Interpretation is the medium…

people try to neuter ilya into a peaceful animal when the beast he is is The Thing that brings shane peace

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

THINGS THAT ARE WRONG the biggest and worst: patient presents for therapy for first time despite significant treatment barriers. patient discloses that he believes he is depressed. patient has a first-degree relative who died by suicide. your next question, your very next question, is "are you thinking of killing yourself". you don't beat around the bush, you don't imply it, you don't wait until the patient volunteers. you must ask directly and you must do so before the patient leaves your office, because there is a huge and immediate risk that this appointment is someone's last cry for help before an attempt, and the odds of a depressed patient with a trauma history related to the suicide of a parent attempting suicide is fucking staggering. it is in my opinion malpractice not to even screen for suicidal intent at this first appointment ANYWAY, i do this for all patients and to not do it for someone with ilya's history is outrageously dangerous. life-threateningly incompetent care. lack of treatment planning: doesn't take a history or anything at the first appointment. jumps directly into talking about a horrific trauma (finding his mother's dead body). sometimes people do come in to a first session in an escalated state and have to begin directly with discussing whatever is happening at that moment, and then you meet them where they're at, but ilya arrives in a calm if slightly nervous state. she should have started by laying out what therapy would look like and beginning to build rapport, not immediately being like "so how about your mom's corpse". the way she makes the diagnosis of depression is bizarre. “I think you are depressed”. she doesn't clarify whether or not she's actually diagnosing him with depression under the medical model, explain what that means, or ask what it means to him to hear that. it's also MONTHS in, after he came in suspecting depression, that she makes this diagnosis (in the US it has to be in the first session generally for insurance purposes, different, also bad). no actual screening for symptoms, no psychoeducation about what it means to have depression, no sense of prognosis which clearly upsets the patient. it is so important to contextualize a diagnosis, both what the particular diagnosis is and what the act of diagnosing means. no differential diagnosis. she knows that ilya has experienced at least one criterion A trauma for PTSD (his mother's death) but does nothing to screen for symptoms. she doesn't ask how old his sexual partners he had when he was fourteen were to screen for sexual abuse. she doesn't rule out bipolar which is a must when diagnosing depression. she doesn't ask any questions about substance use or screen for potential neurodivergence or any of a million other things. she doesn't refer to medical for potential physiological contributors for a guy whose career is "getting hit really hard in the head".

no clear treatment plan or goals, and no sense of how therapy is going to work besides… talking? the only goal ilya really sets is "be good enough for my boyfriend," and although she (rightly) pushes back on that she doesn't help him identify an alternate goal. she also doesn't explain what therapy is going to be like or how it works or help him get on board with what the project of therapy is going to be. she seems unshaken when he misses five appointments in a row (if i had a passively suicidal patient miss five appointments in a row i would not be brushing that off, we would be having a good chat about what the barriers to treatment were). culturally incompetent care: they're part of the same minority group (Russian immigrants) across one axis of identity, but Galina is not a queer hockey player (or as far as we know queer at all). she minimizes and dismisses the discrimination ilya is likely to face in his career from coming out, including the fact that he could get deported to Russia, jumping to a CBT technique that asks him to imagine the worst case scenario without engaging at all with how it feels to be in this position or validating his fears. mental health professionals have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about their patients' identities and to listen first. "I could lose my job and be deported and jailed because of my sexual identity" is not a cognitive distortion, it is a terrifying reality. perhaps an unlikely reality, but it exists. trying to use cognitive therapies to "reframe" real experiences of discrimination is, flat-out, therapeutic abuse. she also should have explicitly responded to his fear that she would out shane when he's afraid to say shane's name, not obliquely implied that she knows they're both hockey players: "i want to let you know that confidentiality extends to anything and everything you tell me, except (reiterate legal carveouts). there are no circumstances under which i would disclose your partner's identity to anyone. if you want to use his name, i won't repeat it to anyone except when we're in this room" THINGS THAT ARE POOR THERAPEUTIC STYLE IN MY OPINION AND WHAT I WOULD DO BETTER #MYNARCISSISM lack of curiosity: she does not prompt him to reflect emotionally, even when there are very obvious entry points to do so to do so. i.e. ilya says he's glad his father is dead, which is a huge emotional disclosure that is very risky for a patient to make, especially in a first appointment because he might expect judgment. and she just… asks a factual question about the timeline, rather than engaging with the emotional content in any way (as a relational analyst what i would do here is ask "what does it feel like to share that with me?", but i do not think any good therapist would like, change the subject away from the feeling)

