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Technoblade

Eva Stratt's pov of phm is kinda insane really. Because it's basically being told, hey humanity WILL go extinct soon. but we've decided that if one person makes it through all the levels of the Torment Nexus our chances of survival might increase. they might also not. Anyway. We think you're the best person to do this. Your reward is that everyone will hate you forever.

And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.

So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].

The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].

Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.

You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.

Then he turns to you and is like, are you fucking insane? And starts sprinting away from the cliff. Suddenly you have a gun in your hand. You're like, no wait. I don't want to do this. For real? I gotta shoot him for real? [Chances of survival if he lives: 0%. Chances of survival if he dies: maybe NOT 0%......????]. You pull the trigger. [congrats! you're a murderer!]

astershollanov

it's been nearly eight months since heated rivalry first aired and i still spend every free minute thinking about hollanov

jakegyllenhaalsteeth

allstarrocks

"who else am i gonna tell" makes me cry so bad. Who else is he gonna tell? Who else in his entire life can he say those words to without failing them? Who else does he feel safe to share this with?

autistic-shane-hollander

"SHANE HATES OTHER GAY PEOPLE" actually shane co-founded and operates a mental health charity in which he intentionally invites openly LGBT players to coach a children's hockey camp something that would absolutely open him up to a lot of homophobic abuse for doing even though he himself is not out.

shame-thesis

no, I don't think you understand...everything is about shane hollander actually

cuppydogshane

crucially important that the centaurs overwhelming response to their first full week of Shane is oh my god ilya why didnt you SAY he was so fucking funny

dragonmuse

As a writer, it's more interesting to me to write Hayden and J.J. as good friends to Shane. (I'm talking from a purely TV show angle for this post, I have Feelings about book Pike and J.J. that can go elsewhere).

Do you know one of the easiest way to build bonds with people? Ask them questions about themselves. We joke about Shane's thousands of question to Ilya, but that only fails with Ilya because Shane is unwittingly touching so many pain points. Hayden and J.J. would eat up with a spoon. This generational player wants to know more about them? He's interested in J.J.'s restaurant hobby and Hayden's children? He dryly funny and fantastic at the game you all love? Fucking sold.

Hayden is so excited (tv show here) to get Shane over to his house. He calls Shane to update him about the baby and wants Shane to come with him and the kids to the aquarium. Shane joins family dinners with ease and holds a baby like he does fairly regularly. They're not just co-workers who are kind of friendly. They're genuine friends.

When J.J. sees the X-Squad people, he doesn't hoard the experience, he calls Shane who he must know likes the movies and invites him to come along immediately.

They like Shane a lot! They hype him up and get excited for him when they think he's getting laid. When Hayden figures out Shane is uncomfortable he even re-calibrates the joke (if poorly) to "Get laid weirdo, or NOT, I don't care". Trying to tell Shane as best he can that he knows it's none of his business and he just wants Shane to go have a good time.

The ways that Shane can be awkward don't seem to phase them. When Shane doesn't respond to J.J.'s 'I'll fuck him for you' moment fast enough, Hayden even steps in to turn it around J.J. and draw attention away from Shane. J.J.'s intention in that moment is to tell Shane he has his back anyway. He has no clue how it comes across. Shane is his teammate and friend and if Rozanov is an asshole to him, J.J. will square up, not to worry.

And as how that will play out as things get revealed is way, way more interesting than 'these two always sucked and weren't real friends'. We have plenty of background characters to give that to us. Let's get into the meat of how painful in is when the people who do love and trust us, let you down in crucial moments. And even if it's not true, you can't help but think it's a little your fault. You could never let them get to know you the way you know them.

crossing-parallel-lines

Just finished The Long Game and I don’t quite understand why there was so much hate for Shane because of this book. This book is clearly more Ilya-centric because his entire arc is basically him realizing, apart from that he has depression, that what he was fine with for the last 10 years (i.e. the hiding, the secret relationship), he’s actually not fine with anymore.

Do I think it’s a bit unfair that he changed a lot of things about himself for Shane while the latter stays in the comfort of his home? Yes. But what’s the alternative though? If Ilya stayed in Boston, he would definitely have a better track record but do you think their relationship would’ve survived that long distance? Do you think he would’ve survived that?

Ok, one could say then why couldn’t Shane be the one to move, and to that I say, why should he? There’s nothing really substantial that’s keeping Ilya in Boston as compared to Shane whose family is in Canada. If it were a battle between Russia or Canada, that I would get.

