Dream, you will fully bloom after all the hardships

My read is that this was a reference to that scene in S2 where Daniel is like, "you're an ancient vampire you could read any mind you wanted to" and Armand was like "it was love", because he was blinded by his love for Louis and thus fucked up with the coven.

and like. LISTEN. shane is a tough, strong dude, okay? he has played a heavy contact sport since he was an itty bitty. he is no shrinking violet. he can take a hit and get back up and keep going. he's no stranger to like. grabbing shoulders and a little playful jostling. but i also feel like his vibe on the team with the metros made him a little untouchable (first with respect that still made him "other" and then with. well.) beyond things like shoulder punches from jj and helmet taps with hayden.

and now he's gotten tossed into this locker room where he is accepted and welcomed but ALSO maybe getting fucking whiplash on the reg from cliff's affection. like hey! thank you for including me! but also you just fucking RAGDOLLED me the SECOND i walked in here today and i am a little turned on and ALARMED about it. just a little.

like hits on the ice? yeah. shane understands those. gets 'em and deals 'em all the time. no big. a little bro shoulder tapping/shaking? yeah sure.

but cliff just fucking. 🗣️HOLL-ZY! MY GUUUY! 🗣️ and that is shane's ONLY warning that he's about to get borderline shaken adult syndrome. everyone else in the locker room including ilya knows to brace or dodge by this point, but shane is still adjusting.

Even if it was not her intention, that's on her for making Shane half-japanese to festishize bottom gay character using east asian stereotype.

Yeah and I can tell from reading Role Model too that she has an extremely hard time making her character convincingly love another character that she doesn’t also love. If she can’t see the appeal, neither can her character, at least not fully.

because she's made some comments in the past that felt like microaggressions (together with JT) and people called that out and were silenced because "you're being parasocial! these people are friends and joke about each other!"

and when people pointed out that they may be joking, but saying this stuff publicly in the context of the racist attacks Hudson has been receiving for months is AT LEAST a horrible look optics-wise, if not intentionally malicious, and it only made the racists feel welcomed in their prejudices, so an environment filled with white people needed some diversity training to know how to handle having a poc actor as a lead

and people were silenced AGAIN (and then the Peabody award announcement mess happened, because of course it did)

and now i can't avoid seeing how similar the way she talks about Shane, a character she accidentally made neurodivergent, to the way she talks about Hudson, a neurodivergent man who brought his knowledge of his dad's autism in how he portrayed Shane's autism