the other blog

Because Shane and Ilya have different styles of leadership for sure. Ilya's is a louder, more extroverted style whereas Shane's is more subtle and more based in individual interactions with his teammates.

But different does not mean better. And I think the assumption that it does in this case is largely rooted in the way society rewards extroversion while punishing introversion. With a pinch of ableism because I think Shane's autism has an inherent effect on his leadership style.

Also, a huge factor of the captain position in the NHL is that they (along with the alternate captains but only if the captain isn't on the ice at the time) are the only ones allowed to discuss calls with the referees. Something that Shane has a huge advantage in thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of hockey.

Ilya is the Centaur's captain because he was on the team for literally years before Shane. Because he was already the captain when Shane joined and he is absolutely a good captain so nobody was going to take it away from him. Because if in some freak universe they did, Shane would have refused to take it.

Now there are probably other factors as well as Shane being a good captain. The depth of the team, if Boston got unlucky with key player injuries in subsequent seasons. The fact that Ilya leaves for Ottawa at the end of the 2017-2018 season for (apparently) inexplicable reasons.

Could be erratic GM decisions in Boston, erratic coaching decisions, or a revolving door of coaches who got fired because they weren’t getting results fast enough. Maybe Boston was up for sale to a new ownership group and the GM was preoccupied with that instead of draft picks and trades.

Some of it is likely down to Montreal having good luck in the playoffs and Boston bad. Other factors that the team captain can’t control. But not all of it can be about luck. Nobody wins three championships by accident!

Shane won back to back cups for Montreal as captain, and then won again a few years later. Something was clearly working in that locker room he ran. His leadership style was quiet, but it got the Metros multiple championships. It’s highly unlikely to be a coincidence that they won three cups under his captaincy.

And then Ilya goes to Ottawa, but one world class player doesn’t instantly make them magic. It also takes Coach Wiebe, and Zane Boodram (who picks up a lot of the social slack when Ilya is suffering from crippling depression and barely interacting with his teammates off the ice). It takes drafting Luca Haas, and Toronto being dumb enough to let first Wyatt Hayes and then Troy Barrett leave for a divisional rival.

And it takes the GM hiring the openly gay Harris Drover as the social media person. Which shows closeted bisexual Ilya and closeted gay Troy that their teammates can work with someone who’s openly queer without making it weird. A reassurance Shane doesn’t get from Montreal after he comes out to his team and it goes badly.

And it takes Ilya starting to come out of his shell and interact with his team, once he’s in therapy. And him and Shane having blowout fights that are painful at the time but actually end up advancing their relationship.

And yeah, Ilya has a good line in inspirational speeches, but his inspirational speech after the near plane crash is clearly Ilya exercising a leadership muscle that had gone dormant for a while. And it’s not Ilya’s fault.

He was hiding an entire secret relationship and clinical depression at the same time. While also attempting to hide said clinical depression from his secret relationship partner. But Ilya doesn’t drag Ottawa up singlehanded with inspirational speeches. It takes a lot of hard work from various people who all end up clicking in the 2020-21 season.

And getting back to Bood’s unofficial role as the Centaurs social director, being a social director type of captain was never one of Shane’s strengths. I suspect JJ (incredibly sociable) and Hayden (pretty sociable) picked up a lot of that on the Metros. Hosting team barbecues and the like, just as Bood does for Ottawa.

Shane is more about quiet competence than hosting Halloween parties where someone brings weed. And also, Shane’s been with the Metros for a decade. They’ve built their offensive line around supporting one of the best centres in the world. For a decade. The team was very likely organized to get Shane the puck as often as possible. Neither Boston nor Ottawa have that longterm continuity in their star players.

Which isn’t Shane’s fault. But yeah, Shane is an excellent captain who gets results. The three cups aren’t only down to him, but he’s the consistent variable there. Which I suspect Montreal are going to find out the hard way after getting complacent about how much he brought to the team. And jettisoning him to a divisional rival in an impulse decision that Coach Theriault, the GM, and the ownership group are going to be having vivid nightmares about. Once they realize how much they were relying on Shane’s quiet competence.

