come to my cottage where there’s no slamming doors and we don’t walk on eggshells and you don’t have to think about how as a child you memorized the sounds of footsteps on the hardwood and who they belonged to and how much to shrink yourself depending on the answer. don’t go back to russia because you always come back to me in pieces and pretend you don’t need to be put back together. i know a place that won’t break you. come to my house. we’ll have so much fun. i want to watch tv with you. i want to knock elbows with you while we brush our teeth. i want to taste your mouth while its still warm from your coffee; to suck syrup off your fingers at the table. i want every mundane luxury we’ve never allowed ourselves to have. it’s so private, no one will know. because they can’t. and for now it’s okay; i’m not ready for the world to have us when there’s so many ways i’ve yet to have you. we’d have a week, or even two, and it still won’t be enough. how do you make up for almost ten years of never seeing a sunrise together. never kissing with morning breath. all the things i might already know if i never left that time you asked me to stay. we’ll be completely alone, together, with our clothes in the same laundry basket and your hair on my pillowcase and the enormity of everything i want touching every corner of every room.
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shane hollander: having a secret feels good as fuck i mean scary bad.. i mean… no one else can know about it which is tragic (if no one else knows about it no one else can touch it or mess it up) and it is so isolating (and mine mine mine no one else can ruin this because nobody knows it exists to be ruined) and it’s hard being so secretive (oh my god this is the only thing in the world that’s mine and mine alone) and it’s eating me up inside (and i do not wantttttttt to let anyone else inside they will ruin my peaceful hell) but i just can’t tell anyone that’s how it is (#mysecret)
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Finished my TLG re-read and I've been seeing posts circulating coming to Shane's defense in that central conflict, and I am finding them interesting because there's often this tactic agreement in them that anyone else would have picked up that Ilya is going through it, but Shane doesn't because of [insert valid reason I usually agree with].
But...I actually don't think Shane is missing it. I think Ilya has built a pattern of lying about anything that isn't absolutely perfect about his life or interior state, from something as small as not sleeping well to as major as how much he would mind Shane sleeping with other people.
Shane in-text is aware that something is off with Ilya. It's very present in his thoughts that he's missing something, that something is going on with Ilya, that Ilya is withholding things and picking little fights but not saying what the issue is:
And what I think Shane doesn't get credit for is that he asks Ilya about it.
Shane doesn't just ruminate, or barrel on as if nothing is wrong. He tries to engage, he tries to do things to cheer Ilya up and plan things he knows Ilya enjoys. And when that doesn't work he asks, outright and directly, and Ilya shuts the conversation down, repeatedly.
Ilya is deflecting and avoiding the discussion through feigning ignorance, snark, purposefully misunderstanding Shane's words, trying to turn it into a fight, and outright telling Shane not to worry and that he's fine. And to Shane's thought there at the end, how is Shane supposed to force the issue, if Ilya doesn't want to talk about it? What does support in that moment look like, when Ilya won't share what's wrong?
And Ilya is actively aware that he's dodging conversation and withholding the information from Shane. He acknowledges it in both his internal monologue and out loud:
And it's clearly a deep-rooted habit of avoidance.
Ilya recognizes the specific face Shane makes when Ilya us using snark to deflect a serious conversation, aka, it happens so often that there's a recognizable and specific response it elicits. Shane yanks back that bid for connection and understanding the second Ilya doesn't meet it. It's such a habit that even after the plane incident, Ilya can't acknowledge that he might not be okay, when it would be wild to expect him to be okay in that situation (and when Shane clearly doesn't expect him to be).
Even in the Big Fight itself, we see the pattern playing out in how it starts. Ilya snarks and digs instead of saying why he's upset. Shane asks five (5!!) times for some type of help in understanding what is going on with Ilya. And Ilya rebuffs him with passive aggressiveness, snark, purposeful misunderstanding, and bad-faith interpretations of his words.
Ilya is trying to pick a fight to avoid the actual conversation about his emotional states and wants and needs, and he's resenting Shane for not understanding something that Ilya not only never told him about but worked to actively hide from him (something Ilya's own therapist points out isn't reasonable for him to expect of Shane, which. Many people seem to forget in their recollections of the book...)
