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Shane Hollander is lowkey the most heartbreaking character of all time and I’m glad Jacob Tierney recognized that because Rachel Reid certainly didn’t.
Shane’s comphet and compartmentalization of his sexuality and true self outside of a few frantic encounters with Ilya a few times a year is devastating. His refusal to tell anyone in his life - his teammates, his parents, friends he doesn’t have - what he truly wants because he can’t even admit it to himself.
Everything is hockey, everything is brand deals. No, he can’t have a glass of wine because he can’t do anything that’ll potentially impact his performanceon the ice. He can’t date because everything is about his career and when it’s the off season, he locks himself away at his cottage where he spends most of his time alone. Hayden is the closest thing he has to a friend, but if Shane can’t even admit to himself how he feels, how is he supposed to confide in Hayden?
He can have sex with Ilya behind closed doors without words exchanged, but the second it begins to resemble something real, when Ilya starts trying to figure out what Shane really wants, Shane panics and forces himself into a relationship with a woman, because what he has with Ilya doesn’t make sense or fit into any version of himself that he can foresee.
One of the best decisions Jacob Tierney made in the show was showing Shane be intimate with Rose and frame it as devastating and stomach churning. Shane’s performance of heterosexuality is painful. It actively holds him back from being his true self. The book glosses over it and mentions Shane has shitty sex with Rose a couple of times, and doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about how Shane, a gay man in love with another man, forcing himself to have sex with a woman to perform heterosexuality would be extremely difficult and unpleasant for him.
The scene in the show is unpleasant and heartbreaking. We see and feel how much Shane doesn’t want to be doing this, but he feels like he has to.
Shane’s break up with Rose is 10 tens more emotional and impactful in the show than it is in the book, because Shane’s clumsiness with women is not portrayed as a punchline. We see him processing in real time that he can’t just keep faking it. Shane thinks he is good at hiding and compartmentalizing, but it only took Rose two sexual encounters to figure him out. He’s forced to reckon with the fact that he can’t just keep ignoring who he really is and what he really wants.
The scene where we finally get a glimpse into just how painful everything is for Shane is another scene that’s not in the book - Shane’s conversation with Yuna outside.
“I tried. I tried really hard. I just can’t help it.”
Now that he’s finally starting to let go of the performance and separation he’s tried to maintain all of these years - Shane Hollander Hockey Player versus Shane Hollander The Person - he can admit that there’s nothing he can do to change who he is or how he feels, but that will never erase the pain of all those years of trying, of trying to be who his mother wanted him to be and who the MLH wanted him to be. He denied himself the ability to be fully human and fully himself for so long and he’ll never get that time back.
I never want to hear the words “Shane doesn’t have trauma” ever again.
So … I saw Rachel Reid’s Discord screenshots, and later that very disappointing response video (and since then the IG story, which did not address the problems).
Wasn’t feeling up to posting myself at first, but I did see the reactions to the screenshots, especially so many upsetting posts from people who see themselves in Shane Hollander for so many different reasons, and were hurt by the attitudes shown towards neurodivergence, EDs, the very real fears around coming out, the consistent lack of awareness about what being POC means through all of this. I’m one of those people, too, because her comments hit me a little too hard as a neurodivergent person.
And then the jokey dismissal of that was … yeah. So here’s another overly long deep dive I’ve spent too long overthinking.
I began my S2 hopes and fears post the other day by saying I go back and forth on the intentionality in the GCU books, especially on Shane’s TLG characterisation. Well, I’m a little clearer on that specific issue now, given that the author seems to have explicitly spelled out her intentions, and unfortunately has justified some less charitable interpretations of her writing decisions.
NEURODIVERGENCE
What did the screenshots say about Shane?
RR said she “REALLY regrets suggesting that he may be autistic”, before immediately (in what may appear to be a contradiction, but isn’t! more on that later) saying she thinks he probably is on the spectrum. For context: she has said on a number of occasions that she realised Shane was on the spectrum between HR & TLG. She has received a great deal of praise for the autism portrayal in the show and Hudson’s acting. In the last few days even, she’s been part of an autism fundraiser.
