Something out of Nothing

Yuna, a business woman to the bone, sends a few emails about a collaboration with a really very exciting brand. Then a few texts. Shane, a little annoyed, more than a little sex-drunk, sends some vague excuses about 'later'. Then Yuna, who takes a hint about as well as her son, stops by the cottage. It's on her way, the collaboration really is very exciting, Shane would really like this one, and it'll only take half an hour, tops.

By sheer luck, both Shane and Ilya are clean, fully dressed, and not currently hard when Yuna drops by. The campaign *is* actually something Shane likes the sound of, Ilya can tell, but Yuna seems completely oblivious to the awkward vibes. Maybe even Shane is mostly unaware of his own frustration. But Ilya is not.

When the papers are signed and Yuna will forge ahead with the arranging etc, Ilya walks his mother in law to the door.

"Mama Yuna, thank you for stopping by with cookies (for Ilya) and fancy green tea (for Shane), and this is very good campaign, and we appreciate everything you do. But we are on silent retreat, yes?"

And Yuna starts to say something about how and what, and is that- before she remembers the last time Shane went on a 'silent retreat'. About meeting Ilya, and seeing a new side of her son. The side that had hickeys and a bruise she really didn't care to dwell on.

"Ah." Yuna says eventually. "Apologies." There's a pause. "Next time you boys go on a silent retreat, maybe put those dates in the calender?" Then Yuna briskly walks to her car, goes home, and puts her entire mind towards arranging this collaboration and nothing else.

Shane nearly hits the roof when he gets a calendar notification and sees that Ilya has put in 'Silent Retreat' for the both of them. But to be fair, they don't hear a thing from either his parents for the whole time remaining.

It becomes a code for them. Luck has four consecutive days off for the team, and the guys are discussing what they will do with them.

"I think we'll probably go to the cottage, kind of a retreat." Shane says when Wyatt asks. Ilya perks up the same way Anya does at the word retreat.

"Yes, just relax. Small silent retreat." Ilya confirms, somewhat gleefully. And the silent part is apparently glossed over, as Bood pipes up that Cassie wanted to go to a spa retreat, and which one were they going to? Cause Bood loved them, but he did not want to see his coworkers at the spa. Ilya winks at Shane, and names a spa Shane knows exist, but is quite a bit outside of Ottawa and the conversation moves on. Shane is half-hard when they get to the car.

They are at a gala at some sort, and it's fine. But it's been a long night, and there are a lot of people, and noise and weird foods and some sort of artisinal ginger ale that is NOT the same. Ilya finds Shane in a half hidden corner.

"Enough, yes? Time to retreat." And Shane knows exactly what he means, and yes. Retreat please.

A barbeque at Bood's. It really was a great night. Easy, nice food, good friends, mellow music..

"I've had a great time, but if you're okay to go, I could use a bit of silence." Shane says to Ilya, who is obviously okay to go. And the cens are great about Shane's (non diagnosed) oddities and don't suspect a thing.

Then, in the middle of the season, Shane has an Idea for the foundation. He texts his mom. Calls his mom. And she doesn't respond.. Shane eventually gets a text back about calling him back in a few days. But Shane really wants to discuss his Idea, it's big and important, and both his mom and dad are off. He'll just drop by quickly to discuss things.

Then he gets a calendar notofication: Silent Retreat - Yuna & David.

Everything bad. Everything unsatisfying. Every bit of guilt or self doubt expressed by Shane. Every uncharitable thought or mistaken impression expressed by Ilya. THAT comes from Rachel Reid.

But somehow everything else, the parts that vindicate Shane or that prove that Ilya is incorrect. That somehow spontaneously happened in spite of Ms. Reid. And somehow that makes her a worse author or person.

It's a little bewildering.

I've mentioned before that I see Ilya as an unreliable viewpoint character. And I believe this because the narrative repeatedly proves him incorrect.

Ilya thinks Shane doesn't know the dark side of hockey. Shane, in the mean time, has a coach that makes homophobic statements in front of him. Shane even thinks to himself about how, after so long in the sport, he isn't even sure he can tell what's homophobic anymore. Shane has been called into Crowell's office and given veiled threats that reference both race and sexuality. Shane's fears about the effects on his career end up completely justified.

