Wild that people are out here making posts about how Ilya is actually the one going through it at the end of TLG because clearly the Russian press would be 10,000 times worse, when the ending of TLG is from Ilya's perspective and he never mentions once being concerned about the Russian press. And also, the problem isn't that Shane is the only one being outed, it's that he is suffering the entirely of the blowback from being outed that is mentioned on page: the press are only targeting him for some reason, no one will stand up for his legacy, he genuinely feels like no team will sign him, Ottawa doesn't give him any respect in joining their team, and Ilya has zero empathy for Shane and cannot offer any support to him as he goes through his entire world burning down other than to offer him a blowjob. But sure, let's invent ways that it is actually all about Ilya, again, because god forbid fans wish Shane could be given any support beyond an orgasm.
If Ilya, in the next scene, had wanted to talk to Shane about his depression and Shane's only response had been, "how 'bout you bend over so I can finger you? that cheers you up" I guarantee those fans would be so upset about how callous Shane was to Ilya's struggles.
The problem is that Shane goes to Ilya and says all these canonical terrible things are happening to me and I'm upset and Ilya goes, let's have sex. Whereas when Ilya goes to Shane to talk about his depression, they have an actual conversation about it and Shane gives him emotional support and validation. He doesn't say, let's watch a goals compilation and it will remind you that you are too good to be depressed.
"it's a romance novel!!! you can't expect a romance novel to realistically address systemic bigotry!!" ok so why is the romance novel using systemic bigotry as set dressing then 🤔
Absolutely fucking crazy to me that Rachel Reid really said “Ilya looks at the fact that he can’t come out and comes to the conclusion that obviously it’s his boyfriend’s fault he can’t come out and so he feels frustrated and sad and angsty and it’s all shane’s fault because Shane is selfish and mean and stupid” instead of the reasonable and sane perspective that any actual queer person grounded in reality and surrounded by a culture of inherent homophobic and racist ideals would come to. Which is, if course, “wow society sucks and I fucking hate how deeply homophobia is tied to the sport I play and more importantly my home country’s absolute hatred of my mere existence as a queer person (which is central to my reasons of staying in the closet that the author totally doesn’t completely abandon because it doesn't serve her weird racist narrative anymore) and if I continue to want to live a peaceful life with my boyfriend I will have to sacrifice my freedom if having my relationship known and expressed publicly in a romantic sense and that is horrible and not my boyfriend’s fucking fault are you kidding me who in their right mind would blame my beautiful wonderful jock autistic Asian boyfriend (who is pretty much the same height as me and not baby smooth lil bottom btw because that would be pretty fetishistic wouldn’t it) for being terrified of being outed because as a Russian man in love with another man from a completely different country I too am terrified and that is a reasonable feeling to have within the world I live in.”
rereading tlg for the crashout fic and just getting progressively more mad about how it ends like if orpheus didn’t turn around but accidentally tripped and fell down a random escalator on the way back from hell
and again. if we subscribe to the idea that shane is experiencing a literal dissociative break post-outing then i think it makes sense that sexual intimacy could be grounding for him because it’s something physically rewarding that he knows he’s good at. like to clarify — it is safe and consensual, but the shane who keeps getting stuck in compulsive rituals and excessively suppresses his own feelings and is very much in a fake-it-till-u-make-it headspace would probably find safety in knowing that he can, definitively, help ilya and make them both feel good. his body has already betrayed him on the worlds biggest stage, this is an opportunity for redemption. even if it’s just the two of them. which then could contribute to a very interesting situation when ilya identifies that both he and shane are reliant on sex over communication when shane is struggling. like maybe ilya’s understanding of sex — coming from someone who viewed his body as his only point of worth — may have also contributed to this. idk man like literally anything other than what we got
and again. if we subscribe to the idea that shane is experiencing a literal dissociative break post-outing then i think it makes sense that sexual intimacy could be grounding for him because it’s something physically rewarding that he knows he’s good at. like to clarify — it is safe and consensual, but the shane who keeps getting stuck in compulsive rituals and excessively suppresses his own feelings and is very much in a fake-it-till-u-make-it headspace would probably find safety in knowing that he can, definitively, help ilya and make them both feel good. his body has already betrayed him on the worlds biggest stage, this is an opportunity for redemption. even if it’s just the two of them. which then could contribute to a very interesting situation when ilya identifies that both he and shane are reliant on sex over communication when shane is struggling. like maybe ilya’s understanding of sex — coming from someone who viewed his body as his only point of worth — may have also contributed to this. idk man like literally anything other than what we got
i understand a lot of people love the trophy room scene. i understand that it’s hot. i understand that the actors are excited to film it. however. it does make me uncomfortable to think that like the primary way shane is comforted by ilya in this book is with sex while ilya receives a variety of different support — both from shane and from others. idk man is that controversial i just think about chapter 38 where they film that instagram video and shane is terrified then ‘quickly squashes it’ and then says ‘god i hope someone signs me’ and ilya’s only response is offer to take him back to the trophy room or show him a highlight video while they fuck again and like. this aligns pretty well with reid writing ilya’s struggles with narrative gravitas and external factors tied to ilya’s backstory and characterisation that requires actual treatment or other support while treating shane’s fears as ultimately meaningless and/or shallow and not affected by his material reality (his race, neurodivergence, etc) and thus not requiring any tangible reconciliation outside of a sex scene. it also does not escape my notice that while ilya acknowledges that ‘[his depression] is not fixed’ despite his efforts, all of shane’s issues — particularly about his diet or the voyagers — are completely resolved offscreen in two paragraphs. im sure id feel differently if shane was allowed to experience any negative emotion before explicitly suppressing it in the last 15% of the book but as it is i would really love someone to just look deeply into shane’s eyes (or like over his shoulder or something if the eye contact is too much) and just tell him i understand why you’re anxious and it’s completely normal to feel this way given what you’ve experienced rather than it always transitioning into ilya being dtf
