The minimisation of Shane struggles in TLG by both RR as well as the HR community as a whole is so widely saddening. Shane being forced out the closet against everything he's ever worked for by his own best friend who is one of the only people in his entire team of over twenty guys that he's spent years with that still treats him like he's a human after he came out right before the season starts is genuinely Shane personal horror movie that came to life and swallowed it whole. Being outed is always one if the worst things to happen to a queer person, but Shane's not just a queer person or just a queer hockey player, he's a fucking model minority in an extremely conservative, white male dominated sport.
To be a POC in conservative spheres is hard enough, just adding another thing to the list of all the things that are simply wrong about your existence as a whole by being queer does absolutely make it worse for Shane. Even if RR refuses to explore the implications of Shane's half asian-ness in favour of writing Shane as the most lukewarm white version of himself, that doesn't mean it's not real and it's not an undisputed reality.
Shane Hollander is an extremely unreliable narrator. He will minimise something that hurts him to dilute the impact of it, because if he refuses to acknowledge something hurts him than it really doesn't, and that's why I feel everyone just takes everything Shane presents at face value. He goes through a lot, his ED and his "quirks" and his fears are all minimised and in some cases shown as selfish or not as big as problems as the ones Ilya has because Ilya's hurt and grief and struggles are just so much more palatable compared to Shane's that people don't try to get it.
To try and understand Shane is to try and understand a half-japanese autistic queer canadian man whos tried his whole life to fit and squeeze and suffocate himself for the first love of his life. He's given up so much for hockey, any and all connection with his japanese heritage, his sense of self, his autonomy to his own privacy and body and time, the most important person in his life, his entire queer identity as something he never got the chance to truly embrace, and his autistic traits that he had to mask and cram lower and lower into tiny little boxes that he'll scream and hurt and cry over in the dark corners of his own mind
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