This statement has to be then taken in the context of a number of other things she’s said about Shane in these screenshots :
“Shane’s biggest flaw is that he can be focused to the point of being self-absorbed”.
Screenshot: Shane’s response to the plane texts: “Huh, weird” [RR commentary: “what an idiot”].
Shane not telling JJ - RR commentary: “Shane is stupid”.
On the foundations of TLG: “Going into TLG my main notes were all the ways Shane had been selfish. It was important to hold on to that. It’s not an impossible thing to overcome, but it needed to create a conflict.”
In addition to the screenshots, the TLG notes list: “Ilya is very intelligent. Shane is not.” “Ilya is very observant and perceptive. Shane barely notices his own feelings”.
And, the recent Swooon article: “Shane’s a little bit selfish in this book, or he’s a little bit self-centered, a little bit unaware … He needs things spelled out for him, and Ilya is not spelling them out. I wasn’t too surprised that people didn’t like Shane’s behaviour in the book, but it was kind of necessary for the story. He had to have an arc where he figures out what he’s doing wrong and fixes it.”
Basically, you have a character who you yourself now believe is autistic, and who you’re going to write as such. And then you set out to - in your words - make his “selfishness” the primary conflict of your two-person romance. And the way you do that is by conflating “selfishness” and “self-absorbedness” and “what he’s doing wrong” with needing things to be clear and being hyper-focused and sticking to a plan. And in addition, your guiding notes for the book are also how he is not “very intelligent” and “barely notices his own feelings”.
And in your cutesy “apology” video to your fictional character - not to the fans hurt by all this - all you say is you know you shouldn’t joke about him being stupid and an idiot because he’s autistic. Which you, incidentally, wish you hadn’t publicly said explicitly.
There are many conclusions to draw here, and again, I’m trying very hard not to draw the most uncharitable ones. But it is bloody difficult not to, actually.
Because how it looks is that you’re calling your character selfish, self-absorbed and unintelligent in a way that you are linking directly to the very same qualities that you have written into him as a person on the spectrum. That the logical progression from what you’re saying is that what he’s doing wrong in his own love story is being autistic. That you seem to not have any good things to say as well about him or his autistic qualities. That you’re dismissing it all as just jokes when there is visibly more to it.
And, also, that the only reason you think it might be bad to call him all those things out loud is because he’s autistic - which you wish you hadn’t explicitly said. Is this because then you can’t use those qualities to call him selfish and unintelligent? Because then you have to take accountability and not just praise for autism representation? Because then it becomes not just about this fictional character who’s fictionally forgiven you, but all the very real ND people who feel gutted at having harmful attitudes reinforced?
I get that Shane is fictional, and I get that I’m over-attached to this character. But I think it’s safe to say fandom spaces in general have a lot of real neurodivergent people, and perhaps this fandom even more than most, and that the show and the books have reaped the benefit of that in every way possible, and a lot of it is because of people seeing themselves in Shane and Ilya. And you cannot claim that huge support and praise for inclusivity and representation and then deflect the very real impact when you fuck up as well.
QUEER AND ASIAN REPRESENTATION
It’s not just ND representation that’s being let down, but how it intersects with the rest of Shane’s life: a biracial, closeted gay man in a deeply conservative field.
When she says he’s “stupid” for not telling JJ, and especially “selfish” (because that one wasn’t a joke). She doesn’t specify how he’s selfish, but as we know, the conflict in TLG is (a) about him not guessing how Ilya is feeling and (b) not wanting to come out sooner. Calling the latter selfish is to me a vast oversimplification of the lives of queer people and how they navigate coming out. It also completely ignores - again - the pressure he would already be facing as a POC: why an anxious, neurodivergent, innately private person would have extra reason to be apprehensive about coming out in a world where he would already be facing microaggressions, stereotyping, model minority pressure, outright racism.
