doing it, he redirects invasive questions away from luca, checks in with him before games, tells him he's doing good and that he deserves to be here. shane doesn't think about it at all until ilya points out that shane stole his child, and shane tries to defend himself. he gets halfway through an explanation with one too many references to his own early years, and all of a sudden it clicks that oh. i'm doing for him what i wanted someone to do for me.

[trippedlaces]

Hahah, it's so cool how this post hit me right in the over-identification soft spot. Because I think it can be a mix of both -- sometimes doing for someone else what you wanted someone to do for you can also make you very resentful!

I can't decide if this is, like, humble bragging or trauma dumping, but I've been in a position professionally a bunch of different times to extend the ladder for someone else in the way that I wish had been done for me, and it actually kind of made me mad as hell. Because it doesn't make the feeling go away. One time this guy told me he just really wanted to thank me for everything I'd done to support his wife's career and I was like, "So ... just shoot me with a gun, actually."

Anyway! What this actually and more relevantly reminds me of is something I've talked about before: I think Shane will absolutely die mad about how it's a slow march toward progress when it comes to being gay in hockey.

All-American Scott Hunter had to be the first guy to come out. Shane and Ilya were the first two players to be in a relationship and they kind of had to play on the same team if they ever wanted to get asked about anything other than whether they were throwing games for each other ever again. Sometime in the future there will be two other out players who get to be in love and play for different teams and it will be because Shane and Ilya went first. And thinking about those guys who will come after him does not give Shane absolutely one single shred of comfort. I do not think he cares about those guys at all.

[trippedlaces]

This is very, very grim, but it does occur to me to wonder what Ilya would think about Brittney Grinner. Would he reach out to her wife while she was imprisoned, because he really couldn’t do anything, but he felt like he should do … something? Or would there be some small and very uncharitable part of him that felt like she knew the risks and she should have been more careful?

Shane would, of course, remember Brittney Grinner from his deep dive on marriages between two active players in the same league. So unfortunately, ending up in Russian prison is actually the second time she lived through one of Shane’s worst nightmares. 

Because, like — what happened to Brittney Grinner was a horrific tornado of racism, homophobia, geopolitics and the consequences of women’s professional sports pay gap, but also 1) She probably should not have traveled to Russia with hash oil 2) I remember a lot about her first marriage because The Read covered it extensively for thirst reasons and … yikes.

[trippedlaces]

We don’t talk nearly enough about which guy on Friday Night Lights was part of Shane’s gay awakening.

I am devastated to report that only three seasons of Friday Night Lights had aired by the summer of 2009, which means it is just not canonically possible that the answer is Vince. Terrible news. Almost makes the whole exercise not even worthwhile. I guess maybe the reason we don't talk about it is that it's pretty obvious that the answer is just Tim.

That being said, kind of surprising that Shane kept watching Friday Night Lights after the first season, because I think the Jason Street storyline gave him at least one actual sweat-drenched nightmare.

[trippedlaces]

Okay, so @asimplewosofan made the very correct point that Shane would not be attracted to someone who did not take their sport seriously. What was I thinking. They're going to take away my Shane Understander card. The idea that Shane would be attracted to someone who showed up drunk to practice ....

[trippedlaces]

We don’t talk nearly enough about which guy on Friday Night Lights was part of Shane’s gay awakening.

I am devastated to report that only three seasons of Friday Night Lights had aired by the summer of 2009, which means it is just not canonically possible that the answer is Vince. Terrible news. Almost makes the whole exercise not even worthwhile. I guess maybe the reason we don't talk about it is that it's pretty obvious that the answer is just Tim.

That being said, kind of surprising that Shane kept watching Friday Night Lights after the first season, because I think the Jason Street storyline gave him at least one actual sweat-drenched nightmare.

[trippedlaces]

Unfortunately, yes, there is a browser tab I can just leave open and periodically refresh to see if they've posted the blueprints for the new orphan-grinding factory.

So obviously, in between doing that I am also trying to write something about Shane sort of inexplicably and unexpectedly being like, "Wait, what if everything is amazing now?" after getting forcibly outed and run out of Montreal, because I think it's fun to mix things up, and of course as always to avoid angst for my smooth brain.

Anyway, my thesis statement here is basically that at one point he thinks about googling "nervous breakdown but good" to get a handle on what's going on. After actually googling "nervous breakdown but good" it seems like the answer is the extremely woo-woo concept of having a spiritual emergency.

Basically, the idea that getting outed is Shane Hollander's spiritual emergency is extremely funny to me. Something something Shane turned being closeted into a religion and now it's time for a VERY radical belief realignment if we don't want to end up in prison or the psych ward.

[trippedlaces]

Tomorrow is the big day I’ve been dreading for six months when they release the blueprints for the new orphan-grinding factory, so let us discuss my extremely low-investment but very specific “Do Shane and Ilya have kids?” headcanon.

I think Shane may not actually want kids, but is not emotionally intuitive enough to ever figure that out. Ilya wants kids but worries it’s not a great idea because of his own messed-up childhood. Shane does eventually figure that out and then becomes very dedicated to the idea that they should have kids because he wants that for Ilya. 

