yes shane not realising people are flirting with him but also shane not realising that HE is flirting with men he finds attractive shane who naturally flutters his big brown sparkly eyes more often whenever hes talking to a big strong handsome man shane who automatically tilts his head slightly down so his gaze is directed upwards shane whose voice turns soft and buttery while he’s delivering smooth jabs and quick compliments shane whose mouth quips into a glint of teeth and scratches the back of his neck so his bicep strains against the cuff of his t shirt shane who says ‘yeah you’d like that?’ without thinking and hums round and airy ‘mhmm’ in acknowledgement shane insisting ‘i was NOT flirting with him.’ when ilya brings it up later and ilya shrugs and says ‘you cannot help it…you’re super gay…i don’t mind, im the only one that makes you nervous’ and grins wickedly while shane blushes and makes a sound in the back of his throat as ilya descends upon him
I can absolutely see this with Shane. Has never been able to flirt consciously with anyone, man or woman, and always felt awkward trying. But when he's actually attracted to someone he accidentally pulls out all the stops without realising it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i looooooooove how annoying shane and ilya must be as the two best hockey players in the world just both of them being able to see the game at such an elite level and notice things no one else does and theyre basically speaking their own language to one another and saying things like "i dont even count a hat trick if its on an empty net if the goalie isnt there its NOT a real goal i think they should not count these" "absolutely if theres no challenge it isnt real" "exactlyyyyy" and they will say things like this in front of players who have Zero career hat tricks
hayden is struggling in the postseason and says its bc he is "playing with a broken rib" and privately shane is thinking "okay but just one though jesus christ" and ilya is texting him like "is pike playing on severed legs" "broken rib" "ok???? just one????" and shane is like wow thank god finally someone who gets it
Ah, the eternal Clone Wars struggle. I haven't been super active in the fandom on Tumblr for a few years, and I'm sure that links to my ridiculous flowcharts haven't made the rounds in a while, so maybe they'll be helpful to newer fans.
Bear in mind that they're my best attempt at interpreting massive amounts of often-contradictory information. I also created these in 2020, so there have probably been some changes to canon since then.
Anyway, here ya go:
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Republic Military Hierarchy Flowcharts
(and here's a link to a reblog of my original post)
Sometimes I think about how the vast overwhelming majority of married professional athletes get divorced. Not Shane and Ilya, obviously, don’t be crazy. But what if Scott and Kip got divorced?
The Centaurs are playing in New York and Shane doesn’t travel with the team because of some, like, very minor injury, don’t worry, he’s fine. Scott asks Ilya to get a drink afterwards, but not at the Kingfisher, somewhere else, no reason. He is absolutely miserable to be confiding in fucking Ilya Rozanov about this, but he eventually confesses that he and Kip are getting divorced.
He says that after he came out, there was all this pressure to make sure the story had a happy ending. He was with Kip when he came out, of course they had to get married! Maybe he didn’t really think about what it meant to actually be married, though. Everything just happened really fast. And, like — Shane and Ilya got married right after they came out. Does Ilya ever feel like they rushed into things? Did he feel that pressure to get married to make the whole thing more palatable?
(For our purposes we are in book canon, Scott and Kip went from getting together to coming out in like six months and Scott doesn’t really know how long Shane and Ilya have been together.)
And Ilya is like, “Cool story, but my relationship has traveled more roads and suffered more obstacles than you could ever possibly imagine. One time Shane had to google because he didn’t know that the word for what he was trying to describe was ‘microagression’ and then he had to get out his Russian dictionary, but there’s no Russian word for ‘microagression’ so he kind of invented one, and then we could finally finish our argument about whether the Voyageurs were being a shitty team and also we were doing all of this over FaceTime because I was in Ottawa and Shane was in Pittsburgh. Actually getting married was a footnote at the end of the 200 page dissertation of things that we did to make that relationship work.” Because obviously a central tenant of Shane and Ilya’s relationship is that they do kind of think their relationship is better than everyone else’s and I don’t know, maybe they make some valid points!
I also like the idea of Ilya being utterly baffled, like, “I have literally only ever made romantic choices that I knew would make the rest of the world unhappy, you’re asking me if I felt pressured to get married? And you think I would care about that? Grandpa, I cannot relate.”
Also, because he’s Ilya, he has known that Scott and Kip were going to get divorced for like a year and a half at this point.
This is a really interesting idea and I can totally see an outcome where Scott and Kip get divorced, especially in book-verse where their relationship timeline before going public is so compressed. Not in the actual books, of course - it wouldn't fit the genre conventions.
Here are some of my rambling thoughts are this:
Sports marriages are a subset of career-dominated marriages, where one spouse plays the supporting role to other's career due to its intensity, status, geographic mobility etc. And by spouse, let's be real - even outside male professional sports, in the vast majority of these marriages it's the wife that plays the supporting role.
Research about wives in sports marriages consistently highlights the power imbalance between spouses and the pressures on wives to both the household and the public image of the marriage/family so that the husband and primary earner isn't distracted. The uncertainty that comes with trades, bad performance or the risk of injury. Not being able to maintain their own career or form strong social networks. Being aware that their husbands have constant opportunities to cheat and could leave the marriage at any time and not be worse off.
I think it would be the thankless fucking work of a traditional patriarchal marriage but dialled up to 11 and with people constantly watching you, waiting to criticise any bad outfit or weight gain, while at the same time talking about how lucky you are. It's the worst parts of being a female celebrity and you don't even get to have your own career/money, just exist as an extension of your husband.
Now imagine being the first out male same-sex couple not only in your sport, but possibly in all of professional sport in North America (and maybe even further?). Who came out it very dramatic fashion on live TV? There's no hiding, no going back.
I think the pressure on Scott, both internal and external, to make this relationship work and be worth it would be incredibly intense. I think the pressures on Kip would be equally intense but coming from other directions and would affect him differently.
Thinking about this through the lens of respectability/equality politics vs liberation politics is so interesting! Marriage is a way to make their relationship more 'normal', less threatening in a homophobic culture. To conform and at least approximate the relationships around them. It's not to say it's not also about love and the very important legal benefits one gains from being married, but there can be multiple driving forces for a decision.
