elena

— —

“man, i can’t wait for thanksgiving! what pie is your favourite, hollzy?”

“fruit should not be hot” (walks off screen)

— —

“hey, has anyone seen my toothbrush? it’s purple” (rookie panicking, looking through his bag)

“why the fuck would you have a purple toothbrush?! that’s just fucked up”

“wh-what..?” (absolute look of confused hurt)

“the only acceptable colours for a toothbrush is blue or green. don’t worry - when we land, i’ll get you a new one” (deadpan as hell)

“…thanks hollzy”

“no problem, rook”

— —

“now who in their right mind would drink fanta lemon when the regular fanta exists? what the fuck ilya?!” (husband hollzy organising the fridge)

“i like it”

not jackie, not shane, not anyone. he has completely cut himself off from his family and despite the church's many attempts to contact him (a common tactic of mormon churches if they have you in the records. evangelism and all), the moment he had enough money he had a lawyer send a cease and desist. he has not spoken to his family in years, and the sibling relationship he has with shane? it's sort of all he has. he never tells anyone about this. why? because he is so fucking scared. he grew up scared, he's only ever known fear, and when he finally got out, he literally couldn't even speak about growing up without being drowned by it. that fear. the fear that it's not over and he's not safe and actually everyone was right and he'll never be safe. myhayden suggests therapy to shane because he started therapy himself because he knew he needed to do something because every time one of the guys on the bench would mumble some kind of prayer he would nearly throw up.

He has one photo of his family. one single photo of him from the ages of 0-18 that he took with him. he's 14 in the photo, the family took a group picture before sending his older brother (he was the youngest of eight) on his mission. he can't look at it, but he has it. His family was exceptionally devout. it is so ingrained in his psyche that he doesn't pick up on his latent bisexual tendencies and when jackie makes a joke about it he laughs and then has to hide in the bathroom and weep while jackie, ilya, and shane sit on the couch in the living room drinking wine. he had never been able to put words to the suffocation. could never explain why he needed to leave.

it's myhaydens initial driving force behind his dislike of ilya. because ilya had only ever spoken negatively about him and it was chirping to ilya but it accidentally hit on every bruise left by the hands of the church. you are not good. you are not capable. you are not enough.

and they get past it, obviously, myhayden is a hollanov diehard. eventually, it's Ilya who notices how hayden flinches at mentions of religion. how he has no childhood photos. how he has never told a story that occurred before he was 18. he knows what jackie said, that hayden's relationship with his parents was pretty much nonexistent and he hated talking about it. so he wonders. and ilya likes knowing things. so he asks shane and shane says the same and he knows neither of them are lying but now he's starting to realize that they've sort of been lied to, or at least not told the whole truth, and he wants to know now more than ever.

it happens one night looking at baby photos. ilya and hayden were flipping through photo albums when jackie and shane had left to pick up the girls. and ilya, after seeing a thousand photos of the kids, turns and asks, "do you think they look more like you or like jackie as kids." and hayden looks at him and ilya's eyes have that knowing behind it and hayden caves. jackie and shane aren't pushers but ilya is and hayden is at a point where he thinks he can say at least something without bursting into flames. so he tells ilya. not the whole thing, but just that he doesn't remember what he looked like as a baby. and ilya, of course, asks about pictures. and hayden says he only has one. and hayden, shockingly (to both himself and ilya) walks to his room, pulls down a box from a high closet shelf, and pulls out a single photograph. and ilya looks down at all that hayden has lost and it kicks the air from his lungs.

And this kid did not have a lot of friends. His teachers thought he wasn't very smart because he made everything about hockey. And they dismissed him when he struggled with math and reading. "if you could just put some of your hockey energy into school, then maybe you would get better." His classmates laughed at the hockey themed valentines day cards him and his mom had to hand make because nowhere was selling hockey themed valentines day cards. And they laugh at him when he repeats the same thing over and over about "getting pucks deep, pucks deep, pucks deep." When he would play all by himself on the yard pretending he was skating, picking up any big stick he could find on the ground, they'd push him around. "Can we play? We'll be defenders" and ram him and take his stick. And he'd just go through all the penalties they would have just gotten over and over again until he can calm down. He celebrated every birthday at the ice rink in his full hockey gear even though he didn't really have classmates showing up. Not for lack of invite.

And his parents try to steer him away from it. They try and watch new sports, they try and get him to watch kids shows, get into things kids his age like, but all he wants to do is watch reruns of the metros cup wins. Wants to wear his hat backwards with his black shirt because that's how Shane looks in the interviews. Memorizes the answers he gives in french even though this kid never learned french in school. And its useless. This kid is hooked and they just kinda have to ride this wave.

So when the announcement comes for the Game Changers camp, these parents do absolutely everything to get him there. They don't care what it takes, this is like a light for all of them really in the midst of all the bullying at school and the meltdowns at home and the obsessive routines that fall apart if even one thing is out of place.

