K.A.Y.

the genders are fixed for the terms of endearment, no matter the gender of the person being described. otherwise, the entire word would change, such as what we see with “dorogoy” (masculine) and “dorogaya” (feminine), but this is pretty rare to find in russian outside of living things (ie animals) so the general rule is the gender is always the same.

i’m not really familiar with spanish, but i know french and maybe that can help? in french when you want to describe an animal and make it clear that it’s female, you pretty much just add the ending -te, ie chat (male cat) to chatte (female cat). yeah russian doesn’t really do this, your average noun is fixed. the entire word has to change (and the declination with it) to make a distinction. so now when i describe my two cats, i have to say kot (male cat) and koshka (female cat), where koshka is the word usually given in translation, so you have to be distinct about it. you can relate this back to my earlier examples of “dorogoy” and “dorogoya”. but then, this is for animals. so what happens when we take “zolotsye”, meaning golden, which has its root in the inanimate object gold (zoloto)? it stays neutral. because gold is gold, and according to russian, gold is gender neutral. can’t make any distinctions.

of course, there are examples of terms of endearment that are meant specifically for girls. “lapochka” and “lapushka” are two examples because they’re both known to translate to “lassie”. it’d be a bit… girly, to call your boyfriend your “lapochka”. and, as you might expect, there is a push to call guys by more masculine terms of endearment such as “tigryenok” and “kotyonok”, which are both masculine. but “lyubov’” as well as countless other terms are feminine and used for guys (especially cuter guys, actually, lol) and are going to stay feminine, so unless there’s a whole other word to utilize (ie koshka vs kot), in russian the gender is predetermined for you and you get what you get.

i mean i feel as though a lot of queers in sports can relate to this sort of burgeoning shame and disgust that you deal with in locker room scenarios in particular: you’re so awfully aware of everyone else’s bodies in a way that no one else seems to be, and there is an element of real desire there, and then shame for having said desires because we frame them as predatory?

and i definitely think shane is the type of character to grapple with that kind of awkwardness (i’m into these bodies that are in the room with me, but everything framing the scenario is conspiring to tell me that having these desires is predatory. not even in just a homophobic sense but in the way that we discuss peeping toms/boys spying on girls in the locker room/general adolescent education regarding consent, boundaries, sexuality, and the flawed framings we create to discuss it)

i dont know, i guess you really don’t get to the level of self hatred and recrimination shane displays in his inner monologue in HR without having a deeply unsettled relationship with yourself and your own body/desires...which is kind of like, core to shane as a character, but i think the level to which shane seems to operate as though he ought to be something completely separated from his body’s real desires (not to body-mind the fuck out of this dude, but lowkey, very body-mind theory) is fascinating and deeply sad. there’s already a kind of forced sexlessness associated with asian men (which shane would have been subject to, and we notice he very much is in show and book) but its pretty likely to me that shane also enforces his own sexlessness in mirroring the homophobia and general discomfort with the realities of gay sex and attraction that permeates hockey locker rooms & likely the majority of his sex ed growing up as a kid

"That's part of what makes it believable, is allowing time to pass and allowing things to accumulate. Part of the reason I wanted this to be six hours of TV and not a movie is because if people think the first two episodes were rushed, imagine if that was 15 minutes of a movie. Because that's what it would've been. It would've been 15-20 minutes, something like that. So it would've all been cliche, it would've been all little dumb things that happen too fast.

But if you slow it down and you allow moments to become meaningful by time passing, it means more, because you've been thinking about it more. And you can feel it weighing on people more. You're watching someone go from 18 to 25. Like, those are big years. Those are big changes. You go from not knowing what matters to you, to understanding what does matter to you. I have always felt that the thing with Shane and Ilya -- with both of them -- is that the reason they figure out they're in love is because they just can't stop doing it. They can't stop seeing each other. They can't stop finding each other in a room. They just can't fucking stop. At a certain point, six years in, you're like, I'm texting this guy. I'm fucking still -- I can't stop doing this. That is when you go, like, I guess I have feelings. I guess! What else could possibly explain it? Other people have noticed I've been texting the same person, even if it's a fake name in my phone, for seven years. It becomes ludicrous to yourself to think that doesn't mean anything.

The interview

WIP fanart below. I don't know if I'll finish it or keep it as a sketch.

(Fanart is mine, with permission from the author. The watermarks are for my insta.)

Six of Crows- Chapter 25 (Leigh Bardugo)

This is such a beautiful moment.

Inej admits to herself she's been lying to everyone. That she's too afraid to risk doing what is supposed to motivate her. And thanks to a stroke of luck, divine intervention or simply her faith, she uses it to find a new goal and strength to finish her climb.