In theory, one of the great things about queer relationships is that you can do away with gendered expectations around household and emotional labour, caring duties, careers and so on. However, a career-dominated marriage of any kind could end up dragging you kicking and screaming into these dynamics. I can see Kip taking real issue with this as the one being dragged.
The research talks about how many women in sports marriages go from being excited and start-struck to struggling to bitter once the long-term reality sets in. Even the women with 'good' husbands who didn't cheat and who tried to be as involved as possible still had a hard time. All the love and best intentions in the world can't change the external stressors in these relationships, nor the amount of time and energy the athlete must dedicate to their career and therefore not have available for their loved ones.
In the end, Kip didn't know what he was signing up for as the husband of a professional athlete. Scott didn't know either - no one else had done this before. It doesn't work out for them and while I think Scott would be resistant to getting a divorce for the public perception and branding reasons, he can't actually stop Kip. Whether they actually still love each other at the end of this is dealer's choice.
This is such an interesting look into the wag world. This reminds me of a discussion about the pro/con of gay marriage (it is heteronormative vs. we want to have the same rights and the same possibilities).
If you ignore book canon and the genre - what are your thoughts about the other book couples and this theme?
(I would also like to reiterate for Skip fans that I do not want them to get a divorce! I just think it's an interesting idea to explore.)
Shane and Ilya
I agree with OP @trippedlaces that Shane and Ilya are unlikely to get divorced. They have a history of mutual obsession and returning to each other no matter what over the course of many years. They have more parity in their relationship and there's no culture shock for them - they were both already professional athletes and public figures, even if the discourse around them is different now and they are receiving more attention, both negative and positive.
There will still be challenges for their marriage. Injuries, including possibly career ending ones, trades (this could still happen - sport is a business!), ageing and eventual retirement. If they choose to have children that can throw up a whole lot of issues around re-experiencing childhood trauma, how to parent, division of labour and so on. But I think they would be able to work through these.
Now for a potentially controversial take: no one wants Shane or Ilya in the Centaurs WAG/Partners chat. Shane and Ilya do not want to be in the WAG/Partners chat. They are players first and it doesn't benefit the WAGs/Partners or Shane and Ilya to blur that line. If they become friends, they do so outside the chat.
Other couples
I have not read the Tough Guy, Common Goal or Role Model so have only seen those characters and relationships in fanfiction.
I have some high-level thoughts that might be applicable but would need way more background to theorise how they would respond to these pressures.
Those caveats given, here is some further rambling.
Active vs. Retired Professional Athletes
Based on what I've read in the wiki/fanfiction, both Ryan and Eric retire from professional hockey within the timeline of the Game Changers series.
Some of the stressors partners of professional athletes face reduce or disappear with retirement. For example, there might be less public attention, no more moving with trades, a partner who is able to be more present.
But retired professional athletes also face a lot of challenges which can impact their partners and families. Mental health, struggling to find a sense of identity or purpose outside their sport, building relationships outside their sport, dealing with long-term injuries (including possible brain injuries and the behavioural impacts of those) and money issues are a few I can think of off the top of my head.
If they remain involved in the sport in some capacity, that can also be challenging. One of the articles I read included interviews with wives of coaches and managers who were former players. These women faced many of the same issues they had as the players' wives such as lack of time/attention from their husband and being unable to maintain their own career due to geographic mobility and needed to support their husband's career.
Complementary Careers
One of the articles I read mentioned that the only wives of baseball players that maintained their own careers were teachers. Because of the way the season worked they stayed settled during the school year and then joined their husbands for the long summer vacation. Remote work may give the wives of professional athletes more options now, but there is still an expectation that she will sacrifice for his career.
[Again, I could be totally off base below because I haven't read Role Model but some expanded thoughts on Troy/Harris below since I couldn't help myself].
This could apply to Troy and Harris, who both work for the Centaurs organisation. They can possibly spend more time together during the season than other couples. Harris would also have a better understanding of Troy's career and its demands than someone who hasn't worked in the industry. Working in comms/social media I think he would also have a unique insight into the role of WAGs. Compared to Kip, I think he would have a much better idea of what he was getting into in dating a player.
However, Troy could get traded again. Harris might be able to get hired in a similar role in the new organisation, become a digital nomad and follow Troy to wherever he ends up, or stay with the Centaurs and do long-distance. All of those have their challenges, but I think Harris being in the industry would have at least thought about these risks already. Would it work out long term?
[Comment: I am a big fan of long distance relationships and couples supporting each other to pursue their individual opportunities. My partner and I did years of long distance, sometimes only seeing each other for a few weeks a year due to my job and it worked for both of us. Different strokes for different folks, though.]
I think that Troy and Harris would also face some of the same public attention pressures as Scott and Kip. While not the first, Troy is one of the few out players in the sport and I imagine their relationship might attract a greater degree of public scrutiny or commentary than a straight player in a similar situation. But I don't think it would be as much as Scott and Kip faced as they were the first and the kiss on the ice made them iconic and famous in a way that Troy and Harris won't be.
Conclusion
As I said above, these are general, high-level takes because I haven't read the books with these characters and don't know them/their relationships. Just noodling around in my mental sandbox and very keen to hear from people who have read these books!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Sometimes I think about how the vast overwhelming majority of married professional athletes get divorced. Not Shane and Ilya, obviously, don’t be crazy. But what if Scott and Kip got divorced?
The Centaurs are playing in New York and Shane doesn’t travel with the team because of some, like, very minor injury, don’t worry, he’s fine. Scott asks Ilya to get a drink afterwards, but not at the Kingfisher, somewhere else, no reason. He is absolutely miserable to be confiding in fucking Ilya Rozanov about this, but he eventually confesses that he and Kip are getting divorced.
He says that after he came out, there was all this pressure to make sure the story had a happy ending. He was with Kip when he came out, of course they had to get married! Maybe he didn’t really think about what it meant to actually be married, though. Everything just happened really fast. And, like — Shane and Ilya got married right after they came out. Does Ilya ever feel like they rushed into things? Did he feel that pressure to get married to make the whole thing more palatable?
(For our purposes we are in book canon, Scott and Kip went from getting together to coming out in like six months and Scott doesn’t really know how long Shane and Ilya have been together.)
