What do you think would have happened in Shane and Ilya were outed during the Sochi Olympics? I'm reading a fic about this and them running away and I'm aware it's not realistic, but I think you're the only writer in the fandom really capable of putting things into perspective, so your opinion is important to me
Anyway I'm actually starting to think you're a genius!! How do you know so much about so many topics it's crazy
I am so honored by the trust you have placed in me. I did my absolute best for you.
Shane’s going to be a lot safer than Ilya in this situation.
Like, Shane should not run if he’s outed in Sochi. He’s actually going to be in a lot more danger if he runs. Russia cannot go after a visiting Olympian—especially one of Shane’s stature—without causing an international incident. I wouldn’t exactly be extending my stay in Russia (I personally would not be leaving the sight of my country’s officials) but Shane’s going to be relatively safe if he gets outed in Sochi as long as he stays in the Olympic village. If Shane’s the only one who’s outed, I’d say he’d be fine to stay and finish competing, as long as he 1) does not leave the Olympic village and 2) does not comment on the situation while he’s in Russian borders. He’s there to play hockey and say “no comment” and that is fucking it. He is not making any goddamn statements on his sexuality while in Russian territory or this all becomes a lot more complicated, for reasons I’ll explain below.
If he leaves and tries to flee Russia himself, he may get murdered in a hate crime by a random Russian homophobe. He should not run. There is no benefit in running for him. His country can protect him if he stays with their group. They cannot protect him if he absconds into a fuck-off big country filled with people who hate him.
In the absolute worst case scenario, Russia could try to subject Shane to a period of incarceration followed by deportation. I personally see this as incredibly unlikely. But it is technically an option.
To be clear, openly gay athletes attended the 2014 Olympics as part of the official U.S. delegation. It is not illegal to be gay in Russia. It is illegal to promote LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. If Shane’s only been outed, then he hasn’t actually broken Russian law. He didn’t promote shit because he didn’t do anything. This is also why Shane can’t make statements about the situation while he’s in Russia. If anything he says could be construed as promoting LGBTQ+ rights, then he has actually broken Russian law, and Russia’s response becomes much more unpredictable. His mouth needs to be goddamn shut until he crosses that fucking border. Shane Hollander is not coming to terms with his own sexuality and making passionate declarations about the rights of gay men in Sochi fucking Russia. He is shutting the fuck up until he’s out of Russian airspace.
That all being said, Russia isn’t exactly known to be adverse to holding kangaroo court. The United States actually advises its citizens not to travel there in part because of the likelihood of wrongful prosecution. And Shane just got outed as a gay man who’s fucking Putin’s favorite hockey player. So maybe Russia’s feeling vindictive and tries to construe some random bullshit words he says as promoting gay rights in violation of their law. In 2014, the absolute maximum penalty a foreign national can face for promoting LGBTQ+ rights within Russia’s borders is 15 days incarceration followed by deportation.
It is incredibly unlikely that Russia attempts to incarcerate Shane Hollander under this statute. It is even less likely that he would serve any time in Russian prison over it. The chances of Shane Hollander going to jail in Russia under their anti-LGBTQ+ legislation are negligible.
You have to contextualize this within the circumstances. Shane Hollander is not some random athlete who got caught breaking the law in Russian territory on a personal visit. He is Shane fucking Hollander, Canadian National Treasure, and this is the goddamn Olympics.
I’ve talked about this in other posts, but let’s make something clear for the sake of this post: International law is not law in the way we traditionally think of it. It doesn’t work like the criminal code of your state or US federal law or anything like that. It is not a legitimately binding code where authorities will show up to incarcerate you if you break it.
It is playground politics on a global scale. To simplify it greatly, it’s about following playground rules so you get to sit at the cool kid’s table at lunch.
To create legitimately binding, codified law, it has to flow from some kind of central authority. In America, Congress is vested with law-making authority over America. America is not listening to some goddamn Europeans tell us what to do. I have read speeches from actual U.S. senators that can be summed up as “America is not listening to some goddamn Europeans tell us what to do.”
When you hear about international law, the Hague, international criminal courts—those are all systems that countries have decided to voluntarily participate in for the sake of diplomatic relations. They cannot be forced. Those institutions have authority because countries consent to their authority. Everyone’s just all playing nice with each other so international trade deals run smoother and no one raises tariffs on each other and so that their citizens can enter your country without applying for a visa first and vice versa. It is an extremely elaborate web of peer pressure and it plays out on an international scale.
The Olympics is a massive fucking part of that.
Countries want to be in the Olympics. That is something that I cannot put in strong enough terms. If we are talking about international diplomatic relations, the Olympics is about as big as it fucking gets. Countries will bend over backwards to protect their place in that fucking show. It is huge for promoting a sense of national pride. It is huge for stimulating the economy. And it is huge for the international pissing contest that is global diplomacy. Countries use the event to either affirm alliances or establish dominance over their enemies.
For example, have you ever watched Miracle (2004)?
For those who haven’t, Miracle is about the 1980 Olympics, and specifically the US v. Soviets men’s hockey competition. Imagine: It is the middle of the goddamn Cold War. The Soviets were the heavily favored team to win. They won Olympics hockey almost every year. They’d just cleaned America’s clock in an exhibition match that happened in advance of the game.
The 1980 Olympics happens. America somehow beats the Soviets.
It united the goddamn nation. Like. We might as well have just won the Cold War. It was a symbolic victory over the USSR, even if it was just a sports match. America rode that high of national pride for a long time.
When it’s the Olympics, the entire world is watching. Them being outed would be so far beyond being about just Shane and Ilya. Every single world leader participating in those Games would have an emergency briefing on their outing within the hour. Even if those are not their athletes, they may have to issue a formal statement or response regarding how Russia handles this. They may have the prime minister of Canada calling them in an hour saying I need you to agree to levy fuck-off tariffs against Russia if they do not give me back my special hockey boy right the FUCK now.
Because that’s the rub. This is not just any athlete. This is Shane fucking Hollander.
Hockey is in an integral part of the Canadian national identity. This is a country that cares profoundly about their hockey boys. It is a load-bearing part of the national zeitgeist. And if we say that Shane Hollander is the Sidney Crosby analogue, then almost every single person in that country knows his name.
I didn’t really grasp just how big of a deal Shane Hollander was likely to be the first time I watched the show. So much of the show focuses on their private interactions, where they’re just Shane and Ilya together. We don’t see them as celebrities nearly as much. We know they’re famous, we know that they’re in press conferences, we know that they get recognized by fans sometimes and that Shane at least got pap’d with Rose Landry. But when I first watched it, I figured that Shane and Ilya were just like. Athlete famous. Or like “drummer in a band” famous. Like you know them if you really follow the sport but other than that they’re pretty low profile. And I was coming from the perspective of someone who grew up in the American south, where hockey’s just not a big deal.
It is a big deal in Canada.
If Shane Hollander is their world’s Sidney Crosby, then he is a national fucking hero. He has been in national news since he was 12 years old. That country has watched him grow up. It has cheered for him. It has hung their hope and their national pride to the idea of Shane Hollander, and it has been doing it for a fucking decade.
The prime minister of Canada is going to crawl up Putin’s ass to get Shane Hollander back home without so much as a single hair out of place.
It is internationally embarrassing if he can’t. It’d be sending a message to the Canadian public and the world at large that Russia is stronger than Canada and can do whatever the fuck it wants to Canadian citizens without fear of retribution. That is simply not an option.
If Russia even suggests that it’s considering pulling shit against Shane Hollander, the prime minister is making phone calls. He is calling in favors. He is threatening tariffs and international sanctions. He is getting on a plane if he has to. Shane Hollander is the people’s princess and he is coming fucking home. The prime minister will personally be at the airport to receive him, with a fleet of the goddamn press. Look at the might of Canada, bringing babygirl home to its tender, maple-scented embrace.
Gay marriage has been legal in Canada for nearly a decade at this point. Canada is pushing itself in the international landscape as an LGBTQ+ safe space. The fact that he was outed as gay wouldn’t necessarily be a deterrent to Canada applying political pressure. And you cannot be the host of the fucking Olympics and imprison a country’s most beloved athlete for being a member of a minority group without opening a massive can of fuck around and find out.
Honestly I’d be fascinated by the global response. I can’t think of a single time in history where a country’s tried to fuck around and find out like that. Like. They may legitimately get banned from the Olympics if they try that shit.
Under the Olympic Charter, you can get banned from competing in future games as a sanction for human rights violations. This has historically only been used as a sanction for actions against a country’s own citizens as far as I’m aware, and it’s very rarely invoked. Like. South Africa was banned due to apartheid for a while but also we let did fully let the Nazis host the Olympics right before WWII. So. Hit or miss.
