Dear Shane,
Major League Hockey is proud to invite you to join the first ever U16 International Prospects Camp (U16-IPC). U16-IPC unites outstanding young athletes from all over the world to do what they do best: play excellent hockey, forge lifelong bonds, and have a lot of fun!
In July of 2006, Shane Hollander gets the chance to show once and for all he has what it takes to become a pro hockey player. Ten days that could make or break everything he's ever worked for.
At his side, thirty teens with something to prove.
Within him, extremely inconvenient feelings.
The summer of a lifetime.
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I just think likeeeee Shane privately yearned for a boyfriend for so long he would die for the chance to call his boyfriend his baby and other such boyfriendly things
wait let me show you all the other bujolds i've found so far ik i was making fun of the falling free cover but the rest are all fantastic—you can't really tell but komarr is shiny too! my current library is tiny and doesn't have any of her books and i get headaches reading ebooks for too long so i've been casually searching for as many second hand copies as i can find, plus it brings me so much joy to have fun covers like these :) bring this art style back pleaseeeee
With that last ask that mentioned grigori not being violent and you saying he loved ilya, I have to admit I've similarly been mulling over the idea that grigori genuinely was very afraid that if he did not control ilya he would just straight up die. I am not saying he was a good man, but I find the idea that his attitude toward ilya was in no small part a reaction to noticing inherited mental illness or some vague "softness" in him and attempting to keep it from "festering." some idea that if ilya was disciplined and successful and never allowed to be complacent, he might never fall into what killed his mother more plausible or at least more interesting for the nuance. Flawed thinking obviously, but I do find it more realistic than the idea that he was a pure monster who hated ilya entirely, as much as i'm not convinced (or at least would prefer) that his relationship with alexei is so straightforward either. Abuse was still happening, but that isn't mutually exclusive.
i mean i think that's totally it and like... often in situations like that the corrective abuse is intended to be love. like i fully believe that grigori loved ilya and thought he was doing the right thing and he was trying to protect his son from his flaws and his (feminine) weakness. "i don't like doing this to you either but i'm doing this because i love you." punishment is intended as a form of love, or it's not punishment, it's vengeance. veeeeery hard to shake. but that's the thing about abuse isn't it. if someone was just 100% awful and violent to you all the time, it wouldn't be that difficult to emotionally handle or conceive of. like if someone spent fully 100% of the time punching you, you'd just leave. it's the love that makes abuse so insidious.
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Ilya would love those redbull challenges like the crazy ones skiing down 50ft slope dirt biking off a cliff etc n he would participate in atleast one bc they get famous athletes on there sometimes
i think ilya fully believes he could excel at any adrenaline sport without trying and then they get him on a motorcross bike and he eats shit so bad and like falls in a pond
do you think as Ilya gets older he ever gains compassion for his younger self and how he handled things? Or is he in forever contempt over those versions of himself? or does he just introspect in that manner
hm this is interesting because what ilya seems to actually dislike about himself and his past behavior is the amount of casual sex he’s had, NOT because he’s opposed to casual sex but because he was doing it to seek intimacy, which he thinks is shameful. there’s some cringy stuff in tlg i’m not gonna bother looking up right now that’s really actually there so that the reader can understand the “tamed the wild wolf” fantasy like wow he has leashed the lion and now he only wants shane. like metatextually it’s there for the romance market to hammer home how great monogamy is and true love etc.
but it actually comes across to me like ilya seems to view his past self as kind of desperate and pathetic for getting laid all the time, which is funny because nobody else on the planet experienced him that way. everyone else was like damn he’s such a standoffish aloof asshole. and yet ilya is like “i can’t believe i yearned for connection like some kind of disgusting sickly euthanizable dog” and everyone is like “…wait you mean when you were doing lines off stripper titties and paying people in the club $15,000 cash to call their boss right there and then and tell them they quit? THAT was you yearning?”
anyways do i think he finds compassion for his younger self… well if i could bully him into EMDR and some kind of addiction or trauma support group then yes i do think so. without me present, i do not know.
