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Shane has been playing hockey since he was a child, and has always been good at it, no way he wasn’t popular among his peers and didn’t have other boys trying to befriend him.

But also this doesn’t mean Shane wasn’t lonely. There is a huge difference between being alone and being lonely.

Oh yeah definitely? I've always found the idea of bullied!Shane a bit odd.

It might be considered a hot take but I've always had the opinion Shane had a perfectly happy childhood with a normal amount of friends and no serious issues. Especially if we're not going to be hyper realistic about how bad juniors hockey can be (which is quite bad. but HR is a glossy romance world, so I'm okay softening this).

It's realistic that child/teen Shane got picked on a few times for his race. He would have been othered due to his sheer talent. He also probably had a sense of unease around his sexuality even though he wasn't self aware about being attracted to men until the night of the draft.

But overall....Shane is the golden boy. By 16 he's the most talented hockey prospect in Canada. He's captaining the Canadian national juniors team and leading them to victory. He probably had groupies in high school. We know he had a girlfriend and she was probably the prettiest girl in Kingston. Beyond that, he grew up in a stable and loving home with two parents who genuinely loved him and were not interested in stealing his future income or micromanaging his career. His life was and is objectively pretty good.

As for the loneliness...I actually don't think child Shane was all that lonely. Maybe some only child loneliness but I kind of think Shane liked being the center of his parents' world. And I think he liked being the standout junior talent.

My take is actually that Shane's loneliness doesn't set in until he accomplishes all his childhood dreams and moves to Montreal. My reasoning for this is that he seems somewhat surprised by it in HR:

I think Shane's life up until that point had been so dominated by the goal of making it to the NHL and getting drafted that he really didn't have time to be lonely. And Shane would have been in that shit with all the other kids, even though he was obviously a stand out talent, there's still this bonding experience of you're all striving for the same thing. And you can kind of pretend you're all on the same ship.

Louis: Where were you during... you know. Armand said your head was with his companion.

Buddy, I can assure you that your personal experience is just that, your personal experience. I can give you example on rice specifically. I live in a south east asian country that eat rice as staple food, one of those countries where the traditional literal translation for the phrase for "have you eaten" in our language is "have you eaten rice?"

And if you ask literally anyone here now, they'll say that they cook rice using rice cooker. It's how they've done it, how their mother done it, and how their mother's mother done it. Everybody from the poorest to the richest would eat rice cooked by electric rice cooker.

But if you go back just *one* generation more, you'll find that rice cooker was newfangled addition to rice for that generation. I'm old enough that I remember from my early childhood when people still commonly used to cook rice by *steaming* them using rice steamer back then.