I just can’t personally think of a single time in history a country tried to imprison another country’s Olympian over something as contentious as wanting to violate specifically his human rights. Like. Olympians have been arrested during the Games before but that’s because they like. Tried to buy cocaine. And even then the police let them go to be disciplined by the Olympic committee for their country. Countries just do not like touching other country’s athletes during the Olympics. That’s so diplomatically explosive that I can’t begin to imagine the global backlash that would come from going after Shane Hollander for being gay and sucking off Putin’s favorite hockey player. But I do see the Olympics committee reacting strongly, because something like this would be a direct attack on the principles of comity underpinning the games. Countries are going to be way less willing to keep participating in the Games if they know their athletes can be unjustly imprisoned in the host country without consequence to the host country. There would likely be multiple countries reacting very strongly to any kind of formal sanction against Shane Hollander, not because they give a shit about him, but because they want to set the precedent that you do not fucking touch another country’s Olympians. Ultimately, I do think the Olympic committee would straight up ban Russia just because the Games may fall apart if they don’t.
Notably, Russia did actually receive a ban from the Olympics after the 2014 Games. This had nothing to do with human rights violations. They got caught doping their own athletes during the 2014 Games, which also violates the Olympic Charter. I’m assuming that this did not happen in the game changers universe because, critically, they doped their ice hockey team. Ilya would have been caught up in it, and there’s no evidence of that happening in canon.
So, presumably, Russia is in a position where the only thing that could endanger its future participation in the Games is if they do something as batshit fucking crazy as trying to arrest and incarcerate Canada’s Favorite Hockey Boy. That is simply not fucking happening. They’d be too worried about a potential Olympic ban and the firestorm of global backlash that would rain down on them for jailing a goddamn visiting Olympian. Like, it doesn’t matter whose dick he sucked, sometimes it’s just not worth it.
So, if Shane gets outed in Sochi, he is fine. Like. He’s not fine, he’s just been outed, but he’s not in any real danger from the Russian government.
Ilya’s situation is different.
Ilya needs to get his ass over the goddamn border.
Ilya does not need to worry so much about legal repercussions. He does not need to worry about incarceration. He can’t actually be incarcerated for this. The anti-LGBTQ+ promotion law that’s in place in 2014 does not actually permit incarceration for Russian citizens, just foreign nationals. If we’re just looking at official state sanctions, the most he’s getting is a fine. So if he’s arrested, it’s because he was framed for something. Which like. Not impossible for Russia to do. And it would be very difficult to get him out of incarceration if he was arrested on false charges.
But if we’re just looking at the consequences of him being outed, Ilya is not going to the gulag for this.
He is going to “kill himself.”
He is going to be found dead, having fallen from somewhere tragically high, or overdosed on drugs no one knew he was addicted to, or having shot himself twice in the head with his non-dominant hand. This was, of course, due to his own overwhelming shame from the embarrassment he’s subjected himself and his nation to, and was absolutely not a state-sanctioned hit, no, really. Really. They promise. They are crying too!!!
Again, contextualize the situation. It is 2014. It actually used to be better for gay people in Russia before 2013. The Russian government started to pass increasingly strict laws against queer people that started in 2013 (and have gotten fuck off bad in the last few years, but those won’t be a problem for the 2014 Olympics). So the Russia government has just kickstarted a national campaign against LGBTQ+ rights, and they find out that their hockey godling who is in all of their nationalist propaganda has been trading blow jobs with Canada’s own Prince of Hockey.
By this point, there has very likely been a very recent press conference that involved Ilya Rozanov shaking Putin’s hand. Putin has endorsed Ilya as one of the greatest this country has to offer. Ilya Rozanov was named the captain of their Olympic team over all of those KHL players who are all major and active participants of Russian state propaganda. And then right after he was picked, Putin turned around and warned the entire goddamn world “do not have your athletes in my country promoting the queer agenda.” There is a fuck ton of preexisting global attention on queer rights in Russia because of the Olympics.
So. In sum: They are at the launch of a national campaign against the very thing Ilya turned out to be. They just endorsed Ilya Rozanov as their national ideal that everyone should aspire in almost the same breath that they told the entire fucking world that Russia did not want that fag shit happening within its borders. And then he lost to goddamn Latvia.
And then he was outed for having gay sex with an equally famous hockey player from a competing country.
This is internationally humiliating for them. They do not want to just let this go with a fucking monetary fine.
And they are smart enough to know that if Ilya Rozanov gets over the border, he is not coming back.
He is getting on a plane to America and filing asylum paperwork the second he crosses the border. He’s moving to Canada and getting hitched to a pretty freckled Canadian in a ceremony officiated by the fucking prime minister. He is never going to be seen on Russian soil again.
There is a time limit to solving the problem of Ilya Rozanov. It is counting down. Russia will have to decide very quickly if there are too many eyes on them right now to retaliate against him or if they need to send a message to their citizens that you do not get to globally humiliate them the way Ilya Rozanov just did.
The options you have to resolve this are going to depend on how exactly Ilya and Shane are outed.
Like. What happened? Did someone put the pieces together and sell the story to the press? Was his incredibly literal sexting thread with Shane Hollander leaked? Did someone get a photo of them kissing on the Vegas balcony when they were rookies and they’ve been sitting on it since 2011? Some other third thing? Were Shane and Ilya outed simultaneously or was it staggered? All of that is going to affect their options to get Ilya out of this fucking country.
Like. If it’s a situation like in snapping birch, where Shane is outed first and it’s unclear for the first few hours whether Ilya’s going down with the ship, maybe you risk having him make a break for the goddamn border. Maybe he just tries to clear Russian airspace before they figure out that he’s Shane Hollander’s bisexual love machine. I’m not saying that’s the safest option, but it’s one I can see them at least considering.
If they are outed simultaneously, Shane and Ilya are now 1) handcuffed to each other, 2) performing gay hockey Romeo & Juliet on the international stage and 3) having some very awkward meetings with world leaders.
Again, Shane Hollander is much safer than Ilya Rozanov is right now. His country still likes him, mostly. He is still Canada’s special hockey boy who they love so so much, and Ilya is on the hit list for the fucking kremlin.
Ilya is not going home. He is not facing his family. They will fucking shoot him and then say he shot himself. #theyarecryingtoo!!!
If he is smart about it, Ilya is now attached at the hip to Shane Hollander, who has the type of bulletproofness that comes with being in a parasocial relationship with your entire goddamn country. That gives him his best odds.
If I’m Shane? Ilya is staying within five feet of me at all moments. We are going to the bathroom together. He is sleeping in my bed with me directly on top of him because it’ll be harder to kill him in his sleep if you have to physically move me to do it. Shane and Ilya would need to jump straight from “uncertain situationship stage where one of you took the other’s virginity and didn’t call after and the other kept texting for several months despite getting no response and now you both feel existential angst over it” to “disgustingly codependent couple that is never ever physically apart.”
They are not staying in the Olympic Village. They are not competing in the rest of the Games. They are sleeping in the Canadian embassy and getting on the first flight they physically can get out of that fucking country. And I am not talking commercial. I mean a world government needs to send a plane to go get them.
Like, if Shane wants to give Ilya his best odds, he is refusing to leave the country unless it’s holding Ilya Rozanov’s hand. He is throwing every single ounce of national goodwill at his disposal at the Canadian government to try and force them to get his situationship out with him.
Legitimately, they need Ilya out of that country so fast that it leaves a fucking smoke trail. They need to get him out before he “dies in a tragic accident” or “kills himself.” They need to get him out before he gets framed for a crime they can actually incarcerate him for.
In this situation, the win conditions are if they can get Ilya out of the country safely when he’s trapped like a rat in the Olympic village in a country where everyone knows his face because the state purposefully promoted him to them as the national ideal. He cannot just go to fucking ground and try to stealth his way across the border. You need the eyes of other governments watching him closely so it’s harder for him to “kill himself.” You need a safe, secure method out of the country—i.e. a diplomatic flight—so he can’t “fall down the stairs” at the airport. Which means you need to 1) convince world leaders to let Ilya Rozanov on one of their planes and 2) ideally get them to pressure Russia to not stop him on the way to the airport.
I want to be clear—Russia can’t just close its borders to Ilya Rozanov specifically. At least not easily. He has a passport. It’s not a simple as just taking away the passport.