realistically how do you think Shane would tackle his disordered eating habits or do you think he never really does and sort of exists like those almond moms who never really do anything about it ( i know his disordered eating is different from almond moms’ I’m just making a comparison of inaction )
i mean the thing is like yes shane has an eating disorder but it’s orthorexia NOT anorexia (which i often see ppl giving him but that’s incorrect). he is very intentionally meeting all caloric and nutritional needs to an exacting exacting degree. that makes it a little more complicated in this scenario because he will never be medically motivated into treatment, like unlike anorexia or bulimia this doesn’t put him at physical risk so he’s never going to like have a doctors appointment where they confront him about this. in fact the opposite he is in an industry and culture where this is super rewarded. what a doctor is going to tell him to eat less healthy? the detriment is to his mental health only.
once he retires maybe he would ease up but actually i think he would clamp down because he’s losing control of his life and also aging, and aging and dying is terrifying to shane to a degree that it isn’t to most people. like yeah i know mr gloomy sunday rozanov isn’t the prime example of desire to live but there is a middle ground between them that most people are at. ilya’s volunteering as tribute but meanwhile shane is out here on some “IF i ever die…” shit.
idk i have trouble imagining him really confronting this one because it’s tied into everything else. it’s tied into performance and winning and concepts of worth and value and he would have to like. excavate the whole thing. the only way i see it happening is if his anxiety gets so bad he has to confront that for non-ED reason, like if he’s put on LTIR or if he got to have the nervous breakdown he deserves over being fanmail outed and then the metros taking him out back and shooting him old yeller style. but without an unrelated mental health crisis, i don’t see this one ever getting wrangled.
I feel like the age gap couple cannot last. Not because of the age gap but bc they had like negative chemistry, something I did not know was possible prior to their book. unsure how the mind behind hollanov could create…that.
ehhh you know i think it’s terrible and also i think people are maybe expecting too much from reid in that these are like. something she wrote for fun at night after her day job and her family life and i don’t even think she was trying to like create an insanely erotic work i think she just was sort of playing around, and romance novel publishers pay so little for books like 5-7k a pop that they will publish almost anything especially from an established author because it’s low risk. basically i think a lot of this is sort of like if everyone started critiquing my notes app drafts i write on the bus for fun. they’re not good. but they aren’t really intended to be viewed by a huge audience and definitely not a huge audience removed from the original context in which they were created. so yeah it’s bad but i also don’t think it’s fair to consider it all a reflection of like, reid’s creative capacity and artistic intelligence or something. these were her farmers market watercolors she was selling for $5 and then sotheby’s swept in and now vulture is writing pieces about her derivative understanding of color. like by all means i think it’s fair to call out racist and sexist and transphobic and homophobic aspects but i see people getting on her about the quality of the work and it just always feels like being annoyed that a soccer team bake sale isn’t providing michelin star level baked goods. sometimes the rice crispies are bomb sometimes the cookies are undersalted that’s how it goes.
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the way shane’s brand deals and ad campaigns made him much more recognizable to non-hockey fans, jeopardizing his ability to have much of a sex life apart from ilya, while also ensuring that ilya was taunted by images of him year-round…the way shane spent the my moon my man montage getting more famous and more awarded and more celebrated and, simultaneously, more and more ilya’s
you know yuna was over the fucking MOON about rose landry. first of all the branding opportunities! second of all she was starting to worry her son might be—you know
I feel like people are always doing some form of "we compared the westborough baptist church with sufism and what we found is that islam is much more progressive than christianity." like i think it depends. it depends though. like it depends.
Fun fact, i live near the stadium. But my uncle? Oh my uncle used to live rgt in front of it, like super fans would camp out in his building garage bc it was in the same direction as the players entrance.
He couldnt even move the car during game day, and sometimes even during non game days bc people wouls try to see the players b4 and after practice.
Shane would have been dealing with this shit since he was 18/19.
Sidney Crosby once talked how he always wore a cap during game days and his parents wouldnt say his name in public bc otherwise he'd be harassed by parents of the other team. At 12.
Shane and Ilya have the kind of skill that would have been making waves since before they were teens.
Oh this is really interesting insight.
The dedication of sports fans continues to blow my mind. I have seen that Sidney Crosby faced a lot of harassment growing up which is. Bonkers to me. Like he’s 12 and grown adults are coming from him.
Shane and Ilya’s childhoods and the role fame played n them is one of those other details that I wished was a little bit more fleshed out in canon. We got a little flash of it in the show that not everything was sunshine and rainbows when Shane mentioned to Rose that he’d faced kidnapping threats before—which could have all happened when he was an adult, but I personally headcanon that some where when he was younger and started making waves.