And Ilya is like, “Cool story, but my relationship has traveled more roads and suffered more obstacles than you could ever possibly imagine. One time Shane had to google because he didn’t know that the word for what he was trying to describe was ‘microagression’ and then he had to get out his Russian dictionary, but there’s no Russian word for ‘microagression’ so he kind of invented one, and then we could finally finish our argument about whether the Voyageurs were being a shitty team and also we were doing all of this over FaceTime because I was in Ottawa and Shane was in Pittsburgh. Actually getting married was a footnote at the end of the 200 page dissertation of things that we did to make that relationship work.” Because obviously a central tenant of Shane and Ilya’s relationship is that they do kind of think their relationship is better than everyone else’s and I don’t know, maybe they make some valid points!
I also like the idea of Ilya being utterly baffled, like, “I have literally only ever made romantic choices that I knew would make the rest of the world unhappy, you’re asking me if I felt pressured to get married? And you think I would care about that? Grandpa, I cannot relate.”
Also, because he’s Ilya, he has known that Scott and Kip were going to get divorced for like a year and a half at this point.
This is a really interesting idea and I can totally see an outcome where Scott and Kip get divorced, especially in book-verse where their relationship timeline before going public is so compressed. Not in the actual books, of course - it wouldn't fit the genre conventions.
Here are some of my rambling thoughts are this:
Sports marriages are a subset of career-dominated marriages, where one spouse plays the supporting role to other's career due to its intensity, status, geographic mobility etc. And by spouse, let's be real - even outside male professional sports, in the vast majority of these marriages it's the wife that plays the supporting role.
Research about wives in sports marriages consistently highlights the power imbalance between spouses and the pressures on wives to both the household and the public image of the marriage/family so that the husband and primary earner isn't distracted. The uncertainty that comes with trades, bad performance or the risk of injury. Not being able to maintain their own career or form strong social networks. Being aware that their husbands have constant opportunities to cheat and could leave the marriage at any time and not be worse off.
I think it would be the thankless fucking work of a traditional patriarchal marriage but dialled up to 11 and with people constantly watching you, waiting to criticise any bad outfit or weight gain, while at the same time talking about how lucky you are. It's the worst parts of being a female celebrity and you don't even get to have your own career/money, just exist as an extension of your husband.
Now imagine being the first out male same-sex couple not only in your sport, but possibly in all of professional sport in North America (and maybe even further?). Who came out it very dramatic fashion on live TV? There's no hiding, no going back.
I think the pressure on Scott, both internal and external, to make this relationship work and be worth it would be incredibly intense. I think the pressures on Kip would be equally intense but coming from other directions and would affect him differently.
Thinking about this through the lens of respectability/equality politics vs liberation politics is so interesting! Marriage is a way to make their relationship more 'normal', less threatening in a homophobic culture. To conform and at least approximate the relationships around them. It's not to say it's not also about love and the very important legal benefits one gains from being married, but there can be multiple driving forces for a decision.
In theory, one of the great things about queer relationships is that you can do away with gendered expectations around household and emotional labour, caring duties, careers and so on. However, a career-dominated marriage of any kind could end up dragging you kicking and screaming into these dynamics. I can see Kip taking real issue with this as the one being dragged.
The research talks about how many women in sports marriages go from being excited and start-struck to struggling to bitter once the long-term reality sets in. Even the women with 'good' husbands who didn't cheat and who tried to be as involved as possible still had a hard time. All the love and best intentions in the world can't change the external stressors in these relationships, nor the amount of time and energy the athlete must dedicate to their career and therefore not have available for their loved ones.
In the end, Kip didn't know what he was signing up for as the husband of a professional athlete. Scott didn't know either - no one else had done this before. It doesn't work out for them and while I think Scott would be resistant to getting a divorce for the public perception and branding reasons, he can't actually stop Kip. Whether they actually still love each other at the end of this is dealer's choice.
how can we bring offer sheet drama into heated rivalry
shane gets outed year 2 of his ELC, he's not a franchise star yet, the management is hostile and the locker room is split
contract talks break down. shane's camp is like i'm playing exactly the same, you were salivating to extend me four fucking months ago. front office is like, locker room distraction, you didn't disclose a risk factor, we have to think through these new circumstances
(shane, incredulously: you think disclosure would have helped?)
trade deadline approaches with no extension signed. mtl does give a qualifying offer. it's, you know, not great. it's not the salary rozanov locked up in his extension months ago. front office says, it's not personal, but we can't do a long-term deal right now. if in a year you can show us it's not gonna be a problem, then of course we'll extend you
🚨 shane hollander enters restricted free agency 🚨
front offices around the mlh are debating: on the one hand, gay. on the other hand, shane hollander.
shane gets four offer sheets. more money. more years. the gms are personally promising him locker room culture isn't gonna be a problem. we're forward thinking, shane. we believe in your hockey. you can be happy here.
one of the offer sheets is a grenade.
it's. it's a lot of money. it's more than shane was willing to extend for a year ago. it's a five year term to take him to UFA. it's an undisguised, unmistakable fuck you to the metros.
i think you should sign it, yuna says.
the metros are your team, shane says.
you're my son, yuna says, nostrils flaring, and the metros don't deserve you.
Shane’s fame is so important to me—his specific breakout fame to people who don’t even know hockey. The endorsements in the show have a somewhat janky look because the show itself isn’t high budget (they fake it pretty well but after a million reheats I’m like oh they don’t even show the video game on the tv when they’re playing at the cottage lmao) but like imagine Hudson’s sleek Peloton Ad with Shane instead, but instead of the artsy stuff they have Hudson do, it’s just Shane Hollander, man that is a machine, pushing his body to the limit. Imagine the Nike ads and the cologne ads on the side of a snowy cliff. He’s gorgeous, model gorgeous, and not all premiere athletes have those looks. And Shane will be what you want him to be. If you need him to be the hometown hero sitting at a fast food table pretending to eat a Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwich, he’ll do it. If you need to zoom in on his compelling freckles and driven gaze to sell athleisure clothing, he’ll let you. Shane wants legacy and notoriety. He wants to control the conversation surrounding him. He wants there to be mystery, like there is with all exceptional people. But in all his commercials, he’s notably alone. He’s a myth.