A recognized principe of international human rights law is freedom of movement. Countries cannot just revoke their citizen’s passports willy nilly—especially if they’re revoking his passport because he’s gay and they want to stop him from leaving the country. They have to have some kind of cognizable ground to put a travel ban on him—like if he had a warrant out for his arrest, owed debts to the government, was a national security threat, etc—or it violates the playground rules that the world governments agreed to abide by. Russia will no longer get to sit at the cool kids’ table if it just goes up to Ilya and says “hey man you can’t leave the country anymore”
It is 2014. Russia is still, for the most part, trying to maintain diplomatic relations. It just convinced the world to let it host the Olympics. And because of that, the entire fucking world has its focus on what they do in response to this. They cannot just fly off the fucking handle and refuse to let Ilya Rozanov leave the country. That would violate their own laws and international principles of law, and the entire world would see them do it. They would be looking for a legal way to keep him in the country, which means Shane and Ilya need a way to get him safely out of the country before Russia has the time to come up with an excuse to keep him there or just, you know, fucking shoot him.
And that. Is not a lot of time. Like every second that he stays in Russia post-outing decreases his odds of leaving the country alive.
If you really want to play out the logical consequences of this kind of fic, you are now writing RPF about former President Barack Obama.
Shane is Canadian, but Ilya is playing for an American team. And, critically, a lot of the spotlight around queer rights and the 2014 Olympics was focused on America.
If we’re talking about 2014, we are pre-Obergefell. Gay marriage is not legal across the United States. But Obama made it a key issue during his time in office. He’s declared that he wouldn’t defend the Defense of Marriage Act. He’s gotten rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’s publicly endorsed queer rights and he’s directed American agencies to promote queer rights worldwide through diplomatic measures.
Obama was under pressure to boycott the 2014 Olympics because of Russia’s recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. He chose not to, but he did send openly queer athletes as part of the official U.S. delegation as an implicit condemnation of Russia’s actions. The spotlight was on America because of this.
So America was participating in the Olympics even after human rights’ activists petitioned for a boycott because of Russia’s anti-queer legislation. It was subtweeting Russia’s stance on gay rights on a global scale. And then a major athlete for an American team who lives in America on an American visa gets outed for making passionate gay love to the Hockey Prince of America’s closest ally.
America’s going to be expected to say something about that shit.
Now, they may say “we don’t actually have any citizens involved in this, we support queer rights but we will not be directly intervening out of respect for international comity.” Or they may say “AMERICA STANDS BY ITS GAY HOCKEY PLAYERS EVEN IF THEY ARENT BORN HERE. LAND OF THE IMMIGRANT RED WHITE AND BLUE MOTHERFUCKERS” *eagle screech* *gunfire*
It. Responses could really vary here. And I think how involved America is willing to be will depend on how much political capital Shane and Ilya can offer them.
Again, at this point in history, the president’s office is on a tear in favor of queer rights for once. It is a major platform actually. It’s a topic that Obama historically has pushed boundaries for.
Who are they trying to bring home? Is it gay hockey Romeo & Juliet?
Or is it just some Slavic fuckboy?
This situation is going to be a lot worse for Shane and Ilya if they are outed because their texts leak. Because their texts do not look good for them. Their texts look like Ilya spent two years saying “please please PLEASE let me fuck you” *unsolicited dick pic* “you want these nine inches so bad cmon baby” *thirsty tongue emoji* *eggplant emoji* *prayer hands emoji* and then ghosted the day after Shane Hollander finally texted that he could come fuck him. Like. Their texts are low key embarrassing for both of them. Ilya comes off looking like some dickhead who just wanted to get his dick wet and Shane looks like a jilted girl who couldn’t figure out she was just a notch in the bedpost after several months of being left on read.
That is not the kind of thing diplomats burn bridges over. Like. American democrats are fighting for their life trying to get people to accept the idea that gay people can get married. They are not about to throw down the gauntlet with a world power in defense of what looks like a chapter torn out of the fuckboy playbook.
But maybe they apply some political pressure if Shane and Ilya at least look like they at least have the potential to be gay Romeo & Juliet.
Yes, the rivalry makes them a divisive couple. But it makes them a divisive couple for specifically some American hockey fans. This is bigger than the NHL. This is bigger than their individual cities. This is a tale you’re selling to the world, most of whom found out that Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov existed 0.5 seconds ago when they got outed and suddenly became headline news in every paper on the planet.
They are both very attractive men. They are talented. And they have a tale of star-crossed love that has the potential to be very sympathetic if it’s told right. And maybe that’s enough to make them valuable as a very compelling story about the need for equal rights, including marriage equality, which the White House is actively campaigning for.
To be clear—America and Canada are not threatening war over this, but they also don’t need to. All they need to do is 1) let Ilya get on their plane with Shane instead of telling him to get his own ride and 2) pressure the Russian government behind the scenes to let him get on the plane. Maybe the White House + the Canadian government would be willing to apply pressure on Russia and package it with promises of a prisoner exchange or trade deal or something if Russia just doesn’t stop Ilya from leaving? I dunno. This part is the most uncertain. I’m not privy to backdoor inter-continental governmental negotiations. Shane and Ilya would have to be really, really worth it for that kind of effort, but they’re high profile enough to have the potential. Otherwise, you just have to have Ilya make a break for the border and pray he gets across before someone shoots him.
If world powers do successfully intervene on their behalf, Shane and Ilya do not just get to shake hands when the plane lands and go their separate ways.
The fuckboy dynasty is over. Their best odds in this situation if they convince the fucking president that they are in a serious relationship—or at least convince him that they can convince the world that they’re in a serious relationship. You can’t just have the fucking president making serious political moves for you and then disembark the fucking ride. Like. You can, the president isn’t going to make you keep fucking each other at like, gunpoint, but it would not be good for their careers or getting any kind of continued aid from the government when it comes to keeping Ilya safe from his very very angry home country.
If they want to minimize the real-world consequences from their outing, they are in a committed relationship now whether they like it or not. They are at the White House on Thanksgiving standing next to the fucking turkey in matching Burberry coats and clapping politely. They are each other’s dates to Christmas dinner with the Canadian prime minister. The upside is that it actually may insulate them somewhat from official NHL retaliation against their relationship, but only because fucking Obama is coming to their games now.
They’d be placed on a collision course with marriage once it becomes legal across the U.S. after it’s codified into federal law by the Hollanov law that democrats named after them. They could probably drag out the dating phase for several presidential terms and then claim they grew apart if they didn’t want to get married? I’d be very careful about how they announce any breakups. But like. In the initial aftermath, they are not telling the world that the gears of goddamn nations just moved so they could be fuck buddies. They need as much public goodwill as they can get or someone will get mad enough to shoot them. No, they are in the kind of gay love that changes history, whether it’s true or not.
It’s political theater. They’d be performing a love story for the eyes of the world. And whatever they do would likely have consequences for if gay people get rights and how fast that happens. It would be a huge deal.
All of this. The OP and the additions and the tags. But I also I need to touch on something in the original post:
This is all absolutely true. Canada is a small country (in population rather than geography). It does not like being pushed around. Canada cannot afford to let Putin win this one, from an international POV.
I would also like to come at this from the domestic Canadian political perspective. The Sochi outing AU takes place late in Stephen Harper’s near decade as prime minister. The Obama administration and the Harper government were NOT ideologically aligned.
Stephen Harper was a Conservative prime minister whose background was movement conservatism. He and his cabinet would NOT have been happy about Shane Hollander holding a gun to his own head and basically threatening to commit suicide via police state if Canada didn’t save his Russian boy toy’s life (to quote a delightful phrase from OP) . Politically, they couldn’t let Shane have a “fatal accident” in a Russian prison. But they would’ve been very resistant to saving Ilya, for multiple reasons.
Here’s the thing, Stephen Harper was one of the founders of the old Reform party. He studied economics at the University of Calgary (neocon alert!) and has spent his entire adult life in Calgary. Alberta is the Texas of Canada, and Calgary is the Dallas of Alberta. He is a believer.
However, Harper was also a practical man who badly wanted to be prime minister. And it was decisively proven over nearly 15 years in the political wilderness that you can’t win Canadian federal elections with movement conservatism. You need swing voters as well. So once he became the leader of the Conservative Party, he started softening its image drastically.
There are plenty of Canadians who want lower taxes and fewer immigrants, and are willing to vote Tory. But they don’t want to be perceived as right wing extremists by their neighbours. They’re not Republicans. Canadians are very anxious to separate themselves from Americans. Conservative politicians being vocal about their faith, or hot-button social issues (queer rights, abortion, racism, etc) fires up the base. But it doesn’t attract enough of the mushy middle voters (most Canadians don’t want to know about a politician’s faith, unless of course it’s Muslim or some other weird religion). And you can’t win Canadian federal elections with just the base.