We know that Shane and Ilya were big deals by 2009. They’re described as two of the most talked about prospects in the world. But canon just kind of ends there. We don’t really know what form that attention took or when exactly it started or what their relationship with fame is. But if we take their real-life counterparts’ as inspiration, then their fame has fascinating implications for the pressures on their relationship.
Sidney Crosby has been in the news for his hockey ability since he was seven years old. When he was 13, they tried to sue to get him into a league that was above his age level because he was that good.
When he was in minor hockey—not even junior leagues, minor—he did this interview with CBC where he talked about how other players would try to injure him, how he was being verbally abused by the parents of the other team, and about how he’d have to try to keep people from recognizing him between tournament games so the abuse would stop. He moved to fucking Minnesota for a time to get away from the abuse.
Like. Sidney Crosby is a Canadian national hero. He’s a question on their nationalization test. He has the Order of Canada. The man is a legend. Canada loves their hockey boy so much. And he plays for goddamn Pittsburgh.
What happens if Canada’s most special hockey boy gets drafted to its most hockey city, home of its most dedicated hockey fanbase? What happens if that guy revitalizes his team and brings the Stanley Cup home to Canada for the first time in nearly two decades?
Legitimately, can Shane Hollander even go to the grocery store? How many stalkers has he had? When was the last time he’s touched his own wallet in Montreal city limits? Has the Prime Minister name dropped him in a press conference?
How many little kids have told him they want to grow up and be just like him?
Then consider Ilya. What about his public image in Russia?
Hockey is a very big part of the Russian identity, and I do not mean from a cultural standpoint. I mean from a state propaganda standpoint.
Hockey is regularly used by the Russian government to promulgate a nationalist ideology. Athletes are figures you rally around. The Russian government personally promotes athletes as ideals to its citizens to inspire national pride. Look at how much better, faster, stronger we are. The KHL is so entrenched in Russian propaganda that multiple countries are trying to stop their own citizens from joining that League.
The fact that Ilya plays in America instead of the KHL would not insulate him from his role in state propaganda. Sending its hockey players to play abroad is part of Russia’s global playbook. They go out and they beat Western athletes on their own playing field and then Russia pushes their achievements to their own citizens. Look at how much better, faster, stronger we are.
Ilya is based off of Alexander Ovechkin. Ovechkin has fucking Putin’s cellphone number. He was part of Putin’s last presidential campaign. Putin personally sent that guy a gift at his wedding. When Ovechkin broke the record for all-time career NHL goals, Russia immediately incorporated it into a state propaganda push. If you are a big enough Russian hockey player, you are part of the Russian national identity. It does not matter if you don’t play in Russia.
Ilya isn’t just some Russian hockey player good enough to go pro. He is the best hockey player to come out of their country, possibly ever. He is neck-and-neck with some Canadian fuck for the title of greatest hockey player in the world. He is one of the greatest hockey players of all time.
And he’s a guy who was raised by a controlling, abusive family that was heavily involved in the government.
His dad worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. That’s Russia’s federal law enforcement agency. It reports directly to the president. And all of his dad’s goddamn medals suggest that he was no small fish. Ilya and his dad have scenes where they are mingling with members of Putin’s cabinet.
There is absolutely no way that Ilya has not been heavily featured in Russian state propaganda. He was the best of the best. His family was already involved in high-level government activities. He is best friends with the daughter of Russia’s Minister of Sport. And he did not have control of his own image. His family was too controlling for that.
This is bigger than him just being a Russian hockey player. Because he isn’t just some Russian hockey player. He is the Russian hockey player. He is the guy that Russia has been pushing to its own citizens as the guy they should all aspire to fucking be, and they have been doing it since he was goddamn 17.
So what does Russia do if Putin’s favorite hockey player defects from the goddamn nation so he can be with his gay lover, the Prince of Canada?
Suddenly it’s not as simple as just choosing to be together. Because there are two very powerful countries invested in each of them. And they do not want the two of them together.
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Rose and Shane are having totally typical, normal life experiences
If you get them to drink where other people can see them instead of playing never have I ever and confessing shit they should be telling a priest they’ll rank their childhood stalkers by creativity as if these were life experiences shared by the whole table
