Hug now, escape later

I am back because I need more of the gay hockey show gifs in my life.

Like with the Senators their whole thing is Roman senators with the helmet and they theme everything like that. It’s stupid af but very hockey.

So honestly Centaurs is kind of a stroke of fucking genius because it’s Greek themed so you still have the ancient world stuff. But even better it has exactly the same shortened name (Sens/Cens). Idk I think it’s a bit brilliant

They’ll probably have to change it in the show (unless the popularity means copyright infringement is no longer something Tierney has to stress over!) which is sad.

bottom ten team: we have just paid a player that no one has ever heard of TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS

jason robertson: no i dont want to be paid 15 million dollars by YOU. who want me tho? no fr who want me?

ducks: we HATE our group

canes: we LOVE our group

half the league: captains? anyone want to be the new captain? no?

kings: i am going to pay a random 40-year-old 8 million dollars a year. yes this is getting us a cup

kraken: well fuck me i guess. worth a shot

connor bedard: i am going to KILL MYSELF

mike grier: well they dont call me big money mike for no reason. you get 8 mil and you get 8 mil and everyone gets 8 mil except for the guys who were alr on the team!

panthers + also gleb for some reason: i am going to KILL EVERYONE ELSE

habs: oui oui puppies! and kittens! and rainbows! and every one of them gets a choco chunk cookie (reasonable contract and term).

danny briere to his ex situationship: "hey... time to run it back... no fr tho... u still want me?" *crickets* "ok watch me money spread. you want me now?"

everyones goalies for some reason: "bye"

elliotte FUCKING friedman: your favorite fourth liner just got sent to HELL for future considerations

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado

illustration from Doktor Johannes Faust’s Magia naturalis et innaturalis, 1849

The second and third actually are ‘harder, please’ and ‘yes, sir’, except he doesn’t tell Ilya.

He just springs it on him mid fuck with a perfect pronunciation and Ilya makes a face like he’s just stepped out into traffic and immediately cums so hard his entire body tenses and he gets a leg cramp so bad he falls off the bed.

He’s entirely obscured from view but Shane just hears a tiny confused (but affectionate) little

Your feelings are important, but they are not immutable facts about the world around you.

But Ilya wins and that’s not what happens!

From a show verse perspective I don’t think we consider enough the possibility that Ilya did not expect to win or at least didn’t make a controlled sex bet based on his possible win. The risk he COULD take was “if you win, Hollander, I’ll do whatever YOU want”. Then he could justify anything - he lost a bet.

But he’s not PREPARED to offer a counter “you do anything I want”, in this bathroom. That’s where he ends up, but in this bathroom, after basically domming Shane into trying to dom HIM re the “get on your knees in this filthy bathroom and suck my dick” bit, he… doesn’t have an answer to “if you win”. So he kisses Shane as both an assertion of control and a way to dodge the question.

But from an audience perspective and maybe from Shane’s: is that an answer? If Ilya wins, kissing?

The Vegas penthouse scene is _deliberately_ failing expectations for both Shane and the audience, but the audience expectations have been set by this kiss in particular. Unlike in a deep 3p romance novel we have no access to internal monologue for either of them, which means there is no definitive canon on How Ilya Thought About This (but fandom really rather under-considers Character Lying To Themself Or Forming Wrong Conclusions Based On Incomplete Data anyway).

Hence I return to turn-taking, which is a concept I learned about in Shakespeare studies. Turn-taking conveys a lot about character dynamics on the stage. I knew a guy who studied interruption in Shakespeare: that was mainly about hierarchy. Interruption serves a different function in Rozenzencrantz and Gildernstern Are Dead, and multiple functions in Oscar Wilde. Hell, if I was trying to explain this concept to zoomers and Gen A I’d probably use the “we finish each other’s / sandwiches” duet from Frozen - the level of interruption and fast turn-taking is a deliberate contrast to Do You Wanna Build A Snow Man. Along with music and animation choices, it creates a sense of synchronicity and alignment- right up to the final “finish each others / sandwiches” line.

Turn-taking in conversation is MAINLY analysed in terms of verbal exchange, for a bunch of reasons. But we all know that Gesture can be a statement, right? Not saying anything at all can be a power move . Giving the middle finger is as much a conversational turn as saying “fuck you”.

There is a significant difference between the book and the show in that scene. In the book, Ilya answers “If you win?” with “I will let you know,” and only AFTER that does he kiss Shane. Shane’s pov provides very little insight into how Shane is processing this OR what he thinks Ilya is on about. I actually think this conveys a combination of “what the fuck I don’t know what’s going on” and “avoiding thinking about one’s OWN motivations” quite well!

I actually have sympathy with the small group of people who prefer the Ilya POV deep 3p narration “we didn’t even kiss” post Vegas Penthouse over the unsent text.”

I am not disappointed because the “if you win?” / “kiss” exchange hits the key character point for me, ESPECIALLY combined with how quickly he responds to “I need… you”. Shane didn’t send the “we didn’t even kiss” text, Ilya didn’t initiate more kisses - but “if you win?/KISS” and “we didn’t even kiss are so clearly bookends.

It doesn’t matter if Ilya KNOWS that - at a watsonian level, if this guy is telling himself he doesn’t want, he doesn’t even want SHANE to suck his dick he wants Shane to beg him to sick his… obviously his internal narration is not going to say “If I win, I will kiss this man so much”. But he breaks and just kisses him.

From an audience level that sets an expectation.

Shane, idek. Watsonian level he’s mad and confused and the book scene is deliberately sparse.

Doylist, structural: in both texts, that kiss and the “we didn’t even kiss” line are foils.

Given that Shane never sent that text in the show, and show!Ilya didn’t say the Mr Sex Knower line “I’ll let you know”… I really like the show version. It’s hot to me, sure, but it’s also a really good adaptation. The actual conversation/interaction turns are different because key dynamics are compressed and because TV show needs to be more explicit in some respects than a book, but can also be more ambiguous.