Once Harper formed a government in February 2006, he had to try and strike a balance between appeasing his base and making the mushy middle think he was an American style right-wing extremist. He had to be electable. The base were all fired up when they won the 2006 election. They wanted legislation on same-sex marriage, abortion, you name it. Harper knew this would be a recipe for electoral disaster. He needed the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” swing voters to support his party.
But he also NEEDED the base. They were the ones who donated money and volunteered on election campaigns (the mushy middle just vote). They were also the ones who could get rid of him in a leadership review if they decided his triangulation wasn’t worth it. And he was himself ideologically aligned with them. So it was a constant tightrope walk between being electable to the masses, and not pissing off the base too badly.
Harper’s cabinet and backbenchers were often not particularly helpful to him in laundering the party’s reputation to the mushy middle. There was a steady trickle of news stories over the years that suggested Harper and his party were just paying lip service to the whole “ fiscally conservative but socially liberal” thing.
A cabinet minister who turned out to be a Young Earth Creationist. Multiple different backbenchers who were recorded saying inflammatory things at private events with likeminded people, and the recordings leaked to the press. These played well with the base but were a nightmare for re-election. And they just kept coming.
The rumours about Harper’s wife having an affair with her female RCMP bodyguard didn’t help. Those may just have been malicious rumours. It’s a great way to smear a powerful and socially conservative man: you’re a cuck. Moreover, you’re so bad at being a man that your wife is cucking you with another woman. In any event, Stephen and Laureen Harper are still married as of 2026. But the rumours didn’t help much.
So you’re Stephen Harper in February 2014. You’ve been in power for exactly 8 years. In 20 months you’ll lose a general election. You don’t know that yet, but you know the next election will be tricky, and you can’t afford any more PR disasters. Your approval ratings are not great. The base is restless and so are the swing voters, for radically different reasons. On the bright side, the Olympics always make Canadians feel patriotic and positive. especially the Winter Olympics, where we tend to do well.
Then you find out there’s a surveillance video of Canadian Hockey Jesus being kissed on a rooftop in Vegas by his Russian rival nearly 3 years ago. Incidentally, the rival is the captain of the Russian Olympic men’s hockey team. Hollander is on the ice when the video drops, so there’s no chance for anyone to ask him what the fuck happened.
The video is ambiguous. Yeah, Rozanov pushes Hollander against a wall and initiates the kiss. Canadian Hockey Jesus eventually pushes him away and storms off. But he takes his sweet time doing so. Looks like he kisses back for a while first. Is Rozanov an evil homosexual predator molesting Canada’s sweetheart, or is it mutual? Everyone in government is hoping it’s the former.
Then there’s the press conference and Shane running away from his delegation to try and save Ilya. Oh shit, it seems like it was mutual. And Canadian Hockey Jesus is missing. In fucking Russia while in a gay sex scandal with Russia’s best hockey player. He could be dead. This is a disaster.
The public are very confused, but they don’t want their golden boy to turn up in a Russian morgue. The base is disgusted, but there are a lot more hockey fans than there are movement conservatives. He’s a faggot, yeah, but goddamnit, he’s a Canadian faggot (as OP said so eloquently in another post). And even worse, he’s not white. Hollander has suddenly gone from a symbol of Canadian multiculturalism to a reminder that most prominent Conservatives are white, and their base is very white.
Everybody in Canada is remembering your movement conservative background. The things your MPs have repeatedly said about gay people when they didn’t think they were being recorded. If Hollander dies in Russia, you WILL take the blame. You’ll be hounded out of office and your party will probably spend another 15 years in the political wilderness before they get another chance at forming a government.
People will say you let Canadian Hockey Jesus get killed by the FSB because you didn’t like his “lifestyle”. That you didn’t care enough to save him. They won’t CARE that Hollander has gone rogue. That he’s refusing to cooperate with the Canadian Olympic delegation, Canadian diplomats, and your government. They’ll blame you anyway, say he died because his prime minister was a homophobe.
So you are really really mad at this fucking hockey player who’s caused an international incident over his boyfriend. But you desperately need Hollander alive. He cannot be allowed to die with Rozanov. You have zero intention of saving Rozanov too, let the the bastard rot. But you have to save Hollander. You meet with the Russian ambassador to Canada. You call Vladimir Putin.
Let’s leave Harper’s POV and go to the lead diplomat at the temporary Olympic outpost in Sochi. Poor underpaid bastard. The Prime Minister’s Office calls you for updates every ten minutes. Every ten minutes the entire time Hollander is missing. Which is hours on end. The PMO keeps telling you to do whatever it takes. The PM himself gets on the phone several times. You’re getting an ulcer.
All the diplomats and security people realize that their PM’s career is over if Hollander dies, and Harper will take them down with him. As you’re the lead in Sochi, you will take the worst of the blame. You’ll be unemployed. But you’ll also be getting anthrax letters from grieving hockey fans for the rest of your life because you let Russia murder Canadian Hockey Jesus.
So that’s the situation you’re in when your convoy pulls up to Canada House. There’s media everywhere. Hollander is standing outside the building with fucking Rozanov. There are three other prominent Olympians there too, they’re all taking Hollander and Rozanov’s side in front of rolling cameras, and they are some of the best in the world at a very physical sport that involves fighting.
Rozanov is telling Hollander the Russian police won’t arrest him too just because he asks nicely. For a moment you think that Russian son of a bitch might get through to him. And then Shane says, on live TV, that they’ll arrest him if he punches a fucking cop. This kid is fucking crazy and trying to get himself killed. As well as trying to kill your career (and the Prime Minister’s career).
You can’t put Rozanov in the car, he’s a Russian citizen. But Hollander is refusing to get in the car if he can’t bring Rozanov. Every TV camera in Sochi is broadcasting the standoff live to multiple countries all over the world. You want to order your chief of security to just PUT Hollander in the car. But he’s an elite hockey player. And there are four other elite hockey players on his side who look about ready to throw down. You’d thought you’d just be dealing with Hollander.
You should’ve brought a lot more security in the convoy if you wanted to force Hollander into the car. Like twenty guys all with tasers. Also, there are TV cameras broadcasting live to at least half the world, interrupting regularly scheduled programming. Your jittery security people remind you that the Russian police are probably thirty seconds away.
You have no good options. No matter what you do, the PM will yell at you. But the entire country will yell at you if Hollander dies in Russian police custody. And you realize he’ll get himself killed out of sheer spite if you don’t save his boytoy.
So yeah, once Shane and Ilya make it back to Canada, Stephen Harper will be on the tarmac to meet their plane, shake their hands and make a speech about Canadian values and the power of love. But Harper is doing all this with gritted teeth, because he has no other choice. And then, to add insult to injury, in October 2015, he loses the general election anyway.
Sorry, this was just supposed to be a political analysis. Why Stephen Harper had multiple incentives to save Shane (and thus Ilya, since Shane refused to leave him behind). International incentives (not letting Canada look like it couldn’t protect its athletes) and domestic ones. But the scene you wrote in the Olympic Village is pure cinema, so I got carried away.
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What do you think would have happened in Shane and Ilya were outed during the Sochi Olympics? I'm reading a fic about this and them running away and I'm aware it's not realistic, but I think you're the only writer in the fandom really capable of putting things into perspective, so your opinion is important to me
Anyway I'm actually starting to think you're a genius!! How do you know so much about so many topics it's crazy
I am so honored by the trust you have placed in me. I did my absolute best for you.
Shane’s going to be a lot safer than Ilya in this situation.
Like, Shane should not run if he’s outed in Sochi. He’s actually going to be in a lot more danger if he runs. Russia cannot go after a visiting Olympian—especially one of Shane’s stature—without causing an international incident. I wouldn’t exactly be extending my stay in Russia (I personally would not be leaving the sight of my country’s officials) but Shane’s going to be relatively safe if he gets outed in Sochi as long as he stays in the Olympic village. If Shane’s the only one who’s outed, I’d say he’d be fine to stay and finish competing, as long as he 1) does not leave the Olympic village and 2) does not comment on the situation while he’s in Russian borders. He’s there to play hockey and say “no comment” and that is fucking it. He is not making any goddamn statements on his sexuality while in Russian territory or this all becomes a lot more complicated, for reasons I’ll explain below.
If he leaves and tries to flee Russia himself, he may get murdered in a hate crime by a random Russian homophobe. He should not run. There is no benefit in running for him. His country can protect him if he stays with their group. They cannot protect him if he absconds into a fuck-off big country filled with people who hate him.
