Here, Queer, Weird

Seeing that performance recognized on one of Canada’s biggest stages feels incredibly rewarding. Williams’ win is also historic in its own right. At just 25 years old, he became the youngest performer ever to win Best Lead Performer, Drama, at the Canadian Screen Awards, accomplishing the feat on his very first nomination.”

- Q+ Magazine

After a while of talking about how Anya acts the trainer says there’s nothing to worry about, Anya likes Shane just fine, it’s just that she sees him as the boss and is acting accordingly

And Ilya is like. But. I’m the one who adopted her? And raised her before Shane got here?? And the trainer is just like yeah well she sees you more like an equal. And Ilya is like WAIT she thinks Shane is in charge of both of us?? And the trainer is just like well do you interact in a way that would make her think that?

Ilya’s life flashes before his eyes as he thinks of all the times Shane has come over with a snack for Ilya and a treat for Anya, or all the times Shane has announced they’re all going for an after dinner walk, or pets Ilya’s hair and tells him he did a good job at practice, or the fact that he uses the same warning tone with Anya when she misbehaves as he does with Ilya when he’s causing problems on purpose

The other SAPs (Spouses and Partners, including Harris) all expect that Shane and Ilya may be uncomfortable with the amount of lighthearted complaining-about-our-partners that goes on in the groupchat, like won't that be weird for you? since you're both here? Only for Shane and Ilya to be fucking thrilled at the chance to take their weird fighting/flirting foreplay to a new platform. They both start texting as if their husbands are other people who are not also in the chat and complain aggressively about each other all of the time. At least four times it turns into some kind of weird infidelity roleplay and everyone else is like ????

Shane and Ilya are very happy to be on the same team for, like, a lot of reasons, but about midway through their first season together the novelty wears off and they both kind of go wait :( I miss competing against you :( where's the fire? where's the drama? :( And the team is forced to invent little ways for the two of them to compete against each other in practice as Enrichment In Their Enclosure. Wyatt is most successful at this by just keeping track of who scores on him at practice, which turns into Hollanov metaphorically beating up Wyatt for fun at the end of every session. This is a fucking grind for Wyatt but does end up turning him into the best damn goalie in the league.

Everyone places bets on how long it'll take for the honeymoon phase to wear off and for Shane and Ilya --- who are, between working together and living together, essentially never apart --- to get sick of one another. But as it turns out, 12 years of long distance and utter secrecy has lowkey made them codependent. They don't get sick of each other, they just start engaging in low-grade psychological warfare over the laundry and then fucking it out. Everyone is confused about how they never seem to have issues until Luca Haas discovers their freaky codependent nonsense by accidentally overhearing them on a plane ride (his earbuds were in, they thought he was listening to music, HE WAS NOT) and is traumatized. His thousand-yard stare tells everyone else to just accept it and not ask any questions whatsoever.

Shane will always know that there were lots of other closeted MLH players struggling with internalized homophobia who didn't resort to the tactics that Troy did. those players include Shane himself, who is gay AND a person of colour, and Shane's husband, whose literal life would have been in danger in Russia if he were outed. so Shane will never ever sympathize with Troy. he might understand why Troy did what he did, but that will never excuse it.

and Troy. Troy just has to live with that. like a lot of us, Troy has to accept that self-hatred and internalized homophobia don't excuse being bigoted and hateful towards others. the hurt you caused them is not negated by the fact that you were hurting, too. and part of growing as a person and trying to be better is learning to live with the guilt, shame and regret. you don't get to make yourself feel better by being absolved. you can try to be better going forward. you can try to spend the rest of your life doing more good than the harm you did in your past. you can try to forgive yourself. but you can't erase it.

‘Cause like, our boy is autistic, which makes him more sensitive to a lot of stuff, but also on a very real note, he doesn’t emotionally process most of his life. I say this as someone who is both medicated and therapized, but I still cannot emotionally process things unless I work through it out loud (AuDHD, baby!). Therefore, Shane internalizes EVERYTHING. He won’t sob or act out or be dramatic, he’ll just go quiet (and then MAYBE he’ll cry if he’s alone, maybe).

Shane hires people to manage things for him, yes, but when it comes to himself, he will Handle That Shit. Yep, it’s not healthy or wise most of the time (his ED, obsessive training, etc), but that’s how Shane regulates his feelings and emotional wellbeing. Again, he doesn’t do regulation well, but rigid routines and rules make him stable enough to present as a functional human (me too, Shane).

Shane doesn’t need Ilya to tell him how to think or feel. He does need to be poked at sometimes to actually talk about things, but Shane will not be the kind of person who has explosively emotional breakdowns at the drop of a hat. Between masking his autism and strict media training, he will never be that kind of person.

