wild surmise

I explain it first in this post, but I am lying to you constantly in snapping birch. Snapping birch is meant to simulate two competing PR campaigns. The NHL camp is lying to you. The Hollanov camp is lying to you. A lot of the information you receive is going to be inaccurate, biased, or misrepresented in some way. Because this is a fic about the internet, and that is what the internet is like.

A lot of the news sources in snapping birch are very biased in favor of the NHL. Because those news sources all have press passes that the NHL commissioner’s office can and will revoke if they don’t play nice. Or because they’re owned by a megacorp that also owns a fucking hockey team. Or because they’re just a conservative sports blog who’s just pissed that the hockey boys turned out gay. A lot of news sources have reasons to mislead you and they will do so shamelessly. And those news sources all have reasons to rush into the fray early and set the tone. But Camp Hollanov does not have a fucking newspaper at their disposal. They cannot put pressure on the news to report in their favor early, and the most unbiased news sources would be more careful about conducting an investigation in the immediate aftermath. They would be more thorough and follow up on sources because they don’t want to fuck around with a defamation suit from the goddamn NHL. As a result, a lot of the official news articles you see at the beginning of the fic display a heavy bias against Shane, Ilya, and Co.

When you’re reading the news articles in particular, don’t believe everything they tell you, especially if what they’re sharing can be construed as someone’s subjective opinion. Subjective opinions can’t really form the basis of a defamation suit—you need more objective falsehoods for that. “Hayden pike is an unremarkable player” is a subjective opinion. They can get away with saying it even if it’s not really true.

Inspect the language each article uses carefully. Does the author exhibit a bias towards one side? What language do they tend towards using? Is it inflammatory?

What would they have to gain by misleading you?

The article that line is found in is interesting. Because it’s a biased source interviewing an unbiased source. Most of that article is just them quoting a historian who’s spewing straight statistics and historical facts. There’s not much bias in what he’s doing, so the article appears mostly unbiased. But if you look at the scant few paragraphs that aren’t just quotes from the interview, that article displays a heavy bias towards the NHL.

Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

The hockey world took another blow this morning when the NHL’s first openly gay player, Scott Hunter, seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike on the NHL in response to its investigation into fellow gay athletes Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Hollander and Rozanov, who have long marketed themselves as bitter rivals, have been accused of concealing a homosexual affair to rig games against each other.

Immediately, the opening sentence should raise red flags of bias. The strike is framed as a “blow” to the hockey world. It’s framing Scott’s actions and the strike as negative from the outset. It wants you to favor the NHL.

The writer displays an implicit skepticism towards the strike. They’re trying to make the reader doubt its legitimacy and likelihood of success from the jump. Scott Hunter “seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike.” Like. Buddy, there’s no seeming about it. He said straight up “I am not playing until they are allowed to play” in conjunction with another player. The intention’s pretty clear.

But the writer wants you to be sitting there thinking how half-asses this attempt is. Look, we can’t even tell what they’re doing. Meanwhile, the NHL’s actions are framed with a neutral “investigation.” It gets none of the added negative commentary that Scott’s actions get.

Lastly, that first sentence implies the conclusion that it wants readers to draw. First gay player does this for his fellow gay players. Oh, okay. So this is just the alphabet mafia ganging up together.

There’s other descriptors that Scott, Shane, and Ilya have in common. They’re all top NHL players. They’re all NHL captains. They’re all recent Stanley cup winners. But the article doesn’t headline that. They want you to think of this “a gay man is here to back whatever the hell his fellow gays have done.” They want you to doubt the genuineness of Scott from the start.

Then go to the next sentence. The bias is again clear. The writer says that Hollander and Rozanov have marketed themselves as bitter rivals. They did this. It was their choice. It wasn’t their teams, who, you know, are in charge of most of the marketing when it comes to them in their official capacity. It wasn’t the NHL that modeled All stars weekend around their “rivalry” and just sort of told those two 19 year olds to show up to it. No, this was a lie that was personally marketed to you by Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Lie the blame at their feet.

