Aliit ori'shya tal'din

I think book!Ilya is just as selfish as book!Shane, though it comes out in different ways. Really Shane is more self-centered than he is selfish. While Ilya's more perceptive (and yes that word has been ruined for me by its overuse in fics but it's the canon trait so) and connects with people more easily but he's also self involved, especially to start out.

This is a major point of contention people are going to fight me on but No I do not think book!Ilya was happy in Boston. The Ottawa plan is still questionable but it's not as simple as "Boston exciting and good Ottawa boring and bad." Book!Ilya doesn't have any friends and crucially, has never had any friends. He describes his life in Boston as a whirlwind of partying and meaningless sex:

This is not the picture of a guy who was living a fulfilled life. Not that there's anything wrong with partying, but you know, not being able to name a single close relationship from a place you lived in for eight years is maybe not great. (And yes I know fandom has endowed Cliff Marlow with Ilya bff status. He very simply isn't this in the books. I can write a post about it, but book!Marlow is obviously just Ilya's most reliable party friend. Every conversation they have is about having sex with random women.)

As far as we know Shane is Ilya's first ever friend and their relationship is, you know, gestures. And even post-cottage Ilya denies himself emotional intimacy with Shane because he's afraid of it ruining their romantic and sexual relationship. Ilya's captain of the Centaurs for two full years before TLG and the strong implication is that he barely knows any of them. He's not doing a great job and everyone kind of knows it.

Ultimately Ilya has to be therapized into basic relationship building because he doesn't know how to do it, because his entire life up until that point has been living entirely for himself except for meeting familial needs out of obligation, not love. When he moves to Ottawa he makes Shane his whole world instead but that's not sustainable either.

It's easy to assume Ilya struggles in Ottawa because it's boring and the hockey is bad and that's not not true. But the bigger thing is that Ilya is undergoing a very serious shift in his self-identity and that's uncomfortable. Ilya's entire life up until like 26 was about escaping to America to be successful and rich and materialistic and to fuck beautiful women, and he accomplishes it. And then throws it away for Shane. That's a deeply destablizing thing.

Ilya's journey in TLG is about how to reconcile the person he understood/understands himself to be (Mr. Sex-and-Hockey) with the new person he actually is, who's the kind of guy to give up peak years of his career to be near his (gay! secret! monogamous!) lover. This is nicely shown in how Ilya's persona slips away over the course of his sessions with Galina.

All of this makes me think about Jacob Tierney talking in a random podcast about Shane using a recipe to make burgers. Many viewers responded to Shane using a recipe to make simple backyard burgers with such disbelief, and I loved Jacob's answer. It was something to the effect of:

"These guys have never done this before. Shane has never cooked for someone or hosted someone like this at his house." (not a direct quote, just from my brain)

And when you take that observation and apply it to other things, so many things make sense. There are so many things Ilya and Shane both have just never done. They haven't lived normal lives, they were always exceptional and alone at the top, which is what brings them together, the understanding they have between them as the two best players in their sport. But where Shane has support systems in parents and some friends, Ilya has next to nothing.

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺

a LOTR calendar! with more LOTR shit inside!

stickers? CHECK! middle-earth map? CHECK!

did she additionally get me a set of greeting cards? YES SHE DID

#artist vs gallery curator vs tour guide (if the tag commentary slaps)

Hi! Belated, but yes!

And potentially niche answer, but John Twist. Jack Twist's father from Brokeback Mountain.

There's a tendency to paint him as just flatly a hateful asshole, and I understand how people get there, but that's such a gross oversimplification. I'm never gonna say John is actually a nice sweet guy, but like there's nuance to be had here.

(Uhhh cw for discussions of normalized violence against children to follow.)

We don't see a lot of John in canon--both the movie and the original novella, he's in one sequence (technically it's two scenes, but most people are gonna think of it as one scene and that's reasonable). And what we see of him, he's Not Nice.

In this sequence, Ennis has gone to visit Jack's parents after Jack's death to offer to take Jack's ashes and scatter them on Brokeback Mountain as Jack had expressed he wanted. John refuses, rebuffs Ennis, aaaaaand makes some comments that are basically an indirect but scathing "I know what you and Jack were."

He's undeniably a cantankerous asshole about it, so between that and the fact that earlier in the book Jack tells that John was unsupportive of Jack's rodeo career and Jack does recount having been beaten as a punishment by his father one time when he was a child, I definitely understand how people land at a place of "John is just all around terrible."

But.....there's some reading around what we're directly told that people aren't doing.

Go with me here. We know that Jack is "not yet twenty" in the summer of 1963, which is generally taken to mean he's 19. That would have Jack born in 1944 or '43, depending on what time of year his birthday is. To be the father of a child that age, John was most likely born in the 1920s--he's Greatest Generation. He lived through the Great Depression and WWII, and was probably a soldier in WWII.

There is not an American man who came through those moments of history untraumatized, and very very few of them ever dealt with that trauma.

Of fuckin' course John's an asshole. Of course he was a kinda shit father. He's screwed up. That's par for the course for a man of his time.

I've seen some portrayals of John as just a relentless and merciless abuser that I don't think are warranted. Honestly, if John were like that, I don't think Jack would be the kind of person we're shown him to be--I think he'd be more like Ennis.

Jack doesn't describe John as having beaten him regularly his whole life or anything like that, he cites one particular instance. And I'm not saying that's okay, the instance in question clearly had a lasting effect on Jack, but fucked up as we know it to be, corporal punishment--especially for boys--was extremely normalized at the time. The one instance Jack mentions probably wasn't the only time John hit him, it's just the time that stands out as when he went too far. For John, that would most likely have just been part of what he thought he was supposed to do as a father, disciplining his son. And probably a place where his own trauma leaked through. And that's horrible, but it lacks the malice I often see attributed to him.

Then, when we do see John in canon, yeah he refuses to let Ennis take Jack's ashes, but the man is grieving his only son, I think he can be excused for digging his heels in about having Jack interred in the family plot. That's the one bit of control he has left in the situation, the one way he can still keep Jack safe. If I were grieving a loved one and some stranger showed up uninvited wanting to take away their earthly remains, yeah I think I'd be kind of a jerk about it too.

But for as much as John is unpleasant to Ennis, he doesn't kick him out. He doesn't object at all to his wife, Jack's mother, inviting Ennis in, offering him cake and coffee, letting Ennis go upstairs alone to Jack's room, and take with him his and Jack's shirts he finds there. The one thing he actually roadblocks is Ennis taking Jack away.

Rocky holding a xenonite model of Grace // Grace holding a xenonite model of Rocky

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

(via @skygemspeaks)