I live in a place that’s fairly liberal (nowadays, anyway - same-sex marriage and abortion have only been legalised within the last decade). I’m thinking of my friends who haven’t come out, because they fear being treated differently by their family and friends and colleagues, because they worry about the harmful attitudes and covert discrimination that still exist, and because it is their decision to come out when they are good and ready. I can totally understand if being at different points in that journey causes friction within a relationship, but I would never call anyone “selfish” or “stupid” for whatever point they’re at in their lives.
Shane, as a gay Asian man in an extremely white, conservative and heteronormative field, would be feeling even more immense pressure at the prospect of coming out. RR can say he’s unaware of the “dark side” of hockey and has no “trauma”, but her books are based directly on the NHL and on the real world. He has every reason to be anxious.
And then it makes me look twice at how the story she wrote actually bears his fears out, even if the lack of attention given to the Montreal locker room pre-Fanmail ends up framing it as being about Ilya instead of about homophobia. When he’s traumatically outed, and when he suffers the final humiliation of tripping and being held responsible for losing the playoffs against his partner, his team - including JJ - immediately question his integrity. We are told the fallout is vicious online (though barely shown it). He loses his team, his captaincy, his first line position. Most painfully of all, his reputation has taken what we can only imagine is a lasting hit, through no fault of his own.
As I’ve said before, I have tried to take the “hero’s arc” argument in good faith, that Shane’s journey is about learning to prioritise love, being true to yourself, standing up for your loved ones, etc (there are questions that can be asked over that framing, but that’s for another time). But given that those screenshots and that interview now explicitly say Shane’s “selfishness” specifically was set up to be the major conflict in the novel, it is also now harder not to interpret his outing and subsequent bringing-down as him also being narratively punished for hesitance that would in reality be logically inextricable from his being a neurodivergent anxious gay Asian man. His “selfishness” is corrected for him. And it’s immediately reframed as a happy ending. It just all shows a staggering lack of awareness of multiple parts of his identity.
(I’m not going to talk much about the “Ilya consider Svetlana” and the Ilya/Shane/Svetlana threesome comments, because I do doubt she actually wants that. But it’s a joke in pretty poor taste, given that a major part of Shane’s journey throughout HR is (a) realising he’s gay and not bi and (b) confronting his own insecurity that Ilya could opt for a straight-passing life without him.)
EATING DISORDER
A last screenshot: “the performance enhancing diet (which we all know is ridiculous) is mostly in the book as another thing that Shane focuses too much on instead of actually important things (like his very sad boyfriend)”.
Feeling guilty for tasting traces of lemonade on your boyfriend’s lips is not just a performance-enhancing diet. It does not matter if she intended to write it as an eating disorder, it categorically is. It actually makes sense that Shane’s perfectionism, especially under pressure, would lead to this - just as Ilya’s feelings of isolation exacerbate his depression. But it isn’t written that way, sympathetically - it is written as another example of supposed self-absorption. She writes it as making Shane miserable in his own right throughout TLG, and yet she is on record saying the reason for including it at all was for Ilya to goad him about, and to show what a bad boyfriend he is to Ilya. I’ve seen a number of saddening posts from people who’ve suffered with EDs and how they feel about that.
(And again, the fact that Ilya is “very sad” is something he keeps failing to communicate to Shane throughout the book. Yet, despite being explicitly characterised as someone who benefits from direct communication, Shane is the one whose biggest flaw is being “self-absorbed” by not guessing this. Ilya’s biggest flaw, incidentally, according to RR, is that he’s “too afraid of being hurt”. It’s honestly impossible to deny the uneven treatment, and how the responsibility consistently falls on the POC ND character to anticipate and orbit around the needs of his partner.)
