men in sports often get addressed as perpetual teenagers, either coddingly or derogatorily, to indicate their fame and money insulate them from many frictions held as thresholds to adult life but shane and ilya live a different kind of permanent adolescence. the narrative beats of struggling to hide a relationship from your parents, sneaking around so they don't find out etc. are staples in teenage romances for a reason: it is unusual that they remain such a vital part of the life of two guys in their mid-twenties that have effectively achieved economic independence at 18

think i've said it over dms but one of the reasons i think hr lends itself very well to readings under the lens of possible incestuous abuse is that the show presents an overarching investment in tracking the interactions between sex and family. i am not referring to the simple impact of familial history on sexual preferences - though the material allows for inferences in this sense. ilya and shane's families intrude in their sex life not merely through the downstream recalling of metabolised personal idiosyncrasies but as a much more immediate presence. every attempt to leave them at the door sees them knocking and trickling into the room - yuna halting ilya in the elevator, calls and calls on ilya's phone interrupting their encounters, the final infraction of shane's space shattering their tentative efforts to find their independent footing. scott hunter's life is impacted by the death of his parents but in their absence his story gets to be that of a man meeting another man, creating their own life. ilya and shane are forever sons. it's not that they never grow up, they are not overtly infantilised, but they can never create an existence where their first identifying label isn't being children of someone. with what little we see of the actual hockey world, their affair is stifled, on screen, in large part by familial expectations. sex can only happen in a secret, fragile bubble until those exist and push and pull in different directions. access to a relational configuration they find fulfilling isn't achieved through a gained liberation from these pressures but through an alignment of the streams: for them to be together ilya's father needs to die and ilya needs to become son to shane's parents. the bubble bursts and their sex life gets finally absorbed, inextricable, into a wider netting of family interests made congruent. there is happiness in this for them, it's not a bleak imposition. but nonetheless the structuring conflict of their story shows the sexual development of children as a contested ground between personal and familial desires, with tension easing only when they can be made to mesh. interesting for me to wonder why this forced abandon is lived with such relief

had a popsicle and feel better 👍 i knew it was the heat

having an exceptionally bad day mental health wise...i still swear the heat is to blame somehow

legislation designating allowances for caregivers of family members is always incredible. here's an exemption from night shifts so you can go home and do your night shift at your other job. and then wake up and work your day job all over again 👍

37°C no a/c...boiling alive...

unbearably hot weather adding to my overstimulation i feel like i am going to vibrate out of my skin

for instance, i tend to define some of the behaviours directed at me by family members over the years as abusive because i perceive in them a trasgression of the extent/content of the power parents/relatives are normally intended to exercise over children within the wider social context that has shaped me (i had a different branch of family members behaving differently, i had specific friends, i had online access to discussions about different modalities of living etc). but i also conceptualise my experience as specifically informed by the fact they do not agree with this assessement and that many people and institutions in italy would not agree with this assessement. not only that there is enough interest in preserving the general power of family over children to overlook trasgressions that are seen as minor but that they are not, by many, seen as trasgressions at all. there is a particular kind of despair and powerlessness and loneliness that comes from knowing that

with domestic violence directed at children and women in past/current social contexts unfamiliar to the observer the most common framing deployed is "they didn't understand it wasn't normal". this happens: people can be put in situations where the perceived normalisation of their harm does not match widespread societal reactions towards that class of events. but very often victims understand perfectly, and better than external observers, what is normalised in their own social context and react accordingly

see, also, situations where violence is foundational to the exchange: if someone has been kidnapped to be raped/tortured/killed the power the kidnapper holds over them was intentionally acquired towards this end. it is not an abuse of it that generates violence, there's no perversion of an original purpose

just had a vision of a hr ballroom dancing au, which i think could work on many levels but also it is seared in my brain that they should reproduce this iconic video

i love saturn peaches. saturn peaches best peaches ever