queer pranks played by lightning

Yes, excellent ask, thank you! And I’ll add onto that —

For sure people are scared of the real life desire for cruelty, and I think you're right that it lends itself to some people wanting doms & sadists to be essentially playacting or only doing it because of external pressure/being of service, rather than having an intrinsic want-lust-need for enacting that cruelty themselves. Because then we're getting into territory that asks us to humanize the people (my Ilya!) with that desire for cruelty, but isn't that just the definition of a Bad person? Or a broken person, in need of fixing or healing or getting help?

I think this is basically the conflict for people, where readers are (generally) coming at things from a submissive point of view, because their fantasies often feel safer when they simultaneous absolve themselves of the guilt and shame around those desires by having the dominant be in control, by having something done *to* them rather than participating in something that feels taboo or shameful. There’s nothing wrong with that obvs, I’m not trying to kink shame, but I do think it means that people don’t want to examine what it means to want the same things from the opposite point of view, because then they have to confront the fact that this is sometime two people are choosing together, and they have to confront all that shame and guilt again when there isn’t that more socially acceptable buffer of a lack of agency any more. But if Shane isn’t dirty or wrong or shameful for wanting Ilya to hurt him, why do people fail to see it isn’t for Ilya to want to hurt him either?

because we're right on the money regarding the absolution of the masochist. christianity (and by extension, cultural christianity) has morality through victimhood baked into it. the idea that suffering has a causal relationship to moral purity is foundational, built into the gospels, at the very root.

and then we add purity culture to the mix. purity culture has two sides for "each gender." for women, those two sides are: 1) you do not desire; 2) men's desire is dangerous to them, so you must protect them. for men, those two sides are: 1) your desire is dangerous, and you must resist it; 2) any woman who pursues you sexually or romantically is dangerous, and you must resist her.

so we see here ^^ that pursuing pleasure, being the aggressor, wanting someone and taking action to get them is Dangerous and Bad and Evil and Sinful. nobody in that equation actually wants a man to desire a woman, or for a woman to desire a man. they want the carefully controlled and sanitized performance of desire (chivalry & courtship) that then cut-scenes straight to pregnancy. the actual desire is a threat.

generally, left-ish and leftist spaces have done a good job at acknowledging that women are people and therefore have desires. but the other parts of purity culture? the ideas that a man's desire is inherently dangerous, that sexually "aggressive" women are dangerous, that it's never okay to be the aggressor? oh we've done fuck all with those. those are still EVERYWHERE. and lets be fucking forreal, we still culturally associate masochism and submission with women and sadism and dominance with men. obviously that isn't how BDSM actually plays out in the real world, but we'd also be goofy to pretend that those cultural associations aren't coloring the way we think about BDSM.

so ilya wanting shane and taking control of shane and wanting to hurt shane already puts ilya on the moral backfoot in this equation. he's doing everything that waves purity culture red flags. he needs to repent via victimhood, and therefore he needs to be shown the pleasure of bottoming, of submission.

#there’s definitely this idea that is taught to us#responsibility to the larger collective#it isn’t enough to sacrifice yourself for just one other person#that choice has to have moral backing#and those morals are determined by the collective#not by two people in a relationship#so the framing that ilya IS a service dom or subtop (not just can be) is there so that he’s only doing these things for shane yes#but there’s this added layer of he needs to be these things it needs to be there in the writing#so that the viewers/readers are absolved of the sin of wanting to control his sexuality#of our own sadistic desires to strip ilya of his pleasure#otherwise- we would be leaving it up to the text/their story how they tell it#this tension also shows up in tlg so i’ve been thinking about it#how shane justifies the sacrifices that they are making by not being out in the open by stating that it would be distracting#he’s echoing organizational rhetoric#because deep down#he doesn’t really want to hide if everything would be okay#if there wasn’t social pressure

hang it in the louvre

OhHh my godddd. 🫠🫠🫠🫠 Luckily I AM ready to hear and receive this!!!! It all comes back to Ilya and how risky sex was his one form of catharsis from his shitty home life, doesn't it? It all comes back to his passive suicidal ideation that made every experience that made him feel even remotely alive seem worth it. What does it matter if the risky sex he's having is with older American men in seedy bathrooms or in the velvet lined bedroom of some oligarch from the old country?

I'm picturing this all comes out after hollanov have a talk about their childhood crushes. Shane shares his revelation about crushing on his old coach in Juniors. And Ilya teases Shane and makes him blush and squirm and obviously they fuck about it, but then afterwards Ilya casually drops: "Did you fuck him?"

"Hm? Who?"

"Your coach."

And Shane sits up from where he's been lying next to Ilya in bed to look at him in the face, to see if he's serious. He is.

"You're seriously asking me if I fucked my coach? In juniors?"

And Ilya, who lost his virginity at fourteen, does a biiig dramatic eye roll and is like "Ugh yes Shane i am asking. Or does that hurt your delicate North American sensibilities?" And he's getting a little mean with it now, to try and distract Shane from the way he's looking at him, with this pinched horrified face. "It would not be so crazy." Ilya ends up saying, a little too defensively.

And then Shane is really looking horrified as he says "Did you... Did you have sex with your coach?"

And Ilya laughs, trying to lighten the mood like: "Not my coach. But this old man, he'd come watch my games. He tried to pay me to step on his balls but I thought This is something I'd like to do to this creep for free, yes?"

Shane is not fucking laughing. He looks at Ilya all fucking,,, scandalised and just says, "Ilya, that's awful." So of course Ilya gets extremely fucking prickly about it, and they end up having a huge blow up fight, before Ilya eventually relents and tries to appeal to Galina, who looks at him with no judgement, no real discernible expression, and asks him in his own language if he really finds the memory funny. THEN we get the big cathartic breakdown.