ON THE AUTHOR
I understand that Rachel Reid never expected her books to blow up in this way, and it must be immensely daunting to think of so many people scrutinising your every word. I believe she generally meant well and that this shows in many parts of her books, and I am glad and grateful that she gave us these characters in the first place.
But when you do write and gain praise for writing real-world issues into your books, you have to accept real people are going to be affected if you deal with and talk about them in a harmful way. And what you should not do in the face of that is dismiss and mock their pain, because that video honestly felt like a slap in the face.
It seems to me a little ironic that RR wrote TLG as narratively berating a neurodivergent POC for taking his time to come out to the world, despite the amount of different kinds of abuse and backlash and pressure that he would inevitably have to brace for - but that marginalised communities’ valid scrutiny and criticism of a white NT woman’s mere writing is being condemned by many as unfairly dogpiling her. Just juxtaposing those. And I categorically condemn and am disgusted by any threats, insults, ableism, harassment directed at her! But the majority of what I’ve seen online over the past couple days is valid, heartfelt and respectful - even if in many cases upset and even angry - commentary.
Anyway. This has honestly all just made me pretty sad. And yes, I cancelled my preorder for Unrivaled. I still hold some hope for S2, and genuinely really hope the show’s creative team is seeing and more importantly taking onboard what the people whose communities are represented by Shane are saying. About how the creative decisions taken around this fictional character can reflect real attitudes and biases and stereotypes, and why that matters to people.
EXTRA NOTES
This is a response to those godforsaken screenshots, and the subsequent shitshow (debacle!) that has been RR’s response, so I haven’t gone into what’s not mentioned in them.
But a few points on context important by omission wrt how she treats Shane specifically: an evergreen reminder that the “selfish” plan was actually canonically agreed on in HR largely to protect Ilya because Russia: the fact that TLG actually ends up having multiple instances of Shane being observant and Ilya not being so as regards each other but Shane is still the one singled out for criticism as self-absorbed and clueless; the fact that Ilya’s depression is never spoken about by RR in a comparably insensitive way to Shane’s autistic traits; the fact her video made light of people being upset over fictional Shane but that she has said it hurts her when people call the equally fictional Ilya’s behaviour a red flag; the fact that it seems Shane alone out of her characters comes in for this amount of criticism from her, both in how she structured her book and the jokes she makes.
Again, I’m just feeling a bit sad atm, as one of the many many people who have found joy in this show and in a character like Shane.
It feels like a switch has been flipped. One moment, there’s the warm light that it felt like seeing someone like Shane depicted as loving and being loved as he is in HR (in the show especially, but also in the book). A whole imperfect and valid person, an equal half of the push-pull and painful but positive growth that is his relationship with Ilya.
The next, the cold realisation that AFTER realising he was autistic, RR appears to have conceptualised every foundation block for his TLG characterisation as making him the selfish, stupid, sole cause of the conflict (even when he literally isn’t or logically wouldn’t be). That there is no way to disengage that now, after these statements.
That’s it. That’s what hurts. And there has been no acknowledgement of that.
I’ve watched a lot of Heated Rivalry reactions, & one thing I never see people clock is the importance of this interview clip in French.
This is a scene meant to mirror Ilya’s interview earlier. Shane is having fun with it. He’s smiling and enjoying answering questions about him being good at the game. He knows he beat Rozanov, and he maybe can’t ‘say’ it without breaking his media-trained answers, but it’s all over his giddy smug little face.
And then the reporter asks this:
“And what do you think about being compared to Tiger Woods and Serena Williams?”
Look at how fast his face drops.
Reactors tend to hear the first part of the question & take it as her confirming that Shane is a really good player, but they completely miss her follow up.
“And what do you think about being compared to Tiger Woods and Serena Williams?”
“Do you think you share any of the same challenges?”
This is yet another instance of the world around them shoving Shane being the ‘Token (W)Asian’ in his face.
Jacob does a great job of making tokenism an important but subtle part of Shane’s character. It’s an aspect of his brand that would be directly ‘harmed’ by his coming out, regardless of the other issues of Russia and his own anxiety.
