Jeff Satur stole my sanity

JJ is the ultimate himbo ally, loveably stupid and stupidly loveable. He bullies Shane out of being a hermit and tries to help him socialise with the team. He went around collecting phone numbers from gay dudes for Shane because he was Concerned™ that little bro wasn't getting laid. He actually bought it when Shane said he couldn't date one of them because he had the same name as his Dad. He patted himself on the back for clocking that Shane was down bad for Ilya, while not questioning why Ilya was messaging his last words to Shane. He was so concerned for little bro that he tried to make him feel better by pointing out that dating Rozanov would be a disaster, missed that it was pissing Shane off, and cheerfully fucked off promising he'd help Shane get past this.

The only difference between JJ and Cliff is that Cliff had to reason to be hostile to Shane except on the ice. Ilya is a white man and arrogant asshole whose favourite activity was needling and sneering at Shane. Egotistical fuckboys that have a personal problem with an unproblematic player of colour are almost routinely racist. This would be especially true in ice hockey. It is not on JJ or any other person of colour to give white men whose made being a dickhead their entire brand the benefit of the doubt. In fact doing so would be remiss of JJ's duty as Shane's friend, alternate, and enforcer.

Shane rewarded this protectiveness by repeatedly blindsiding him. JJ had to find out from a press conference that Shane and the guy they were supposed to hate were now besties, and had been planning a charity for a year. He still didn't make trouble, signed up to be a coach at the camps, and even shared his day with the Cup with the kids there. He probably learned to see Ilya in a softer light at camp, watching him interact with the kids. But that's still not enough to counter a decade of conditioning. Basically, JJ's view of Ilya was like the family dog's opinion of the delivery guy—he doesn't know why this asshole keeps coming around, but he knows he's upto no good. Mostly because he's given no more context for Ilya's presence in his best friends' lives than the family dog.

Loveable silliness aside, there is an integral racial dimension to JJ's connection with Shane. Given her severe lack of racial sensitivity in general, I don't believe Rachel understood this. The fact is that the culture of ice hockey is horrible to PoC, but especially to Black players.

Here's a fic that touches on the struggles they face.

“Ilya, I was eight when my mom told me I couldn’t roughhouse on the ice like the other kids.” Shane said. He pulled up into a sitting position and stared at his dresser. He couldn’t do this lying down. “I was already leagues better than anyone else I was playing with and my parents knew that if I kept it up I could probably go pro. But there were barely any Asian or other minority players in the game. I couldn’t be seen as a liability in any way. The older I got the more obvious it was. Another player could slewfoot me, but if I tried to retaliate back I was the one sent to the box. “Do you know how many times JJ has been called a thug and penalized for hits that would get you a slap on the back? Do you think I like having to let Hayden take my fights for me? I can’t be you Ilya. If I complain about how I’m treated I’m a bitch who can’t take it. Whatever they said, it was a joke and I should get over it. Guys like me who act out don’t get selected for the Olympics or Worlds. They don’t get endorsement deals. They get labeled a problem in the room and sidelined. I thought you knew that.”

— Ch: 12, Better Bets Taken by emerald_moons

JJ and Shane were (probably) the only two non-white players in the Montreal locker room and probably no stranger to swallowing microaggressions in exchange for acceptance. (It's therefore not unreasonable for JJ to assume that Ilya's friendship involved a subtle manipulation of this dynamic.) If Shane has invested years swallowing microaggressions and playing locker room politics to prove he deserves to lead the team, JJ would have had to do that twice as hard. As shown above, there would have been an extra layer to having each other's backs as captain and alternate. Shane needs JJ's role to protect him in ways it's unacceptable to do himself. JJ needs his captain's protection from being penalised disproportionately for doing his job. Shane's stainless professional reputation is what allows him to override referees' institutional bias against him, therefore JJ depends on it by extension.

