COME LEARN MY MANTRA

the thing about heated rivalry is that it is that serious

[louder than everyone] MAN I THINK IT DEPENDS!

don't get me wrong i love the fact that shane and ilya retcon their relationship to be love at first sight. like good for them!! but when i look at the source material im like .. you were charmed. you were jealous. he had everything you wanted (supportive family and his country behind him, able to be big and brash and move through life with ease) and you wanted to see if you could make him feel good (can you debauch the golden boy, can you be good for the man who's had everyone) but the love didn't come until you started to take apart the things that attracted you to this person in the first place. shane fell in love with the ilya who checked in on him and with the sweetness behind the barbs and with the ilya who couldn't stop kissing him in that stairwell. and ilya fell in love with the shane who thinks buffalo is stupid and can barely get his shoes off before he throws himself at ilya and can't tell his parents he's gay because he's suffocating behind his own image not because he thinks they don't love him but because he wants to honor everything they've done for him. and so it's really nice that ilya goes "i loved you from the first time i saw you" but i, omniscient reader, call bullshit. i think you love that boy now because no version of you could ever not love any version of him. but at the time i think you were mostly just curious and then the love grew despite all odds in the most hostile of circumstances because everything you learned about each other made you want more and more and more. and also probably that's even MORE beautiful. so.

nothinggg is more ilya than the tampa hotel room sequence where shane comes out, ilya acts like a dick while keeping himself physically as far from shane as possible, shane gets his feelings hurt and starts looking a little chin-wobbly, and ilya audibly GROANS and flings himself across the room to sit next to him on the bed. but he’s still not looking at shane or touching him because ilya is NOT here to comfort him or anything ok he just randomly and totally unrelatedly got tired of standing up at the exact moment that shane’s big brown eyes started getting all wet and shiny with tears and the nearest place to sit down happened to be on the bed next to shane. do NOT read anything into this none of this means ANYTHING (in under two minutes he will be crying in shane’s arms btw)

I do think it’s so funny that rose was like GOD I’m so tired of dating these actors who turn out to be closet cases! I’m going to date a hot pro athlete who plays the one sport where men are actually encouraged to knock each other’s teeth out on the ice as a sign of their aggressive macho man virility. and then shane is like 🥺 it’s ok that I have to fantasize about being being held down and railed by my big strong manly rival to get off when we have sex right? and rose is like oh my fuckinhhggg godddfddddddd