she regularly offers direct opinions about/interpretations of things ilya says, very early in their therapeutic relationship. "that must have been very hard" in response to his father's expectations of him (which he interprets as being about sochi--he seems to hear 'it must have been hard for you to fail like that', which is, uh, bad!), "it's good that you had that," etc. in spite of the fact that he's already indicated a complex relationship with his family and himself that mean he might feel quite differently than someone else expects! was it good that he had hockey, or did it just create another burden on him and his relationship with his father, or is it somewhere in the middle? did his father's expectations feel hard? traumatizing? was he proud that so much was expected of him? when did he notice those feelings? just some questions i might ask. describing how ilya must feel about things closes off conversation. her affect and presentation in the session: ilya repeatedly notices her masking her reactions to things, like the fact that he became sexually active so young. i guess technically you're still allowed to be a blank slate style therapist, even though i don't know anyone who still does this. but if you're a blank slate, be a blank slate. don't let patients notice that you're hiding your reactions to things. so for instance i would approach that conversation by having whatever reaction i had and then saying, "you might notice i had a reaction to you saying that," and either asking the patient how they interpreted my reaction or asking them if they'd like to know what i'm thinking (and then how does it feel to know that i'm feeling concerned, etc, the relational field goes on forever). my way isn't the only way but if you're visibly swallowing reactions it's bad. she doesn't check in with ilya about how he's feeling about therapy and dismisses his fear that it's not working. tbh the only thing she says that i like is "i'm good, but i'm not that good," which IS something i might say. but she doesn't go from there, it becomes a way of dismissing his fears. i would have asked what it's like to have to tolerate such a slow and uncertain recovery process. does he think therapy can help? are there ways in which it has helped? how does it feel to talk about it? how does it feel to talk to me about it? bizarre attitude towards self-disclosure. she gives ilya next to no information about herself, which, again, is an old-fashioned but not per se wrong way to do it. just because i'm the relational yapper machine 3000 doesn't mean that every therapist needs to tell their patient anything about themselves. but she does self-disclose twice. she tells ilya that she's watching their season/is a hockey fan, and makes a weird comment that she also enjoys shopping as a coping mechanism but that bedsheets are more in her price range than sports cars. even though i'm the yappatron 3000 i would not choose to make these particular disclosures! admittedly if i had a famous patient and i knew about their career i would probably tell them that directly in the first session, i would not however make asides about it because now you're kind of creating a dual relationship. the bedsheets thing is weird bc you gotta keep a wiiiide birth around anything even quasi sexual, like don't invite a patient to imagine what your bed is like you weirdo. also finances are usually an inappropriate thing to self-disclose, because therapy is also a financial relationship! i would never joke about how a patient has more money than me (even though most of my patients have a lot more money than me), it seems likely to induce guilt and also to disturb the therapeutic frame around money which is hard to manage anyway

I really do genuinely love the idea of shane having a "change the culture in his locker room" type of arc.

so funny that people will willingly turn a blind eye towards the ways in which bdsm turns up outside the sex for the two of them, but they’ll cling to moments where it seems, to them, like ilya is purposefully trying to confuse shane and run themselves ragged over how unfair it all was. but, those moments (specifically thinking about the end of the tuna melt and vegas scenes), are moments of him escalating or navigating their dynamic with a hesitancy that’s unlike him. that he isn’t used to. he’s uncomfortable during those moments and when ilya leaves choices to shane or doesn’t give him any directive at all because of he feels wrong-footed, like he could push at something delicate and break it - shane , it’s shane btw. that’s when tragedy strikes. his intention isn’t to hurt shane. he’s trying his best to be careful, and that carefulness is exactly what shane doesn’t want! the only unfair thing about those scenes is that so many factors prevent them from talking openly to each other. that so many factors make him feel like he can’t be himself with shane.

Also, you don't have to like, delete it from existence. Keep a second document full of the Darlings. You never know when you'll need it later.

yes, your killed darlings are ripe for rebirth

I always think of the description I saw years ago: Self-imposed deadlines don't help me, because I know the person who set them, and they're full of shit.

oh my GOD

I needed to know this.

See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.

