Stephanie Leary

There have been a bunch of conversations about how the sex is how Ilya and Shane communicate and how that leads to the boundaries breaking down on the emotional side of things in a way that scared both of them, but I think we should all talk more about the specificity of how terrifying it is to know someone, to be able to predict them, to understand exactly where they're coming from, even when they're inscrutable to other people. It's well known that they play together like a dream, they just know where the other person is on the ice and what they're planning, as if they share a psychic connection. And that's fine, that's not scary, they're the best hockey players in the world, their elite level of skill allows them to be the only ones who can keep up with each other. It's easy to justify that it comes from both of them being so talented that they just naturally move in sync together on the ice. But it's not just on the ice. In the book, Shane sees right through Ilya's act in Sochi. He instinctively understands that Ilya had proven something to someone when he won the Cup, long before he knew about Ilya's family life. He can feel that something is wrong in The Long Game and keeps asking Ilya about it. And until he's ready for it, that level of instinctive understanding when it's not about hockey is pants shittingly terrifying. It's the Mortifying Ordeal Of Being Known when you're already Wasian and struggle to not be an awkward potato around 99% of the population and desperately trying not to recognize that you're definitely not interested in women. It sneaks up on Shane because he can justify so much of it Because Of The Hockey Of It All, oh sure he can read Rozanov because they're both hockey players, Shane's hockey IQ is off the charts, of course he understands him so easily. But suddenly he's understanding Rozanov--Ilya--in a way that has nothing to do with hockey, it's so deeply personal and intimate and vulnerable, it's cutting off the path that he's worked his entire life for, and it all crashes down on him. He knows Ilya Rozanov, he knows that Ilya is fishing for more, he has gotten close enough to this guy that he really sees him and is really seen in return. The oh I understand this person of it all, for someone who spends so much of his life hiding himself from others, hits him like a fucking freight train.

where's the joy and whimsy guy? Have they found this one yet?

@joy-and-whimsy-official

Someone who is vaguely aware of hockey real person fiction (HRPF) but not intimately familiar with the genre might assume that Rachel Reid's Game Changers series is rooted in HRPF, following the recent fanfic-to-traditional-publication trend which began with Reylo and has more recently occurred with a number of prominent Dramione fics. Readers are often surprised to learn that Game Changer was originally published on archiveofourown.org as a Stucky fic (although Reid claims that the story was in fact an original work which she superimposed the visages of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers on in hopes of getting feedback from online readers). But those who have spent some time familiarizing themselves with the typical tropes and pairings of HRPF will notice that Reid's series actually appears to have been influenced very little by HRPF, and is in fact tied more closely to traditional M/F romance novels. This becomes very apparent when looking at the dynamics between the two protagonists of each book in the series. With the notable exception of Shane and Ilya in Heated Rivalry and The Long Game, none of the other books in the series feature two hockey players falling in love. It is always a hockey player falling in love with an ordinary person with an ordinary job (or in one case, a musician, but they met as teens before either of them were famous). This dynamic—a famous or extraordinary person falling in love with a normal person—is a wish-fulfillment trope typically seen in heterosexual romance novels, not HRPF. Although there is a large community of self-shippers within the HRPF community, it takes only a cursory glance through the top pairings on AO3 to see that the vast majority of HRPF is written about romantic and sexual relationships between teammates, not players and ordinary people. This also sets the couple in Heated Rivalry apart, as they are notably rivals and do not play for the same team during either of the books that they feature prominently in. The rivalry that Shane and Ilya’s dynamic is based on, the Crosby/Ovechkin rivalry, actually has less than 200 works on—hey where are you going? You haven’t even finished your drink yet

Update: it’s out and it’s exactly as silly and fun as it looks.

--Eva Stratt

Update: it’s out and it’s exactly as silly and fun as it looks.

I worry a little bit that people who refuse to learn about ai as a part of their anti ai position are going to be extremely unprepared to understand what’s actually scary about it and already have their digital literacy at risk tbh

not that I am some genius in this regard but if you follow ai developments even slightly you might change the things you are most worried about. do people know the extent to which ai is already eating itself and how meaningless this is making swaths of the internet. do people know that there are plenty of random mid-sized companies today buying their employees’ likenesses to create digital clones and using these to make hundreds of videos. I am so much more worried about labor and surveillance and abuse than people becoming lazy about writing emails. and idk man I sort of like and respect people who are willfully ignorant about it as a way of minimizing its force in their lives and I am in some ways jealous but also when I see posts that basically still boil down to “chatgpt will never fool me” I am like 😭😭😭 for one thing not the only thing to be concerned about, for another thing I am really sorry but I don’t think you’re right

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

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

I finally got around to reading Not Easily Conquered and I'm just about as okay as you'd expect after that

this is one of the fics they're talking about when people say stucky fandom in 2014 was writing beautiful poetry and academic papers in their fanfictions

ilya core self destruction vs shane core self preservation being double edges of the same sword..that's so hot .....

remember how utterly inescapable how i met your mother used to be with the memes and references and barney and bro code and wait for it... and then the finale was so hated it vanished overnight

The finale so successfully erased the show from public consciousness, that when people tried to come up with a name for the "extremely popular show with finale so bad that people just immediately stop talking about it" phenomenon, people called it... the Game of Thrones Effect. HIMYM got memoryholed so hard that people forgot it even existed

This is your reminder today that Irene Adler in the original Conan Doyle story is literally not a criminal. She never commits a crime.