what this country needs is plenty of moxie

Swimming, One Day in August, by Mary Oliver

-only to IMMEDIATELY lose shane's interest to the architecture of his house

Prev’s tags are sending me. Like nah lads, you’re just seeing him in Peak Autism Special Interest Zone. He’s out here memorising housing stats for everywhere. He knows what’s up and he’s done so many home tours that he’ll be driving the rookies somewhere and will just be like: ‘and yeah, that house is good. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, single garage. Gas stove top. It currently has carpet but it was done in the eighties and it’s covering up real hardwood floors - don’t know why they’d do that - but anyway- it’s listed for X amount but I think with the plumbing issue in the laundry it’s worth about Y-‘

And the rookies are just like *star-eyes* this man is a god.

The whole team settles in with rapt attention, ready to roast the shit out of Roz over it via group chat, only to see. Well. It's a series of interview clips over the years. It's made up exclusively of three things. One, clips of Hollander "stealing" linguistically challenging questions that the whole team knows Rozanov hates. Two, clips of Rozanov derailing questions that are about Hollander's "representation of his community," which gossip on the street says makes Hollander uncomfortable. Three, Hollander and Rozanov commenting individually on the rivalry, with vicious comments such as. "He's of course a great player, but he'll find us difficult to beat." Such fire in Rozanov's comments are especially damning, given his whole chirp-king-schtick. The video editor, with all the obsession and perception of a true fangirl, makes sure to circle every instance where you can see the shadow of Hollander and Rozanov pressing their feet together - and in one instance holding hands - beneath the interview table. (You wouldn't see it unless you're looking for it - or unless someone circles it in red for you.)

The video finishes, and the team sits in a kind of shocked silence as the next video auto-plays. This one is a compilation of Rozanov chirping Hollander on the ice. Here, the editor has helpfully drawn an arrow to Hollander's face whenever he blushes. The editor has also inserted text overlays with comments like. "Look at how fiercely Rozanov insults his rival." And then puts smaller arrows pointing to Roz's body language, with helpful texts like "excited wiggle indicating absolute fury," and "besotted grin indicating deep hatred." The sarcasm is distressingly accurate in its point.

(Listen, the whole team knows what Roz looks like when he's chirping someone. This - this is not it. This is not it at all. This is him when he's being silly with people he really likes. What is going on.)

The video finishes, and this time someone has the presence of mind to stop the auto-play before another mind-breaking thing comes up.

Someone else, trying to lighten the silence with a joke, and maybe dismiss it all as a fever dream, says, "Montreal Jane? More like Montreal Shane, am I right?"

And. Well.

Once it's out there, there's no coming back from it.

Hudson Williams, #1 Shane Understander

I think Shane was a character who, soon as I read him, made all the sense to me. I felt immediately a kinship and an ownership over Shane. I was like, “I need to be the only person to tell this story. I get it. I want to be the person to be Shane and I want to spend time with him.” [x]

(sources below)

sometimes people just aren't very good writers. sometimes people are banging out romance ebooks as fast as they can. posting fics even though they're not the epitome of craft. sometimes people are doing their best and it's just mid. sometimes people aren't doing their best and it's mid.

CHICAGO PWHL WILL PLAY INSIDE THE BEAN

ilya rozanov asks shane to be his boyfriend, attempt 2: might fuck around later and marry a woman lol. yeah i have one in mind. she's really hot :) her dad was a goalie :)

Asian diaspora people in real life don't always have """cultural markers""" or whatever it is you expect us to have. Within the Japanese diaspora specifically you think we're not aware of how many people fetishize Japanese culture and are less interested in us than in oooooh proximity to Japan? Do you know anything about our history in the West or do you just yap to say the thing you think you're supposed to say because that's what applies to everyone else?

Shane's culture isn't Japanese, it's fucking Canadian. Shane speaks English. Ilya's first language is Russian. Shane learning Russian helps Ilya, the immigrant, be able to express himself more comfortably. Japanese-Canadian Shane might be a minority but he is still a citizen of one of the countries the NHL/MLH parts of the story take place in, the dominant cultures that Ilya is conforming to.

Ilya learning about Japanese culture does nothing for Shane. It's bizarrely othering, and it's not inherently poor representation for a 3rd generation hafu to not do a bunch of Japanese shit. Get the fuck over yourselves. You wouldn't even know what Japanese diaspora culture looks like if it shot you in the face. I could fucking describe the average day in the life of myself or one of my family members and some of you would complain we're not displaying enough Japanese culture 🙄

This should not be a requirement for Japanese diaspora characters, and I don't need white people to write about diaspora cultures even when they decide to have characters of color. We're perfectly fucking capable of telling those stories ourselves.