So yeah, Shane and Ilya have different leadership styles. But Boston Ilya also has a different leadership style from 2018-2020 Ottawa Ilya. And from 2020-2021 Ottawa Ilya, who is finally settling into therapy and his new team.

Another factor is luck. A good playoff run isn’t just about excellence, it’s also about the team clicking at the right time. And getting lucky with injuries. And the teams you face getting unlucky with injuries.

So Ilya only having one Stanley Cup doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a worse captain than Shane. But Shane having three suggests he was doing something right. Quite a lot of things right, in fact. Nobody wins three Stanley Cups by accident. They have good luck and they’re also excellent.

If Coach Theriault and the Montreal GM had backed Shane wholeheartedly after he came out to the team, he probably would’ve led them to a fourth cup eventually. But they were homophobic themselves, so they did nothing to back him up. He lost the locker room and management let it happen.

The coaches and the GM were pissed at him for ruining their image of their heroic captain by being honest about who he really was. So they didn’t back their captain when his players muttered about the f-slur behind his back. And for a while it worked. The team kept winning, so everybody could pretend everything was still fine. But as soon as they stopped winning, the knives came out.

Hayden is allowed and forgiven for living his life with a carelessness that would have been catastrophic for either Shane or Ilya

Like, when I think of book!Shane especially, he’s been with women, even before Rose. He’s not a total shut-in. It’s very occasional and rare, but he does hook up sometimes and it’s like… rote. He’s doing it because he thinks he should and he thinks he ought to enjoy it and he thinks he ought to enjoy women. There’s one point in HR where he mulls over not understanding why some guys like eating girls out because it’s just, like, not doing it for him.

And! I think it’s also crucial to remember! Shane never DENIES that he likes men. His comphet does not actually feature denial of his desire for men — the reason he tries to deny his desire for Ilya isn’t because he’s a man, it’s because he’s Rozanov and because there’s the fear of feelings. Not cuz he’s a dude.

No, Shane’s arc is so interesting to me because it’s not a story of realizing or discovering his queerness. He’s not, like, figuring out that he likes men. He’s figuring out that he doesn’t like women.

And I think that’s so interesting! Shane Hollander, golden boy of hockey, forcing himself to fit the mold and also go above and beyond, he thinks for a long time “okay, I want to fuck men and that’s fine, whatever, but I’ll find a nice girl and settle down someday” and he thinks it’s the first part that is making him feel trapped and panicky and scared, but NO! It’s the second! It’s the trappings (literally) of heteronormativity that has him reeling! He’s convinced himself it’s an option, just like it’s hypothetically an option for Ilya, and the tuna melt scene emotional overflow scares him because he’s thinking oh fuck, I have these options and I might choose the “wrong” (re: not straight) one

The moment he realizes “I don’t want to fuck women,” when Rose makes him confront that he’s gay and not bi?? That’s when he’s like “oh. That doesn’t have to be the choice I make. That doesn’t have to be an option for me. I don’t have to like women”

It’s liberating for him. It lets him open up, lets him let the feelings in.

Sometimes, occasionally, on random nights, she'll wake up and she won't know why and she has to call him to make sure it wasn't some kind of sign. And she knows it's probably bad and she knows it's probably not fair to his sleep schedule or to whatever personal life he may be trying to have but she just can't help it. And usually she only has to call once for him to pick up, voice bleary and sleep-deep, and he'll just say, "I'm fine, mom, go to sleep," because he knows her so well, her velcro baby.

And then once or twice it's two in the morning and it takes three calls for him to pick up and by the time he finally does she's pacing in the hallway in front of her and David's bedroom and the sound of his voice, slightly out of breath and strangely awake for this time of night, strikes her with icy relief.