It’s also important to note that Shane grew up in a safe, loving home. His parents (from what we know) have a very healthy relationship. Yuna, while a little overbearing, is stable and controlled (behaviour that Shane likely mimics) and David is a very calm, relaxed guy that balances out his wife’s intensity. It’s very likely that Shane rarely witnessed any fights and if he did, it’s unlikely they were highly emotional displays.

Between them, Ilya will be the one who’s prone to emotional breakdowns. With the C-PTSD of his childhood finally catching up and his battle with depression, Ilya will struggle to regulate or push it down, especially since he’s in a place where he has a good support system. It’s part-brain chemistry and part learned behaviour bc his father was obviously abusive (explosively, so, from what we can glean about both Ilya & his mother) and he watched his mother struggle with depression. Ilya can put on a face until he explodes because he has no other way of expression.

Ryan being an enforcer is not just aesthetic characterization, it is the central thesis of the novel.

As someone who comes from pro wrestling fandom rather than hockey fandom, a lot of the small details in the Game Changers series stood out to me immediately. In Game Changer, Scott casually taking steroids to heal faster and ignoring medically recommended recovery time after injuries is treated as basically normal athlete behavior. In Heated Rivalry, Ilya’s fake teeth are framed as almost a funny little character detail. My reaction to both was literally just “yeah, it really be like that.” Because once you spend enough time around contact sports, you realize the destruction of athlete's bodies is completely normalized.

Tough Guy is the first book in the series where Reid stops treating those details as background flavor and basically holds up a sign saying “hey maybe we should talk about what this sport actually does to people.”

There is a reason Ryan is not another superstar protagonist like Scott, Shane or Ilya. Reid specifically makes him an enforcer: a player whose primary purpose is intimidation and violence rather than technical skill. Ryan exists in hockey as a deterrent first and an athlete second. He gets traded constantly, struggles to maintain relationships, has almost no close friends, isolates himself from teammates, and exists in a role that modern hockey has slowly been phasing out over the last fifteen years.

After finishing the book I ended up going down a massive research rabbit hole about enforcers. I watched hour-long videos and read articles about concussions, opioid addiction, chronic pain, depression, memory loss, and the long-term psychological effects of repeated head trauma. And weirdly, it reminded me a lot of “hosses” in pro wrestling.

“Hoss” is a derogatory wrestling term for those giant steroid-abusing wrestlers who are not necessarily technically skilled performers, but get pushed because they are physically imposing and function as spectacle. They are valued more for size and intimidation than actual technical ability. Which is why the comparison immediately clicked for me: enforcers occupy almost the exact same role in hockey. They are not there because they are the best players on the ice, they are there to absorb punishment, intimidate opponents, and protect the stars.

And importantly, neither archetype started disappearing because people suddenly developed concern for athlete safety. Enforcers became obsolete because hockey got faster and more skill-focused. Hosses became less prominent because wrestling audiences increasingly started valuing technical ability and athleticism over sheer size. In both cases, the industry moved on because the role stopped being profitable, not because anyone cared about the long-term damage done to the people filling it.

Which is also why I think Fabian gets misunderstood by a lot of readers. People reduce him to “annoying pushy twink,” which, to be fair, he absolutely is at points in the story. But Fabian is also one of the only people in Ryan’s life who fully recognizes how horrifying Ryan’s situation actually is. Ryan minimizes everything because hockey culture teaches players to normalize pain, isolation, and permanent injury. Fabian looks at Ryan and sees a man having panic attacks on airplanes, self-isolating across nine different teams, and destroying his body for a league that would replace him in six months without blinking.

And the novel itself reinforces that point constantly. Reid literally includes another former enforcer who died from opioid abuse and whose funeral nobody attended. That is not random tragic backstory flavor text, that is the thematic core of the book.

It's just a day of cute posts, and Ilya keeps checking to see if Yuna's post has gone live because those baby Shane pictures always hit like crack and Shane so rarely lets his parents pull them out.

Delightfully, Yuna chose one of Ilya's favorites--a VERY nineties newborn photoshoot where Shane already has a shock of black hair sticking up in all directions, and a pinched little expression on his face. He is all cheek and eyebrow, and Yuna is twenty-four and has bangs and denim overalls, and it is so nineties.

"Yuna sent Harris the Sears photo," Ilya tells Shane, giddy.

"Oh great," Shane groans.

"People are saying you make the same face when you argue with ref."

"I don't argue with the refs," Shane mutters.

"True, you have very smart and sexy Captain husband to do this for you now."

Ilya scrolls through the rest of the pictures--not to be outdone, Yuna has provided more than most. Shane in the Metros onesie that Ilya knows he was brought home from the hospital in. Yuna holding a year-old Shane in her lap, her narrow frame nearly dwarfed by his chubby body. Yuna with little Shane at what is clearly a Centaurs game, circa 1995.

The next one--he sort of wasn't expecting, but he isn't completely surprised either. His own face, smiling politely next to Yuna and David the day he flew out to Ottawa to sign some paperwork for his contract with the Centaurs. It was only the second or third time he'd seen them without Shane, and maybe the first picture they'd taken together as well. He'd been carefully cropped out of previous ones.

