just a fan

- Confrontation with the most powerful figure in the league who has successfully pushed out other queer players who have come out

- Direct and unambiguous threat from said figure

- Willing to lose professional hockey altogether at the height of his career

- Had an easier alternative path (dismissing fan mail video as a joke) explicitly provided to him and refused

- Nothing to gain (ie. no Canadian citizenship)

- There is no woke and supportive team behind him

Shane Hollander faced this formidable foe and narrowly saved his and Ilya’s career through his intelligence and resourcefulness (the recording).

Every minute he and Ilya Rozanov spends in the MLH after this, we need to think about how they got there, how Shane Hollander made it possible.

so the next time ilya is there, they're kissing and laughing softly while they grind against each other. ilya nips at shane's bottom lip and grins down at him. he gives a playful wink before reaching over to the drawer in shane's bedside table. he pulls it open, and sees an almost empty bottle of lube [shane's dildo has been seeing a lot more action after that first time] and one singular condom.

his face immediately falls; his body stills. he suddenly is feeling the urge to throw his fist through the wall, he wants to rip somebody's throat out.

because who the fuck is fucking shane when he's not around???

he saw the box that last time, an unopened value pack of 40 condoms. it made him grin like an idiot at the time, made him want to tease shane for his eagerness then kiss his lips til they were numb and cherry red.

and now it made him sick to his fucking stomach. did shane get fucked by 38 other men since the last time ilya had him? was it all with the same man? ilya didn't know which option was worse.

so, despite wanting to vomit, buy a gun, then go find all of shane's other boys, he resolves that he has to remind shane how good it can be with just him instead. that he can be all shane needs, can satisfy him better than anyone else ever could.

every time after that, ilya is frantically checking shane's drawer, then filling with dread and white hot jealousy each time he finds only a condom or two and a bottle of lube that is always within various stages of usage.

and then, like every other time before, he works to wring as many mind blowing orgasms out of shane as he possibly can and nearly drowning him with kisses and whispered praise. and then he hopes that this time will be the one where shane decides to give all the others up.

meanwhile shane is over the moon over how attentive and gentle ilya has been. he's loving all the kissing and the way he coos in russian all soft and sweet into his ear. and he's started calling him sweetheart and baby??? that was a little weird at first, but shane warmed up to it and now it makes his heart flutter.

ilya doesn't learn the truth until the cottage when shane tells him he hasn't been with anyone since their last time.

"you finally want to give up all your other boys just for me?" ilya teasingly asks.

"my other boys? what are you talking about?"

"you know, the ones you used boxes and boxes of condoms with when i wasn't around."

"oh, like you have room to talk - wait. ilya what the fuck are you talking about?? i've had the same box of condoms for two years."

ilya furrows his brow. "but... every time i was there, there was only a couple left in your drawer."

then it finally hits shane. he bursts into a fit of laughter and drops his face into the crook of ilya's neck. he presses a quick kiss there then lifts his head back up.

"you made fun of me when i pulled out that strip of them the first time we did it! so i got embarrassed and started keeping them in the bathroom and just grabbing one when i knew you were gonna come over. i just got used to keeping them there."

Following this, a lot of them (because stupid) continue to believe that Rose was Lily even after Shane and Ilya are outed. And this little rumor spreads, because hockey players are a bunch of gossipers who are very excited to jump on the narrative of Shane cheating on Hollywood darling Rose Landry with evil bisexual Ilya to vilify him.

Ilya hates it, but Shane just finds it a little funny. He's passed giving a fuck what other people think of his private life. Sometimes he even jokingly calls Rose 'Lily' to get a rise out of Ilya.

This, of course, backfires majorly when Ilya shares that a concerningly large portion of the Raiders believed (and probably still do) that 'Jane' is Sveta's 'English name'.

Shane: can't i really need to finish this essay

Ilya: whats it on maybe i can help you

School was never really little Heath’s thing, which was a constant disappointment to his parents. So he threw himself into the one thing he was genuinely good at: hockey. His family had plenty of money, so they paid for the camps, equipment, travel teams, and everything else he needed. But they never really cared about sports, so while they supported his hobby, they were never particularly interested in it… at least not until he made it to the NHL and started making millions, of course.

But Cliff grows up as this kind of the stereotypical neglected rich kid. His parents weren’t especially interested in actually raising him. They could provide money, but not much attention. He’s much closer to the nanny who raised him than either of his parents.

Eventually, he gets shipped off to a hockey boarding school full of other wealthy, emotionally stunted teenagers growing up in an incredibly toxic hockey culture. So while Cliff is a genuinely good person underneath it all, he’s also kind of immature and a complete mess.

Anyway, while he’s at this school there’s already another player named Heath (what are odds?), so that’s when he started going by Cliff instead.

Naturally, Ilya is absolutely insufferable when he finds out Cliff’s real name.

“Heathcliff? What kind of name is Heathcliff?”

“sweetheart, my shane…have you seen this?!”

“seen what ilya?”

“spiderman is on jimmy fallon and says he dm you about dinner and you didn’t reply?!”

“oh is that who that was..huh”

from Hayden’s point of view the man he fucking idolizes more than anyone in the world (“Shane is like, off limits, dude”) comes out to you as gay and seems really inexperienced, maybe he’s never even really dated?? And Hayden’s like okay bud we’ll get you a WAG with a dick. Nothing else has to change. A nice guy you know like Hunter’s smoothie chick. Not a chick Hayden. You know what I mean Shane

And then Ilya who’s spent his whole career shit talking Shane in public and being very well known as a player shows to do domestic role play with your specialist baby boy best friend?? And he’s like. Touching him and kind of manhandling him and acting like he knows him BETTER THAN YOU when you were Shane’s first ever friend, excuse you Rozanov, Shane was my best man, okay, Shane is godfather to my kids. Who the fuck are you. Stop touching him. What are you doing here even is this some weird psychological power trip for you are you even gay. Stop touching him!!!

And then you find out oh no this isn’t a new thing (like Shane implied) this has been going on since the DRAFT. Since before the draft! And your brain is just like melting (you don’t have a lot to work with there anyway) and then you’re pissed all over again because what, Shane was getting jerked around by Rozanov all these years (Not how it was Hayds) or like Rozanov was taunting him (No) and wow is he just going to up and leave once he gets bored (Hayds…)

again i am not looking to white canadian rachel reid for nuanced deconstructions of race in sports but the way black and asian athletes are treated in hockey is not an esoteric topic that requires rigorous study. jason robertson did not compete at the olympics this year despite being a score leader for american players because he ‘didn’t have the grit.’ pk subban spent his entire career being criticised for his tone of voice, for being loud, for being opinionated, for being attention seeking. it is very easy to draw parallels from the treatment of real non white players to how — reasonably — shane and jj would have been treated because of their race, regardless of their talents for hockey. it makes both shane and jj’s struggles seem very flat and underwhelming by comparison to characters like ilya and troy barrett. racism is missing from the conversation, although these characters transparently do not live in a post-racial world

it also makes it more insidious that jj, while he makes one ignorant comment, is relegated to villain status in fandom, sometimes ranking even lower than the actual homophobic metros players. he gets more heat than actual former bigot troy barrett and actual rapist dallas kent. ive seen him featured in fanworks as a serial abuser, someone who assaults shane, every variation of ist and phobic. any positive qualities are entirely flattened, often for the benefit of ilya to ‘protect’ shane from material harm caused by jj