Mostly Fandom Ramblings

but why is this only about shane? to my knowledge RR has not spoken like this about ilya or at least not to the same frequency. so then why does she feel the need to consistently reiterate negative comments about shane?

why is the main conflict in TLG, as per her own words, attributed to shane's supposed selfishness (im not going to even get into how i feel about this claim, thats an entire different post)? shouldn't a romance book focus on how the shortcomings of both characters impacts the relationship? why isn't ilya's lack of empathy regarding shane's disordered eating/overall anxiety also a factor, or his inability to communicate until he blows up? why is shane the asshole for not focusing on his sad boyfriend, but ilya is not expected to worry about how shane's anxiety has a significant negative impact on his life?

i can maybe understand how as a white nuerotypical author RR did not initially consider how shane's autism and race would impact his life, and how it would certainly be traumatic for someone like that to be a star player in the nhl. but to not only do that, and then claim that he has no trauma, and then double down and sideline a question specifically talking about shane's trauma to instead talk again about how ilya has trauma because his parents are dead whereas shane has good parents is insane. to have ilya claim in the book that has a white man, he understands the dark side of hockey more than shane, a POC, is insane.

or if shane were the one who backed ilya against a wall in anger in that TLG scene, you just know everyone would be bringing it up every 5 minutes to trash him and call him all sorts of names. people already pick him apart in the book even though he didn't do this. yet it's all crickets when ilya did this. right. not once have I seen ppl mention this scene.

the fandom has had a pattern with dismissing the racism hudson received and subject shane to so many microaggressions disguised as headcanons, but always tip toe around critiquing ilya's flaws. his always begins with "I love Ilya...." but shane's critisism is just blatant, harsh and sharp, people aren't afraid of bashing shane the way they are afraid about ilya, because they know they can bash shane comfortably, they're aware that the fandom's unspoken notion is more pro ilya. so yeah. I'm not letting this one go sorry not sorry.

Dallas Kent cannot be racist because that means Troy is racist, or at least outwardly condoned his friends racism (which is still racist!) Additionally, this would mean that Ilya becoming buddies with Troy would mean he became buddies with a guy that was racist towards his boyfriend, which would be insane way to write any character in a romance book, much less the author’s favorite. It risks alienating readers of color who, understandably, don’t want to have to sympathize with racist characters when they’re just trying to read hockey smut.

However, this leads to a strange gap in the narrative. Even though Dallas isn’t directly racist towards Shane, we see in Tough Guy that he has a respect for Ilya that he doesn’t seem to have for Shane. When Troy says that he thinks they’re fucking, Dallas defends ilya by saying he couldn’t be gay, but agrees that Shane probably is. While the reasoning for this was probably meant to be that Ilya has a reputation with women while Shane does not (or that the rumors of Shane being gay have reached Toronto), it’s hard to not see the implication that Dallas believes this due to stereotypes surrounding East Asian men (at least for anyone familiar with these stereotypes).

It’s possible the author isn’t aware of this implication because she herself perpetuates these stereotypes through the way she writes her characters. Shane’s race plays little to no role in his relationship with hockey and he has no relationship to Japanese culture within the text. However, he is repeatedly described as being hairless, physically smaller than Ilya, and is a submissive bottom. This is just fetishization. It kind of grossed me out when I read the books to be honest.

She doesn’t engage at all with the social implications of Shane’s race outside of the commissioner, who is supposed to be the irredeemable villain of the series, implying that Shane can’t be gay because he’s already Asian and that’s too much (this conversation was super fucked up but it was also glossed over in favor of Ilya worrying about whether Shane will still want to come out, because the author is uninterested in Shane as a character outside of Ilya). I honestly think she included this just to hammer home the fact that Crowell is supposed to be evil without considering how damaging it must be to hear, especially for Shane who has built his whole life around hockey. If I get irritated enough I might write another vent about how Shane was treated in the long game tbh because despite how many warnings I saw about how I was going to hate him, I ended up more irritated with Ilya because of how a lot of his problematic thoughts and actions went unchallenged by the narrative.

But going back to Troy, this disconnect between what the author most likely intended and what the text implies is a common dilemma when writing redeemed bigot characters. Troy can be redeemed from his homophobia more easily because he’s gay and felt as though he had to perform it due to the hostile environment he was in (whether you think this is justified or not is up for debate, but it is more understandable than him being racist). He’s not directly misogynistic as far as I can remember, but if he is then he’s also redeemed for this by believing and advocating for victims of sexual assault. He is also ableist towards Ryan by making fun of his anxiety, but this situation is different from if he was racist towards Shane. Ryan never has to see Troy again if he desires, while Shane ends up playing on the same team as him (and again, Troy is good friends with his husband). He is forced to interact with him.

Reid has to walk a fine line between making him enough of an asshole to need a redemption arc but not so much of an asshole that readers don’t want to forgive him. Unfortunately for her, the aura of racism that surrounds the NHL is so pervasive that it makes Dallas not being racist feel unrealistic. I knew nothing about the NHL before watching the show/reading the books except that it was so white that people were genuinely impressed by hockey players having wives/girlfriends who were white brunettes instead of white blondes. Like that’s insane. It’s hard to read anything negative Dallas, a character who has no issue with other forms of bigotry, says about Shane without sensing a racist undertone. And that racist undertone makes Troy look bad.

I think this will be a bigger issue in the show because a) they have already acknowledged racism and the impact of race and b) the show has a much wider audience than the books ever did, which is why a lot of these points haven’t come up until the show got popular. In my opinion, the best way to do this would be to make Troy also a person of color. Tbh when I was reading Role Model he was biracial with a white dad in my head. Doesn’t help that he looks sort of ethnically ambiguous on the cover 😭