I've left off the stuff that's subject to interpretation and only mentioned the parts that specifically happen on page.

Now it is true that there's no explicit point in the narrative where Ilya realizes that he's wrong. There's no point where the narrative says in exact words: "Ilya was wrong about Shane."

But...everything that happened, on page, indicates that yes, Shane DOES know the dark side of hockey and is currently living it.

Ilya thinks that he doesn't have a support system and Shane does. And to some extent, it's understandable. Being in the closet is isolating and Ilya's depression also gets in the way of him being able to reach out to the people close to him.

He hasn't spoken to Svetlana in three years, but as soon as he calls, she races over to have lunch with him. He comes out to her and she reacts very well.

He has an entire team that he goes back and forth about wanting to come out to, but when he's involuntarily outed, they immediately have his back. His coach comes to him in person, comes out to him, and promises support.

Early on, he dismisses Ryan Price, even though Ryan's known about them for a year and even went on a de facto double date with them. But he hasn't spoken to him or the other Gamechanger coaches in months.

BUT when they're outed, Scott comes to see them with the whole Avengers Assemble offer. In the books, at least, Scott and Ilya have much more interaction than Scott and Shane.

Meanwhile, Shane has his parents, sure. He has Hayden and Jackie. He has JJ, once JJ apologizes (off page, which I'm still genuinely irked about). He has Rose...and that's it. He's lost everyone else.

And yes, again, there's no explicit point in the narrative where Ilya realizes "Oh, I do have a lot more support than I thought." or "Wow, Shane actually has a lot smaller a support system than I thought." But the narrative shows us this very clearly.

Ilya thinks he's a bad coach and the team is doing badly. And admittedly, this one does take a bit more extrapolation. There's a reason I keep comparing TLG to Ted Lasso Season 2 though. In Ted Lasso, Season 2, the main character has found his happy-go-lucky facade increasingly crumbling based on the emotional stress he's been under. And at the same time, the narrative focuses pretty exclusively on the games that have gone badly.

But if you pay attention to details, like scoreboards and the like, it becomes pretty clear that actually, the team is playing very well. Well enough that they make it back to the Premiere league at the end of the season. It's just that the story is carrying us with Ted and it's a long time before Ted is ready to see it.

TLG is the same way. We see the losses. We see Ilya's doubts. But they make the playoffs. They are able to match Montreal game for game until Shane's trip. Even without that trip, they might have won. And even if they hadn't won, they would still have made a very good showing.

(I've also heard, though I haven't read, that in Role Model, Barrett's view of Ilya as Captain is very complimentary.)

Again, we don't get an explicit "oh, I was wrong" moment. But the narrative gives us events that prove him wrong.

It would have been more satisfying if Ilya did admit that he was wrong in each of these moments, sure. But an unreliable viewpoint character can be unreliable even if he never admits to it. The narrative events prove him wrong.

Likewise, yes, there is a discord excerpt somewhere where Ms. Reid calls Shane selfish but without context, it's hard to know what exactly she's talking about. But she is the one who wrote Shane constantly checking in on Ilya, doubting and blaming himself for not being able to meet Ilya's needs, and being absolutely right about what he was afraid of.

She did write that.

I'm not saying we have to like what she wrote. (I've made complaints myself.) But she did write it.

Shane is not vindicated in spite of Rachel Reid. He's vindicated because she wrote the plot points that vindicate him. Ilya is not wrong about a lot of things in spite of Rachel Reid. He's wrong about things because she wrote those plot points that show us that he's wrong.

First of all that's not really how depression works, but second of all it's not how people act, and it's also a little too "Sesame Street episode" for me.

By the end of the book Ilya probably barely even remembers thinking that Shane doesn't know the dark side of hockey. It's burned in our brains because this is a book and we have a permanent record of our boys' thoughts. But Ilya is living through a series of extreme events, and his perceptions are shifting constantly (just track how he feels about coming out and how much he blames Shane over the book. it's inconsistent!)

Ilya apologizes for his actions. To Shane for the Boxing Day fight and asking him to leave. He apologizes to Svetlana for ghosting her.

