Forks and Hope

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

#260: Sunshower Kiss

if i'm being honest one of my biggest gripes when i first read tlg was ilya's depression plot and how very surface-level his depression was explored. i also upon first reading actually really liked the Would You Choose Me fight bc it was the first time there was significant #drama in what was otherwise, To Me, a pretty boring novel, plot-wise. and i think that is because of the aforementioned surface-levelness. BUT. if i were to be generous and treat the story like its own entity that maybe was just not fully manifested to its potential, with all the events staying the same, there's a way to argue that what was unexplored in the underlying emotional reality of ilya's depression is the missing link that makes the fight and the central conflict of the novel make way more sense.

what bothered me the most about how ilya's depression was talked about (keep in mind i am a #therapist with strong anti-medical model opinions who is incapable of being chill about how mental health is treated in media) is that it's essentially presented as this Disease he inherited from his mother that he has no control over. and i understand that that is in fact how he would see it. i also think that that idea is a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps him stuck in it, and i think that also makes perfect sense. he's terrified of ending up like his mother, so he fights against his own sadness, which just makes it worse, making him depressed and more likely to end up like his mother. you can see this when he confesses to shane that he is afraid it will get worse and there will be nothing shane can do (i'm afraid of putting you in the position i was in, watching my mother slip away from me while i was completely helpless and alone) and in the way he keeps insisting that he can Fix Himself to be good enough for shane, and in the way he immediately spirals upon having One Bad Feeling post-engagement when he loses a game and gets passively suicidal on the plane ride home (i thought i had beat my sadness with the power of gay love but it came back which means i have no control over my emotions and i'll end up like my mother or burden shane trying not to so i might as well just die now actually). there’s also another layer to this - if it wasn’t purely a Disease She Couldn’t Control, if she had any agency whatsoever, then that means she chose to leave ilya. which means ilya wasn’t enough for her. giving him a core fear of not being enough that is once again reflected in his relationship with shane (though of course he will likely not unpack this for many years bc of his need to keep his mother on a pedestal.)

But! none of that is really explicitly Addressed in the text. ilya's therapist does not really do a lot to call out this belief ilya has that he is Doomed to end up like his mother, which ends up kind of leaving ilya's reading of his depression as this purely biological inherited disease as the accepted truth. the reason ilya’a depression stays surface level is probably because the text is a romance novel that is not equipped to delve deep into mental health. but it also has the consequence of making shane and ilya's core conflict seem rather emotionally context-less, and the whole Would You Choose Me fight seem kind of random and out of character.

ilya's core fear is that he is going to emotionally burden shane, that he will be more than shane can handle and that he's not worth what shane will have to do to handle him. this manifests as ilya keeping his emotional needs to himself, especially ones that he believes will conflict with shane's and potentially cause shane to realize he'd be better off without him. the reason ilya wants to be out more than shane is because shane is the only person ilya has really let in emotionally (going off book canon so ignoring svetlana here) which means All of his emotional needs (which I think he is mostly attempting to satisfy via sex, which of course only kinda works as a stopgap) are going to one Very Secret basket. while being a Secret feels kinda hot and fun to shane, to ilya it feels like a punishment, proof that he can only ever be partially happy, and a reminder that his very existence is a burden to the one he loves most. (i think he also has a bit of emotional object impermanence: he's finally loved, but no one is allowed to know, so when shane isn't with him, is it even real?)

shane's core fear is that he's going to be Found Out. that he's going to lose control of his life, fall from the pedestal and be damned to hell. not really by ilya, at this point (ilya already Found Him Out by loving what was his most shamed aspect of self, his Sexual Freak Self) but by The World (which, In My Annoying Therapist Opinion, i think is likely an extrapolation of an emotional reality his parent's - probably mostly yuna - unintentionally laid on him). Hockey, and hockey culture, for shane, represents The World. this also makes more sense when we add the context of shane's autism. he likely, from a young age, has felt like The World is a place he doesn't really belong. Hockey is the one place in the world where he undeniably Does belong, because no matter your social failings, no one can argue you're not supposed to be there when you're literally that good. so his entire sense of belonging in the world hinges on keeping himself good enough so that Hockey will approve of him no matter what.

i think this changes a bit upon being in a relationship with ilya, who is maybe the first person in shane's life to love him for more than what he can perform - to love him inspite of (or because of) what he perceives as his failings and imperfections. i think this challenges shane's idea of what belonging is, but it takes some time for him to accept it. he's spent his entire life sacrificing himself to the god of Hockey just to feel belonging - only to find out it wasn't real belonging. (keep in mind when i say Hockey with capital H i'm talking about the world that hockey represents for shane, not the sport itself, which you could argue he'd love regardless). i think for most of tlg, he's still in the bargaining stage where he wants to believe that Hockey really does love him, and he's not ready to risk losing its approval.