It might kind of slip under the radar for people on a first watch, but this happens to Shane fairly often.
The Montreal guy on draft night being ‘excited that Shane is Asian’ is the most heinous & obvious example. But you also have:
Yuna telling Shane at the CCM commercial that people look up to him.
Rolex signing him on as the youngest player they ever have because he’s exactly the kind of young man they want, is subtle but it’s there.
Rose almost immediately bringing up him being Asian when discussing his childhood. Shane even mentions the fact that the other kids kind of forgot to make fun of him in favor of the other Asian kid, simply because he has a White last name.
I’m sure there’s more that I’m missing.
Regardless, it’s not every time he interacts with people, but it’s enough to make clear to him that people will see his race & those stereotypes first. Before they see any of his skills or personality.
& Shane is NEVER the one to bring it up. It just keeps getting thrust in his face.
There’s a reason these 2 in particular (Shane & Ilya) were chosen for this very public rivalry & it’s not just because they’re good. This is marketing.
Shane’s media persona is calculated Golden Canadian Good Boy who is continuously pitted against Bad Boy Clearly Russian Rozanov in an effort to make his image more palatable, and more White. Ilya’s obvious accent & struggles with English highlight Shane’s poise & confidence.
The majority white population is going to hone in on the ‘Russian Mobster Bad’ stereotype & sidestep most of Shane being half-Japanese. The general population’s mild Xenophobia is being used in Shane’s favor by making Ilya look like a violent outsider in comparison.
And if Shane comes out as Gay, he runs face-first into a number of roadblocks:
Now he’s got another Tokenism thing to deal with. A part of himself he’d have to perform for the cameras.
He’s no longer going to be seen as the Golden Boy - he loses respect & people are going to notice & comment even more on his heritage.
Hockey is an extremely homophobic sport, he’s now at risk of losing all support on the ice & locker rooms.
There are also a number of stereotypes surrounding Gay Asian men in particular, and he’s now going to weather all of that with little to no support.
Throwing Ilya into the mix here throws so many problems I can’t talk about it all, but in short: Russia, Ilya’s slutty image, game interference allegations, etc.
tl;dr: Shane is not being compared to these 2 bc he’s good. This is about him being Asian in a White sport & is only 1 of several instances where people shove that in his face. This extra bit of complexity to Shane’s character just adds more issues & anxiety regarding him possibly coming out to the greater world.
One of the things about Heated Rivalry that always struck me a little bit odd is that Shane is by far the more terrified of the two about their relationship becoming public. Ilya would lose his ability to ever return to Russia. That seemed much more significant.
Last week, Jason Robertson, the Dallas Stars’ half-Filipino left winger, who leads American players in the NHL in points this season, got left off the USA’s roster for the Milan Olympics.
And this, finally, has helped me understand Shane’s fear. Let me explain. (also look at both these cuties).
By all accounts and statistical measures, Jason Robertson is an attacking powerhouse. He’s tied for 9th in total points (goals + assists) this season, but is the top American, and he’s 4th overall in goals scored. He’s a damn good hockey player and seems like he could be a helpful guy to have on your team if the goal is to win six straight hockey games by as large a margin as possible.
US Olympic GM Bill Guerin spoke about wanting to build a roster that's a “true team” and not just an “All-Star” team. He’s talked about prioritizing physicality, which tbh is an unhinged choice, considering referees in international hockey permit way less physical contact than the NHL.
This Guerin character seems like an ass, and, oh, his implicit racial biases are showing.
Indeed, the Hockey Graphs blog did an in-depth analysis of racial bias in hockey scouting, called “Racial Bias in Drafting and Development: The NHL’s Black Quarterback Problem”. Though, as the title suggests, this report is largely focused on bias against Black hockey players, the analysis compares scouting report language used to describe white, Black, and Asian players.
