All The Things & Stuff

And Shane loves it. He has to weigh so many things in English. The meaning of the words, the subtext, what his response should be, what his responsibilities are. Communication has always required a little bit of extra work, it seems, than it does for his friends. But when Ilya speaks Russian, he can drop his mask and just flow on the beautiful sound rolling out of the man he loves. Syllables and intonations rising and falling that he is free to let wash over him and just sit with, without having to sort through or organize them. A puzzle he can enjoy without solving. 💜

I’m not sure at what point you picked up this little Harlequin gay sports romance and confused it for “Racial Trauma” by Kenneth V. Hardy, the DSM-5, “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love” by bell hooks, or “Born on a Blue Day” by Daniel Tammet, but boy, you have opinions about it.

Two thoughts here:

1. As someone who has worked in advocacy environments for two decades, it has been deeply woven into me by equity denied advocates that we will never be perfect in our advocacy, but that’s okay. Write with love for the character when you write someone whose experience is not your own (ie ALL CHARACTERS). Rachel has been pretty clear about her love for both characters, despite expressing frustration when her writing wasn’t what she envisioned or how she wanted it to come out. That’s life and that’s writing. No writer is perfect, but if we tell them not to include diverse characters and experiences in their writing, how does that exposure begin?

2. In the genre she is writing in, she brings attention, she doesn’t teach. It is not her job in this novel to explore the complexities of an equity denied athlete in hockey, except for the ways it consciously and directly impacts the plot. It is to the reader to bring your knowledge or to expand their knowledge to connect with the text. That is literary analysis. This isn’t non-fiction, it isn’t dramatic fiction, it is romance. The requisites for a Harlequin romance tend to follow specific tropes and be light enough for people to pick up and put down without too much brain power.

My point is, by all means, wish it was more. Take the work, research, and write a dissertation on the real impacts of race on athletes, on neurodivergence in identity, on the impacts of childhood trauma on mental health, on neurodivergent, anxiety, and disordered eating. But don’t turn around and shit all over a writer because she didn’t use her vehicle, that was designed for something else, for not doing it. If you don’t like it, put it down. There is no need to lambaste and tear down someone because you dislike what they created, OR because you feel like you know their creations better than they do.