This guy covers children's songs in the style of various artists, and he's incredible.

I'm weirdly emotional about it?

Trump treats the military like he treats his rape victims. He denies their story. Accuses them of lying. Says the victim deserves worse.

1.06 The Cottage | Heated Rivalry

specifically i need him expressing non rhoticity (dropping rs at the end of syllables, the classic “pahk the cah in havahd yahd”) (admittedly i dont know much about russian phonology besides their beautiful palatalization so this might be impractical but idc)

Stories (such as romance novels) are all about tension. There is a conflict which the characters are affected by and at some point, that conflict and the tension created by it as resolved (not always positively!). In romance novels, that conflict is also called "the barrier between them"¹ because the central problem is not whether the protagonists get together and live Happily Ever After, but how they overcome the internal or external obstacles that are keeping them apart at the beginning of the story.

In The Long Game, the main barrier between Shane and Ilya and their HEA is homophobia in hockey generally and the fallout of their relationship with each other as Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov specifically. This is an external obstacle that was already present in Heated Rivalry, but that book focused on how the external obstacle also created internal barriers, making them unable to believe that they could ever be together, and the resolution there is "we can't overcome the external obstacle, but we can accept that we love each other and that acceptance makes us happy." It makes a lot of sense for this story to focus on the internal conflict because the external conflict is basically insurmountable.

The Long Game has to end with Shane and Ilya publicly out and in a relationship with each other because this second HEA needs to be a progression from the first one, because otherwise the story stagnates. So there are three options for when in the book it happens: the beginning, the middle, or the end.

If the outing (labelled "bradgate" in the above, extremely scientific illustration) happens at the beginning of the book, it has to be the inciting incident for the story and the main conflict would then be about navigating the fallout of getting outed, leading to some kind of climax that resolves the resulting tension between Shane and Ilya and brings them back together.

If it happens in the middle of the book, there would still need to be a conflict leading up to it because otherwise there wouldn't be a story. So they would be not out for half the book, dealing with something else, then get outed and spend the other half of the book dealing with the fallout of getting outed. I'm sure it would be possible to make this work somehow, maybe if the first half was also about information being leaked, but generally this would be bad storytelling practice for genre fiction and especially romance, which prioritises the protagonists' relationship over external plot and therefore usually keeps the latter to a minimum.

The third option, the one we ended up with, positions getting outed as part of the resolution to the tension created by the protagonists' relationship. The Long Game primarily revolves around Shane and Ilya realising that their previous HEA doesn't work for them anymore and trying to negotiate what they want (to stop having to hide their relationship) with the external obstacle represented by the league and the threat to their careers and safety. By the time they are outed against their will, they have already decided to come out themselves in a couple of months and are so secure in their relationship that they are willing to accept the negative consequences. Bradgate then functions to increase the stakes so the story doesn't just trickle towards an ending (if they had been in control and come out after the season ended, the realistic and in-character plan, the outcry wouldn't have been so immediate; it would all have happened online and in meetings with lawyers during the off-season, which would be boring to read about).

If The Long Game started with Shane and Ilya being outed against their will, it would be a very different book. Diving deeper into the consequences and backlash would be a really compelling and emotionally intense story, but it would be a complete tonal shift from the rest of the series, which prioritises queer joy as an empowering force while acknowledging the limitations of the main conflict (homophobia in men's sports). The Long Game as it was published instead centres the protagonists growing both as individuals and as a couple so that they are able and ready to stop hiding, because they love each other and are choosing their love over the potential negative consequences. All of the couples in the series actively choose to be together (and the closeted characters choose to be open about their queerness) because that's what makes them happy and gives them the kind of life they want, and The Long Game ultimately lets Shane and Ilya make that same choice before Bradgate accelerates their timeline.

As a book, it definitely has its flaws! Not every part of it is executed as well as it could be and the constraints of the genre mean the ending feels rushed because there are a lot of loose ends to tie up. But Shane and Ilya were always going to be out and married at the end of it and the choices made in the construction of that narrative make perfect sense to me. This is not the only possible version of the story, nor is it the only good version of the story, but it is consistent with both the genre conventions and the author's other work and successfully does what it sets out to do.