“Asian players were much more likely to be cited than Black players for their hockey IQ, while Black players were significantly more likely to be cited for their athleticism (particularly size and strength).
If we drill down by comparing players of Asian and Black descent to White peers of similar rankings at the same position on [Central Scouting lists, we find a similar bucketing of skills sets.”
Even though Jason Robertson is 6’3”, even though his defensive statistics are somewhere between average and excellent, Guerin clearly perceives him as not being “physical” enough.
So, in short, racism is why Jason Robertson is not going to the Olympics with Team USA.
And this racism is exactly why Shane and his mom work so hard to associate Shane with old-school luxury, and its incumbent whiteness, in his endorsements.
It’s why Shane pushes himself to be perfect. Because he has to be the best, at everything in hockey, or the doors won’t even open for him.
It’s also probably why Shane is drafted second. Why Shane wins rookie of the year, but Ilya wins MVP.
If this blatant racism is still happening in hockey in 2026, I can only imagine how much worse it was in the 2000s and 2010s timeline of the show. Shane’s professional life, his professional success, in a racist hockey landscape relies upon his difference, his Asian identity, fading out of focus for the white men in power.
Jason Robertson’s Olympic snub illustrates that being “too Asian” might’ve been enough to harm Shane’s career. Shane must then have viewed being both Asian and gay as an absolute death knell to his involvement in hockey.
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I love the everyone wants to fuck Shane Hollander agenda so picture like, Ilya at a team member's bachelor party and the whole Raiders team is there and everyone is drunk and they're playing games and just yelling out answers at the same time to questions like what's your favourite position and age you lost your virginity and giving each other shit for the answers but then there's what player you would go gay for and suddenly the whole team yells Shane Hollander at once to stunned silence afterwards and Ilya has the worst fucking night of his life
What makes Leverage a great show is that Nate has your standard Catholic guilt, Sophie is a chronic liar who struggles with genuine vulnerability, Parker and Eliot invent eighteen new types of repression with every episode, and Hardison is just trying to make a group hug happen.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
“at least I know I am kinder hearted than you” is a crazy thing to say to your sister who had to be your parent and took care of you your whole life btw
Ok I probably am being bitchy with this one but on the subject of Troy here is something I can see him doing that I think would piss Shane off. I don't know the best way to word this but I feel like there is a common phenomenon that happens where people who were in proximity to bigotry(and also other forms of oppression) as witnesses (and often enablers and beneficiaries if we are being real!)(Troy was both) of it but who are not targeted victims themselves(and I use targeted very specifically here because while Dallas's homophobia would have affected Troy it was not directed at him) but then turn against these things seem to think that they are now imbued with some kinda great moral authority about how hate works.
Often they will have directly benefited from what they are now speaking out against. Yet their voices and authority are prioritised over the victims most of the time. And I do think that listening to them does have important and valuable insights. And I think they absolutely do have a responsibility to speak about these things. However, I also think they are overly platformed; partially because often it is easier for people to face and it allows people to comfort themselves that even normal good people can be allies to hate "accidentally" and to excuse themselves from things.(Ok I am now maybe getting off the topic of heated rivalry a little because the commissioner did tell troy to shut the fuck up- but he did that because people were paying more attention to Troy than Dallas' victims so...).
This cycle of platforming does sometimes give these people an overinflated sense of their own education and lets just say wisdom. And Troy is in hockey locker rooms not a fucking gender studies class. So becoming disillusioned about his best friends character and working to educate himself means he probably does know better than alot of other people in those rooms now.
But here's the part where I could see him pissing Shane off: (I am not saying Troy does this. All I am saying is I could see Troy doing this and think it would be a good charecter study fic I am probs too lazy to write) No amount of instagram infographics can stand in for lived experience.
