you could make this place beautiful

 nourishes it

keeps it warm

fills it with love

fills it with rice

refills sanity bar

everything about ilya & hayden's beef is just so contrived and doesn't actually make sense, because rr is completely inconsistent about ilya being "an asshole" and having a bad reputation. like. she wants him to be a bad boy and to have him as some sort of ~oft-disliked~ vibe, where everyone hates him bc they don't know he's secretly a sweetie! but also she doesn't ever write him doing anything actually shitty or assholey because she doesn't actually want any readers to dislike him. the worst thing he ever does on page is tease people, and those people are all pretty much shown to all like him even if they joke about finding him annoying (like every time he shows up at the kingfisher). but she still insists his reputation is that of being a jackass and a weirdo and fundamentally not very likable, and not interested in being very likable.

so she writes hayden responding to him like he's a genuine jackass, but she doesn't like. ever SHOW him being a jackass, so hayden's dislike of him doesn't even make any sense as written. so then it's like okay so why is shane's best friend so irrationally angry at ilya? there is no real reason; his prior characterization in hr seemed pretty easygoing and one of the few people shane liked to hang out with. in tlg he's just a constant hater about ilya, but there's no justification given for it other than that ilya "is an asshole" - which is never actually shown. BUT ALSO like. why is ilya so opposed to the idea of making an effort to get along? there is no good reason for either of these, other than the fact that rr wants contrived drama (and, perhaps, to posit that ilya's friends are better than shane's, given that hayden and jj are both written to be dicks about shane being with ilya and the resolution jj gets isn't even fucking on page), regardless of the way she's previously tried to write hayden as like a decent and normal person and good friend to shane.

I think a lot of people want Harris to be a six pack abs type guy because Troy is canonically a pro athlete and a smokeshow. And they feel like Troy would be “settling” if he dates a guy who doesn’t also have a body you could see on billboards. Never mind that Troy thinks he’s the luckiest man on earth that Harris took a chance on his grumpy self!

There’s a scene early on in “Role Model” where Troy is with Ottawa on a visit to his hometown of Vancouver. His dad Curtis Barrett has brought some business acquaintances to meet his pro athlete son (Curtis uses his son being an NHL star as leverage in his construction business).

Curtis is being an asshole as usual. Troy notices that Curtis and his buddies all have the same look to them. Fiftysomething men who were once athletic and have now settled into middle aged flabbiness. Troy figures he’ll look exactly like them in thirty years. He has no illusions that youth, beauty and fitness are eternal.