i do think what gets ignored about carrie as a character is that she’s an incredibly easy target to bully; she’s a chubby, sheltered acne ridden teenage girl who wears frumpy grandma clothes and regurgitates the jesus freak shit her violently abusive mother tells her. she has violent thoughts about her classmates and is uncomfortable to be around. she’s far more interesting being a victim that’s somewhat uncomfortable to be in the head of than a tragic waif. she’s not a martyr, she’s a child and a child who’s been victimised her whole life shouldn’t have to be kind and angelic to be recognised as a victim. suffering teenage girls shouldn’t just be presented on screen as toned down glamorous thin ophelias, suffering teenage girls can be fat and poor and think violently. i do think we need to examine why culturally we need teenage girls to be beautiful and kind to valorise their suffering and treat it as bad
rotating your stepford curse au in my mind. your brain is so beautiful. like I have sooooooo much beef with how tlg does(n't) give Shane any space to be unhappy when he is actively undergoing A Neverending Avalanche of Upsetting and Traumatic Events, because he is there to Be Ilya's Partner and every bad thing that happens to Shane is Unimportant because Ilya gets to have everything he wants. and what if that was a curse!! and the interpersonal effects are so devastating. the people who are supposed to know him best in the world don't even notice that he's not there. they think this not-Shane is just happy :) he's just happy to be with his husband :)) augh it's destroying me to think about it but I will be rotating it in my mind like it's a microwave turntable for the foreseeable future
I did a mini tags essay about this but I’m making it into its own post: the stepford wife curse au has been so bizarrely healing for me.
I could not engage with the ending of the long game or any fics set after the long game because I was Too Fucking Angry about it. I was even noping out of fics that try to process and explore the trauma Shane would have around what happened with the metros because I was Still Angry. And I realize now that it’s because what made me so angry about the long game ending wasn’t actually what the metros did.
Like. I will hate crime Shane Hollander every single fic. Snapping birch is just a five month long hate crime. I am comfortable exploring the metros rejecting Shane. But for some reason doing so in the context of the long game was a hard no for me. And the stepford wife curse au made me realize that that’s because it was never what I was angry about to begin with.
I was angry about the fact that the narrative subjected this absolute fucking avalanche of Bad Things to one character and refused to give him any narrative space to process it. Instead of addressing any of the conflict it set up, it just made him Happy and Excited and Ready To Be Fucked by the end of it. Because his pain was inconvenient to Happily Ever After, it was removed instead of resolved. It was healing via lobotomy. His pain is inconvenient to Ilya’s happy ending so we just pretend it’s not there.
I was pissed off at the orientalism inherent in the ending. At the objectification and stepford wifeification needed to make it work. I was pissed off at how it reminded me of so many relationships I’d seen in media and in real life that demanded that one partner be uncomplicated and convenient and empty for the relationship to work.
Addressing what happened in the long game never helped me because the fact that it was never addressed in the first place was what was pissing me off so badly. I never got to explore the right emotion.
I had a different post about this so I won’t go into this fully, but the Greeks wrote tragedy with the core aim of providing emotional catharsis. It was so important to them that they would build amphitheaters next to hospitals because they believed that emotional catharsis aided in physical healing.
Catharsis is about release. Greek tragedy goes to some extremely dark places and its endings are unhappy. But the point of Greek tragedy is not to make the audience feel happy. It is to allow the audience to safely explore and release negative emotion. It presents you with unjust situations so that you can explore and process and release your feelings around injustice through art.
Which is what the stepford wife curse au does for me. Like. The story itself is fucked up and disturbing but I actually feel so much better now. Because it has finally let me explore and process and release so much of my anger around the long game. Like it’s been great y’all.
The first fish to ever break the water surface to briefly come to land for just a moment or two at a time, and then popping back in, gradually spending longer and longer on land and therefore starting the process of becoming land animals, didn't do it in search of new territory or potential food sources - they mainly did so in order to avoid another fish they owed money.
Don't blame all your earthly problems on the ancient little shithead who decided to crawl onto land. Blame the loan shark.
everyone post your biggest hear me outs my friend just showed me two conventionally attractive white men in a row i need to teach him what a real hear me out is
I don't think I could do it justice but it's crazy to me that I haven't seen any fics where Irina runs away instead of dying. Maybe Ilya knows she left but doesn't know where to find her. Maybe Grigori tells him and Alexei that she's dead. Maybe they tell other people that she's dead instead of the truth to protect the family reputation.
Idk there's just so much potential to her just... showing up again, years later, at literally any point in the Hollanov timeline and making a huge impact
nothing no one nowhere @voideville - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
