Like Ilya has never experienced kindness or warmth from any older male/father figure in his life, even his older brother was cold and spoke to him with such vitriol. All Ilya has ever known are stoic, cold or cruel men. Then comes boring and socially awkward David Hollander who welcomes him immediately, calls him ‘son’, buys good Russian vodka, cooks chicken Parmesan bc it’s Ilya’s favorite, does puzzles with Ilya and treats him with the tenderness and kindness of a quiet loving father, something that Ilya had NEVER had before. 

This man of few words went to see Ilya the morning of his wedding specifically because he knew Ilya had no family there and he had a full speech rehearsed about how he and Yuna always wanted another child and now they have one, because he wanted to Ilya to know that they both see him as a son and that he has a family now, even though he was worried about over stepping.  

I feel like people are dooming so much over the cast/crew of this show that they’re forgetting (or just never grasped (extremely plausible possibility)) key plot points of the book.

By TLG, Ilya’s fear of being forced back to Russia & punished for being queer was lessened by moving to Ottawa & becoming official with Shane, because then the scary US immigration situation wasn’t an issue anymore and if he was outed & lost his job, he could marry Shane & that would grant him a Canadian visa - these are all points they discuss together at the end of HR. It’s why he’s so desperate to come out in TLG compared to his fear/reluctance in HR– Russia isn’t as much of a factor for him anymore. He even says in HR that he doesn’t think he’ll ever go back after his dad dies, he doesn’t want to. So realistically, Russia isn’t even going to be mentioned in that regard.

Shane is the one with more fear around coming out, for pretty fair reasons, so it would generally make more sense for the show to focus *more* on Shane than Ilya when it comes to this element of the plot, and tie in elements of his race that the book neglected to deal with – the pressure of being a minority in a predominantly white (and historically pretty racist) sport, how coming out would just add to that, how he doesn’t want to be a poster child but also doesn’t want to let people down etc. All of which the show has already given more weight to than the books.

Ilya’s struggle in TLG isn’t about fear of homophobia in Russia/coming out, it’s about resurfacing childhood trauma from his family & how that leads to depression. Russia barely comes up in TLG in the context of coming out.

Ngl I haven’t rly thought about gallavich in a long time but this made me laugh bc Mickey would probably be like “I heard there’s a bunch of gay sex in this hockey show let’s watch it” and then cry at the end of episode 5.

(I sorta feel like ep 3 would probs hit him a bit harder than expected bc the whole bit of Scott being a lil mean to Kip in the museum and them breaking up bc Scott wouldn’t come out would remind him of how he was with Ian at the beginning maybe. He also may have a knee-jerk reaction to the moment David finds them initially.)