"Oh, that's nice," Shane mumbles. He's stopped pretending he's not looking over Ilya's shoulder, watching him scroll.

The next picture is of their wedding day, unsurprisingly--one of several pictures from that day wherein Shane and Yuna had matching misty eyes and Ilya was actually just visibly crying with his face pressed to someone's shoulder.

Lastly, Yuna in her jersey--custom-made, Hollander-Rozanov on the back and 24|81 below. She's smiling over her shoulder at some game or other, proud of it.

Then there is one more picture. Yuna's hand in frame, holding a wallet-size picture of Irina Rozanova as she was thirty-two years ago, young and smiling with a baby Ilya pressed to her cheek.

It's one of only a few pictures that Ilya knows exist of his mother, and he thought the only copy was in a frame in the room he's currently sitting in.

"Why does Yuna have tiny picture of Mama?" Ilya murmurs.

"Oh." Shane rubs the back of his neck. "She, uh, she does this thing--she has pictures of all of us in her purse. It's, like, so that she has us with her. She asked me for Irina's picture a little while ago."

In the picture, Yuna is holding Irina's picture up next to the Jumbotron broadcasting Ilya's grinning face from the season intro video.

"Oh," Ilya murmurs. "That's..."

"If you think it's weird--"

"No," Ilya snaps. "Don't even finish that sentence, Hollander. I love it."

The caption of the post reads:

Yuna Hollander, mother of #24 and mother-in-love to #81! Mama Hollander is a reformed Metros fan and a proud Ottawan who can almost always be seen in the crowd at Canadian Tire Centre cheering on the home team. We love you and your boys, Yuna! Happy Mother's Day!

Don’t send actors fics

Don’t give them explicit art ever

Don’t tag them in rpf questions or theories

Don’t try to bring them into fandom drama of any kind

Don’t hold them responsible for what the producers and writers decide

Don’t tell the show runners how to run the show.

Don’t show up on set and threaten suicide if you don’t get to meet your fave. (Yes this has happened).

Don’t harass actors. THEY ARE NOT THEIR CHARACTERS.

Don’t fish for spoilers at cons.

And this kid did not have a lot of friends. His teachers thought he wasn't very smart because he made everything about hockey. And they dismissed him when he struggled with math and reading. "if you could just put some of your hockey energy into school, then maybe you would get better." His classmates laughed at the hockey themed valentines day cards him and his mom had to hand make because nowhere was selling hockey themed valentines day cards. And they laugh at him when he repeats the same thing over and over about "getting pucks deep, pucks deep, pucks deep." When he would play all by himself on the yard pretending he was skating, picking up any big stick he could find on the ground, they'd push him around. "Can we play? We'll be defenders" and ram him and take his stick. And he'd just go through all the penalties they would have just gotten over and over again until he can calm down. He celebrated every birthday at the ice rink in his full hockey gear even though he didn't really have classmates showing up. Not for lack of invite.

And his parents try to steer him away from it. They try and watch new sports, they try and get him to watch kids shows, get into things kids his age like, but all he wants to do is watch reruns of the metros cup wins. Wants to wear his hat backwards with his black shirt because that's how Shane looks in the interviews. Memorizes the answers he gives in french even though this kid never learned french in school. And its useless. This kid is hooked and they just kinda have to ride this wave.

So when the announcement comes for the Game Changers camp, these parents do absolutely everything to get him there. They don't care what it takes, this is like a light for all of them really in the midst of all the bullying at school and the meltdowns at home and the obsessive routines that fall apart if even one thing is out of place.

And they explain to the camp that their boy might have a hard time. Might need some time to adjust. That he struggles with math, and reading, and can get caught up in all the rules sometimes. Preemptively trying to say "he's not a bad kid. he's trying his best."

So at the end of the first day, his parents are prepared for a meltdown. Its new, its a lot of kids, the rink can get loud and cold, and he doesn't always do well with transitioning out of hockey. He's hard to pull off the ice at home.

And they can see some upset under the surface when they arrive. He clearly doesn't want to go home. Thats no surprise.

What is a surprise is the way Shane gets down on one knee next to where the boy is sitting upset on the ground. He doesn't move to touch him. He just gets down and the two of them softly have a chat. The boy is tugging on his hair and nodding at what Shane says. And eventually he stands and the parents walk over to them.

"You must be the parents. Its good to meet you," Shane says softly. "I was just going over some things about tomorrow. So that way he would know the schedule."

And they can see their son isn't quite happy, still clearly exhausted. He'll nap in the car and be grumpy at dinner. But he is much more regulated than they expected him to be.

"And, I was telling him about my schedule when I go home. About getting some quite time, making sure I can decompress. I think that's what all good hockey players need, right buddy?"

"Right buddy," he repeats.