ALISON!

The difference is that jealous Ilya looks homicidal while jealous Shane looks suicidal

it's absolutely fucking Crazy to build a TV show with the premise "every time you get angry literal millions of people die but you can't emotionally reach any of them because they're a perpetually-happy hivemind but they're still THEMSELVES so you can't rationalize it away as killing zombies/aliens. you already have anger issues and you're a middle-aged closeted alcoholic dyke whose wife just died and no one around you gives a fuck about your wife's death AND IF YOU LOSE YOUR TEMPER ABOUT ANY OF THIS..... MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY LITERALLY DIE....." like oh my god the utterly suffocating psychological horror goes CRAZY. i'm INSANE.

Shane is like: ok so I haven't slept with anyone since the last time we were together and you haven't slept with anyone since the last time we were together and we're going to spend 2 weeks in my house and I'm making you lunch and we're sleeping in the same bed and you're telling me about your mom and I'm telling you about my parents and you like me and I like you and I don't want you to marry someone else and you wish all the women you slept with were me and you will switch teams and move to my country so we can be closer to eachother and we're starting a charity to make it easier to be together and I already have our future planned because I care about this I care about us and you love me and I love you and you're kissing my ankle and you comfort me and hold me when I panic and you're meeting my parents and supporting me through it and you're drinking my dad's vodka and eating pasta at my family's house and you tell my parents that you would leave Boston for me and that I'm the only person you've ever loved. Ok great 👍

genuinely i do think it's crazy how this show hit every single mark for no reason other than pure love of the game. like this wasn't a money grab and it didn't think it would be a big success, jacob just read a book he enjoyed and thought huh i think that would be a cool thing to make into a tv show. and then he brought on hudson and connor and they're fresh and passionate and not bogged down by the industry yet and they instantly became best friends and wanted to just have fun bringing these characters to life. and they didn't have a huge budget but they did the most with what they had and everybody took the show seriously and everybody took the book seriously. the cinematographer worked his magic. the music supervisor managed to snag a well-known queer hit and an up and coming new release and old school gems that have been around since the 2000s. it's canadian to the core, built from the ground up. it takes russians and the russian language seriously. it uses sex in such a specific, meaningful way that almost no other show has done thus far, and especially not in a queer context like this. they interlaced every episode with callbacks and parallelism and self-references. they didn't take themselves too seriously. they took everything so seriously. there is love and care baked into the core of this show and it's deeply queer and it doesn't shy away from the horrors of toxic masculinity and hockey culture but it is also, always, a story of joy and love and happiness. and on top of everything, it's almost word for word, the original source material from the book.

The show’s so serious when it comes to treating the subject matter with care and respect, be it the queerness, the sex, the languages, the cultures…