They're so loud and can't even recognize the "cultural" things present because it doesn't say NIPPON JAPAN on it.

There are MULTIPLE cultures for people of the Japanese diaspora, multiple ways we "assimilated" or did not. Not every child or grandchild of immigrants EVER learned Japanese. Not everyone who did not learn Japanese even fucking cares!!! Some wish they did, some do not. Neither of these are "bad rep". What the fuck does that even mean when they're both how REAL FUCKING PEOPLE OF JAPANESE HERITAGE act??????

RR and Tierney not """engaging""" in Japanese culture all that much is far less offensive to me than all the weird freaks demanding 'Japanese culture' (that they personally can recognize bc Christ did none of them recognize the details that are in there) out of someone, fictional or otherwise, just because they have Japanese heritage. Maybe if you knew ANYTHING about the people you claim to care about so much you'd know why some of us DON'T do recognizably Japanese things, do not care to, do not want to, and that you are fucking weird for expecting that to always be part of our representation.

If anything, including random Japanese cultural details just because a character has Japanese heritage makes me roll my fucking eyes bc it's so fucking lazy. Japanese pop culture, language, and food is popular. I know white people and people who aren't Japanese love that shit and anybody can google that and slap it onto a character.

#also like my interpretation was that shane has a VERY white first name to go with his white last name and there's no indication that his mother in any way taught him japanese. idk if this is different in the books but Shane seems to be quite removed from that and japanese culture and language doesn't seem to play a role in their family culture at all which is actually a very common phenomenon in mixed households especially when the 'of colour' parent is so focused on assimilation. I've had friends where their immigrant parents (of colour) did not teach them their native language to avoid further ostracisation and racist encounters. idk if yuna immigrated to canada as a child with her parents or as an adult/student but she might not even speak much japanese anymore either if it's the former because parents who immigrate with children were and are often discouraged from using their native language at home to help their children 'assimilate' and learn the local language faster. it ends up cutting them off from their culture language and identity which is quite othering. but yeah I don't think Shane speaks ANY Japanese and I doubt Yuna speaks much of it anymore

Thanks for the tags! And yes it is different in the books in that Shane being Japanese/Asian is mentioned basically never outside of his appearance, and only by Ilya. The show adds a lot more through other characters bringing it up to point out how much he stands out in the very white sport.

I don't know if they changed it for the show, but in the books, Yuna was born in Canada (Montreal specifically iirc) and would have grown up during extremely anti-Japanese times. One of her first lines in the show about being a fan of the Metros making her "feel Canadian" works whether she immigrated herself or was born in Canada— during and in the decades just post-WWII, North America really wanted to make sure anyone Japanese felt like a foreign enemy, regardless of how we behaved or where we were born.

Different Japanese Canadians/Americans/Mexicans, etc, had different responses to internment during the war and the violence after. Some embraced everything Japanese harder, many desperately tried to prove how unJapanese they were, or how patriotic and loyal they were to whichever country they had come to or been born in. Some embraced the unique cultures that come in immigrant communities, but not everyone even could have done that because many Japantowns were destroyed during and after WWII, and many that exist now are only permitted to do so as long as they appeal to tourists and obey the demands of the cities they exist in.

That's also why the discourse around how Shane needs to do more Japanese things, needs more "joyful" engagement with 'his culture' gets on my nerves. For generations, many of us were treated violently for existing, and now ignorant people demand we be represented as """joyfully""" engaging in Japanese culture because none of them ever had to sit in a silent house full of family members too ashamed to speak. Japan Is Cool Now and everyone expects us to do Cool Japanese Things because they believe that's Such A Cool Heritage To Have or so they can gawk at us or we can check some box for Representation in *their* eyes instead of ours, because whether they hate us or "love" us, we will only ever be an extension of Japan in the eyes of others 🙄😒

I also had a friend who was an immigrant but wasn't taught her native language. She understood it but couldn't speak it, so while she never wanted to be an American, she didn't feel perfectly comfortable at home either. :( So all the people claiming it's "unrealistic" for Shane and/or Yuna not to speak Japanese also annoy me for that reason. That's just an experience that some people have! Even if they spend half their lives in their country of origin/their parents/grandparents country!

