again the emphasis on shane being pretty is another kind of fraught descriptor because ok on one hand he’s a romance lead he’s gotta be attractive + he’s also ripped straight from sid who was indeed a pretty boy and got chirped for it A Lot as a young man (just look at any sign made by a flyers fan from the 2000s). but there’s also this added edge with him being asian & being called this by mostly white guys in a majority white sport where there’s such a strong constructed racialized gender expression template that all players are expected to conform to. so this rhetoric of pretty implying femininity/un-masculine-ness as an insult plays into the particular racist demasculinization of asian men in the white western cultural imagination; it connotates that shane is less physically capable, less one-of-the-boys, less of a man overall. And then you also have shane seemingly internalizing so much of that like that screenshot i posted earlier where he’s like “omg i am so unmasculine compared to ilya that is a Man.” it could be a fascinating study of internalized racism from this character who sublimates so much as Canada’s Perfect Hockey Player and doesn’t even realize what he’s regurgitating in his own narratives about himself but i know RR literally did not have any of this in mind when she wrote shane being called pretty boy like three times in four chapters