I think about Simone Biles dropping out of the Olympics due to struggles with performance, and the mythology created around elite performance athletes like Ilia Malinin, who had a very public fumble at the Olympics despite all the hype. This created a ton of dialogue. Where they had once been something to marvel at, now they are something to scrutinize. Scrutinized by people who know nothing about their sport, even!
Shane doesn’t disappoint though. He brings Montreal three cups. If you don’t know hockey, you know Shane Hollander. Just like you know Tom Brady, Serena Williams, LeBron James. Michelle Kwan, and Simone Biles. You’ve probably rooted for these people alongside diehard fans even when you yourself know nothing about the sport. That’s who Shane Hollander is. He can belong to everyone. He is everyone’s athlete.
And then he’s outed. And then he trips. Suddenly, this man who up until then has lived life mostly unscrutinized (besides the microaggressions of the insular hockey world), who had been unquestionably A Badass, someone to admire, someone to put on a pedestal, he’s suddenly human. He’s someone who passionately kisses his rival in the side yard of his best friend and teammate’s house. He’s someone who carried on a secret affair that has rocked the foundations of the sports world. And because he kissed his rival, because he has revealed himself to be human, he is now brought to the same level of scrutiny as anyone else. It is open season for opinions about Shane Hollander.
Not every opinion would bad. Many would be good. Many would love him for it. But the fact that people feel entitled to make the opinion means that the fabric of Shane’s fame has changed. He’s now up for interpretation. You don’t just sit back and marvel at him, you now have other things to say that cloud the myth. And that changes what he is allowed to do, even as an athlete.
He’s no longer allowed to trip on a piece of ice or a bad edge. He isn’t given grace. Because if his secrets hold so much meaning, that also means that his outward actions now also hold meaning. When something so intimate about you is revealed, the stony facade of excellence crumbles. Now everyone has a take. Everyone has an opinion. You are now a public conversation, instead of pleasant inevitability. How can the team count on him, once he reveals his humanity? How can they depend on him, now that he’s a conversation, instead of a lecture?
One thing the Centre Bell really impressed on me is the oceanic gulf between Shane’s fame and Ilya’s. Ilya is a star athlete in a city where sports are valued, he’s not a nobody. But he’s less famous than whoever the current star pitcher is on the Sox, and way less famous than the Patriots’ quarterback. Good chance the average Bostonian doesn’t know his name.
But Shane….Shane after the cups would be a fucking god in Montreal. He doesn’t pay for anything anywhere ever. And with the number of Canadians in the entertainment industry (I am a big Drake is dropping Shane’s name truther) and the endorsement deals and the Rose Landry of it all, I think Shane is like a D list *actual* celebrity even in the states.
But in Montreal he’s the most famous person after like, the King and the Prime Minister. He can’t take the metro because it would shut it down. He has to pick an apartment with a completely private parking / entrance structure. His house in Brossard is in a gated community because if it wasn’t he’d have constant gate crashers.
All these social media fics where Shane and Ilya are getting roughly equal attention from fans…nah. The real dynamic is an ocean of Shane stans posting endlessly about how he’s the GOAT and will live forever and like, a handful of dogged Ilya GOAT truthers (made up of Bostonians, Russian and American fans who are annoyed by Canadian crowing, white supremacist/conservative types who resent Shane for being non white, people who think Ilya is hot and cool and Shane is boring and too perfect, and contrarians) who spend all their time fighting for their lives in the comments trying to argue that Ilya’s stats make him just as good a player as Shane, he’s gonna catch up in cups just wait—and then Ilya moves to Ottawa and it’s like a death in the family
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I think a juicy dynamic and one I think we as a Fandom should dig deeper into is the fact that metros didnt actually have serious issues with Shane pre-coming out. Thats their boy, and their captain, and they love him. They are his ride or die, thats Hollzy, he led us to 3 Stanley cups. Shane was a great captian and great leader, ilyas just better in this regard. Doesn't mean he was floundering and incapable of being a leader. He was very capable and his 3 cups prove it. However being near him once he comes out and especially post fanmail he becomes a very loud threat to the metros masculinity by association and therefore must be cast out.
Masculinity is performative and because it is so nebulous and changing you are constantly have to re-assert it over and over again. And once you are deemed to no longer have it, it is almost impossible to get it back. (Please go watch Dr. Shawn's hot takes with citations on this concept). To associate with an openly gay man in their field is to draw into question their masculinity.
As a result of this, to preserve their masculinity, they throw Shane, a guy they were friends with, a man they respected, under the bus to save face. It feels so out of nowhere because it is, becuase this is how homophobia and misogyny works. After the dust of the fanmail video and tripgate settles, the metros all have to deal with the guilt of what they did and the friend they lost. Some will deflect, some will probably never realize or acknowledge what they did, some will do the work, sit in the guilt, and realize their cowardice.
The Metros’s love for Shane was far more conditional than even they realized. As long as they got cup rings because of him, they adored him. Once he threatened their masculinity they turned on him. But OP is right. That doesn’t mean they never valued their captain. They did. Or at least they valued the leader they had convinced themselves he was.
They liked Shane better as the efficient, sexless hockey robot than as the human being. So they tried to force him to stick to the role they’d assigned to him, instead of accepting him as a human being with complexity and strong emotions.
The real Shane was a quirky, neurotic guy who’d fallen deeply in love with his rival and risked his career to be with him. That wasn’t the Hollzy they wanted. That Hollzy was passionate, and inconveniently, not just about hockey. That Hollzy refused to apologize for being gay. Or, later, for falling in love with Ilya.
So they turned on him. But they did admire and even love him first. Even though they didn’t really know him. And reacted badly whenever he tried to show them the real person beneath the facade. Shane coming out to his team was him trying to be honest with them. Trying to share a part of his true self.
Their reaction says more about their insecurity in their own masculinity and heterosexuality than it does about Shane. They were marinating in toxic masculinity, and when they discovered they had idolized someone who wasn’t a “real man”, they were horrified.