So! when ilya asks Would You Choose Me Over Hockey, i don’t think he’s Actually asking shane to give up the sport he loves or his career. what he's really asking is - if loving me means losing their approval, is it worth it? if it happens - when it happens - will you regret loving me for what it made you lose? am i exactly the burden i've always feared i am? i think it's also a bit of projected resentment of the things he preemptively gave up (sports car collection, friends he can be out with, the entirety of his boston career) to be with shane - which shane never asked him to do! but he did, both for the sake of practicality but also for the sake of Making Himself Less Of A Burden, a resentment that's really towards himself for minimizing his own needs because he always insists he's Fine. and because shane is often too distracted by his own anxiety to really question it, he unknowingly enables ilya in lying about being Fine.

i also think this is why shane proposing after the plane crash and deciding he wants to come out - while narratively feels a bit lazy - CAN make sense if we read it as shane realizing he was never actually in control anyway - no matter how perfect he makes himself, he could lose everything in a second. being forced to confront the idea of actually losing ilya permanently, to death, forces him to contend with the fact that the belonging he thought he had with Hockey is actually not belonging, or at the very least, completely and devastatingly pales in comparison to what ilya means to him.

(and then of course to top it all off - shane's right! his worst fear comes true! he does fall from the pedestal and get condemned to Hockey Hell! and i do think that would cause a Lot of grief and anger! but that ultimately he wouldn't regret it, he would just be Pissed The Hell Off. which i am naively hoping we will get to see in unrivaled or at least in the show but that's to be determined.)

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

May I present the best apple:

Black man named Daniel Cressy!! (23) in Louisiana has been the first person cured!! (Happy Black News!!!)

like. hayden doesn't know ilya. hayden knows rozanov.

and what he knows of rozanov is stuff like shane saying he offered his condolences after his father's death, hayden saying "oh, i should do that," and then being told that rozanov was offered this kindness and told shane to fuck off. and i get why shane was so protective about not wanting to let anyone know there's anything but rivalry between them but still!! hayden isn't getting ilya ever! he's getting rozanov.

like as a friend, if my friend (who is funny and snarky in private but tends to be pretty quiet and reserved in larger settings and doesn't assume that he has a space in places socially and has to be directly invited) said he's suddenly dating someone with a reputation for sleeping around, starting fights, and being cocky and smug all the time...yeah. i'd have concerns. i'd be on edge about it and very ready to be critical of the guy because this is my FRIEND. i care about them. i want them to be happy and with someone who treats them right, and EVERYTHING i know about this guy is that he's an asshole who responds even to nice gestures with being prickly.

and yeah, there is a chance for hayden to observe what's actually going on between the two of them in private...but ilya also pokes back. and i get why! guy is coming at him with all of this energy and clear doubt about him being worthy of shane! who WOULDN'T get snarky back. but if i already have doubts about this guy and then everything i see even in private is that he's the same asshole i already thought he was...not exactly encouraging me to jump on board with the whole thing.

But they can't ever leave it at that, and say that this isnlt their preference, and move on. Instead they then need to write a long in-depth analysis of all the different components of the cake and describe how the ganache is not a good pie crust, there arent any cherries and the syrup is all spongy. also it's way too tall and doesnt fit in a pie tin.

online, by far the worst offender of this is every review that expects a piece of fictional media to have coherent "worldbuilding" and then docks points for how many alleged "inconsistencies" there are in the world model the reviewer attempted to construct, as if the most important marker of quality is how easily something can be transformed into a major media franchise like star wars or tolkien.

But to answer your question directly, no it absolutely does not matter. You've been trained by star wars to expect that the "worldbuilding" behind a narrative is and must be coherent.

if you want 50s scifi but don't like Heinlein, you could always give Asimov a try, The Gods Themselves is a pretty good story if you want to analyze the setting of the story specifically, especially the third part, though I'd warn you that if you deconstruct the socioeconomics of his moon colony it's probably not going to be coherent. I, Robot is not Asimov at his best per se but it is a very good example of the "linked vignettes" i was discussing in my original post. Lovecraft's later and longer works also fit in the "slightly more complex scifi/horror" category and are training wheels for weaning you off of worldbuilding addiction so long as you avoid the "mythos" of later authors, but i hesitate to recommend them because while I enjoyed them at 14 or so, they're just not that well-written and he is often kinda racist (though he got a bit better later in life).

Moving outside the genre and towards more mature fiction, Thomas Pynchon tends to be pretty popular with people who like science fiction, so if you want a book that's much more unambiguously anti-Nazi than Starship Troopers, Gravity's Rainbow is a good bet. Something a little more modern and a bit of a lighter read in the same sort of vein of "literary not-quite-scifi" is White Noise by Don DeLillo. And I suppose Infinite Jest fits the same category too, though David Foster Wallace's writing style is not to everyone's taste.