I do not think they have kids before they retire and they do not retire early in order to have kids. Rich gay guys have kids in their late forties and early fifties all the time. 

(Brief sidebar, Anderson Cooper’s first kid was born when he was 52. And I vaguely remembered that he co-parents his kids with an ex but apparently they broke up two years before the kid was born and also still decided to co-parent? Queer relationships really do contain multitudes.) 

I know that surrogacy is often very problematic, but unfortunately I think they do use a surrogate because (yuck I know, I’m sorry) it’s the arrangement that gives them the most control over the situation. Hopefully a friend to make it a little less weird. Jackie would probably be too old by the time they’re ready, but maybe the wife of a younger teammate we haven’t met yet in canon, who they end up really close with for whatever reason, and she’s like, “I’ve been pregnant three times with zero complications, gave birth three times while my husband was on a roadie, I can pop out a kid for you in my sleep.”

Shane is the sperm donor and they try their best to pick an egg donor who looks like Ilya. Shane reads about how sometimes couples ask a family member to donate an egg so the kid is biologically related to both of them and worries that Ilya might be sad this isn’t possible for them because he’s estranged from his family and Ilya is like, “Yeah … no.” When they’re trying to pick an egg donor, Ilya tries to get a sex thing going about Shane fucking girl Ilya to make a baby and Shane is Not Into It. 

I think they have one kid when they’re, like, 48 years old. Because they wanted to fuck around (both literally and figuratively) for a couple years after retirement and then it takes a couple years to have said kid. So they stop at one, because 48 is pretty young to be completely retired from your full-time job but definitely on the older side to become a first-time parent. 

There are a couple times when Shane is awake at three am and covered in baby shit when he wonders if this was a mistake, but they love the kid and it all basically works out fine. 

[trippedlaces]

I am reluctant to write anything set during Ilya’s Boston era, because I worry I would just try to Do Too Much and by Too Much I mean kind of literally anything at all. Because I think the lives of professional athletes (especially single ones without kids) are pretty hermetically sealed.

Like, most of Ilya’s life in Boston was probably a circuit between a penthouse in Back Bay, the arena and the practice facility. (The Bruins’ practice facility is in Brighton.) Went out to either bars on Newbury Street or clubs in the Theater District, maybe? Not as often as you’d think because everything closes at 2, probably went out more on the road and maintained more of a roster at home. Didn’t have the time or the interest in going anywhere else during the season and wasn’t in Boston during the summer.

Which is to say: Unfortunately, I do not think Ilya had a favorite lesbian barista at Diesel and he did not ever have to contend with Allston Christmas. He never got into a space saver war. But I guess it’s possible he might have met Keytar Bear. The things that broke through to his day-to-day life would be pretty substantial, like the marathon bombing and the winter 2015 snowpocalypse. 

My one piece of relevant Boston lore is that visiting hockey teams mostly stay at the Ritz. I know this because I work across the street from the Ritz and sometimes I have to wade through people waiting outside for autographs. 

[trippedlaces]

I'm currently pecking away at this story that's just not working, and I should probably scrap the whole thing. Except that buried in there is an absolutely superfluous one-line throwaway joke about Ilya Rozanov and getting storrowed [*] and like ... have we considered that if that joke dies, I die?

[trippedlaces]

This story continues to be a plague on my fucking life, but last night I was like, "What if there's a panel at the 2022 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that's called, like, 'How We Use Data to Tell Stories' and it's mostly about how the advanced stats prove that Shane and Ilya did not throw games for each other." So ... I've got that going for me, I guess.

[trippedlaces]

Couple things:

1) Thinking about how Shane Hollander would, very regrettably, fuck with Tom Brady’s ungodly avocado ice cream. 

2) Also -- It is, unfortunately, a canonical event that you will dislike a very popular ongoing WIP. (Crucial that this is an ongoing WIP, so you can be periodically re-reminded that you dislike it.) And this is fine, a lid for every pot, etcetera! 

However, perhaps you would like to do a little harmless bitching in private about how you dislike this story, but all of your fandom friends looked at you like you needed to be tested for diseases when you got into this fandom. So instead, you ask your partner to text her friend who you know also reads in this fandom, to see if she has read this story, because you are prepared to dictate your thoughts. 

[fractally]

Sorry I do not believe there is any world where a guy who buys a dildo is not watching gay porn. Shane watches gay porn

I feel like this goes back to the whole thing with the fandom broadly misunderstanding Shane’s sexuality crisis. He is not afraid of his attraction to men. He’s not confused about it. He knows he likes men and seeks out multiple male partners and almost certainly watches gay porn.

Shane has comphet. He’s trying to force himself to be attracted to women too. One of my headcanons is he watches a lot of MMF or MFM stuff in an attempt to force himself to feel attraction to a woman.

I don’t know why this is still so murky in the fandom. There’s really this stuck idea that Shane is afraid of gay sex/attraction but the text just…doesn’t support that. (He’s just nervous before his first time.) Not the book text at least, and not really the show either.