Also (and I must stress that this is my reading of the Metros, not my own opinions) Shane has been so repressed for the entirety of the time they’ve known him. He’s been hiding a huge part of his personality, not only from them but from himself, because it didn’t fit his image. Even when they thought they were seeing the “real Hollzy”, the one who went out with his team and made some jokes and maybe got a drink or two, they were still seeing a performance, at least in part.
When Shane is revealed to have been in a committed relationship with a man they all genuinely believed he hated; when he’s revealed to have settled down with a person who is know throughout the league for being a terror on and off the ice; a man who is recognised as one of the league’s biggest fuckboys, it genuinely shatters the image of the person they thought they knew. The Hollzy they thought they knew (as described above) could never do that.
I’m not saying it’s justified but beyond just the inherrent homophobia of the whole thing, they also feel like Shane has been deceiving them. And that’s partially what makes them so ready to turn on him. They can rationalise it to themselves by claiming that they’re not being prejudiced, they’ve been betrayed. And at least a few of them never move on from that belief.
I wanted to expand on the topic of masculinity being performative touched on in the first post in this chain. There are two books that really influenced my understanding of masculinity that I wanted to pull into this conversation:
'Masculinities' by R.W. Connell (1995)
'Performance Anxieties: Re-producing Masculinity' by David Buchbinder (1998)
I was doing this research in the 2000s, so both are a bit older and might not be as referenced or available now, but highly recommend both of them.
Connell's concept of "hegemonic masculinity" and how it doesn't need to be the most common form of masculinity, only the most valued. In our culture hegemonic masculinity is straight, strong, and domineering. It oppresses women, but also excludes many men.
Connell writes: "We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit and so on." (p. 37)
Homosexual masculinity is one of the examples Connell uses of a subordinated masculinity.
Buchbinder uses the term "dominant masculinity" to express a similar idea to Connell's hegemonic masculinity. Buchbinder writes about the competition among men for dominant masculinity, noting that "[t]he experience of individual men also indicates that they daily operate under the assumption that they must show other men that they succeed where others fail, professionally, personally, sexually...it [is not] surprising that they attempt to conceal or suppress elements which might betray them to others as insufficiently manly." (p. 133)
Masculinity is therefore an unstable concept. It is something that is performed, that is achieved (sometimes at great cost to an individual) and can be disrupted at any moment. Just as the first post in this chain outlined. The idea that you can't 'earn' it back after it's lost is another way to continue enforce the stringent standards of our culture's dominant masculinity even when they cause harm to the person performing them and the people around them. The risk of not doing so in some environments is just too high and once done, you can never go back.
I think it's important to note that there are multiple masculinities, which is why Connell and Buchbinder use 'hegemonic' and 'dominant' to distinguish the specific type of masculinity which is most highly valued under patriarchy.
There's an amazing multi page passage from Buchbinder that is too long to quote (starting from around page 122), but digs into the importance of heterosexuality and male bonds in defining and reproducing masculinity, but also how association with homosexual desire and femininity can call masculinity into question.
A key insight about the "radical ambiguity at the very heart of masculinity, at least as it is constructed in our culture: heterosexual desire, yet misogyny; homosocial desire, yet homophobia.... misogyny and homophobia are the twin motors which drive the patriarchal machine, distancing and disturbing categories of the feminine and the homosexual from the masculine, protecting the masculine and preserving it from dissolution into one or the other of those categories." (p. 128)
I think this is so relevant in professional sports cultures. The high importance placed on homosocial bonding and the performance of dominant masculinity in a sense relies on equally high levels of homophobia, heteronormativity and misogyny to avoid being exiled from the dominant masculine culture.
Shane, from what we see, is not explicitly homophobic or misogynistic and gives only limited evidence to his teammates of his presumed heterosexuality. But their perception of his masculinity is bolstered by other cultural signs associated with dominant masculinity like his skill at a violent sport, physical strength, wealth etc. The one thing Shane's performance of dominant/hegemonic masculinity can't survive is being one of the very things it is defined explicitly against - homosexual.
I don't have time to thoughtfully expand on how Shane's race would also influence people's perceptions on his masculinity in this post (I would need to give it way more time and space to explore), but suffice to say that whiteness/white supremacy in the culture is also a trait associated with dominant/hegemonic masculinity and Asian masculinities are often closely linked with femininity.
Perhaps my most controversial yet unserious Heated Rivalry opinion is that I'm glad the sex building didn't make the adaptational jump for the show. I know people think it's funny and illustrates Shane's need for control, but.
To me, it's much juicer for that to be Shane's real home, and Shane's real bed. He had so much anxiety about letting things with Ilya advance any more physically, and showing that barrier coming down by having him let Ilya into his home as well... I think it's great. It adds layers to the six months of silence as well—there was a real vulnerability to that whole encounter that Ilya was good about in the moment, but (for very understandable reasons!) kind of trampled over in the aftermath. So even when they reconcile, things are different. Ilya gets to be close to Shane, he gets to come over to Shane's house and they have lots of great montage sex, but Shane's learned that it doesn't mean what he felt like it meant, that the closeness they share can't be vulnerable in that way. Which helps move past things in the moment, but sets up issues for further down the line.
And to underline that, we're left to assume that, in Boston, they only ever hook up at hotels, maybe some crashpad apartment near the rink that Ilya doesn't think of as his home at a stretch. For years, there's been a gap in vulnerability, in how far Shane is allowed into Ilya's life even after gaining entry into Shane's.
Shane can't know about Russia or Ilya's family life, and he can't see inside his home. Ilya comes back to him, but the barriers are all still up. They're just holding hands through the fence, both looking the other way and pretending it's not happening.
So on Tuna Melt Day, Shane is coming over to Ilya's house for the very first time with his badly learned lesson that This Isn't That Deep Don't Worry About It Be Cool Hollander. And Ilya is doing his devastating I want more but I can't ask for more so I'll pretend just for today thing (I am a staunch believer that this wasn't Ilya planning on asking Shane for a real relationship. If he had resolved to give things between them a serious shot, his reservations in Tampa through to Scott's coming out would have been coming from a very different place). To Ilya, having Shane over to see his real house and to share his real bed, even for just the night, is vulnerable and significant too, just like it was for Shane, but he's dead set on pretending to be casual about it. Shane is supposed to be let in, but he isn't supposed to know that he's been let in.
