hello, would you mind expanding on your shane thrives in grroups of large men tag bc i would like to hear more if you're willing.
Okay so I'm gonna try to put this into words but I also need you to bear with me because it's gonna sound a bit wild at first.
Shane Hollander is a pick me.
STOP THROWING TOMATOES HEAR ME OUT. Yes I know pick me is a loaded term. I've known a couple of pick mes and they were actually really lovely girls who had been so conditioned to behave only in the most male-attention-oriented ways that it literally broke them. Yes I know this is not the universal experience but honestly I think it's more common than anybody realizes. We live in a society etc. etc.
So enter Shane Hollander who grew up in locker rooms. He has spent most of his life courting and thriving on male attention purely by necessity. If you want to do well at sport you need to perform at a level that catches the attention of your (male) coaches and your (male) teammates and your (male) rivals on the opposing team. As a gay man, this almost definitely crossed some wires for him. He wants every man in that room to want to be him. He wants every man in that room to want him, sickly and carnally. And some of this is latent and internalized to hell while some of it he is painfully aware of, most notably when he is jerking off and allows himself to think about kneeling in a room full of men who are all fighting over who gets to fuck him first--
I mean, you get the POINT.
So yeah Shane thrives in groups of men. He's their guy, he's their good hockey boy. The inherent assumed heterosexuality of the spaces he orbits in allow him to flirt kind of WILDLY with some of these guys and nobody is any the wiser because these highly masculine spaces are also, paradoxically, highly homoerotic to the point where male bonding is valued highest above almost any other relationship one can have. And Shane, who is Actually Gay and genuinely does WANT that attention, even latently, is very good at male bonding (read: flirting.) You'll look great in silver, Vaughny. See You In October [wink].
Crucially, Shane doesn't really realize that he's doing any of this.
It's probably part of how Ilya clocks his shit. The way Shane behaved around him at the CCM shoot is probably not all that different from how Shane approached other men in his social sphere who he wanted to impress or to be impressed by him. But Ilya, who is enlightened to those tactics by being actually queer, sees it for what it is.
The other major key factor in Shane's ability to thrive in rooms full of men is that he very early on becomes an object of envy for these guys. He's hockey Jesus. He's a generational talent. Honestly, some of these guys probably WOULD like to fuck Shane Hollander if they had it in writing that it didn't make them gay, no way, doesn't count if it's Shane Hollander, that's basically the same as putting your dick in hockey itself,
And yeah maybe that's also something that Shane has fantasies about.
Then again, the pick me analogy isn't perfect because Shane actually IS in a position to be coveted by the people whose attention he craves, just not in any way that is actually accessible to him. And not in any way that he would actually admit to himself he wants.
Again, this is part of the reason why his relationship with Ilya goes down the way it does. Part of Shane KNOWS that he is Ilya Rozanov's perfect little slut and that Ilya Does Not Know How To Quit Him. At some point years down the line Shane will actually be able to admit this to himself and it WILL make him a slightly worse version of himself, but only in ways that make Ilya that much more insane about him.
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