i'm allergic to the dawg in me

They BOTH literally admitted they were wrong because they were BOTH wrong about things. THEY BOTH grew as people and partners to each other. What the fuck is the actual point of arguing who's right or wrong? because they both were, and that's the fucking point.

I think one aspect of fandom that will always frustrate me is that everyone seems legitimately mad that the long game has a plot at all

People are legitimately mad that Ilya was traded to the Centaurs, and they're a bad team. THERE WAS NO RULE MAKING OTTAWA A BAD TEAM MANDATORY THAT WAS TO ADVANCE THE PLOT

I've said it once, and I'll say it again, y'all keep begging for characters with flaws, but you bitches(gn) can't even handle Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander

Went through a bunch of AI fics that just got exposed, and it turns out I hadn’t actually come across most of them before. But imagine my surprise when I found a few that I’d already tried reading and had given up on because they were either confusing as hell or the writing was just… exhausting.

For me, the characterization in AI fics is always lacking and the logical inconsistencies are rampant, but beside that they’re just… so boring.

A lot of them have this thing where chapters or conversations just go round and round in circles. You know what I mean? Like, nothing is actually happening. The story isn’t progressing. It’s just… words. So many words.

It’s endless internal monologues that don’t really lead anywhere. Characters repeating the same feelings over and over. Why did I read about Ilya making circles on Shane’s hip with his thumb for the 15th time in one chapter? 😭 Or two characters are having an argument and they quite literally just talk past each other. Nobody actually responds to what the other person said. They just launch into another paragraph of vaguely emotional introspection until eventually the scene ends.

The stories are so wordy, but in the most boring way possible. They’re incredibly long and somehow say absolutely nothing. You get the obvious AI tells (the silly similes and overly polished phrasing) but honestly those aren’t even what bothered me the most. It feels like a word salad made out of the most boring words imaginable.

And the funny thing is, real people absolutely can write poorly. The pacing can be rushed, the dialogue can be clunky, the prose can be awkward, the grammar can be a mess. But it’s rarely boring. Fanfic exists because someone got obsessed with an idea or a pairing or a scene and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even when the execution isn’t great, you can usually feel that enthusiasm on the page because you’re reading something someone genuinely wanted to write. With a lot of these probable AI fics, I just don’t feel that. There’s no sense that someone was excited to tell this story. It just feels like text generated to resemble a story.

Yeah I think I've come to this opinion too.

I think it's such an important thing that it's another player. It being Ilya is a problem, obviously, but it being another player is actually the bigger issue than his specific identity imo (though they use that as an excuse).

Because if Shane's gay and he goes out and gets some civilian boyfriend who can just hang out with the WAGs, wear the WAG jacket and function completely identically to a wife (see: Skip) then that's like, not ideal because your captain who you're supposed to idolize is gay but it's ignorable. It's fine. You can just mostly pretend John the accountant is a woman except when the room chirps Shane about his dating life and very progressively remembers to use he/him pronouns. It's fine.

But Shane dating another player?? Well, fuck, that's a completely different dynamic. Who's the WAG? No one's the WAG. What the fuck, Shane. Are they fucking in the showers? Are other players hooking up too? Is this thing I've devoted my life to actually just a bunch of depraved [insert slur] getting off on slamming each other up against the boards? What the actual fuck, Shane?