Then you get to the end of the sentence. Shane and Ilya are not in a committed relationship of eight years, no. They’re concealing a homosexual affair to rig games.

The language is purposefully evocative of scandal. It’s not a relationship, it’s an affair. It’s not private, it’s concealed. It is meant to set you against shane and Ilya. From the first paragraph, you should doubt every opinion the writer of that article is sharing with you.

Now jump down to the sentence where Hayden is called unremarkable:

To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action: Hayden Pike, a mostly unremarkable left-wing for the Montreal Metros whose most noteworthy attribute appears to be his friendship with the scandal-plagued Shane Hollander, joined the strike within an hour of Hunter’s declaration.

Again, huge bias from the jump. “To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action—”

Like Jesus Christ, what do you mean to date? This happened today. This happened five hours ago. You probably wrote that paragraph twenty minutes after Hayden joined the boycott. Some NHL players haven’t even woken up yet.

But the article doesn’t frame it like, “This is an unexpected and fast-developing situation. We are waiting to see how the League’s players respond to Hunter’s call to action.” No, it frames it as “oh my oh me, even now, we only have one person and he’s not even that good. Nothing remarkable about him, no. No, no, don’t think about how he’s alternate captain for the team that won back to back Stanley cups not that long ago. The only remarkable thing about him is that he’s friends with Shane Hollander. He’s only in this for his friend.”

Because the strike suddenly looks a lot better if you frame it as, “In a three-hour span this morning, the NHL lost three captains and one alternate captain from its three most recent Stanley Cup winning teams after it launched a hasty investigation into its two most decorated players.”

The words you pick matter. The impressions you leave the reader with matter. The writer of that article wants you to think it’s not a big deal if Hayden Pike strikes because he’s not even that good to begin with, and also he’s only doing this to help his scandal-plagued best friend.

Shane Hollander is not fucking scandal plagued. He’s got the cleanest reputation in the fucking league. This is one of the only scandals he’s ever been in. But they don’t want you thinking “fuck, hollander’s reputation is stellar, could he really do something like this?” No. They want all of those people who didn’t really watch hockey before this and who don’t already have an impression of Shane Hollander to walk away with the idea in their head that Shane Hollander is constantly finding himself in the middle of a scandal, so maybe there’s something to this one.

Shane’s ending in TLG is a humiliation ritual. It’s cruel. And it makes me so goddamn angry.

The books have a recurring problem, and that’s that they want to benefit from the struggles of marginalized individuals but then immediately trivialize those same struggles. Discrimination exists only to the extent of narrative convenience. They can’t come out because of homophobia in the League and the dangers of being a queer person in Russia. But instead of those problems being solved, they’re dropped. Suddenly, it’s not a big scandal to be gay anymore. Suddenly, we’re not even talking about Russia even though nothing has happened to fix Ilya’s immigration.

The book’s handling of race is a big example. Shane’s race only exists as a matter of aesthetics. He’s beautiful in a feminine way. He’s pretty. He’s the prettiest boy in the whole league, actually. They even call him pretty boy, he’s that pretty. He’s hairless and slight like a woman.

His race is there to make him exotic and beautiful. It’s there to lean into stereotypes around the feminization of Asian men in a way that just seems to wholeheartedly embrace the stereotypes instead of comment on them. But his race is never allowed to impact anything other than his beauty. He’s a racial minority who’s just never experienced racism despite occupying an aggressively racist space.

Ilya has a line where he says that Shane’s never seen the “dark side” of hockey the way he has. Systemic racism is not a factor or concern in this statement. If it’s there, his high-profile POC partner just hasn’t seen it, I guess.

But it’s probably not there, because at this point, discrimination is no longer convenient for the narrative to acknowledge. It’s not even that big of a scandal to be gay. The only reason why they can’t come out is because Shane’s so fucking selfish.