"Mom," he sighs, "Sorry, I'm fine, I was just--I was, uh, asleep. And I didn't hear my phone."

"Oh, that's okay," Yuna says, even though she can tell he wasn't asleep and isn't sure why he's lying to her. She's been encouraging him to, like, live a little. Go out for more than just team bonding. Be a little fucking wild--be a twenty-something in one of the most interesting cities in the world. Surely he knows she wouldn't judge him.

And then she hears a rustle of sheets and a clearing of a throat that sort of very clearly didn't come from close enough to the phone for it to be Shane's throat it came from. And as soon as she hears it she knows that she shouldn't have, and that she needs to forget she did, and so she does.

"A-anyway, Mom, I gotta get back to sleep," Shane says. "We're on ice first thing in the morning and Coach isn't gonna go easy after that shitshow tonight, so..."

"Theriault always makes it personal about Boston," Yuna muses.

"Yeah, well, it's Boston. So, um. G'night and I love you and tell Dad that I'll see him on Thursday after his, uh, banquet thing."

"Will do. Love you too, sweetheart." There's a beat during which Shane should be hanging up the phone, but he doesn't, because he can probably tell that she has more she wants to say.

"Mom," he says, a little impatient, but he doesn't hang up. Sometimes, Yuna is glad that Shane is her only baby, because she genuinely doesn't know where she would fit twice as much love in her body.

"Just--are you...I mean..." She wants to ask are you happy, are you lonely, are you WITH someone right now and if you are please just tell me if they take care of you--

But, of course, she can't say any of that because Shane really, truly is not the baby in her arms or the child wrapped around her leg anymore, and she has to make her peace with that even if it means not knowing if he's okay.

"You know you can always talk to me, right?" she says finally.

maybe like a pre-wedding "I just wish your mom could be here for this" comment that gets manifested a little too hard. irina who died in 2003 in her early-to-mid-thirties getting dropped in 2021 to see her thirty year old son (who was just her sweet twelve year old baby boy, like, yesterday) get married. and to a man.

her learning about what happened since her death. I don't think that ilya would be particularly forthcoming about the details of life in the rozanov household but she can read between the lines. ilya's mental health struggles. alexei's substance use issues. just the fact that her boys live on opposite sides of the world and no longer talk to eachother, and that one primarily speaks a different language that she doesn't know.

and the flip side. ilya getting to know her as Irina The Person. not just the sad and beautiful and young idealized version that lives in his mind. and maybe he's aware enough to know that he's put her on a pedestal, but who cares, that's his mama and she's dead so what difference does it make - except now she's alive and he's happy to have her here he is. but it's also dragging up a lot of unresolved Stuff about how she left, how he was a kid and she made a choice and left him behind.

it doesn't help things with alexei, either, that of course she came back to or for her favorite son. who knows/who cares what these magical rules are, he's married, he has a kid, where was she when any of those happened? why wasn't he important enough to come back for.

and like. of course ilya tells shane that she would have loved him. and she probably would like him just fine, as a person. but as a spouse for her son, I don't know. same-sex marriages in the US and canada was only just going through the courts when she died. she would have been coming of age during a time very hostile to gay people, especially in russia, mid-AIDS crisis, etc. and all we really know about her is that she wore a cross and presumably took ilya to church with her - he doesn't go anymore, he says.

shane — who at this point has spent the entire book being told by literally everyone that he needs to be less mopey and anxious and to support ilya’s life more — fully compartmentalises everything and pushes all of it down. he’s never been happier, truly. yes he’d love to host the centaurs at his new house without warning. he’d love to do a photoshoot. he’d love to post a video on instagram. he’d love to be the butt of the joke. look how much fun he’s having. this is great. he just needs to be less worried about everything and it’ll all work out. ilya will take care of it. he just needs to go to the back of the line. yes, he wants another slice of chocolate cake please and thank you