In the absolute worst case scenario, Russia could try to subject Shane to a period of incarceration followed by deportation. I personally see this as incredibly unlikely. But it is technically an option.
To be clear, openly gay athletes attended the 2014 Olympics as part of the official U.S. delegation. It is not illegal to be gay in Russia. It is illegal to promote LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. If Shane’s only been outed, then he hasn’t actually broken Russian law. He didn’t promote shit because he didn’t do anything. This is also why Shane can’t make statements about the situation while he’s in Russia. If anything he says could be construed as promoting LGBTQ+ rights, then he has actually broken Russian law, and Russia’s response becomes much more unpredictable. His mouth needs to be goddamn shut until he crosses that fucking border. Shane Hollander is not coming to terms with his own sexuality and making passionate declarations about the rights of gay men in Sochi fucking Russia. He is shutting the fuck up until he’s out of Russian airspace.
That all being said, Russia isn’t exactly known to be adverse to holding kangaroo court. The United States actually advises its citizens not to travel there in part because of the likelihood of wrongful prosecution. And Shane just got outed as a gay man who’s fucking Putin’s favorite hockey player. So maybe Russia’s feeling vindictive and tries to construe some random bullshit words he says as promoting gay rights in violation of their law. In 2014, the absolute maximum penalty a foreign national can face for promoting LGBTQ+ rights within Russia’s borders is 15 days incarceration followed by deportation.
It is incredibly unlikely that Russia attempts to incarcerate Shane Hollander under this statute. It is even less likely that he would serve any time in Russian prison over it. The chances of Shane Hollander going to jail in Russia under their anti-LGBTQ+ legislation are negligible.
You have to contextualize this within the circumstances. Shane Hollander is not some random athlete who got caught breaking the law in Russian territory on a personal visit. He is Shane fucking Hollander, Canadian National Treasure, and this is the goddamn Olympics.
I’ve talked about this in other posts, but let’s make something clear for the sake of this post: International law is not law in the way we traditionally think of it. It doesn’t work like the criminal code of your state or US federal law or anything like that. It is not a legitimately binding code where authorities will show up to incarcerate you if you break it.
It is playground politics on a global scale. To simplify it greatly, it’s about following playground rules so you get to sit at the cool kid’s table at lunch.
To create legitimately binding, codified law, it has to flow from some kind of central authority. In America, Congress is vested with law-making authority over America. America is not listening to some goddamn Europeans tell us what to do. I have read speeches from actual U.S. senators that can be summed up as “America is not listening to some goddamn Europeans tell us what to do.”
When you hear about international law, the Hague, international criminal courts—those are all systems that countries have decided to voluntarily participate in for the sake of diplomatic relations. They cannot be forced. Those institutions have authority because countries consent to their authority. Everyone’s just all playing nice with each other so international trade deals run smoother and no one raises tariffs on each other and so that their citizens can enter your country without applying for a visa first and vice versa. It is an extremely elaborate web of peer pressure and it plays out on an international scale.
The Olympics is a massive fucking part of that.
Countries want to be in the Olympics. That is something that I cannot put in strong enough terms. If we are talking about international diplomatic relations, the Olympics is about as big as it fucking gets. Countries will bend over backwards to protect their place in that fucking show. It is huge for promoting a sense of national pride. It is huge for stimulating the economy. And it is huge for the international pissing contest that is global diplomacy. Countries use the event to either affirm alliances or establish dominance over their enemies.
For example, have you ever watched Miracle (2004)?
For those who haven’t, Miracle is about the 1980 Olympics, and specifically the US v. Soviets men’s hockey competition. Imagine: It is the middle of the goddamn Cold War. The Soviets were the heavily favored team to win. They won Olympics hockey almost every year. They’d just cleaned America’s clock in an exhibition match that happened in advance of the game.
The 1980 Olympics happens. America somehow beats the Soviets.
It united the goddamn nation. Like. We might as well have just won the Cold War. It was a symbolic victory over the USSR, even if it was just a sports match. America rode that high of national pride for a long time.
When it’s the Olympics, the entire world is watching. Them being outed would be so far beyond being about just Shane and Ilya. Every single world leader participating in those Games would have an emergency briefing on their outing within the hour. Even if those are not their athletes, they may have to issue a formal statement or response regarding how Russia handles this. They may have the prime minister of Canada calling them in an hour saying I need you to agree to levy fuck-off tariffs against Russia if they do not give me back my special hockey boy right the FUCK now.
Because that’s the rub. This is not just any athlete. This is Shane fucking Hollander.
Hockey is in an integral part of the Canadian national identity. This is a country that cares profoundly about their hockey boys. It is a load-bearing part of the national zeitgeist. And if we say that Shane Hollander is the Sidney Crosby analogue, then almost every single person in that country knows his name.
I didn’t really grasp just how big of a deal Shane Hollander was likely to be the first time I watched the show. So much of the show focuses on their private interactions, where they’re just Shane and Ilya together. We don’t see them as celebrities nearly as much. We know they’re famous, we know that they’re in press conferences, we know that they get recognized by fans sometimes and that Shane at least got pap’d with Rose Landry. But when I first watched it, I figured that Shane and Ilya were just like. Athlete famous. Or like “drummer in a band” famous. Like you know them if you really follow the sport but other than that they’re pretty low profile. And I was coming from the perspective of someone who grew up in the American south, where hockey’s just not a big deal.
It is a big deal in Canada.
If Shane Hollander is their world’s Sidney Crosby, then he is a national fucking hero. He has been in national news since he was 12 years old. That country has watched him grow up. It has cheered for him. It has hung their hope and their national pride to the idea of Shane Hollander, and it has been doing it for a fucking decade.
The prime minister of Canada is going to crawl up Putin’s ass to get Shane Hollander back home without so much as a single hair out of place.
It is internationally embarrassing if he can’t. It’d be sending a message to the Canadian public and the world at large that Russia is stronger than Canada and can do whatever the fuck it wants to Canadian citizens without fear of retribution. That is simply not an option.
If Russia even suggests that it’s considering pulling shit against Shane Hollander, the prime minister is making phone calls. He is calling in favors. He is threatening tariffs and international sanctions. He is getting on a plane if he has to. Shane Hollander is the people’s princess and he is coming fucking home. The prime minister will personally be at the airport to receive him, with a fleet of the goddamn press. Look at the might of Canada, bringing babygirl home to its tender, maple-scented embrace.
Gay marriage has been legal in Canada for nearly a decade at this point. Canada is pushing itself in the international landscape as an LGBTQ+ safe space. The fact that he was outed as gay wouldn’t necessarily be a deterrent to Canada applying political pressure. And you cannot be the host of the fucking Olympics and imprison a country’s most beloved athlete for being a member of a minority group without opening a massive can of fuck around and find out.
Honestly I’d be fascinated by the global response. I can’t think of a single time in history where a country’s tried to fuck around and find out like that. Like. They may legitimately get banned from the Olympics if they try that shit.
Under the Olympic Charter, you can get banned from competing in future games as a sanction for human rights violations. This has historically only been used as a sanction for actions against a country’s own citizens as far as I’m aware, and it’s very rarely invoked. Like. South Africa was banned due to apartheid for a while but also we let did fully let the Nazis host the Olympics right before WWII. So. Hit or miss.
I just can’t personally think of a single time in history a country tried to imprison another country’s Olympian over something as contentious as wanting to violate specifically his human rights. Like. Olympians have been arrested during the Games before but that’s because they like. Tried to buy cocaine. And even then the police let them go to be disciplined by the Olympic committee for their country. Countries just do not like touching other country’s athletes during the Olympics. That’s so diplomatically explosive that I can’t begin to imagine the global backlash that would come from going after Shane Hollander for being gay and sucking off Putin’s favorite hockey player. But I do see the Olympics committee reacting strongly, because something like this would be a direct attack on the principles of comity underpinning the games. Countries are going to be way less willing to keep participating in the Games if they know their athletes can be unjustly imprisoned in the host country without consequence to the host country. There would likely be multiple countries reacting very strongly to any kind of formal sanction against Shane Hollander, not because they give a shit about him, but because they want to set the precedent that you do not fucking touch another country’s Olympians. Ultimately, I do think the Olympic committee would straight up ban Russia just because the Games may fall apart if they don’t.
Notably, Russia did actually receive a ban from the Olympics after the 2014 Games. This had nothing to do with human rights violations. They got caught doping their own athletes during the 2014 Games, which also violates the Olympic Charter. I’m assuming that this did not happen in the game changers universe because, critically, they doped their ice hockey team. Ilya would have been caught up in it, and there’s no evidence of that happening in canon.
