ohh thoughts on role model?
(reread this ask and I'm literally just rambling from here sorry)
i read it first a!d then i just finished tlg. i don't really expect anything from rr. i think she has ideas and concepts and executes them really poorly (why do we know little to nothing abt shane's japanese heritage? does he speak japanese? does he wish he spoke japanese? are there things he subconsciously thinks in japanese like spanish is my first language but now i mostly speak english, still when i think of food, home, sayings, its in spanish. and part of the reason i always think abt that is bc there is such an emphasis on ilya's russian and his struggle with expressing himself in a different language than his native tongue. its why him finding a therapist who speaks russian is so important. i don't think shane needs to speak japanese at all but for him to nearly never bring up his race is odd idk. like even him thinking about the fact that he doesn't think about it? or he doesn't worry about mom experiencing discrimination and racism? i don't often think abt myself experiencing those things im lucky to be in a decently diverse area but i always have my family on my mind and unfortunately racism does not go away regardless of tax bracket or citizenship status. so for shane to NEVER experience it is crazy)
i love troy sm. not as much as shane or ilya but i am unfortunately weak for an okay redemption story. i haven't read tough guy so i don't know how bad troy is and honestly reid doesn't go in to it. he's just sorta fixed with little to no work. (by this i mean he doesn't examine his biases or rarely has a moment where he thinks something wrong and has to redirect his thoughts towards something more positive). Still, troy starts the book at rock bottom and hes so miserable that i like him. he loses a lot and i think he and shane are similar in the way they live through hockey. in tlg, one of the conflicts that i wish was explored more was how shane gives so much of himself to hockey to point of almost self harm. his relationship to food was not great. (i don't know if its an eating disorder but listen im abt related to him so hard and i don't want to unpack) him restricting his diet to the point that he cannot eat one cookie is insane. the way i viewed it was a moment of control thing where he wants to believe that even though he cannot control the homophic hockey culture he's in, he can out work it by being the best. and his worry and resentment of ilya eating freely (read:poorly) and engaging in "vices" makes sense. firstly, shane LOVES hockey and he's good at it and he's willing to make "necessary sacrifices" to remain that way and he feels ilya isnt. i thought shane was also going through this thought of "if I'm good enough, if I'm irreplaceable for long enough they will accept me despite whatever homophobic racist thing they think". was disappointed to not see that explored at all.
i viewed both of them as using their crutches (for shane the very strict diet and for ilya smoking, eating poorly, and drinking) as forms of self harm. i thought that reid would address shane's need for control and how he expresses it through restrictive eating but she doesn't. at least with ilya we see that he's in a bad place but so is shane! it is horrific to be closeted in area where you don't feel safe. he handles it differently from ilya. i didn't think he was being overly selfish, i thought he was stressing and spiraling in a different way and resented ilya a little 'for not trying'. but narratively, ilya is given grace where shane isn't
though in reality, reid doesn't want to explore strong conflict or the themes she wrote. when shane speaks to and is threatened by crowell, we get a small glimpse of shane facing some discrimination but its only a hint. i don't hate ilya for being worried about being stuck in the closet but i hate that shane's fears are never dealt with! he loses so much! i don't think im as frustrated as others bc i am naivelely holding hope that in unrivaled shane's issues will be more front and center.
i like harris but in a sort of neutral positive way where i don't have strong opinions about him. he's sweet i guess.
Yeah I've spoken at length about the issues with Reid white-washing Shane. She has since said that she thinks Shane would know some Japanese, now that people have criticized her so much for not paying any attention to her race, but I don't trust her to understand or care about the heart of the criticism here, which is not simply that Shane never spoke Japanese in the books, but that she just didn't put any thought into his race at all and didn't make Shane aware of his race and have it affect his characterization or story at all.
I don't know that I would say Troy never reflects on his biases or has any moments in which he needs to redirect his thoughts. A number of times he wonders how he hadn't noticed what Kent was up to, and at one point he second guesses his choice to do the social media accounts and if it's actually the right thing or if it actually helps and he has to set himself straight. It's not much but I wouldn't say it's not there.