And how does Shane respond when he learns the shape of what Ilya is upset about?
He feels terrible for not knowing Ilya's emotional state and that he'd been unhappy in their status quo, though he sets aside his own feelings in the name of supporting Ilya in the immediate moment.
And he arrows in on Ilya's self-sacrifice in the name of Shane's happiness as a problem that needs to be addressed, even with others in Shane's life don't seem to recognize it as a problem. Their relationship is foundationally one between equals. Shane doesn't want Ilya giving unequally into it. Ilya lashing out frames it as a balance of 'who has given more', but Shane doesn't want either of them to 'win' the who-can-sacrifice more-for-the-other-competition. He wants neither of them to be engaging in that competition in the first place!
The other piece I think that gets forgotten is that Shane is the one who initially introduces the idea of changing things. They have a plan together (that Ilya actively participated in making!), but Shane floats the idea that they could have another plan:
Ilya doesn't take him up on it, which is fair. But that's a sign for Ilya that Shane is ready to have that conversation (and the reader sees Shane's narration is full of chafing at hiding), one that Ilya misses in his assumption that Shane is perfectly happy in the status quo because Ilya hasn't actually asked:
And importantly, Ilya's stakes have changed. At the end of Heated Rivalry, he communicates that the consequences of being outed are fairly dire in terms of being an openly queer, famous Russian. Ilya through therapy is acknowledging (or coming to realize) that the stakes are different for him now.
But Ilya never tells Shane, who is still operating on 'dire impacts' assumptions in his drive to protect their relationship and keep it a secret. And so Shane doesn't tell Ilya that he is frustrated with aspects of needing to hide their relationship in turn, because that frustration feels like a small price to pay against Ilya's stakes.
They both proceed forward with incorrect understanding of each other, born out of trying to protect the other from their own unhappiness. And it's great, organic, character-driven setup for them both to learn and grow, individually and together within the space of their relationship, and come out the other end stronger.
god giving Ilya a nuanced relationship with his father fucking hurts. Some would assume that Ilyas' brother is the favorite. I don't think he is. I think it's Ilya. Being the favorite doesn't always save you.
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i see your "hayden is in love with shane" and raise you a "hayden thinks shane is in love with HIM"
maybe jackie asked him about it before the aquarium trip and hayden's like "no way you're insane" and she rolls her eyes and tells him to "bring up having kids or shane dating anyone at all and see how weird he gets"
so of course he does and shane cracks a joke about hayden impregnating him and sirens start going off kill bill style and then he asks about ex-jessica and he watches shane go all distant and that's all it takes for hayden to come busting through the door of his suburban McMansion screaming "JACKIE YOU'RE RIGHT IM IRRESISTIBLE"
and now he's walking around all "the greatest hockey player of all time has a crush on me 😏" and "i can't believe i'm breaking his heart like this 🥺" and "my poor gay buddy, he needs me to set him up with someone 😤"
think of the utter devastation when he learns who shane has actually been pining for the whole time
I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.
A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:
2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.
2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.
November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.
December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)
Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.
1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)
Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.
The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.
ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.
It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.
Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.
And from today.
They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.
And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.
So that's a brief history.
Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.
It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.
I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.
Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.
adding a link to this website, created by a local, which is a central hub for local reporting, mutual aid requests, gofundme campaigns, and calls to action
A directory of places to give to as Minnesota defends itself from ICE occupation
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80% of unrivaled has to be ilya being incredibly uncool at all the casual intimacy he gets to have with shane now. they go to a bar with the team and shane puts his hand on ilya’s knee midsentence and ilya chokes on the rest of it. at the grocery store and ilya is holding up an avocado to see if it’s ripe enough and shane walks up behind him and puts a hand on his hip and ilya drops it. yes they’re having freak sex but now it’s because shane was on the phone with the dog groomer and they’re asking about appointment times and shane says “hold on let me ask my husband—“ and now he’s face down ass up in the middle of the kitchen and ilya is like say that again say that again say that again say that again
