I thought it would be a fun project to re-cover my copy of Heated Rivalry with something that felt a little more like the vibe of the TV show. Cartoon romance novel covers aren't really my thing, so I wanted to make one that wasn't shy about being a novel for adults!
This cover puts the reader in the position of voyeur, peeking through the hotel window in Las Vegas. The dust jacket's window frame purposely obscures the identities of Shane and Ilya, as a reference to the secrecy of their relationship in this book.
I don't have a printer, so it was a good challenge to figure out how to make this all by hand. I illustrated the inner cover with colored pencils (this is the project that made me really fall in love with my Prismacolors), and hand-lettered the dust jacked with acrylic paint and gel pen.
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.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
In #myhrtimeline Shane is on Sesame Street to talk about good sportmanship whether it be a win or a loss and then a week later he tries to physically fight Scott on the ice after winning his game against him. Ilya sends him pretty much nonstop memes about this. Most of them are just Elmo wildly swinging his arms around w/ âyouâ attached.
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.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
"'We could only have one child,'' David said quietly. "We thought about adopting, but we decided in the end to just focus on making Shane the best person we could. I think we did an okay job of it.
Ilya smiled at the understatement.
"We couldn't be prouder of the man he's become,' David continued. "I don't have any Stanley Cup rings, but I have Shane.''
Chapter 39, The Long Game
....
It's Christmas of 1988.
There's one more present under the tree, and Yuna's eyes are dancing as she hands it to David. He opens it to find the tiniest pair of shoes he's ever seen.
"No. Really?" He's dizzy.
"Really," Yuna grins, and her eyes are shining with tears, and David loves that face more than anything. He hopes their baby looks just like her.
.....
It's a bitterly cold day in February of 1989 when David puts the shoes away. He pushes down all the anger of it's not fair, why us, why our baby. Yuna needs him.
The doctor had said you're young, you can try again.
.....
In the spring of 1990 the flowers are blooming to life and Yuna's belly is starting to look rounder. David looks around the empty bedroom in their Ottawa house and thinks green might be nice, something that works for a boy or a girl, a nice cheerful shade. Next week he'll buy the paint.
The call from the hospital comes before he gets the chance. When he looks at the doctor's scrubs he thinks green is the ugliest colour on earth.
.....
They don't talk about it. Not when the leaves are changing colour and the nurse offers them congratulations. Not at Christmas or New Year's as they turn the calendar over to 1991. It's Valentines Day before David gets the courage to touch the rounded swell of his wife's body and he cries when whoever is inside touches him back. It doesn't matter that they don't have a name or a face yet, he loves them so much it hurts.
.....
On a Friday morning in May, David holds his son for the first time. His face is scrunched and blotchy red and angry. He's the most perfect thing anyone has ever laid eyes on.
He watches Yuna sing and rock him near the nursery window at home, her face glowing. He thinks the yellow paint was definitely the right choice for their sunshine, their only sunshine.
.....
Shane is a chubby baby (they laugh themselves sick when the baby shoes don't even fit on his fat little biscuit feet) but by the time he turns two he has leaned out into a little boy, they think maybe they are ready to try again. David imagines a girl this time, introducing Shane to his baby sister. Melissa sounds pretty. The baby name book had said it meant honeybee and doesn't that just fit perfectly amidst sunshine and flowers and springtime?
.....
It never happens.
Shane is an only child at four and five and six and he's becoming something special on the ice, all the coaches say so. David thinks that they have no idea what they're talking about when they say that because Shane Hollander has always been special from the time he kicked and rolled inside his mother, before he ever knew what cold was.
If he's all they get, they will make sure he knows he is everything.
.....
Sometimes David wants to take Shane by the shoulders and apologize to him for making him think he has to be everything. You don't have to try so hard to be perfect for us, he wants to say. You're perfect to us because you're you, you're ours, don't you know how we prayed and hoped and waited just for you to exist, don't you know that's enough?
Much, much later as he waves to him (to them) in late evening sunshine, he sees Shane relax behind the windshield with a loving hand on the back of his neck. David feels something inside of him loosen.
.....
On Shaneâs wedding day, David embraces both his sons and dances with his wife and my god, if this is all he ever gets in life, no man has ever been so lucky.
.....
"Are you ready?" Shane is smiling and his eyes are shiny. Ilya looks much the same.
David is dizzy. But he nods and holds his hands out. Shane places the baby in his arms and oh, she's so tiny. He forgot how tiny they start out.
Her little knit hat is yellow.
"Hey there, honeybee," he murmurs, and his voice is foggy with unshed tears. "I'm your grandpa."
i tried making a contrapuntal poem for hollanov, which can be read 3 ways: shaneâs side alone, ilyaâs side alone, or both sides together. inspired by the long game.
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.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
I was debating wether or not to post this here but I guess I have to start somewhere âď¸đ¤¨ here is my heated rivalry fanart for everyone who enjoyed the show as much asIĂ did
Go to my Instagram to see all my work â¤ď¸ @/roperodibujo
The brilliance of creation goes to @mewsthumbring and kindly tagged by @ae-azile.
*Rules: We all know the gif search on this website/app is a farce. So letâs have a laugh! Pick 5 shows or characters, type them into the gif search bar, and then pick the first gif that comes up in the results.*
Bed Friend
Lol, it was from a "10 Fave QL Leads" post
Thamepo
Yes, we know you want to get fucked through the couch, po
Pluribus
Ok was this actually the first one? No, but it's funny and no one can stop me
Make Some Noise
Crucially, the answer is "it's pride, bitch"
What We Do in the Shadows
4 for 5, other than getting a "this is too mature for little ole grown ass adult you" message for searching"knot"
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.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.
Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?
That's a Problem.
It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!
And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.
The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
Obviously, the presence is easier to spotâyou can actually see something that is present, but you canât directly see something thatâs absentâso it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.
Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just canât only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
This whole thread is incredible and you're encouraged to read it all and share it. But if you read nothing else after the opening, let it be the above.