If you mean he never reflects on like, being queerphobic before, I would argue that's because textually, the way it's written, he doesn't really need to. He was never actually queerphobic, based on how it was written. It was only ever something he pretended to be. He doesn't have to unpack any internalized queerphobia. In real-life it's fair to argue that it's unlikely someone who was being queerphobic so overtly never actually believed in any of it, and it might be fair to criticize Reid for not having the guts to make Troy actually buy into some of it, but at the end of the day, she didn't. Troy technically was never queerphobic in the sense that he never actually believed in it.
I also wouldn't say he loses a lot. Not the way, for example, Shane does. Troy loses his team and his dad but this is not framed as narrative punishment. This is part of what makes Troy's story weak. It is difficult for his redemption arc to really mean anything if it never meant sacrificing something he wanted to keep and benefitted from having. His old team and his dad are not framed this way.
But, I think I get sort of the sentiment of the points you're making here, which is that Troy was redeemed too easily by the narrative, and he did go through some miserable shit.
As for Shane, it wasn't meant to be an eating disorder. Reid has said this multiple times. However, in real life, it absolutely would be. The way you're interpreting Shane is fair, and I think is how a lot of people who are empathetic to Shane view him. The problem is that the reason none of that was explored with Shane, his eating, his need to perfect, his effort to make himself irreplaceable to compensate for his race and sexuality - none of that was something Reid intentionally put in there. Reid gave Shane the diet she did to make him whiney and selfish and to give Ilya something to tease him about. It wasn't meant to say anything more about him. His dedication to his career was meant to depict how selfish and self-absorbed he is. We weren't meant to find anything about it empathetic. It's only because we care about Shane's character a lot more than Reid ever has that we can extrapolate more from these decisions Reid made than she intended to put in there.
I think it's fair to interpret Shane's diet as a form of self-harm, or Ilya's drinking and smoking as a form of self-harm (for reason I won't get into in this post, and in an effort to not be a bitch, I'll just say that I don't agree with viewing Ilya's eating as a form of self-harm personally), but Reid, again, undoubtedly didn't intend for Shane's diet to be viewed as a form of self-harm, nor does she see it that way herself.
Shane wasn't being selfish at all, and Shane wasn't allowed to be in a bad place. Throughout the entire book Shane has every reason to be as stressed and struggling as Ilya is even if he doesn't want to solve it the same way Ilya does but Reid made Shane "happy as can be" and acted like Shane had nothing to be upset for the entire book. Even in the end, when he loses everything, she doesn't allow Shane to grieve this. She doesn't allow him to be depressed about this. She intended for Shane to be the antagonist in this story, to be the one fucking up, to be the one wronging Ilya, and she didn't spare any empathy or care for his side of the story at all.
It's true Reid doesn't like conflict, even beside her disdain for Shane that made it so she didn't even really understand his conflict. She barely introduces conflict before she sweeps it away, usually in far to conveniently a manner. She wants to allude to serious issues in her writing but doesn't want to actually confront those issues, and often, it appears as though she doesn't really think there's anything that needs confronting, because she doesn't take those same serious issues very seriously.
And yeah, her treatment of queerphobia is a prime example of this. I mean, racism isn't even something she remotely attempts to address. She barely barely alludes to it even once when Shane is seeing the Commissioner, but otherwise, it is not even a acknowledged as something that exists. But with queerphobia, she does treat it as a paranoid delusion of queer people's that never actually impacts them outside of their own fear. I have bitched about how she treats the rivalry as a bigger obstacle to Shane and Ilya then them both being men a thousand times. It is one of the best examples of how she trivializes queerphobia, and it is literally the premise of the book.
You're being a lot more generous to her than I know how to be anymore lol. I don't have any faith in Unrivaled. I will read it before stating anything definitively about it, but I am not giving it any benefit of the doubt really.