More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do

the beauty of archival research *sigh*

You forgot the bit where Holmes fans wore honest-to-god *mourning* attire after the death of their fave. Men wore crepe armbands in the streets for Holmes. It was redonk.

Looks at @timeforalongstory Boisrenard.

the way ppl talk about shane and ilya's sex life on here is unbearable like i don't understand the need to sublimate all of ilya's desires under shane's when that's not even what either of them are attracted to. ilya isn't sitting around waiting for shane to tell him what to do or come up with crazy unbelievable kinks like spanking that somehow shock ilya. i understand that most people in fandom are women or afab and there is no denying that penetration can be a touchy or scary or violent thing for a lot of us like same but at a certain point you really do just need to contend w these hang ups about penetration and domination if you're going to engage this much with anal sex, and you have to be able to separate yourself from these sexual fictions. if you can't, which is fine, then find texts that don't require you to deal with a dominating penetrating man instead of this endless cycle of always erasing any individual or fulfilling sexual desire for canonically staunch tops. it's the same pattern every time where you guys talk about dom tops as if this is a carnal sin they need to atone for by making them little more than sentient dildos or sex robots with no sexual desire that the canonically staunch bottom doesn't encode onto them. it's boring! and it shows up everywhere. the walk him like a dog edit was cute and funny, but almost immediately it got reduced to an excuse to write ilya as if he can't have individual characterization or subjectivity if he "must" top shane. you need to contend with why you think that the penetrating person respecting liking and loving their partner means that they can't possibly enjoy sex for Themselves and must be a service top or submissive or lacking human free will. why does everyyyyyy sexual character and sexual relationship need to be flattened into nothing? ilya's sado-dominance is one of the most straightforward aspects of his characterization and the entire point, the sexual dynamic is the point! there reaches a certain point of self projection onto another creator's original characters where you should just write ur own ocs or an autobiography

and honestly tbh tbsfr to be completely truthful the "shane invents [literally any sexual thing] in his own crazy mind and doesnt have to self awareness or knowledge to know that [spanking? consent play? roleplay?] existed until it came to him in a dream" is getting a lot ableist and a likkle racialized. an autistic person having a hyperfixation doesn't mean that they don't know how to use the internet or have never like existed in society before. even if you ignore that ilya did in fact teach him everything he knows about sex and everything he likes about sex and shane's sexual development is always in conversation with and guided by ilya: EVEN if you ignore that--which most people do anyway--there is still a line between riffing off said sexual exploration and kinkiness versus what is increasingly just infantilization. he is not a child. under or unnegotiated doesn't mean that shane is never aware of what he's asking for or wants and he is not trying to have sex solely for himself or interested in doing something that isnt equally good for Ilya beyond fandom's reduction of their sex life to solely shane's orgasms. that is not the type of sex he's having or wants to have and just because he is learning this for the first time doesn't mean that he doesn't recognize himself as a sexual being. he's not stupid or a child! just because he doesn't have the exact word for it doesn't mean he isn't self aware and must be flabbergasted when ilya gives him what he asks for lol again there's a line between writing him as coy and bratty and writing him as if its his first day on earth when they're 29 and fucking since teens. shane did not sprout his dildos or butt plugs from thin air, he is an adult man with the wherewithal to google how long it's safe to drive with a plug in and how to prepare himself for anal sex. even when he had sex he hated with women, he still tried to at least be good at oral. he can be kinky and come up w crazy roleplay scenarios without this incessant demeaning of autistic people's self awareness and capacity for growth and Knowing More Than One Thing even if they don't care about those other things as much! which. doesn't even count here because being ilya's sub bottom is like. shane's final boss hyperfixation. he was not in fact born yesterday

May we never become so obsessed with representation that we forget the sanctity of privacy.

i don’t feel like debating that topic much farther bc truthfully if it comes down to “women will lose to men in every sport bc they don’t have as much testosterone!!!!!” my elite feminist response is honest to god “ok we will lose with honor as equals instead of having our own special Easy Mode Female category so we can win amongst ourselves” like i’m sorry i just can’t be persuaded. i’m a brick wall. i want co-ed sports

i bring a sort of “women can lose at some sports against men if it means being regarded as equals” vibe to the debate that “testosterone objectively increases performance” people don’t really like

So relationships between a man and a woman shouldn't be heteronormative either. Jot that one down.