They were both initially fine with keeping it a secret when they both started being exclusive. In TLG, both of them are still anxious about dealing with the absolute shitshow that’s gonna happen when they come out and reveal their relationship. It’s not just Shane. And hell, they both have moments where they just wanna be done with it and scream on top of their lungs that they’re fucking in love with each other. It’s just that out of the two of them, Shane is the more…disciplined(?) one. He’s better at sticking to the plan they both agreed on– Ilya goes to Ottawa and get a canadian citizenship, start Irina Foundation, play up their “friendship” so that their “rivalry” image slowly dies down, and then retire, reveal their relationship, and get married. For all he knows, he’s just sticking to their plan and protecting their relationship and peace.

In this long game they’re playing, I definitely clocked it even just from Heated Rivalry that Ilya will be the one who cracks first.

So I can’t hate Shane for keeping their secret when Ilya didn’t outright verbalized that he is not fine with it anymore. And once Shane understood that, he immediately went to fix things. He proposed, planned their coming out as well as their wedding. Because that’s the type of person Shane is. He’s only playing this long game because it’s what he thought would keep him from not losing Ilya. He had the patience and the grit to stay in the dark for a long time if it means he gets to be with Ilya always.

$fractally blog's avatar$

fractally

Sorry for the addition OP but I think there's a weird dynamic with some fans where they take the TV show canon and then read TLG and so they see Ilya's more positive seeming relationship with the Raiders (compared to the Bears, which are described as being hard partiers and with whom Ilya seems to have no intimate friendships) and his close friend Svetlana in Boston and they see it as Ilya having lost so much, and Shane ignoring it.

But book!Ilya says the Bears kind of sucked. He genuinely likes the Centaurs a lot more. Book!Ilya doesn't have childhood friend Svetlana, she's just an old hookup he likes better than most because she's Russian and knows puck. Book!Ilya wasn't leaving behind anything in Boston other than his career.

Which is a lot! Obviously! But it's a calculation book!Ilya makes very deliberately.

The book spells this all out pretty clearly too. The conflict Ilya has in TLG is he doesn't know how to be in relationships---platonic, romantic, AND familial. He doesn't know how to express his needs to Shane. He doesn't know how to build intimacy with friends. And he doesn't know to be part of a family dynamic. He learns each of these over the course of the book, with the help of his therapist.

Shane's shittiest moment in TLG is when he accuses Ilya of just slacking off and smoking weed, but if we think about it from Shane's perspective for a hot minute, this is when Shane's out to the Voyageurs and things are pretty obviously not going well, based on how fast stuff falls apart after the leak. Shane's developing an eating disorder and Ilya won't stop bitching at him about his diet, he's worried about Ilya but Ilya won't talk to him, he's (in his mind) running out of time to acheive his career goals with his 30th bearing down on him.

Whereas (from Shane's perspective) Ilya is having a ball on the Centaurs. He's throwing fun Halloween parties. His house smells like marijuana. He's going to gay bars with his hot gay available teammate Troy Barrett. He doesn't seem to care that the team loses constantly even though wasn't it hockey that they fell in love over? Doesn't he miss competing with Shane? Why won't he talk to him?

So Shane's over here like "I thought we were doing this together for our careers and you're fucking around and having fun. And now you're asking me to put our whole plan in jeopardy for what, a party? What the fuck?"

Anyway my point being that I don't think either of them are in the wrong they just don't know how to communicate because they don't know how to be in a relationship because they're barely adults and have never done any of this before and they're doing it under the most stressful possible conditions. I love how Yuna says she's proud of them because really it is a miracle what they manage to do and how they manage to love each other despite everything. Or not a miracle, they fucking work for it.

elizabethtenderlyatomic

I think Shane has more screentime and positive interactions with various Montreal players (and certainly more numerous players - Hayden and JJ, but also Miity and Andropov the Canadian-accented Russian-named ginger guy) than Ilya does with Boston players, but yet the fanon is the other way around.

Hopefully in s2 Bood and Wyatt get some screen time early on and people fall in love with the Centaurs.

gabriellelestat

there’s a cultural obsession with labelling all female authors as unintelligent or otherwise only capable of accidentally stumbling into brief moments of genius in their works that we need to start pushing back against

artemis-the-sinister

I don’t care if you hate Hayden. In canon he is one of the best allies in the books, bar his admittedly shitty behavior in that dinner short story which he learns from. Almost all of those “characters” that you say are better than Hayden are basically canon ocs that you gave fandom stock personalities to because apparently the only way to be a true ally is to be a big goofy himbo who treats Roz like a bro and worships Shane like the god of hockey. You think Shane wants to be friends with a bunch of big goofy himbos who worship the ground he walks on? That’s uncomfortable as shit! He’d rather take his steady friends who support him and treat him like a person. A friend who acts like a real fucking person, with flaws and misunderstandings and an imperfect understanding of him. But who tries anyway.