And yeah Rachel doesn't talk about race so we don't have canon Shane feelings about racism but we all know damn well that is not accurate. Shane might not be very in touch with Japanese culture(which honestly had that been an intentional character choice it would have been a strong one but thats a diff conversation) but he is actually very fucking aware of how bigotry works. Also considering how much racism against asian men is tied up with emasculation he is also gonna have a pretty good idea about how misogyny, racism and homophobia intersect and prop up patriarchal structures. shanehollanderhockeyplayer may not know all the technical terms for everything but he damn well knows what it is and he damn well knows how Troy participated in it. And I think if Troy hit him with the instagram terminology of some of this shit and tried to give Shane a vocab lesson about his own oppression, which Shane is not gonna wanna talk about anyway(another strong character choice had it been on purpose) especially with this motherfucker, Shane would try to kill him with his mind. And try to check him over the boards at practice and make it look like an accident. And he would be right to do so.
(And (this is maybe cheapening my point now cus this is more of a joke) there are a few times where Dallas is talking about having sex with a girl and it sounds really fucking questionable and Troy does not clock that shit at all. And I feel like that would translate into Troy being more consciousness about these things. But that could also mean that if Troy hears things about Hollanovs sex life and their complete lack of pre-established verbally communicated boundaries (or whatever else about them will freak him out) he may have concerns. And that will be what really makes Shane kill him.)
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im seeing a lot of confusion about rachel reid's discord comments, because how can she assert that her major notes for TLG were about shane's selfishness and stupidity and inattentiveness to his sad boyfriend, when shane is the one who reaches out to ilya, gently suggests he's mentally struggling and could talk to a professional, and ilya is the one who rudely shuts him down?
meanwhile, when shane is the one going through it—he's anxious about being outed and doesnt want to come out due to the league's homophobia, he's personally threatened by the commissioner, he struggles with disordered eating, if not an outright eating disorder (outright saying he diets for a sense of control, feeling guilty about tasting lemonade on his boyfriend's lips, his low point is eating one singular snicker's bar)—ilya fails to reciprocate empathy. shane tells ilya about the commissioner threatening him and ilya basically goes great now my bitch bf will never want to come out 🙄 (compare this with how he reacts when his reformed bigot white bestie troy was threatened by the commissioner: ilya is automatically protective of him.) shane starts an unhealthily restrictive diet due to his fears of aging (read: being pushed) out of the sport, and ilya looks down on him for it and mocks his diet to his face. shane, who is a hypervisible athlete of color in an extremely white sport, looks uncomfortable in a room full of white people talking about the league's issues, and ilya deduces that this is because shane doesnt know "the dark side of hockey" the way he does. this is a ridiculous assumption that should reveal a worrying lack of empathy for his partner of color, especially since throughout the series there is a pattern of other hockey players targeting shane with homophobic language, which ilya has been present for. except rachel herself states shane has no trauma from the sport and shane's own pov asserts that hockey has never made him sad.
do you guys get where im going with this? the elephant in the room is race. rachel narratively blames shane, hyperscrutinizes his flaws and justifies or provides excuses for ilya's, because she has implicit racist biases and subconsciously sees empathy as a one-way obligation in their relationship. ilya lacks empathy for shane because she lacks empathy for shane and thinks ilya is right. she monopolizes empathy for ilya because he is white and because she doesnt see characters of color as fully people and capable of having their own interiority or struggles to explore. if you've read tough guy or role model, you can see this same exact thing play out in ryan price and fabian salah's relationship or with troy barrett and his ex adrian dela cruz.
and remember how i said that there's a pattern of other hockey players being homophobic to shane? this is never brought up in shane's pov, not even hinted at. we only see these instances through the pov of white characters and are only given explorations of how they feel, not shane. shane is completely absent except as a prop to make her sadboy white characters feel tormented and angry, and rachel never connects his "self-absorbed" anxieties about wanting to stay closeted to the disproportionate homophobia he already faces, because rachel is uninterested in giving shane grace.
