Be the magic you want to see in the world

but a weibe coach makes sense in the form of this whole narrative i guess! romance, and the subgenre of romance that is the most popular form of fanfic, tend to eschew any story where the Character desires (or, should desire) more beyond the Relationship (and also, like, showing The Relationship off to everyone--romance really loves the 'showing it off' trope, hence weddings and socmed fics and friend groups seemingly having nothing else to talk about but their friend's love/sex life and so many pop queer romances being about coming-out-no-matter-what). weibe coach has a great indie pop score to him, i think! his practice montages probably make suicides (drill) look like fun :)

but it's just soooo funny to imagine shane as the sole realistic sports-person in a room of professional athletes who are Not in the sports-reality. he's the only one that is not Genre Aware. like tom stoppard's rosencrantz and guildenstern. he is like "why are you monologuing, we have an hour of conditioning to get done before scrimmaging". in his head, he's in a 24/7 black and white olympics-broadcast nike ad where everyone is sweating. all the other characters are vacillating between dual modes of nicholas sparks and the proposal. maybe a way to bridge the gap, and a way, i think, for shane and ilya to heal a little bit together, might be by watching love and basketball.

So I think fandom by and large cannot understand the idea that some people are sincerely, genuinely competitive. Some people find competition and self improvement fulfilling and would whither away like husks if they weren't able to compete or hone their skills. There's a such a common take that Shane needs to find the "fun" in hockey again and get his whimsy back in Ottawa or whatever and honestly? Hate it.

And you know I blame Tierney for this. Okay I'm gonna say something: Tierney is not a Shane Understander or whatever you guys say, he's a Shane Rewriter. It's possible to read Shane in the show as this guy trapped in the nexus of the hockey world, drowning in pressure and sad because he misses how fun it used to be. That's Tierney's Shane. The guy who says mournfully "hockey stopped being fun" is not book Shane and it's not My Shane. That's a different character.

Book Shane thrives on competition. He loses his shit going 2OA in the draft despite Montreal clearly being a better choice for him than Boston. These are the kinds of faces Shane is pulling every time he gets silver in anything:

Book Shane very sincerely wants seven cups. He is NOT "here to have a good time" and you know what. GOOD.

Honestly sometimes with this fandom I feel like I'm watching one of those Hallmark movies where the successful career woman falls in love with a lumberjack and is told / realizes that her career doesn't really matter and she should move to the fucking woods and have babies and this is the correct priority set to have. And I don't think the books do this to Shane (he only starts considering Ottawa seriously when Ilya lays out how they can win the cup) but the fandom sure fucking does.

Anyway all of this said, to be fair to Wiebe in the books, he's not *actually* as Ted Lasso as the fandom makes him out to be (and I joke in that direction too). Ilya says he's a good coach and the Cens don't start winning until he comes on board. He's got a different approach but I think if he can convince Shane it works Shane will get on board. Even if Shane's kind of gritting his teeth at some of it.

You've unlocked something for me with the whole "showing it off" trope. That's a whole nexus of fantasies in fics that often tick me off because they feel....weird and unreal and I think also because they're getting at an iddy pleasure (everyone seeing and admiring your relationship) that I just don't experience as someone on the aro spectrum. While I enjoy romance, I'm not into the whole centrality of romance thing and I definitely don't like the framing of it as like, an accomplishment that everyone else has to stop and stare at (feels very Disney love story coded to me. like oh look at what I got, see how my status has improved via my relation to a man kind of logic.) And I agree HR fandom is OBSESSED with doing that.

However, I keep having this scene running through my mind, of Shane just sitting with Brian one day, and he just goes "Huh, I was 16 years old" and Brian's not listening so he asks Shane to repeat himself, and Shane just says "I was 16, how you not tell/how could you think I was older". It maybe doesn't start a fight, but it would maybe be a moment where Shane starts to realise that Brian isn't as great as Shane thought he was. Like as a person. Brian, of course, has his own justifications that he's told himself again and again.

Maybe Yuna sends Shane a photo of himself, from when he was 16, taken sometime before he went to the collage party and Ilya sees it and goes all cuteness aggression over baby faced Shane Hollander, all soft checks and not quite cut jaw, it makes Shane realise just how young he looked back then. For some reason that moment, in my head, feels really cathartic.

I get so excited whenever you post an update, and the snippets format makes it flow better, as a story, I think. I'm so excited to see the whole story~ Thank you for posting them!

LOVE this moment of quiet realization because like.... Shane knows on some level that the age gap was an issue. It felt wrong to him the night they met but he pushed the feeling away because Brian was sweet to him after and he didn't have any other place to put this newly discovered interest in men.