Shane Hollander is so legible to me and so much of his personality and personal struggles so easily map onto "high performing athlete that is also high generation Japanese diaspora in North America". Like of course he's insane about hockey and neurotic about his reputation. He has "my assimilationist mother's identity is wrapped up in the Montreal Metros" sansei disease lmao. The only other Asian kid got bullied and Shane had to watch all that, knowing he only avoided it bc the kids didn't know he was Asian and then suddenly the GM and his mom and everyone wants to make a big deal out of him being Asian bc it's "important for representation" and meanwhile he associates people Noticing You're Asian with mockery, with telling someone they don't belong, that being Asian is why they suck at hockey.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

ONLY THE MIXED PEOPLE ON THIS WEBSITE UNDERSTAND WTF IS UP WITH SHANE OH MY GOD

THE AMOUNT OF NONSENSE THAT CONSTANTLY WADE THROUGH.......TRULY UNBELIEVABLE

THAT MAN IS NOT JAPANESE HE IS CANADIAN I'M SORRY

like listen rachel reid also wrote him in such a deeply uncomfortable way but none of you guys are helping. hudson williams playing him and clearly understanding that part of his experience did help. the people of tumblr don't get him though. people keep trying so hard to make him Not White but there are many ways to be Not White and sometimes the way you are culturally and the way you are perceived racially do not line up. and sometimes there are many aspects to them. there are many ways of being mixed race and i promise you shane exactly as is in this show is one of them. i keep going into the tag by accident and wanting to kill people for many reasons but this is number one on the list by a long shot.

Yeah 😭 RR's descriptions of Shane were... very bad, and that's basically the only way Shane being mixed & Japanese Canadian gets explored at all, but so many people's "suggestions" for how to fix him are so much worse lmao.

And I don't want to begrudge other mixed people, Asian people, PoC, etc, who want to make fanwork where Shane has a different relationship to Japan/Japanese Canadian culture etc. They can do what they like, and people can use fiction to explore what feels interesting or true to them. But I take issue with anyone, white people most of all but frankly anyone, claiming that Shane or Japanese diaspora rep in general has to look a certain way.

Shane Hollander exists in a specific way already on the TV show and is already ripe for an exploration of how racial assimilation + tokenization can create an even more horrific situation for a closeted superstar athlete. That adds so many additional layers to the anxiety and fear that already exists in Shane!

Two scenes that I really enjoy are Ilya watching Shane's French interview and Ilya's Russian monologue. There's a literal language barrier—Ilya doesn't understand what Shane's saying, doesn't see or understand why his face falls when the reporter asks if he has similar struggles to Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, two other athletes who face racism and the pressure of being the best, of being PoC in white-dominant sports.

And Ilya mentions that he doesn't know if his family sees him as an enemy. The fear of being perceived as an enemy by your family is certainly a queer one, and I don't know if it was intentional on the show's part, but the fear of being seen as an enemy by your country, your friends, your neighbors, is also a common Asian diaspora one and especially to the Japanese diaspora that either was or had family who was interned.

The fear that being too noticeably unCanadian, too gay, too in love with his archrival, too bad at hockey could make him an enemy in the eyes of his teammates, the league, the fans? That'd make Shane crazy lol. And that personally feels like more meaningful to me than what food Shane eats or whether he speaks Japanese or not. The food, the language, those change from person to person, and I don't think they make us any more or less who we are.

__________

@nixtheclause tags

#shane hollander is incredible rep for second generation wasian diaspora through what i assume is no work on rachel reids part. completely by accident by writing a character who's just sort of half japanese for flavor text you CAN stumble upon a legible experience

Yes lol, although he's third-gen in the books and maybe the show, but your point still stands!

Even in the books it was pretty obvious to me how easily Shane being Japanese Canadian could inform him, RR just didn't seem to. Do. That. Lol. But it means with the benefit of hindsight or whatever, the show was able to bring in text and subtext to make it more intentional.

The same thing happened with Shane being autistic and his TLG disordered eating tbh, and for those, I don't really fault RR (I'll fault her for other things lol).

Getting off topic a bit but to those points, it's very common for writers, maybe who are undiagnosed autistic or have autistic family members, to unintentionally write characters who could be interpreted as autistic, especially since autism is a wide spectrum and many combinations of traits feel familiar. Autistic + ADHD people make up a large portion of Fandom and so are likely to recognize these types of things maybe before writers do lol.

And as someone who has a restrictive eating disorder, Shane in TLG did remind me of a lot of stuff I heard in recovery from other patients and from doing my own research into ED experiences. He might be more classified as having disordered eating as opposed to an Eating Disorder, but still. Diet culture is very pervasive and institutionally-supported, especially in the fitness/wellness/athletics world. A lot of people are very ignorant about it and I can't fault them when so much money and "legitimacy" goes into perpetuating it.

I don't think she actually handled it too terribly all things considered. Disordered eating/eating disorders are basically never explored at all in fiction and extremely misunderstood in the real world. I'm interested in how the show will handle it and I'm glad that this very popular show will at the very least bring up the topic in wide conversation.