Now, we could absolutely interpret Ilya’s words as just him being wrong. Narrators can be unreliable. You can interpret your partner’s facial expressions incorrectly. But we know that interpretation is wrong, because the author herself has said so. Shane does not have any trauma from hockey. It has always been a safe, happy space for him. He just hasn’t seen the darker side of hockey the way his white partner has. It’s all been sunshine and rainbows for Shane, and the eating disorder and the attempt to conversion therapy himself was just for shits and giggles. Shane’s just fucking stupid.

In parts, the book has close brushes with acknowledging that racism exists. During his meeting with Crowell, Shane’s given veiled threats around “inclusivity” and has to wonder if it’s about the fact that he’s gay or Asian. Shane would have no reason to wonder that if he hadn’t at least encountered racism in some capacity. As a result, the book seems to acknowledge that people would want to exclude Shane based on his race would be othered based on race. But that acknowledgment is strictly limited to a backhanded comment in that one scene. The book refuses to acknowledge that Shane would be affected by institutional racism—or even experience it beyond the one scene we got of a single Big Bad Man implying that his race was a bad thing. After all, hockey has only ever been a good thing for Shane. He has no trauma for it whatsoever.

And I know. I know what everyone says. “This is just a romance book, it’s not that deep.” She admits she didn’t do any research into the Japanese Canadian experience before writing Shane and that his race isn’t meant to be a big factor. And to be clear, I do not think Shane’s depiction in the books is intentionally meant to be racist. But I do think it is still racist. You can be racist without meaning to be.

First—why does diversity matter in art?

Art is meant to connect with its audience. It’s an emotional exchange. It’s a mechanism that we use to convey beliefs, feelings, and meaning to each other. And people connect very strongly with art that they see their own experiences in. Characters tend to mean a lot to people when they see some reflection of themselves in them. Those are the characters that help them process their own emotions and feelings and thoughts. You understand yourself better because the art held up a mirror.

For a very long time, the vast majority of art has been aimed at conveying the straight white experience. Minority voices get choked out. Those stories don’t get published because there’s “no market for it.” But there is a market for it. There’s a lot of people who want to see themselves in art, and they are not straight, and they are not white. We’ve got a fuck ton of stories from the perspective of the straight white protagonist on a journey of self discovery, and comparatively few from any other type of person. And the stories that did get to be published were underpromoted, undersold, and swept under the rug. There are a fuck ton of people out there who have never gotten to see their own experiences portrayed in the art they consume.

Like. I personally didn’t even know the word for my own sexuality until I was in high school because I had never once seen it be portrayed in media, and no one was bringing it up during sex ed. And I only learned the word from goddamn fanfiction. I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve actually seen it be portrayed in media since. Both characters mean the goddamn world to me.

In recent years, there’s been a push for more diversity in art. And that’s good. But we as artists need to understand that that’s not a box to check so we get bonus points and a pat on the back. Race is deeper than skin color. If you want to write a person of color, write a person of color. Do not just write a white character and say their skin is darker.

Shane Hollander isn’t written as Wasian. He just isn’t, and we know he isn’t, because the author fucking said she didn’t even try. He’s written as a white man who happens to have a different color skin. His experiences with racism are nonexistent. He never saw the dark side of hockey. Hockey has always been a positive thing for him.

Hockey always being a positive thing for you is—frankly, I think it’s toxic enough in Canadian junior hockey that it’s a pipe dream for any demographic, but if there’s anyone out there managing it, it’s straight white guys. But a queer mixed race autistic guy? The entire goddamn space is hostile to his very existence.

Shane Hollander’s depiction in the books is not real diversity because he’s not written with the actual demographic in mind. His race is irrelevant. It is not going to hold up a mirror on the Japanese-Canadian experience because those experiences were not considered at all in his creation. His race is only there to benefit his overly feminized beauty. Sure, you can have an Asian character, but his skin color will only matter when he’s bent over or on his goddamn knees.

That’s not diversity. That’s a fetish.

The author chose to base her plot on real societal pains. There are real gay men in Russia who are being disappeared and murdered by the state. There are real people of color in Canadian youth hockey who are being discriminated against. There are real queer people in Canadian youth hockey who are being discriminated against because of heated rivalry.

