Cunning Language

So I legitimately cannot let myself think about or engage with the ending of the long game because it makes me too physically angry.

Which is a really weird reaction for me, if I’m being honest. Like, sincerely, I usually maintain more of an emotional distance from the media I consume. I do not get super heated about stories. I don’t get angry or sad, whether I like how the story was written or not. I like rotating them in my head and picking them apart but I don’t usually have like, a lingering emotional reaction to them. If I don’t like a book, I can usually just be like “oh. That kind of sucked” and leave it at that.

The ending of the long game makes me physically angry.

It is simply not a happily ever after to me. It is such a cruel humiliation ritual that I just can’t see it that way. I would be so much more okay with the ending if Shane had more of a choice in going to Ottawa. But he didn’t. He was forced out, and that fact is barely even acknowledged, let alone processed by the narrative.

If Shane had looked at his life and said “hey, I could stay in Montreal and win 7 Stanley cups and retire here like I always dreamed of, but my life with Ilya is more important to me so I’m going to leave my old dream behind so we don’t have to be long distance anymore,” I would be so much happier about the ending. Because he gets the narrative benefit of it being a sacrifice. There is decision in that. There is autonomy. There is dignity in the fact that he at least gets to choose.

There is no dignity in what happens to Shane.

He gets forced out by homophobia. He is accused of something he does not do. The media eviscerates him. His teammates, who had already reacted poorly to him being gay, who were already icing him out because of his relationship, completely abandon him. His legacy is destroyed. His reputation is trashed. All of the respect he has spent his entire career earning is gone.

Shane leaves Montreal in disgrace. He loses his home of more than a decade. He loses his team. He loses his captaincy. He loses his legacy. He loses almost every friend he has ever had.

But it’s fine. Because his husband already has friends and he can share. It’s really good that all of this happened, really, because Shane gets to go off to the Gay Hockey Oasis, where twinks can frolic freely.

Everyone fucking clap.

There is something so fundamentally repulsive to me about the idea that the answer to being retaliated against by your homophobic teammates is to leave and Go To The Land Of The Gays Where You Will Be Happy And Free. Your homophobic teammates will be keeping the team you spent your entire career building btw. They get to stay. They get everything you built. You go and find happiness with the people who already accept people like you. There is no fixing homophobia :(

Fuck. That. Noise. I will never be happy at an ending that happens because a queer person is forced out of a space. I can’t be happy about that.

I think one of the things that upsets me so much about the long game and its ending is that there is no ability to emotionally process what Shane’s teammates do to him because the entire ordeal is basically brushed off. A lot of it happens off camera. The effect it has on Shane is given next to no attention. Nothing about it is processed by the narrative. There is no cathartic relief. And so I am left fucking angry.

I think it’s helpful to think about catharsis through the lens of its original meaning. The concept of catharsis is rooted in Greek tragedy. In Ancient Greece, they believed that stories and specifically tragedies were important because they helped the audience process and release negative emotion. You left that story feeling relieved even though bad things happened because the stories helped you understand and process your own negative emotions. You get cathartic relief. They believed so strongly in the importance of this that they would build amphitheaters by hospitals because they thought it legitimately had health benefits.

You don’t get any catharsis out of Shane’s storyline. Because the fact that something tragic is happening to him is barely even acknowledged.

Shane comes out to his teammates off camera. We do not see what happens in the room. He has a single sentence about it in the epilogue and told in retrospect. Oh, by the way, he came out to his fucking teammates. No biggie.

Later, we know coming out made it awkward between them. We know sometimes they still use homophobic words around him and it makes Shane uncomfortable. Nothing is discussed in detail, and most of it is brought up retrospectively. Most of it happens off camera.

We also know that Shane’s sexuality is an open secret after. It is the unspoken something that the whole league knows. People didn’t know before but they sure do how.

That knowledge did not come from nowhere. Someone fucking outed him. But we will never talk about it. It is all off camera. It is barely even addressed.

Now, Shane also comes out off camera in snapping birch. But there, it is treated like a horror story.

When writing that text exchange, I broke my usual convention. If there’s a break in the texts, I don’t usually re-show parts of the text exchange that have already appeared—I just pick up where the last texts left off. But when Shane comes out, I copy and paste the texts you’ve already seen before you get to Dave checking in on him again.

Because I don’t want you to just see the silence. I want you to see his father’s encouragement. I want you to see Shane’s nerves. And I want you to see him overcome those nerves. He was afraid and he trusted them anyway. I want you to see that, and then I want you to see those empty fucking time gaps after.

The horror is in the lack of knowledge. It is in the fact that Dave is not there and does not know if Shane is even safe right now. You are meant to feel like a terrified parent reading that conversation back again and again and wondering if he is okay.

That’s not the treatment that Shane’s coming out in the books gets. It’s not off camera because that’s the point—it’s off camera because the details are unimportant. It is the only time in his entire life where Shane gets to choose to come out, and it is an afterthought.

Shane is so often an afterthought in the scenes that should be significant to him that it drives me nuts. Shane’s best friend accidentally outs him to the world, and Ilya, who already wanted to come out, is the one who gets to say it’s okay. And to be clear, I am not trying to diminish the fact that Ilya got outed. The fact that he wants to come out does not make his outing any less violating. He has the right to pick how.

But it is Shane’s best friend and Shane’s biggest fear. And the narrative never processes that. It’s just fine.

The exact same issue is found in the teams’ reactions to the reveal of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. We get to see the Centaurs react to Ilya. He is greeted with laughter, and that is fantastic.

