I don't even like flying domestically

Thinking about how Shane loves a secret. I think Shane loves feeling Special. I think that plays into how he feels about his race, about his sexuality, about his relationship.

I think it's exciting to Shane, even while being painful, to have all these secrets bubbling underneath his persona. He gets something out of being withholding. Not really in his relationship with Ilya once it's a real relationship, but in his relationship with the world. I imagine Shane walking through the world with this experience of dual consciousness / self-objectification / self-cinemization.

John Berger talked a little about this in Ways of Seeing but there was a feminist essay I read once that I have never been able to find again (if you think you know it PLEASE tell me) that was about the idea of cinemization, and the idea that in the 21st century we're all soaked in narrative image and this changes how we imagine ourselves in the world. We (esp women) have a movie camera in our brains---the example here is the "riding the bus and imagining you're in a music video" experience. We all relate to that, that feeling of self-narrativization, of imagining your own life as narrative art in real time. And then that changes your behavior. Oh a girl in a music video wouldn't pull out a granola bar and eat it, right? She'd look sad and pensive the whole time. So you wait to eat the granola bar until you get off the bus

Anyway Shane has lived his entire life in the narrative. This is how he pitches the plan to Ilya: what if we changed the narrative. He's not living his own life most of the time. His mind is split between his own sensory experience and the viewpoint of the camera hovering above him (this also appears in his sex life imo. The constant focus on mirrors and windows)

whereas I think ilya as a captain is one of those people who seem to be running an extremely loose ship (it’s noisy it’s chaotic guys are roughhousing during practice people prank guys other all the time everyone’s out a little later than they should be at the bar together etc etc) but actually the second something starts souring in the atmosphere it becomes obvious that ilya has his finger on the pulse of the room and absolutely nothing escapes his notice. and he has a knack for fixing things or smoothing things over without it actually seeming like he’s intervening at all, just by saying the right thing to the right guy at the right moment or giving someone a little nudge or taking some of the guys out drinking and by the end of the night it’s somehow all resolved even though no one can remember what happened or how he did it.

In the book, the 2014 Vegas scene is allll about Shane taking control of the moment. Ilya is being bossy and pushy and telling Shane what to do but Shane almost immediately realises that he can push right back. By having Shane act out his fantasy, Ilya is making himself vulnerable to having that fantasy enacted upon him; he's too into it, he's too affected by the image of Shane Hollander naked in his bed, "putting on a show" for him to keep up the arrogant, icy demeanour.

And Shane is so fucking into it. He was uncomfortable at first because Ilya set him up to be vulnerable and exposed but as soon as he realises that he can provoke Rozanov into breaking character, he leans all the way in. Shane wants but when he says "get it for me :)" he's confronting Ilya with his own want and Ilya breaks basically immediately! He wants so badly that he can't stop his wanting being known!

The whole thing is a back-and-forth, forcing each other to admit to their desires. Shane is initially humiliated to hear himself beg (because he still hates how much he wants gay sex in general and Ilya specifically) but then he also understands, maybe for the first time, that begging is not just an act of submission. By begging, he is exerting power over Ilya, who, after all, wants to give exactly what Shane wants. By pushing at the limits of Ilya's self-control, Shane is claiming control for himself because he has the power to affect Ilya so strongly. This is an empowering scene for Shane!

It's also notable that afterwards they kind of collapse onto the bed together and share a moment of "Jesus, dude, that was hot" until Ilya kicks Shane out (right after Shane asked about Russia, mind you! stuck his finger right in that festering wound!). Shane doesn't leave that scene feeling weird or uncomfortable or humiliated by what they did, but he does leave suddenly aware that he craves a tenderness (kissing) that he isn't entitled to under the usual rules of their relationship, and that's what makes him uncomfortable:

And the kiss thing—it’s not subdrop, at least not in how it’s usually understood. It’s not Shane being overcome or overwhelmed by the rush of everything that happened, it’s him wishing the sex had played out differently. And in my opinion I think he’s judging his own actions here as much as Ilya’s—he also doesn’t go for a kiss, he’s too wrapped up in how hot their power struggle is to reach for any tenderness. And that’s what freaks him out.

But he knows Ilya used to traipse around Europe in the summers, and he knows he was a club rat, so despite the fact that it makes Shane feel like he’s gonna puke, he’s incredibly excited to, like, not only see this side of Ilya but to experience it with him.

But before we talk partying we gotta talk about transport.

They get picked up from the airport with a very highly rated private service and rent an obnoxious villa on a fucking cliff over-looking the water because they can. It has a gym, infinity pool, private beach access and various other amenities, including a huge wine cellar with included sommelier, and a garage of sports cars and motorbikes/scooters. They take the cars a few times, and the Montrealer in Shane fucking relishes in the chaotic pace of Spanish traffic (which Ilya has not yet had the opportunity to see and is a little shocked by, but finds incredibly hot).

It takes more for convincing for the motorbike.

“I don’t want to end up in the hospital on our honeymoon—”

“Who said anything about hospital? Hollander, I am an expert. I would drive all around—”

“Yeah, and you shouldn’t have been doing that, anyway! They’re death traps!”