The symmetry there is so delicious. For both of them, there's a pivotal change in their relationship attached to having the other person in their home—the place they spend their real life—for the first time. And it provokes a near relationship-ending crisis both times because it's so scary and its such a big deal.
When they're separated, Ilya longingly watches footage of Shane's most private home. Missing him, fantasizing about the level of closeness that would let them be there together. Feeling like he'll never get to have it. And then Shane invites Ilya to share that truest home for the summer! And Ilya manages to accept, even though it's scary! They go there together! Gorgeous.
You made a post about Shane's salary going to Ottawa and being valued by the Centaurs, but it's even worse because Reid already wrote that they don't value or respect him even beyond that. He isn't given an A in the next season. The Shane Hollander, three time Stanley Cup winner, is left entirely out of the leadership structure.
Celebrini would have ripped that C off his Team Canada sweater with his bare hands to give it to Crosby out of respect, but sure, both Centaur As who have done jack shit in their career compared to Shane don't see any value in him being part of leadership or want to give him even a shred of dignity after the public humiliation he just suffered. How does that look to the public? How am I, the reader, supposed to feel good about them?
Bood laughs at him and calls him a "'fucking prima donna" for instinctively going towards the back of the lineup in their first game. Ilya literally brags to Shane about how he's the captain and how Shane isn't even an alternate. Haha, isn't it funny. "Who does [Shane Hollander] think he is?"
Reid puts in some nonsense about how Shane is coming for the C, but that's not how captaincy works. It's not a score you achieve over time, it's a management decision, and it would only make sense when Shane arrived as reflection of who he is a player, which is already well established. And if he's not even an A, he's certainly not becoming the C.
Honestly, at the end of TLG, I genuinely did not want Shane in Ottawa.
This is actually one of the big reasons why I legitimately cannot engage with the ending of TLG because it makes me too angry.
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.
I love your fics and your Shane Hollander characterization is IT for me. What do you think about Shane's 'obliviousness' in asking a Russian to keep their gay hookup on the downlow when telling would have likely gotten him killed and in The Long Game?
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t really read this as Shane being oblivious. I read it primarily as 1) he just didn’t know much about Russian politics, and 2) even if he did know, it was more the product of understandable anxiety than obliviousness.
If we’re asking ourselves what we can reasonably expect Shane to know the first time he hooks up with Ilya, we have to put ourselves in his position: a 19 year old boy who’s fresh from Canadian junior hockey leagues in 2010.
I legitimately don’t think someone in Shane’s position would reasonably know about the queer experience in Russia.
First off, it’s 2010. I’m thinking back to over a decade ago, so I may be misremembering this, but I don’t recall there being a very big focus on the Russian queer experience in the news back then. Like. In 2010, gay marriage is still illegal in many parts of America. It’s been legal for less than a decade in Canada. The news was much less inclined to put a spotlight on queer struggles and was certainly much less inclined to portray queer people in a sympathetic light. I don’t personally recall Russian queer rights entering the global conversation until 2014, because they only made it illegal to promote LGBTQ+ rights a year or so before the Sochi Olympics. I don’t think you can reasonably expect most Canadian teenagers to be educated on the topic back then. It’s just not in their realm of experience.
I especially don’t think you could expect a boy from the Canadian junior hockey league to know it. Because, speaking broadly, boys who participate in Canadian junior hockey—especially at a high level—tend to be very undereducated.
Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying “hur dur boy hockey players are stupid.” They are not stupid.
They are exploited.
That is different.
So, I just started reading We Breed Lions, and I’m already going to start promoting it because it’s so far it’s been phenomenal.
Right at the start of the book, there’s a really fantastic breakdown of how this system exploits young boys to their detriment. The junior hockey league has its own draft. Teams draft promising young players, who often leave home to live with billet families, leaving them with their only structure being their team. They join for-profit teams, who are promoting them as young celebrities and making enormous amounts of money off them. It is frankly weird to think about, because America doesn’t have any kind of corollary system that I can think of where a children’s league is promoted like they’re pro-level teams, but apparently in Canada they’re very profitable enterprises. Top junior hockey competitions are broadcast nationwide. The teams receive sponsorships from major corporations. The absolute best players gain celebrity followings.
All of the boys playing on the team are being paid below minimum wage, because they are “student athletes.”
It is industry standard to have them be professionals in all but name. These athletes regularly miss school and assignments to accommodate the demands of their hockey schedule. Teachers regularly look the other way and just let them fall behind so as to not interrupt their participation on the team. The book describes one student who was still playing despite pulling a 16% average in math class. There’s another student who got suspended for one (1) game because he skipped school for 30 days straight.
Recently, a video of Macklin Celebrini went viral because he was playing a game of Heads Up, where someone holds a card to their head with the name of a famous historical figure on it, and you have to describe that figure to them so they can guess it. Celebrini had to keep skipping basic prompts like “Henry VIII,” “Julie Andrews,” “Dick Van Dyke,” “Charles Darwin,” and “George Orwell” because he had no goddamn clue who any of them are. The Canadian junior hockey league for the most part does not produce well-educated people, especially if they are performing at a high level, because those are the players who have the most demands on their time.
These educational failings are not the fault of the 16 year old boys who have been taken from their homes and drop kicked into a hockey town where they’re flooded with the message of “you are SO SO special for your hockey, just focus on your hockey, YES you need to miss class again but do not worry king!! hockey is all you should focus on!!! We will look the other way for you!!!” all to accommodate the demanding schedules of the extremely exploitative teams farming them for cash while giving them stipends that are below minimum wage.
Shane Hollander was one of the most talked-about prospects on the fucking planet. He has most likely been working sixteen hour days minimum since he was fourteen years old and then had to be a full-time student on top of that. There are literally not enough hours in the day. He was probably fighting for his life trying not to fail out of fucking math class. That guy is not reading up on the Russian sociopolitical landscape in his free time. He doesn’t have free time. And he is not in the kind of environment where the common topic of conversation is “hey fellas, maybe we should educate ourselves on the struggles of the Russian queer population” like fuck no. The main topics of conversation for Canadian Junior hockey players are hockey and their own dicks. Shane likely had no idea what it was like for queer people in Russia. He didn’t have a reason to know.