Shane is greeted by silence. He describes the tension as being like he’s playing a game of operation waiting to get buzzed. They are not happy for him. They do not accept him. Even before the trip, they ice him out. But we do not address that in any real capacity. It just happens, and then he is forced out, and that’s it. We do not process it. The point is not the rejection. The rejection is a means to an end, and the end is fucking Ottawa.

To be so, so clear—I am not upset that Ilya got accepted when Shane wasn’t. I am glad Ilya got accepted. And I’m not upset that Ilya gets the narrative attention that he does, because I love Ilya’s character and I want to see him get that attention. But if you want to tackle the kind of topics that Shane’s storyline in the long game raises, you need to give it the necessary narrative space.

And like. I’ve heard all the rationales the internet tosses around about this already. Each book focuses on a specific character and the long game is Ilya’s story, not Shane’s. Shane is not meant to get the same narrative attention because it isn’t his book. The author has said that she never intended for it to be that deep.

She should have written a different story then.

One of my biggest rules of writing is that you do not get to escape the logical consequences of your own narrative. The audience is not fucking stupid. You cannot dodge the weight of the writing decisions you made, so you have to fucking deal with it or you cheapen the narrative.

Take Svetlana’s absence in snapping birch, which I’ve talked about in other posts. I love Svetlana. I want her in the story. But if I include her, it necessarily has narrative consequences.

Russia is a source of conflict because it is illegal for its citizens to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Svetlana is a Russian citizen who regularly returns to Russia. If I have her out here tweeting in the defense of her friend’s bisexuality, then either Russia isn’t that big of a threat, or Svetlana is fucking stupid. That is the logical consequence of the narrative decisions, and I cannot ignore the logical consequences.

As a result, I cannot include Svetlana without cheapening the conflict or her character. So I have to exclude her even if I want her there. Because the reader is not a fucking idiot, and if I can figure out Russia Bad, so can they.

If you do not want to deal with the consequences of writing a storyline about a queer character getting outed and rejected by his loved ones, then do not write that story. Develop it in accordance with its logical consequences or pick a different story.

The logical consequences of Shane’s ending in the long game are fucking tragic. And it is never truly discussed or processed. The narrative gives you no catharsis. Because it is not treated like a tragedy.

Shane is completely rejected by every single person in that locker room. The only person to say something even remotely in his favor is Hayden, who fronts his defense with how fucking weird Shane’s relationship is, but hey, he’s still our captain. Great job, Hayd.

Shane says explicitly that he hoped for better from the people he loved so much. He loved them. They turned on him. And they do not apologize. He loses them permanently. Over ten years together and only two of them come to his goddamn wedding.

And the narrative’s solution is to have him just leave and go somewhere that appreciates him, i.e., his husband’s team, and we should be happy about that. Never mind that he gave Montreal everything. Never mind that it was his dream to see his number retired to the rafters. Never mind that the team he goes to doesn’t have the cap space for him and he wants to be paid what he’s worth. His rich fucking husband will provide. Ottawa gets him at a goddamn gay discount.

Play out the logical consequences of that one. It does not matter if you’re the greatest hockey player in the fucking world. If you tack on enough minorities, then you get him on goddamn fire sale. Too Asian, too autistic, too queer, so he goes for a fucking song. The greatest hockey player in the world, and he is paid less than Troy fucking Barrett.

And I know that’s not why Shane has to take a massive pay cut at the ending. It’s because they do not have the cap space for him, not because they value him less. But that is not what people are going to think when they look at his salary. They are going to see a queer poc with three goddamn Stanley cups getting paid less than every single one of his teammates, and they are going to think they know why.

And maybe you say it doesn’t matter what people think. But I’d say it matters a whole fucking lot to the queer pocs who are wondering if they will ever have a place in this fuck-off white, aggressively straight sport. I think it’s going to matter a whole fucking lot to them when they are negotiating their own salaries and suddenly are finding themselves valued a lot less.

After all, look at what they pay Shane fucking Hollander.

I am not saying that queer people should feel obligated to remain in a hostile space. But I am saying that if they are forced out, you need to treat it like the tragedy it is. Do not write an ending that happens because a character is outed and spat on by his friends of more than a fucking decade and tell me to goddamn clap. Do not call that a fucking Happily Ever After. And I know that’s what it’s meant to be, because that is what the author calls it on her goddamn blog.

As you can probably tell, I feel strongly about the subject.

I don’t fuck with a lot of fandom’s characterizations around the entire thing, to be honest. Like, you nailed all of my issues with it perfectly. I hate the idea that Shane wasn’t friends with his teammates. I hate the idea that he was always a bad captain. Because that is all meant to make the fact that he was forced out somehow more okay. It is meant to make the loss he felt somehow less.

He spent over ten years with those people. He loved them. They all turned on him. And they did not apologize, and they did not come to his wedding. He still invited them and they did not come.

That is supposed to hurt.

If what happened to Shane happened to me, I would be angry for the rest of my life. I would not be able to get over it easily, if I ever got over it.

Ottawa isn’t a happy ending to me. It would have been if Shane got to choose to go be with Ilya instead of getting forced out. But he was forced, and that is what makes it goddamn tragic.

I am not saying that I wanted Shane to stay in a hostile environment. I am saying that the happy ending to discrimination is not to put the high achieving minority out to fucking pasture in the land of the gays where everyone accepts him already. Shane should have gotten to choose where he wanted to be. If that is Ottawa, let him actually choose Ottawa. It is not a choice if you have to tear away the option of Montreal so he’ll make it.

The answer to homophobia is not to segregate the fucking gays in happy centaur land. It is to get rid of the fucking homophobes. Do not tell me that the system is homophobic and you can’t change that. Skill issue. If the system won’t change?