This means that the curveball of Shane's relationship puts JJ in a far more vulnerable position than Hayden. He either has to stick his neck out further than Hayden ever needs to defend Shane, or he has disengage himself from Shane entirely to protect his place in the team. This scene from Look, I Know You've Got This Thing For Rozanov by wilmonstan12345 shows the very realistic contrast in the way Hayden and JJ would have experienced this blowback. Anti-Blackness is the constrained but deep conditioned instinct to punish any Black person far more unfairly and disproportionately than a non-Black person just for being in proximity to transgression. Once Shane left the team, it's almost inevitable that JJ, not Hayden, would have become the primary whipping boy for all that residual ire.

All the while JJ was being placed under an unwarranted cloud of suspicion and ostracization, Shane did not answer his calls or texts for days. That left JJ to stew on the implications of Shane's choices—that his relationships with white men were far more important than his one with the Black man who routinely puts not just his body but also his career on the line every time he tries to protect the team; one of the white men being a guy he protects his team from. After an entire career of being communicated in a myriad ways by the league that he was worth less than his white compatriots, having your two best friends imply the same would have been the the most hurtful of those experiences. That isn't JJ making it "all about himself". That is the trauma of systemic marginalization.

Yes sure, queer people don't owe cis hets anything, but by that same token Black people don't owe non-Black people anything, especially if their choices put their livelihoods and professional reputations in jeopardy. JJ was looking at the very real possibility that this might burn down the team and he might have to rebuild his job security at an entirely new place as an overage player because of his best friend's grand romance with Whitey Mcwhiteson. Unfair maybe, but realistic for someone in his unique position. No, Shane is not responsible for JJ's career, Shane wasn't responsible for Montreal's homophobic actions, he shouldn't be expected to cut himself up into pieces out of a misplaced sense of obligation. But JJ also had no idea that his friendship and professional connection with Shane could become a liability, and he didn't get to choose whether to risk it beforehand. It's additionally infuriating because the Numero Uno of being BIPOC is: you do not risk yourself for white people. Again, this is JJ having no context whatsoever for Shane's relationship because he never returned his calls.

None of this pertains to Cliff. Ilya wasn't even with Boston when this went down, and even if he was, their professional relationship wasn't a symbiotic one.

However, with ALL of that, Shane never acts like he seriously distrusted JJ. He drops the bomb that he's been hooking up with Ilya their entire career and had planned to get married in the summer—a wedding to which JJ might not even have been invited—and then says, "Can you think about what it must have been like for me and get over yourself?" And JJ does. Even though it was so clear that Shane hadn't been afraid of JJ finding out, he just hadn't wanted to deal with the potential messiness of his initial reaction. But JJ gets over it. All the worry and potential fallout for himself he just stows away once he realises this isn't just Shane acting on a whim.

If Shane had eased JJ into getting to know Ilya and explained matters to him before the entire team came down on his head, they could have skipped all that drama. There's a lot of discourse about Rachel calling Shane "stupid" for keeping JJ in the dark, but that's what she intended. Not telling JJ was supposed to be an act of self-sabotage, following Shane's pattern of avoidance and tunnel vision throughout TLG. Reid wrote Shane in TLG like the chief antagonist of his own romance, for her own racist, Boy Mom of Ilya reasons.

Of course these two bozos still don't really talk. JJ's paranoia that maybe he's never known Shane at all get stuffed into the back of his mind because Shane needs him, his team needs him. It sets up a perfect storm for when Shane trips, in overtime of Game Seven in a grueling playoff series that was made all the more exhausting by weeks of locker room tension that JJ was in no position to handle. Even then, he's the only one who point blank asks Shane whether he threw the game. He's the only one that accepts Shane's answer unequivocally. He's the only one who goes and apologises profusely to Shane the very next day. It's a crushing shame for a man whose base value is loyalty to know that he has betrayed his friend.

Cliff's entire character is based wholly in fanon. There's no canonical evidence of the kind of absolute loyalty to Ilya that fic writers insist on. It was created as a contrast with the disloyalty of Shane's friends. Conversely, JJ's canonical loyalty is very realistic. He's a cheerful idiot and a steadfast ally. He still feels things deeply and can make mistakes on account of it, but only in extraordinary circumstances. He gets over his own doubts given the slightest amount of grace. He can shrug off any consequences to himself in order to support his friends.

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

That said, these tags were what I needed to hear:

we're all gonna make it