So, presumably, Russia is in a position where the only thing that could endanger its future participation in the Games is if they do something as batshit fucking crazy as trying to arrest and incarcerate Canada’s Favorite Hockey Boy. That is simply not fucking happening. They’d be too worried about a potential Olympic ban and the firestorm of global backlash that would rain down on them for jailing a goddamn visiting Olympian. Like, it doesn’t matter whose dick he sucked, sometimes it’s just not worth it.
So, if Shane gets outed in Sochi, he is fine. Like. He’s not fine, he’s just been outed, but he’s not in any real danger from the Russian government.
Ilya’s situation is different.
Ilya needs to get his ass over the goddamn border.
Ilya does not need to worry so much about legal repercussions. He does not need to worry about incarceration. He can’t actually be incarcerated for this. The anti-LGBTQ+ promotion law that’s in place in 2014 does not actually permit incarceration for Russian citizens, just foreign nationals. If we’re just looking at official state sanctions, the most he’s getting is a fine. So if he’s arrested, it’s because he was framed for something. Which like. Not impossible for Russia to do. And it would be very difficult to get him out of incarceration if he was arrested on false charges.
But if we’re just looking at the consequences of him being outed, Ilya is not going to the gulag for this.
He is going to “kill himself.”
He is going to be found dead, having fallen from somewhere tragically high, or overdosed on drugs no one knew he was addicted to, or having shot himself twice in the head with his non-dominant hand. This was, of course, due to his own overwhelming shame from the embarrassment he’s subjected himself and his nation to, and was absolutely not a state-sanctioned hit, no, really. Really. They promise. They are crying too!!!
Again, contextualize the situation. It is 2014. It actually used to be better for gay people in Russia before 2013. The Russian government started to pass increasingly strict laws against queer people that started in 2013 (and have gotten fuck off bad in the last few years, but those won’t be a problem for the 2014 Olympics). So the Russia government has just kickstarted a national campaign against LGBTQ+ rights, and they find out that their hockey godling who is in all of their nationalist propaganda has been trading blow jobs with Canada’s own Prince of Hockey.
By this point, there has very likely been a very recent press conference that involved Ilya Rozanov shaking Putin’s hand. Putin has endorsed Ilya as one of the greatest this country has to offer. Ilya Rozanov was named the captain of their Olympic team over all of those KHL players who are all major and active participants of Russian state propaganda. And then right after he was picked, Putin turned around and warned the entire goddamn world “do not have your athletes in my country promoting the queer agenda.” There is a fuck ton of preexisting global attention on queer rights in Russia because of the Olympics.
So. In sum: They are at the launch of a national campaign against the very thing Ilya turned out to be. They just endorsed Ilya Rozanov as their national ideal that everyone should aspire in almost the same breath that they told the entire fucking world that Russia did not want that fag shit happening within its borders. And then he lost to goddamn Latvia.
And then he was outed for having gay sex with an equally famous hockey player from a competing country.
This is internationally humiliating for them. They do not want to just let this go with a fucking monetary fine.
And they are smart enough to know that if Ilya Rozanov gets over the border, he is not coming back.
He is getting on a plane to America and filing asylum paperwork the second he crosses the border. He’s moving to Canada and getting hitched to a pretty freckled Canadian in a ceremony officiated by the fucking prime minister. He is never going to be seen on Russian soil again.
There is a time limit to solving the problem of Ilya Rozanov. It is counting down. Russia will have to decide very quickly if there are too many eyes on them right now to retaliate against him or if they need to send a message to their citizens that you do not get to globally humiliate them the way Ilya Rozanov just did.
The options you have to resolve this are going to depend on how exactly Ilya and Shane are outed.
Like. What happened? Did someone put the pieces together and sell the story to the press? Was his incredibly literal sexting thread with Shane Hollander leaked? Did someone get a photo of them kissing on the Vegas balcony when they were rookies and they’ve been sitting on it since 2011? Some other third thing? Were Shane and Ilya outed simultaneously or was it staggered? All of that is going to affect their options to get Ilya out of this fucking country.
Like. If it’s a situation like in snapping birch, where Shane is outed first and it’s unclear for the first few hours whether Ilya’s going down with the ship, maybe you risk having him make a break for the goddamn border. Maybe he just tries to clear Russian airspace before they figure out that he’s Shane Hollander’s bisexual love machine. I’m not saying that’s the safest option, but it’s one I can see them at least considering.
If they are outed simultaneously, Shane and Ilya are now 1) handcuffed to each other, 2) performing gay hockey Romeo & Juliet on the international stage and 3) having some very awkward meetings with world leaders.
Again, Shane Hollander is much safer than Ilya Rozanov is right now. His country still likes him, mostly. He is still Canada’s special hockey boy who they love so so much, and Ilya is on the hit list for the fucking kremlin.
Ilya is not going home. He is not facing his family. They will fucking shoot him and then say he shot himself. #theyarecryingtoo!!!
If he is smart about it, Ilya is now attached at the hip to Shane Hollander, who has the type of bulletproofness that comes with being in a parasocial relationship with your entire goddamn country. That gives him his best odds.
If I’m Shane? Ilya is staying within five feet of me at all moments. We are going to the bathroom together. He is sleeping in my bed with me directly on top of him because it’ll be harder to kill him in his sleep if you have to physically move me to do it. Shane and Ilya would need to jump straight from “uncertain situationship stage where one of you took the other’s virginity and didn’t call after and the other kept texting for several months despite getting no response and now you both feel existential angst over it” to “disgustingly codependent couple that is never ever physically apart.”
They are not staying in the Olympic Village. They are not competing in the rest of the Games. They are sleeping in the Canadian embassy and getting on the first flight they physically can get out of that fucking country. And I am not talking commercial. I mean a world government needs to send a plane to go get them.
Like, if Shane wants to give Ilya his best odds, he is refusing to leave the country unless it’s holding Ilya Rozanov’s hand. He is throwing every single ounce of national goodwill at his disposal at the Canadian government to try and force them to get his situationship out with him.
Legitimately, they need Ilya out of that country so fast that it leaves a fucking smoke trail. They need to get him out before he “dies in a tragic accident” or “kills himself.” They need to get him out before he gets framed for a crime they can actually incarcerate him for.
In this situation, the win conditions are if they can get Ilya out of the country safely when he’s trapped like a rat in the Olympic village in a country where everyone knows his face because the state purposefully promoted him to them as the national ideal. He cannot just go to fucking ground and try to stealth his way across the border. You need the eyes of other governments watching him closely so it’s harder for him to “kill himself.” You need a safe, secure method out of the country—i.e. a diplomatic flight—so he can’t “fall down the stairs” at the airport. Which means you need to 1) convince world leaders to let Ilya Rozanov on one of their planes and 2) ideally get them to pressure Russia to not stop him on the way to the airport.
I want to be clear—Russia can’t just close its borders to Ilya Rozanov specifically. At least not easily. He has a passport. It’s not a simple as just taking away the passport.
A recognized principe of international human rights law is freedom of movement. Countries cannot just revoke their citizen’s passports willy nilly—especially if they’re revoking his passport because he’s gay and they want to stop him from leaving the country. They have to have some kind of cognizable ground to put a travel ban on him—like if he had a warrant out for his arrest, owed debts to the government, was a national security threat, etc—or it violates the playground rules that the world governments agreed to abide by. Russia will no longer get to sit at the cool kids’ table if it just goes up to Ilya and says “hey man you can’t leave the country anymore”
It is 2014. Russia is still, for the most part, trying to maintain diplomatic relations. It just convinced the world to let it host the Olympics. And because of that, the entire fucking world has its focus on what they do in response to this. They cannot just fly off the fucking handle and refuse to let Ilya Rozanov leave the country. That would violate their own laws and international principles of law, and the entire world would see them do it. They would be looking for a legal way to keep him in the country, which means Shane and Ilya need a way to get him safely out of the country before Russia has the time to come up with an excuse to keep him there or just, you know, fucking shoot him.
And that. Is not a lot of time. Like every second that he stays in Russia post-outing decreases his odds of leaving the country alive.
If you really want to play out the logical consequences of this kind of fic, you are now writing RPF about former President Barack Obama.
Shane is Canadian, but Ilya is playing for an American team. And, critically, a lot of the spotlight around queer rights and the 2014 Olympics was focused on America.