[trippedlaces]

Ruminating a little more on what I already said in the comments here because I had very loose plans to meet up with someone today to learn aquatint and now I’m just … hanging around waiting to see if she shows up.

Shane’s comphet is interesting because it isn’t fueled by either of the things that people (especially straight people) associate with comphet by 2016 and definitely by 2026. He’s not experiencing either religious pressure or explicit immigrant family pressure. (You can make a case for the latter in the show, I guess? But I feel like Yuna’s ‘You’re a role model!’ thing is more broad and less personal. She’s not telling him he needs to, like, carry on the family line.)

Anyway, this is funny and tragic because I think what this means is that hockey is both Shane’s shame-based evangelical religion and his old world family.

There’s something very, very tangentially related to this that I’ve been chewing on about how playing professional sports puts you in a kind of arrested development, and how that’s sort of funny because then being a professional athlete would make you gay in, like, a Freudian sense. But then I googled “homosexuality arrested development” to confirm my recollection that that’s a Freud thing and since Google sucks now all the results are about whether it’s problematic that Tobias was cluelessly gay on the show Arrested Development, which … lmao.

Guys I really don’t think I’m going to learn aquatint today.

[trippedlaces]

Okay one more thing before I give up and go home. This is always one of the saddest parts in the book to me, from one of their phone calls while Ilya is in Russia:

Because Shane has never said that before! But he has told Ilya he’s gay. Like, he’s using “I don’t want to marry … anyone” interchangeably with “I’m gay.” In his mind, being gay is a life where marriage is not an option. And like … that is a very 1997 ass mindset. Something something to understand Shane Hollander you must imagine that he is experiencing comphet like he’s Ellen Degeneres.

[fractally]

Sorry I do not believe there is any world where a guy who buys a dildo is not watching gay porn. Shane watches gay porn

I feel like this goes back to the whole thing with the fandom broadly misunderstanding Shane’s sexuality crisis. He is not afraid of his attraction to men. He’s not confused about it. He knows he likes men and seeks out multiple male partners and almost certainly watches gay porn.

Shane has comphet. He’s trying to force himself to be attracted to women too. One of my headcanons is he watches a lot of MMF or MFM stuff in an attempt to force himself to feel attraction to a woman.

I don’t know why this is still so murky in the fandom. There’s really this stuck idea that Shane is afraid of gay sex/attraction but the text just…doesn’t support that. (He’s just nervous before his first time.) Not the book text at least, and not really the show either.

[trippedlaces]

Ruminating a little more on what I already said in the comments here because I had very loose plans to meet up with someone today to learn aquatint and now I’m just … hanging around waiting to see if she shows up.

Shane’s comphet is interesting because it isn’t fueled by either of the things that people (especially straight people) associate with comphet by 2016 and definitely by 2026. He’s not experiencing either religious pressure or explicit immigrant family pressure. (You can make a case for the latter in the show, I guess? But I feel like Yuna’s ‘You’re a role model!’ thing is more broad and less personal. She’s not telling him he needs to, like, carry on the family line.)

Anyway, this is funny and tragic because I think what this means is that hockey is both Shane’s shame-based evangelical religion and his old world family.

There’s something very, very tangentially related to this that I’ve been chewing on about how playing professional sports puts you in a kind of arrested development, and how that’s sort of funny because then being a professional athlete would make you gay in, like, a Freudian sense. But then I googled “homosexuality arrested development” to confirm my recollection that that’s a Freud thing and since Google sucks now all the results are about whether it’s problematic that Tobias was cluelessly gay on the show Arrested Development, which … lmao.

Guys I really don’t think I’m going to learn aquatint today.

[trippedlaces]

Setting aside the extent to which Shane and Ilya have a dom/sub dynamic, whether the roles are ever fluid and what inhabiting either of those roles mean … let us perhaps re-center that I do think the load-bearing part of Whatever Is Their Whole Deal is a desire to make their sex life a game they can play and a competition. It’s actually kind of sweet to think about — before they played on the same team together, sex was the only competition they could have where they both get to win. 

[trippedlaces]

Anyway, my other hot take is like--

Showing up to the neighborhood of a new fandom and building a TPE lifestyle 24/7 D/s dynamic from first principles is a canonical fandom event. Not really my thing, but the person who does that is my cousin, it would be weird if I showed up to the family reunion and they were not there.

And I'm trying to think of a way to say this that doesn't sound a little condescending -- because I 100% do not mean it that way -- but it must be so much fun to be like, "So for once I am not building this from scratch out of subtext, it is literally there on the page!" Because, like, I don't even agree! But it must be so fun and I am so happy for you! You are my cousin and I am so happy you are having a good time at the family reunion!

[trippedlaces]

Setting aside the extent to which Shane and Ilya have a dom/sub dynamic, whether the roles are ever fluid and what inhabiting either of those roles mean … let us perhaps re-center that I do think the load-bearing part of Whatever Is Their Whole Deal is a desire to make their sex life a game they can play and a competition. It’s actually kind of sweet to think about — before they played on the same team together, sex was the only competition they could have where they both get to win.