There is one other way we should contextualize that statement within Canadian junior hockey culture. And that’s in the context of the normalized degradation of your sexual partners.
Canadian Junior hockey is very sex obsessed. It is very misogynistic. It is very homophobic. And the widespread expectation is to go into that locker room and talk about your sexual partners like they are objects to fuck and sexual exploits like they are conquests.
Canadian junior hockey leagues typically have players aged 16-20. But Shane is an exceptional player who was recognized when he was very young. His real life analogue, Sidney Crosby, was drafted by his junior team at the age of 13. He started playing some games in the season with them by 14.
So imagine Shane is 14 years old. He is the youngest person on the team. There is already a crushing amount of national attention on him. And he is going into that locker room for the first time with his 20 year old teammates, who are standing there talking about how this weekend they fucked this bitch who was such a slut for it, fuck, she was on her knees slobbering for it like a whore in seconds.
Hey, Hollander, have you fucked anyone yet?
In Shane’s experience, telling people all the gorey details about your hookups is what you do. It’s what the people around him have always done. It is baked into the culture that he has been marinating in since he was a very young child. With those experiences in mind, I think it’s very understandable to be in your first hookup with someone and have a flash of fear that they’re going to walk out of this room and go tell their teammates “Shane Hollander dropped to his knees and started slobbering on it like a whore the second I shut the door.” Because that is what happened to every single woman who hooked up with one of his teammates. He has been hearing that shit almost every single day since he was 14. It is so deeply understandable to be afraid of that.
Now, granted, his teammates are not regaling the locker room with their gay hookups. This is where you get to prong two of the analysis.
Sometimes you ask someone to confirm something that is seemingly obvious, not because you don’t see it yourself, but because you’re scared and anxious and you want reassurance.
Like. First off, even if he had the context of Russia, he doesn’t know if Ilya has some queer-friendly person in his corner who he can share secrets with. He already knows Ilya has had other gay hookups. So it’s understandable to want to voice “I don’t want this to be told to anyone else” because this is not the kind of secret that you just assume everyone is on the same page with on keeping it. But beyond that, I think you could be fully aware of all of the reasons Ilya had to keep it a secret and actually believe he would keep it a secret and still want the vocalized assurance that this isn’t going to be spread around.
Look. I am an adult with a law degree. My brain is fully developed. I am very well educated. My entire job is to be articulate and reasoned and to weigh risk.
I still walk into my coworker’s office five times a week and say “hey so I’m gonna ask a stupid question and I already know the answer to it but I just need someone else to confirm for me before I do this because it’s pretty big and I need the reassurance.” And my coworker, who is equally intelligent and educated and accomplished, turns around and does the same thing with me. Sometimes, you say something that sounds stupid not because you’re stupid, but because you’re human and it’s natural to seek reassurance in others.
I don’t read that scene as Shane being oblivious to the risks Ilya faces if this comes out. I read that as him being a 19 year old boy who is battling a lifetime of fear around his own sexuality, who is extremely aware of at least some of the risks but who just wants some extra reassurance from the dude whose dick was just in his mouth. And that is okay. It’s not obliviousness. It’s just being human.
I personally find that I have the best experience with a narrative if I read the characters’ actions in a compassionate light. If something they do doesn’t make sense, put yourself in their shoes and try to see where they’re coming from. Give them grace and understanding. And usually, what characters are doing makes a lot more sense and the narrative overall becomes more interesting. Personally, I think “Shane’s seeking reassurance from one of his first ever sexual partners because he’s a child coming from a sex-obsessed environment where your sexual partner is routinely degraded for the amusement of your peers” makes for a much more interesting story than “haha, Shane’s so fucking stupid and oblivious.”
A lot of the analyses of the character’s actions—and in particular Shane’s actions—that I’ve personally seen coming out of this fandom are almost entirely devoid of compassion and understanding. And it’s kind of hard to be surprised when the author herself is climbing onto discord to say “Shane is so stupid and oblivious.” Like. The call is coming from inside the house.
Narratives are so much more fulfilling and engaging if you extend compassion and grace to the characters. Let them be human. Let them ask stupid questions. And as the audience, try and ask yourself why that question is important to them. Stories are way more interesting when characters aren’t these shallow strawmen whose actions can be boiled down to “they’re just fucking stupid and oblivious.” Give them some grace, and you’ll have a better story.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Do you know of any fics where Shane goes to Ottawa first?
Hmmmm I cannot find a lot on this trope. The main thing I have found is Shane joining Ilya's team, Canon Divergence!
Shane Gets Traded to Ottawa
🏒 i've been pushing for this for so long | 1.0k
Shane's first season on the Ottawa Centaurs, as told by everyone else in the world
🏒 You're in love with Shane Hollander? | 3.8k
Shane moves to Ottawa before everyone finds out about them and Ilya decides this is the time to convince the team that he has a one sided crush on Shane. The team knows Shane has a boyfriend(but they don't think it's Ilya) and try to talk sense into Ilya about all the flirting but he convinces them to help him get Shane instead, they comply because Ilya looks really desperate in their eyes.
🏒 HR sanctioned team building activities | 6.6k
After Shane gets traded to Ottawa, Ilya and him try to keep the relationship a secret by leaning into the rivalry that has followed them around for the entirety of their careers. But they underestimate just how competitive they are and it gets so bad that the team has to call an intervention
🏒 Operation: How Gay Can We Go? | 8.4k
What if the video never leaked and their relationship was still a secret when Shane joined the Ottawa Centaurs? The team wait in anticipation for Rozanov's reaction to his career-long rival joining their team... but wait a minute, they're jumping into each other's arms, giggling like a couple of schoolgirls?