I read an article recently about how the popularity of heated rivalry caused increased incidents of homophobia in junior hockey circles. So many people are looking at them and saying “gay” that it’s causing a surge in homophobic behavior to compensate. Increased use of slurs or homophobic language, decreased ice time for players suspected of being gay. And to be clear, I’m not blaming heated rivalry for this. Bigots will always respond to queer positivity with retaliation. Heated Rivalry is not responsible for the homophobia that followed in its wake—if anything, it makes it more important than ever to tell queer stories and celebrate queer love.

But heated rivalry put a spotlight on the issue. It made the conflict of the first book/season homophobia in hockey culture forcing players to remain in the closet. It stirred up all of this international attention and inadvertently incited retaliation against queer players.

And then, in the same breath, it said that it wasn’t a problem at all, actually. This doesn’t happen. It’s not a big deal. Again and again, the books take the struggles of real marginalized people, benefit from them, and then turn around and say “it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal.”

Shane’s ending is a fucking humiliation ritual. It is needlessly disrespectful. There was absolutely no reason to make it canon that he had to take a pay cut. There was absolutely no reason to not at least make him an alternative captain to acknowledge and respect everything he’s achieved in the sport. It served no narrative purpose. It was just to fucking punish him.

There are two A positions available in NHL hockey. But teams do not need to fill both of them, just one. It would have been the simplest thing in the goddamn world to have an A open for him on the Centaurs, and to give him that when he joined. You don’t even need to take a fucking A from a character to give one to Shane.

Shane’s happily ever after is to strip him of his status, his friends, and his reputation. It is to cut his goddamn pay and take his position and everything he’s worked to achieve in his career. He loses everything except Ilya. But it’s all fine, because Ilya’s got a team and friends for him to have instead. And it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal.

And the final scene reinforces that. It suggests that losing his captaincy is something that hurts Shane. But fucking Ilya, the goddamn empath himself, laughs at him for it. Bood, his new teammate who hasn’t accomplished a third of what he has, laughs at him too and acts like it’s just about an ego trip. Fucking prima donna Shane Hollander. We’re not even going to dignify him with sympathy because he’s not even worth that.

Can you fucking imagine that. Can you fucking imagine having just been through the humiliation of being forced out and spat on by the team you built and your pain is the butt of the goddamn joke? It is such a needlessly, mindlessly cruel scene and I cannot think about it without getting intolerably fucking angry.

The books borrow from the trauma of marginalized individuals, and then in the same breath they minimize that trauma. They say it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal. And the ending of the book is the biggest goddamn showing of that. Shane experiences traumas that are all unfortunately central to minority experiences—he is underpaid, under-appreciated, denied leadership roles he is objectively more qualified for, and completely rejected and outcast by the people he loved. And it is played off as a fucking joke by his own husband and new teammates.

Shane's jaw works. The camera doesn't capture the flint of his eyes, the line that must be creased between his brows. It doesn't matter. Ilya knows the ways Shane will bend. He stares at the screen, hungry, and a thousand miles away Shane gets off the bed.

The view dips, goes dark, then too bright. A clatter; an angle of a bathroom counter. Shane comes back into view, a razor in hand. Hesitates. "Should I--"

"Mm."

The water runs. First the soap, and then the clean stroke of the razor. Shane's hands are steady as he works. He'd had a goal second period: a slick dangle through the D-pair, then a wrister into the top corner. The Raiders in his living room had exploded in appreciative shouts. Ilya had watched, and wanted, his mouth gone wet.

"I should do this for you," Ilya murmurs.

"Yeah?"

"You would like it, I think." He imagines being there, taking Shane's jaw in his hand. "You'd have to be very good." Ilya would be so careful with him. All that tender skin, smooth and pink. Shane's shallow breathing; his glassy eyes.

Shane lowers the razor. There's water dripping onto the counter. "Ilya."

"Touch yourself." He waits for Shane to put the razor down, a quiet click. "No, other hand."

It'll be harder for Shane, and that's what Ilya wants. It takes a second before his hand disappears under the counter. Ilya watches Shane's eyes, the teeth sinking into his lip. The hiss of his exhale, just audible over the call.