If we’re talking about 2014, we are pre-Obergefell. Gay marriage is not legal across the United States. But Obama made it a key issue during his time in office. He’s declared that he wouldn’t defend the Defense of Marriage Act. He’s gotten rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’s publicly endorsed queer rights and he’s directed American agencies to promote queer rights worldwide through diplomatic measures.
Obama was under pressure to boycott the 2014 Olympics because of Russia’s recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. He chose not to, but he did send openly queer athletes as part of the official U.S. delegation as an implicit condemnation of Russia’s actions. The spotlight was on America because of this.
So America was participating in the Olympics even after human rights’ activists petitioned for a boycott because of Russia’s anti-queer legislation. It was subtweeting Russia’s stance on gay rights on a global scale. And then a major athlete for an American team who lives in America on an American visa gets outed for making passionate gay love to the Hockey Prince of America’s closest ally.
America’s going to be expected to say something about that shit.
Now, they may say “we don’t actually have any citizens involved in this, we support queer rights but we will not be directly intervening out of respect for international comity.” Or they may say “AMERICA STANDS BY ITS GAY HOCKEY PLAYERS EVEN IF THEY ARENT BORN HERE. LAND OF THE IMMIGRANT RED WHITE AND BLUE MOTHERFUCKERS” *eagle screech* *gunfire*
It. Responses could really vary here. And I think how involved America is willing to be will depend on how much political capital Shane and Ilya can offer them.
Again, at this point in history, the president’s office is on a tear in favor of queer rights for once. It is a major platform actually. It’s a topic that Obama historically has pushed boundaries for.
Who are they trying to bring home? Is it gay hockey Romeo & Juliet?
Or is it just some Slavic fuckboy?
This situation is going to be a lot worse for Shane and Ilya if they are outed because their texts leak. Because their texts do not look good for them. Their texts look like Ilya spent two years saying “please please PLEASE let me fuck you” *unsolicited dick pic* “you want these nine inches so bad cmon baby” *thirsty tongue emoji* *eggplant emoji* *prayer hands emoji* and then ghosted the day after Shane Hollander finally texted that he could come fuck him. Like. Their texts are low key embarrassing for both of them. Ilya comes off looking like some dickhead who just wanted to get his dick wet and Shane looks like a jilted girl who couldn’t figure out she was just a notch in the bedpost after several months of being left on read.
That is not the kind of thing diplomats burn bridges over. Like. American democrats are fighting for their life trying to get people to accept the idea that gay people can get married. They are not about to throw down the gauntlet with a world power in defense of what looks like a chapter torn out of the fuckboy playbook.
But maybe they apply some political pressure if Shane and Ilya at least look like they at least have the potential to be gay Romeo & Juliet.
Yes, the rivalry makes them a divisive couple. But it makes them a divisive couple for specifically some American hockey fans. This is bigger than the NHL. This is bigger than their individual cities. This is a tale you’re selling to the world, most of whom found out that Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov existed 0.5 seconds ago when they got outed and suddenly became headline news in every paper on the planet.
They are both very attractive men. They are talented. And they have a tale of star-crossed love that has the potential to be very sympathetic if it’s told right. And maybe that’s enough to make them valuable as a very compelling story about the need for equal rights, including marriage equality, which the White House is actively campaigning for.
To be clear—America and Canada are not threatening war over this, but they also don’t need to. All they need to do is 1) let Ilya get on their plane with Shane instead of telling him to get his own ride and 2) pressure the Russian government behind the scenes to let him get on the plane. Maybe the White House + the Canadian government would be willing to apply pressure on Russia and package it with promises of a prisoner exchange or trade deal or something if Russia just doesn’t stop Ilya from leaving? I dunno. This part is the most uncertain. I’m not privy to backdoor inter-continental governmental negotiations. Shane and Ilya would have to be really, really worth it for that kind of effort, but they’re high profile enough to have the potential. Otherwise, you just have to have Ilya make a break for the border and pray he gets across before someone shoots him.
If world powers do successfully intervene on their behalf, Shane and Ilya do not just get to shake hands when the plane lands and go their separate ways.
The fuckboy dynasty is over. Their best odds in this situation if they convince the fucking president that they are in a serious relationship—or at least convince him that they can convince the world that they’re in a serious relationship. You can’t just have the fucking president making serious political moves for you and then disembark the fucking ride. Like. You can, the president isn’t going to make you keep fucking each other at like, gunpoint, but it would not be good for their careers or getting any kind of continued aid from the government when it comes to keeping Ilya safe from his very very angry home country.
If they want to minimize the real-world consequences from their outing, they are in a committed relationship now whether they like it or not. They are at the White House on Thanksgiving standing next to the fucking turkey in matching Burberry coats and clapping politely. They are each other’s dates to Christmas dinner with the Canadian prime minister. The upside is that it actually may insulate them somewhat from official NHL retaliation against their relationship, but only because fucking Obama is coming to their games now.
They’d be placed on a collision course with marriage once it becomes legal across the U.S. after it’s codified into federal law by the Hollanov law that democrats named after them. They could probably drag out the dating phase for several presidential terms and then claim they grew apart if they didn’t want to get married? I’d be very careful about how they announce any breakups. But like. In the initial aftermath, they are not telling the world that the gears of goddamn nations just moved so they could be fuck buddies. They need as much public goodwill as they can get or someone will get mad enough to shoot them. No, they are in the kind of gay love that changes history, whether it’s true or not.
It’s political theater. They’d be performing a love story for the eyes of the world. And whatever they do would likely have consequences for if gay people get rights and how fast that happens. It would be a huge deal.
There’s a fic where they get outed while in Sochi, and Ilya has to go on the run. “I Really Hope You’re Gonna Get Out Soon” by Taywrites11. Shane gets screwed over by Team Canada, of course, but at least he’s not on the run from his own government.
He gets put on a plane back to Canada, and they rapidly come to rue the day when they let the media at him before they put him on that plane. Because well-known nice guy Shane Hollander is not playing nice any longer.
He’s worried sick about Ilya, and his own career, and Ilya, and explaining all this to his parents, and whether Ilya will end up caught and dead in a gulag, and how they got outed, and Ilya. Team Canada think Shane is so media-trained he won’t make trouble for them, but they’re wrong.
I would also argue that Ilya would be much safer in the USA under Obama (president during Sochi) than under Trump. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s early on in the first Trump administration (summer 2017) when Ilya seriously starts considering moving to a Canadian team.
Trump is way too cozy with Putin for a high profile queer Russian refugee to feel safe there. And Ilya was the captain of the Olympic men’s hockey team. There would’ve been lots of photos of him shaking Putin’s hand. Which would have been very embarrassing for Putin after Ilya gets outed. He would’ve wanted to make an example of Ilya, and been willing to call in favours in order to do so. Exactly as the OP says!!!
Although if Shane and Ilya are already married by the time Trump takes office, there’s not much he can do to them, even if Putin pushes him for a favour. Justin Trudeau would have had no choice but to expend political capital protecting Canadian Hockey Jesus’s husband.
And OP is absolutely right. A star crossed lovers story is much more palatable for the politicians and the public than a story about a sleazy bisexual Slavic fuckboy who ensnares a sweet, sheltered Canadian gay boy. They would have to sell it as Romeo and Juliet regardless of their real feelings just to keep Ilya safe. “Safe” in the most literal sense of the word.
It really is a blessing they didn’t get outed that early. I doubt their relationship would’ve survived the intense public scrutiny, back when they were in their situationship era.
Oh, and a lot of Canadians who aren’t particularly comfortable with queer people but don’t want to admit it (especially when Russia is being openly homophobic) will be concern trolling. “Shane seems like such a sweet boy but he’s obviously not as experienced as Rozanov. I just worry that he’s being taken advantage of. His poor parents must be worried too.”
And there will be a whole lot of stereotypes about slutty bisexuals being weaponized against Ilya as part of the concern trolling. Because obviously nobody would be good enough for Canadian Hockey Jesus. But especially not some Russian club rat who’s known for his promiscuity and is probably just using Shane for a Canadian passport.
I suspect there will be people badmouthing Ilya at Tim Hortons locations all over Canada. By spring 2021, when they get outed in canon, they’ve been monogamous for going on four years. People are willing to entertain the idea that maybe Ilya is a retired slut. He’s been living in Ottawa very quietly for almost three years. And even before he left Boston, he’d stopped hooking up with random women at clubs. As anybody could tell by looking at TMZ’s archives.
In February 2014, Ilya is still very much in his active slut era. And would get eaten alive for it by the Canadian public. “If Shane Hollander is really gay, he needs a nice boyfriend. Not this sarcastic Russian asshole who buys condoms in bulk packs.”