And they explain to the camp that their boy might have a hard time. Might need some time to adjust. That he struggles with math, and reading, and can get caught up in all the rules sometimes. Preemptively trying to say "he's not a bad kid. he's trying his best."

So at the end of the first day, his parents are prepared for a meltdown. Its new, its a lot of kids, the rink can get loud and cold, and he doesn't always do well with transitioning out of hockey. He's hard to pull off the ice at home.

And they can see some upset under the surface when they arrive. He clearly doesn't want to go home. Thats no surprise.

What is a surprise is the way Shane gets down on one knee next to where the boy is sitting upset on the ground. He doesn't move to touch him. He just gets down and the two of them softly have a chat. The boy is tugging on his hair and nodding at what Shane says. And eventually he stands and the parents walk over to them.

"You must be the parents. Its good to meet you," Shane says softly. "I was just going over some things about tomorrow. So that way he would know the schedule."

And they can see their son isn't quite happy, still clearly exhausted. He'll nap in the car and be grumpy at dinner. But he is much more regulated than they expected him to be.

"And, I was telling him about my schedule when I go home. About getting some quite time, making sure I can decompress. I think that's what all good hockey players need, right buddy?"

"Right buddy," he repeats.

but now apparently troy’s a racist and was calling shane slurs to his face? a couple months ago bitches were headcanoning troy as south asian, right? what the fuck happened. i don’t think it’s a stretch for shane to have to take time to warm up to troy at all, but troy’s, like, not evil. i fear we missed the point of role model (and that brief moment with eric in tough guy) if you think that this is the direction their relationship goes. shane’s lived in the gay torment nexus for far too long and has too little queer friends in general, let alone ones who understand what it is to be a queer athlete in a sport like hockey, to resent troy until the end of time. i think shane gets over it pretty quick, if it even happens at all (because troy being well-received by the public in comparison to shane not being so accepted has nothing to do with troy at all really), and they form the singular bitchiest duo professional hockey has ever seen.

if anything, i think shane wishes he was as brave as troy became after his time in toronto. shane would wish that he was brave enough to stand up against toxic locker room culture (accepts jokes about ilya being a cocksucker when boston wins the cup) and support queer players (as far as we know, he made no attempt to speak to scott hunter after he was the first to come out, even in private, compared to ilya who did congratulate him and even partied with him at a gay bar despite at the time having more to lose with the whole russian gay propaganda thing).

At first they don't acknowledge it, but then there's a particularly loud sound from Ilya. One of them almost spits out the water she just sipped and then they're laughing and comparing notes ("did Shane ever make you moan like that?" "never! Did Ilya sound like that for you?" "never, and we had some great sex")

After a while, Ilya emerges looking thoroughly debauched to fetch a fresh glass of ice water for Shane and finds his best-friend-with-former-benefits and his husband's best-friend-former-girlfriend debating whether Shane is incredibly talented in bed with men or Ilya is just down bad.

Joe is someone Shane trained with when they were kids. He's NOT a hockey player. He's actually in a profession that most of North America stereotypes as gay. And for all of his issues with his sexuality, for all of his self-consciousness and awkwardness, Shane still cares enough about the guy to want to show up for him.

In fact, he's even willing to ask a couple of friendly acquaintances, men that he has no reason to believe aren't straight hockey players themselves, if they'd come along.

Shane's a guy who, when asked about racism in his own life, immediately thinks about some other kid who had it worse than he did, and disliked Shane for it.

And I'd love to hear more of that conversation with David about the boy his mother apparently bullied. Not a great situation, admittedly, but the way fandom talks about Shane sometimes, you'd think he'd have forgotten the kid entirely.

From what we see of Shane's relationship with his team, it's mostly good. He's clearly well-liked and well-respected, even if there is a measure of aloofness or distance. The dynamic in the locker room seems pretty easy going and we know, at some point, that he'll apparently end up trusting them enough to come out to them.

I've mentioned this in a previous post, but while he does forget baby Amber Pike's name, it's a new name for a new baby. We do know that Shane likes Hayden enough to spend multiple montage scenes with his family. They go to the aquarium together. He takes care of the baby when Hayden's chasing after the other kids. And he's willing to spend time during his sole vacation a year catching up with him.

The show is funny because they've got such a limited time to tell a story, compared to a book, which can go for pages and pages and give you the internal monologue of every character. And I acknowledge that sometimes, for the purpose of storytelling, characters do change. There are traits and aspects that work better in one medium over another.

But I feel like, considering the narrow focus of the show, how rarely these characters really interact with anyone outside of the immediate circle required for the romantic plot beats, Jacob Tierney went out of his way to make sure that we see Shane as a person who, by and large, does care about people, he pays attention to them, remembers them, empathizes with them, and generally is portrayed as a kind, polite, straightforward, and awkward person.

i do draw the line at ilya talking like a caveman tho, that man is perfectly capable of being eloquent and knowing complex vocabulary, he just doesn’t think it’s necessary when he’s talking to his family and/or his teammates