so when rachel says ilya's biggest flaw is his fear of being hurt (note how the language centers his hurt, not how his actions cause hurt), while shane's is his supposed selfishness (is shane not also afraid of being hurt? isnt that where his food issues and unwillingness to come out come from)? when she said shane is too focused on his "ridiculous" diet and not on "actually important things" like his depressed boyfriend? when she said in a reddit AMA that she only gave shane food issues to give ilya something to poke fun at? when that one interviewer asked her about the criticisms of how she wrote her asian character and she pivoted to talking about ilya's childhood trauma? her fetishistic descriptions of shane and fabian, to the point you can tell she wanted to call them exotic and her editor probably told her to tone it down? the way she contrasts adrian's appearance and supposed shortcomings with harris? her insistence that her books are challenging hockey culture while completely dismissing how hostile and dehumanizing it can be to people of color? and last but not least, THE DICK SIZE RANKING?
I like to imagine Rose’s brothers gave her shit for not sticking it out with Shane Hollander long enough for him to meet the family then when they find out it’s because Shane is gay they give her shit for not passing him along to one of them and she’s like??? you’re not gay??? to which they’re like !!!! everyone’s gay for Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov ain’t special
People knowing who Shane is but not knowing who Ilya is is fairly common (The devil works hard but Yuna Hollander works harder). People knowing who Ilya is but not knowing who Shane is, on the other hand, is pretty much unheard of.
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hot take: the people in fandom that are infantilizing shane as if he's not a grown ass man who can make his own decisions are the racist ones, not rachel reid.
the first and only time i read the books, i nearly DNF'd within the first few chapters of heated rivalry because of the fetishistic descriptions of shane (smaller, hairless, looks younger and less masculine than ilya, "pretty like a doll"). i only powered through because the show added just enough texture (even if not a lot of it) to shane irt his experiences as a tokenized biracial minority in the whitest of the four major north american sports leagues, and i thought maybe the books would touch on how shane is excluded from hegemonic [white] standards of masculinity. i thought, well there's nothing inherently wrong with him about being all of those things and a bottom, some people do happen to fit those stereotypes and it's only bad representation if it's being done uncritically and as a fetish. like hey maybe rachel will pleasantly surprise me
yeah, no. turns out it was just an asian fetish all along, and apparently she used to have a discord server where she ranked the main characters' dick sizes (?????) and she put both shane and fabian (who is lebanese and therefore asian, even if he is also white) in the bottom three. again, this is not inherently bad representation, but the way she writes these characters is fetishistic. rachel reid is just another racist, orientalist white woman. like it was immediately obvious to me and i genuinely regret giving her the benefit when i should have just DNF'd to save my time and energy lmfao
and also idk what you mean by fans "infantilizing" shane, could you elaborate? i think a lot of fans, particularly fans of color, are protective of him and critical of rachel's racism, which informs how she prioritizes the struggles and interiority of white characters and has almost zero exploration of white supremacist, conservative hockey culture.
side note: white man troy barrett's half-baked redemption arc is actually such a fascinating case study of how those two things (prioritizing white character arcs + neglecting race) can intersect. he was best friends with notorious bigot dallas kent, he himself was a notorious bigot, and racism isnt brought up at all in relation to him, not even in shane's pov? did troy and dallas just randomly decide to be progressive or at least neutral about one thing and that one thing was race, in the NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE? imo his character arc and the automatic empathy the narrative has for him is informed by his whiteness. and this isnt even getting into how female characters, particularly dallas kent's victims, are narratively sidelined in favor of role model's pity party for troy, which as a survivor myself i thought was extremely tasteless and himpathetic
but i digress. all of this translates into fans of color wanting to explore shane and his struggles more, siding with him over favored white characters, etc. i dont see this as infantilization. it's an understandable reaction to rachel's racist writing
Yuna and David having watched their autistic son be so isolated all of his adult life and never having a happy relationship or close friends who understand his anxiety and then finding out that the man they’ve spent a decade hating on his behalf can casually talk him down from a panic attack in less than a minute