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
I think the issue with torrenting is that is requires (albeit small) a bit of effort. It also needs you to run a vpn which most people don’t actually have. On top of all that it’s difficult to find a good reliable site, even then there’s risk that people don’t want to take. It’s considered taboo so finding information about it winds up being difficult for the average dweller
Here's the thing: depending on your country and internet provider, you might not even need a VPN. Some countries have stricter laws about torrenting than others, but many of them don't really enforce them. Same with internet providers. Often, it depends on how much you're downloading. Like, if you're torrenting multiple ~5 GB movies every day, then yeah, they'll probably notice and look into it, but if you just download something every once in a while, you're likely to slip under the radar. I've never actually heard of anyone getting fined for torrenting. Worst case scenario, you'll get a "strongly worded" email asking you not to do it again, lol. (Don't take my word for it though, as I said, it's very country-dependent, but still, for most people, the risk is much smaller than they assume).
As for torrenting sites, yeah, one of the most annoying things is that they constantly get taken down, but you can always just type "[name of popular torrent site] proxy" on google, click on one of the top links, then keep checking out each proxy link until you find one that works, and then you might not need another one for many months or even a couple of years.
Also, if anybody needs to hear this: I promise you can just look it up yourself. You're not going to yet arrested for simply googling about it 😂 Reddit has a piracy sub with a lot of info, too. The information is out there, and it's free.
Everything requires some effort. Signing up on a streaming service requires effort, too. Actually having content on your computer is so much more convenient. So many services have utterly shit media players. Once you get used to opening video files on a proper, dedicated media player that lets you customise the look and position of subtitles, funetune brightness, contrast etc, it's hard to go back.
For a long time I did it with no VPN. But it did get me into trouble, and here's how.
Basically you only get into trouble for torrenting if a company who owns the content tracks who all is torrenting it, and goes to your ISP with a complaint. This doesn't happen often, but it DOES happen, depending on the rights holder.
What happened to me is that several years ago my ISP sent me a notice saying "we are declining to provide internet service to you anymore because you hit three strikes of rights infringement." I think it was Game of Thrones, actually, I downloaded like two episodes and HBO was tracking it and those two episodes were strike two and three. And I'd gotten a first strike ELEVEN YEARS BEFORE.
So yeah the problem is that there is no appeal or anything, your ISP just says we are kicking you effective yesterday, you broke the law.
I live in a rural area with limited providers so that can be a problem because if the big company most people use won't serve you, it's gonna be a problem. I got pretty lucky but I do pay more than I should for internet now because I know I can't switch providers cause I'm like blackballed with the other company.
Also there are free VPNs. Mozilla includes a built-in free VPN up to like 50 gb a month. So now I just turn on my VPN when I want to DL something and it's not a problem.
can we send up a quick thank you to pdf uploaders, torrent seeders, copy sharers, scanlators, fansubbers, digitizers, paywall dodgers, and various other internet archivers for making niche art and information more accessible in a media landscape where all but the most profitable mainstream are often tossed aside and left to rot
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Fandoms have a serious problem with how creators are being treated these days.
Fandom creators spend hours of their free time to create something to make fandom thrive...for free and for the love of the game.
And what do they get? A wholeass heap of fuck all. No reblogs, no comments, no nothing. And people are surprised that creators are dropping out left, right, and centre??
"Why is there no long fic anymore?" "Why did my favourite writer stop?" "Why is my favourite artist not posting anymore?"
I implore you to ask yourself: "What's the last thing I did to support my fandom? Does my favourite creator know they are my favourite? When was the last time I left a comment under something?"
This Fourth of July, I ask that you support Native Hawaiian independence.
The Kingdom of Hawai’i was illegally overthrown with the help of American businessmen and we have suffered under the iron grip of America.
Our land is simply seen as a vacation spot, my people are simply seen as tour guides and hula dancers. We have had our culture, our history, and our people turned into a commercialized joke by America.
The rampant tourism kills our islands with endless hotels, attractions and overcrowding. The housing and living costs are out of control because of the false “paradise” narrative. The Navy poisons our water and destroys our land. Covid has killed so many of my people due to the reckless and selfish nature of tourists. I have lost loved ones to this virus, because tourists “couldn’t stay away”.
My people have suffered. I have suffered.
We are more than your vacation. We are more than an aesthetic.
We are a sovereign nation illegally occupied by the United States of America.
Restore Hawai’i to Hawaiians. End the American Occupation.
See the links below to learn more and to read up on your Hawaiian history.
Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy | HISTORY
Hawaiian scholar Dr. Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio explains the movement asking the United States to return the lands taken during a 18
‘Āina Momona is a Native Hawaiian led community organization dedicated to environmental sustainability, food security and resilience, and so
The United States Navy has a history of terrorism in Hawaiʻi (and throughout the world). In 1940 the Navy started to build the Red Hill Fuel
The latest number brings the statewide total since the start of the pandemic to 308,695.
I wish I could make white people(and not just white Americans) understand how diverse the pre-columbian Americas were. The history, religion, culture, politics was at least as complex as Europe's. There was the full gamut of religions, from monotheists to animists to ancestral religions. There were city building empires, village farmers, nomadic traders, and so many other ways to live. This is all just based on what we know, the fragments left behind and the stories of survivors of an apocalyptic plague. All this before the most extended campaign of genocide in history was waged in an attempt to wipe out those survivors.
Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.
Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.
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“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”
—
PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)
Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it.
"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)
Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".
Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; one day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hallow mockery; your prayers and hyms [sic], your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), from a speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852.
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ohhh man. apparently when you copy+paste stuff directly from claude into ao3 it includes code. which anyone can find. people have found it in big, popular fics in multiple fandoms 😬. also heated rivalry; some of which the authors fervently denied using AI. link to thread.
link to their complete findings for those without twitter
Writing this up for data literacy purposes. There's a philosophical conversation to be bad about AI but this post is not that, this is just explaining what the Claude fragment ai checker can say and what it can't.
I didn't write the checker and have no involvement with that.
What the tool linked above can say:
This fic includes content that was directly copied from Claude into the ao3 post box
What it can't say:
How much of the fic is ai
What the ai was used for
Reiterating that it only finds Claude fragments so that means that the checker:
Doesn't know if another ai was used
Doesn't know if Claude was used and the copy from Claude feature was used
Doesn't know if content comes from Claude but was first pasted into another document first
Here's some scenarios where ONLY ONE Claude fragment would be detected:
Person goes into Claude, asks it to generate 20k words of a college au meet cute fic. Person pastes the text directly into ao3. One ping
Person asks Claude to generate text that would make their pre-written text look like a tweet, copies that into the ao3 box. One ping
Person uses Claude as a spellchecker and copies the output into the ao3 box. One ping
Scenario where Claude ai checker would ping more than once:
Person pastes a paragraph into Claude and asks it to rewrite it more smoothly, copies that into ao3, then does that again
Frequency of code fragment does not equal quantity of ai usage.
Here's a scenario where the Claude fragment ai checker would not detect ai even when that person was using Claude:
Person asks Claude to write their entire fic but then copies it into a Google doc before pasting it into ao3
More does not mean more. This is a binary check of “has fragment or does not have fragment.”
and GOING FORWARD, because this is such a simple and distinct marker, I expect that no future Claude AI fic will include this marker. It is trivial to remove it. So this is not a preventative future checker. What this IS good for is to read flagged fic and hone a personal sense of what an AI fic reads like.
Today I was also turned onto this fic which can help articulate what makes an output feel like AI, if someone is looking for another training tool.
So apparently, over the summer, Quibi (the shortest-lasting streaming service ever lmao) did a quarantine project called “Home Movie: The Princess Bride” where a bunch of celebrities recreated The Princess Bride in tiny chunks at home.
And like there was no permanent cast, all these celebrities seem to have gotten a scene or part of a scene to do (i’m not sure exactly, I did not ever watch Quibi and thus haven’t seen this yet), and then they just… recreated it as best they could. At home. Under quarantine.
So like, you had Jennifer Garner in a blanket cape playing Princess Buttercup AND the Booing Old Woman with a crowd comprised entirely of stuffed animals:
Or Taika Waititi paying Westley off a badly-drawn Inigo on a piece of cardboard held in front of someone’s face:
And it’s all just delightful.
But my absolute favorite part of this thing that I’ve sadly never seen but assume is probably absolutely hilarious and a treasure and I want to find it some day and watch the whole thing… is that Carey Elwes is in it.
In case you need a comfort watch and because Youtube search nowadays sucks rancid farts, I remind you of the Princess Bride Home Movie from the lockdown, starring everybody