"I want to hear you," Ilya says, and finally gets a hand on his own dick. A long lazy stroke, groaning with it. Shane's breath hitches at the sound; his forearm jerks, convulsive. "Make some noise for me, okay?"

Shane does. God, he does.

***

T-1 to puck drop there's a ping on Ilya's phone: Raymonds pulled out of Team Canada. For a moment Ilya just blinks at the text, no context for it, before he remembers the fucking World Championship. Conflicts with the playoffs every year. Shane would have declined the invitation before.

You have not had enough hockey?, Ilya sends, but he knows the answer to that. He looks up where Worlds are this year, mentally marks the time difference between Boston and Bratislava. Then he tucks his phone away and gets ready to destroy Florida.

The Raiders are playing hungry this year. Ilya tries not to dwell on it, but the thought lives in him, bright and sharp-edged. One last time before he leaves. He's been here eight years, called this place home, bled and cried with these men. It's the only way he knows how to say thank you.

***

The first game is a shutout for Boston. Ilya stretches into bed with a satisfying ache all through his muscles. Shane picks up on the second ring. "Hey," he says. "You looked good out there."

"I always look good," Ilya says, preening. "When are you flying out?"

"A few days. I've been trying to pack, but I can't find my neck guard."

"You have one?" Shane doesn't normally wear one. Ilya's thoughts snag on the image of something dark around Shane's throat.

"From the juniors." Shane sounds a little sheepish. "It's comfortable, you know? I might've left it at my parents' place, I'll go over tomorrow."

The words come out without thought. "Wear mine."

Somewhere deep in his closet Ilya has one, too: a strip of fabric and plastic, worn, faded. At some point Ilya had put his name on it, the inside edge where it would lie against the hollow of his throat. Silver against the black: Илья Розанов.

Shane opens his mouth. Closes it. "I can't come to Boston," he says, which is not a no. His eyes are wide on the screen, and Ilya's teeth ache.

"I will send it to you." There's same-day delivery to Canada. The logistics aren't the problem.

"What if--" Shane swallows. "What if it's not comfortable?"

This is how Ilya knows he's won. He can be magnanimous in victory. "If you try and don't like it," he says. "Then fine, don't wear it. You can choose."

Shane's breathing hard; they both know what he'll choose. "Okay," he says. Touches his tongue to his teeth. "Okay."

***

Boston wins the next game at home, then lose one away. A grinding, dirty game, chippy from the start and stretching into 2OT. It's a lucky bounce that wins it for Florida, the kind that sticks in your teeth, and Ilya doesn't get back to the hotel until midnight.

He's exhausted when he crawls into bed. He means to go to sleep, but midnight in Florida is seven where Shane is, which means Canada is playing Norway in ten hours. Have fun, Ilya texts, absently taps open Twitter, and abruptly comes face to face with Shane.

There's a mic in his face. His hair is a sweaty fringe, probably just out from practice. Someone's asking him a question, who the fuck cares, and all Ilya sees is the dark layer of the neck guard under the collar of Shane's jersey.

Fuck. He goes hard in an instant, shocked wide awake. The way it shifts when Shane tilts his head. The bob of his throat. The interview ends, and Ilya hits replay, shoves a hand into his briefs. It's embarassingly fast: the orgasm hits like a train, hard and blinding, before the video finishes playing a second time.

He's still panting when Shane texts back. Next time, and then: Good night :) Love you.

An ocean away Shane is waking up. He'll put on his pads, his skates, his Team Canada jersey. He'll play the same beautiful hockey he's been playing since he was old enough to stand up, and it will be Ilya's name on his neck, pressing against skin. Keeping him safe.

This year, Ilya is going to win the Cup. He's going to win with the C on his chest, Raiders screaming in his ear, and that will be what he remembers when he asks for the trade. He'll walk away, even though it'll kill him, because the other side of this is Shane. Shane, and the slow yielding in him that has him thrusting his own head into a collar.