“One ride. Just quickly around.”

“Ilya.”

“Shane.” He comes closer, sliding his hands over Shane’s hips. “You, with your secret fucked up driving? You will love it, I promise.” He squeezes his hands and shrugs innocently. “And if you’re too scared you can follow me in a car.”

“Fucking—” Shane cuts himself off. Glares. “If we get hurt you’re gonna break the news to Weibe. And my parents.”

Ilya gleefully hands him a helmet.

“This is peer pressure,” Shane grouses as Ilya helps him put it on.

“Mm,” Ilya hums, straddling the bike. He puts on his own helmet. He’s not hot. At all. “Now, behind me. Feet on the little things on the side—yes, perfect.” He revs the engine like an asshole, and Shane firmly tells himself that isn’t hot, either. Neither is the way Shane wraps his arms around him, or how he has to hook his chin over Ilya’s shoulder to hear him over the noise, or when Ilya smirks and says hold on, Hollander before they take off like a fucking shot. Shane swears in surprise, arms squeezing Ilya’s middle. He can he feel him laughing and can’t help but grin back.

It’s… okay, it’s fun.

Ilya eases off the speed a little so it isn’t quite as terrifying, takes the turns more slowly, and is careful with the cracks and potholes. Eventually, the fact that he’s holding back becomes more annoying than sweet, and Shane takes advantage of an empty road at their more sedate pace to cuddle up against Ilya’s back more thoroughly. “This how you normally drive?” Shane yells against the wind.

He can feel Ilya shrug. “Precious cargo!” He yells back.

“Don’t worry about me!”

Ilya glances back at him, raising a brow. At the squeeze of Shane’s arms around him, he smirks and fucking guns it. They weave through traffic, around potholes, and take turns that have Shane’s heart in his throat and his adrenaline pumping. “If it’s too much, you say!” He hears Ilya yell through the wind.

It’s not too much. It is so embarrassingly not too much that he gets hard and horny enough to rub up against Ilya and feels him laugh delightedly. When Shane sees a good spot up ahead he grins. “Hey! Pull over up there!”

Ilya glances back, confused, but does as he’s told. “Are you—”

Shane has his helmet off almost before they’ve stopped, sliding off the back of the bike and walking backwards towards the trees. His hands are already undoing the button and zip of his shorts.

it's here! the 1960s hollanov spy AU that's been eating my brain since february!

title: birdwatcher

description:

birdwatcher (noun): slang used by British Intelligence for a spy

Shane and Ilya are secret agents on opposite sides of the Cold War, occasionally tasked with working together on high-stakes, strictly off-the-books missions. It doesn’t stop them from falling in love.

rating: M

chapter 1 is posted now!! (mind the tags)

free sample:

This marker only exists if text was copied directly from Claude AI into the AO3 text box. It wasn't originally identified in a fandom context and doesn't occur if the text was copied from Claude into ie a Word doc or if a different LLM was used. It also doesn't differentiate between text that was completely generated by Claude and text that was only edited by Claude for formatting or spelling.

The main takeaway from this experiment is, in my opinion, that AI use in fanfiction is widespread and ubiquitous and not detectable to most people. There is no reliable way to tell if a text was written using AI because of how LLMs work and what they were trained on, but a lot of people ARE using AI to write fanfiction and the results are good enough to make AI use rewarding.

Just to note that this can't be differentiated because LLM models (unless paired with additional methods, which Claude may or may be) don't track input in this way. All output is identical: it's statistically generated text, based on the input. There's no mathematical distinction between "editing" and "generating" for the model, though people try to draw a distinction when they talk about LLM use by humans.

Otherwise, yes, agreed. Presumably there's plenty of authors copying into word processors and *then* publishing to AO3, which would hide these artifacts.

I'll just say this: my mathematical research is adjacent to LLMs. I understand very well how they work. I do not think the mathematics of it is somehow evil. And I refuse to sit around and draw lines about "acceptable" use: is it ok to use LLMs to copy edit? What about to translate? Or to generate a list of names for background characters? To format?

You could spend a lot of time building an ethical framework to try and answer these questions in a coherent way. But for me it comes back to the fact that I fucking hate "AI" and the companies that peddle it. I do think they're evil. And I don't want to read anything touched by "AI" because I don't want to engage with their products.

But there's never going to be a way to know for sure, short of artifacts (that will very quickly disappear, now, due to the new knowledge of how they're generated). It's easy to just feel hopeless.

Shane’s brain cycled rapidly through a half-dozen celebrities, porn actors, Grindr profiles, every attractive bartender who’d ever served him a beer, trying to find a comparison for this level of outrageously concentrated beauty in one person, but he was drawing a blank. The man—Ilya Rozanov, Facilities Attendant, his badge read—gestured around the supply closet. “I help you find something?” -- Canon-divergent AU set during the 2017-18 MLH season. Shane Hollander doesn’t have a single Cup to his name when he meets a very hot and very annoying janitor who works at the Metros stadium.