🏒 the boy who blocked his own shot | 14.0k
Ilya’s dad dies right before the 2017 All-Star Game, so he never learns that Shane and Rose broke up. While he’s in Russia, a threat from his brother makes him ask Svetlana for help and marry her so he can get a US green card—it’s meant to be a discreet, simple thing, but the Boston tabloids get a hold of it and then it’s all over social media. Three months later, Shane Hollander holds a press conference to share two things: he's leaving Montreal to play for the Ottawa Centaurs, and he's gay
🏒 Love In Exile Has Nowhere To Go | 22.9k
Shane doesn’t get hurt, they break up, and they don’t talk for five long years. Until Shane is traded to Ottawa
🏒 Second Line | 29.7k
Shane and Ilya are estranged for years after Tuna Meltdown. Then Shane confuses everyone by signing with the Raiders (Not Ottawa, but same team as Ilya)
🏒 Never Tell Me The Odds | 32.1k
The prologue picks up mid-book 6, but rather than Brad posting the video to Twitter he sends it directly to the Montreal Metros. In this universe, Shane and Ilya are not outed to the world, but Shane is still kicked off the Metros team and transfers to Ottawa
🏒 Eurydice | 75.2k
where Shane just wants to play hockey but biology and shitty teammates make it nearly impossible. Ilya just wants to have some good competition on the ice. They make it work (eventually)
🏒 Change Your Win Conditions | 102k
Sometimes life came at you with a clenched fist and Ilya had never figured out how to duck. So here he was, twenty-eight years old, single, dealing with the fallout from injuries given to him by the game he loved, and the second youngest assistant coach in the league to one of the worst teams. Stability was hard to come by, but he was managing. Then along came Shane Hollander to knock him on his ass, one more time.
🏒 Shane Hollander’s Centaurs
After a breakup with Ilya Rozanov and being painfully outed, Shane Hollander tries to find a new future. He requests a trade to the Ottawa Centaurs in 2020. Wounded and wary, Shane is desperate to regain something he's lost: feeling like he belongs in the sport he loves
Feel free to add x
Make sure to check out other fic rec request here -> Requested Lists
Do you have any recs where Shane is traded specifically to Boston and they play together?
Yes I do x
Shane Plays for Boston
🏒 Six Days Until Florida | 5.0k
Shane was freaking out. Coming out to his team DID NOT go well. Instead of talking to his friends, or Rose, he calls Ilya.
And then he follows his advice
🏒 Adopt A Stray | 19.4k
"I'm calling it 'Adopt a Stray,'" Cliff announced, pacing the rug. "Tomorrow night. Boston vs. Montreal. We announce a new 'tradition.' We say that Boston has noticed that not every team is as close as ours. We say we’re looking for 'strays'—players who aren’t really accepted by their team, always seem an outcast, that need a little extra team bonding or whatever. And the first 'stray' we’re adopting? Is Shane Hollander."
🏒 All the Stars Align | 32.1k
when the long game falls apart, Shane and Ilya need a new plan. (Or or, from the ten year plan to the one week speed-run.)
🏒 Second Line | 29.7k
Shane and Ilya are estranged for years after Tuna Meltdown. Then Shane confuses everyone by signing with the Raiders
🏒 A Moonbeam In Your Hand | 38.3k
Ilya spirals into a deep depression when Shane breaks things off with him definitively after a horrifying run in with their feelings (and tuna melts). They go no contact for close to a year until Shane is unexpectedly traded to Boston the following season
🏒 Tiny Moves | 48.8k
In which the hit that Cliff Marleau had on Shane Hollander goes a little different. For one, they’re in Boston. For another, Ilya realizes he might be panicking? Which is probably not something to do in the middle of a game. And, oh yeah, he just outed both himself and his not-boyfriend to an entire locker room of hockey players. But that’s okay, because while Boston may be vicious, they do take care of their own. And they quickly realize that their captain’s happiness and willingness to stay with the Bears is tied to Shane Hollander. The solution is easy, they’ll just have to make Shane Hollander a Bear
🏒 Boston Boys | 51.5k
WIP : When the unsentimental financial imperative of the NHL sees Shane traded to the Boston Raiders, he and Ilya are thrown into closer extended proximity than ever before. As they adjust to life as teammates, they are forced to contend with the nature of their relationship -and must answer for themselves: is it even a relationship at all?
🏒 Home Ice Advantage | 51.9k
Shane gets traded to Boston AU
🏒 Better Days To Come | 54.0k
Refusing to let Ilya ruin his career by signing with Ottawa, Shane chooses to really give their relationship a try and moves to Boston to live with Ilya and become a Raider. What follows is enough public scrutiny and backlash from his team that it has him questioning if he made the right decision. Until moments with Ilya and the Raiders show him exactly why he chose correctly
🏒 Shane Hollander is Not a Coward | 74.8k
WIP : Shane just got traded to fucking Boston. To where Ilya was. With no apparent fucking reason in the middle of the season. He just won them two cups, why was this happening?
🏒 Something You Can Build | 96.8k
It’s 2018. Shane Hollander has to figure out his new life, in a new city, on a new team, while being out to the world but not by his own choice. Ilya, along for the ride, also has to learn what it means to be connected to a place, to a person, and to his own inner truth.
🏒 frequently, secretly fond of each other. | 186k
WIP : A year after mysteriously dropping out of the 2009 draft, Shane Hollander is signed by the Boston Raiders, right behind Ilya Rozanov. Having the two biggest stars in the league on the same line is great for Boston — but playing alongside their worst rival was never exactly in Shane or Ilya's plans. Especially not when staying away from each other starts to feel just as impossible as getting along
🏒 (We Could Be) Something Great | 195k
WIP : the Boston Bears figure out Ilya and Shane's relationship first-and decide that instead of letting their captain move to Ottawa, they'll just kidnap his boyfriend instead. Shane Hollander would make a better Bear anyway
🏒 Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other | 212k
A year after mysteriously dropping out of the 2009 draft, Shane Hollander is signed by the Boston Raiders, right behind Ilya Rozanov. Having the two biggest stars in the league on the same line is great for Boston — but playing alongside their worst rival was never exactly in Shane or Ilya's plans. Especially not when staying away from each other starts to feel just as impossible as getting along
🏒 Baby Bear | WIP
Shane Hollander is traded to the Boston Bears after back to back Stanley Cup victories, to the surprise of everyone. Most of all, Ilya Rozanov, Captain of the Bears and long-time situationship of Shane Hollander
🏒 Recalculating the ten year plan | WIP
When Montreal shows it’s true colors sooner, a No Trade Clause is waived and Boston gets an opportunity to build a dynasty that rivals the one of their largest rivals up North.
Make sure to check out other fic rec request here -> Requested Lists
