got milk, i mean got projection?
something i've been thinking about with got milk is that nobody has gotten shane right yet. and for a long time i found that extremely annoying, despite the fact that the fic is literally designed so that you can't.
the whole thing is written from inside ilya's head, which means you're getting shane entirely through the lens of someone who is projecting onto him constantly and compulsively. and because shane is a high-masking, avoidant autistic character, the gaps that ilya fills with his own ideals are very wide. his actions read that a certain way to ilya, and because you're in ilya's head, they read that way to you too. if shane were a more expressively legible character, the projection would have less room. but he isn't, so it does.
what's interesting is that the reader does exactly what ilya does. depending on what you find sexiest, most narratively satisfying, you fill shane in accordingly. some people have decided he's an omniscient mastermind orchestrating everything because that's the version that excites them. some people have stripped him of agency entirely because that's the version they want. people are certain he's desperately in love, certain he's completely apathetic, certain he's performing, certain he isn't. most of these takes are completely innacurate, and all of them are completely logical conclusions from the text. i suppose, because the text is giving you a silhouette and your own desires are doing the colouring in.
this is, i think, why the fic is popular. the narrator is available for inhabitation in a way that shane is not. ilya is rendered fully, but shane is deliberately withheld. so the reader slides into ilya's perspective and shane becomes whatever they need him to be, which means the consumer is, without necessarily realising it, occupying the position of the obsessor. we are inside the projecting mind, we are doing the projecting. the fic is about obsession and the way obsession hollows out the object of desire and replaces it with an ideal, and it produces that exact mechanism in the reader while they're reading it.
which is why the moment we get shane's perspective (when he becomes a person with an interior rather than a surface to project onto) the illusion snaps. and suddenly there's someone actually in there, and everything you decided about him has to be renegotiated from scratch with all the consequences that it came with.
