#hr asks

what i really wish people would think, for a second - that at a time where tensions are so high all around the world. where sentiments behind prejudiced narratives are now being pushed explicitly. 

prejudiced narratives that can be reflected, and echoed, even within gay romance novels. 

yes, real life queer, austistic and asian men exist. they might even prefer submission. but the in text framing of shane hollander as daintier, more hairless and submissive in comparison to strong, manly and domineering ilya rozanov is not neutral. 

juxtaposed with the way ilya is written - how he is given grace, humanity, and interiority (allowed to receive professional and interpersonal care for his mental health; allowed to lash out and make mistakes; rewarded with captaincy, and the passport he had a right to look for, and did receive) 

how, instead, in text, when shane’s worst nightmare of not “performing” properly as a model minority is proven true - when he is swiftly punished by being stripped of dignity, agency, and even financial independence - 

he is at turns dismissed with mocking, and placated with sex. a narrative that marks this as a joyous celebration cannot be framed as neutral. these sentiments, in text, have nothing to do with romance’s genre conventions - and everything to do with unexamined bigotry. 

and fandom is supposed to fun. that’s what they say. 

i really, sincerely, hope that ever single person who has said this has had a think about this. thought seriously about whether seeing the microaggressions and caricature of their own identities reflected in an endless echo of enthusiasm - is in any shape or form fun. 

the word is aversive racism. 

real world issues do not disappear the moment you step online, nor do they vanish when placed within the medium of a romance novel. you remain just as responsible for your words and actions - and the harm you may cause, knowingly or not. it does not exist in a vacuum.

the thing about discrimination - that so many people seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around. is that they seem to imagine it as a literal cloud floating overhead. whereas it’s more like plastic. it covers you from rain, it holds your water, it’s in your water. 

if you refuse to do work you’re just drinking and regurgitating plastic. if you refuse to acknowledge the plastic exists  everywhere around you - i don’t know what to say to you. 

can i say - despite everything i’ve said here, it hasn’t changed the fact that i deeply appreciate the care hudson williams has brought to his role. that he has, if nothing else, made season one’s telling of this (otherwise potentially extremely fraught) story so human and warm.

people who sit in marginalised identities so seldom get to see the nuance of their own struggles, triumphs and humanity reflected on screen - much less become beloved. marginalised folks so seldom become romantic leads. the more intersections you sit in, the less human you become in the eyes of the public. 

i appreciate so much the work hudson has done to humanise his character, who is very dear to my heart. 

i appreciate so much folks like you too, you take the care examine and reflect upon what it means to experience discrimination - and what beliefs specific depictions of marginalised identities reflect. 

-🍏

i'm sorry this took me a couple days, the week kinda got away from me

Yes Shane Hollander is fictional. However. Autism, queerness, and Asian heritage is an intersectional identity that exists in reality. 

People who continue to behave deliberately obtuse about these issues are making this Fandom so incredibly hostile for folks who match with any of these identities - especially those who sit at this exact intersection.

When you’re engaging with a work that has explicit racial and ableistic bias, you have got to put in the work. 

Asking us to level with groups who doggedly cover their eyes and ears, putting the onus of outreach and emotional labour on us is unreasonable. Asking us to block, curate or quit Fandom altogether - starts sounding an awful lot like when certain folks shrug and decide, in real life, that if we dislike it so much - we ought to “go back to where you came from”.  (I have heard and had to disengage with similar sentiments from White Immigrants who said to me, ad verbatim, that they dislike the word “White Privilege”.) 

Because guess what? Ask any person whose cultures produced J or K or C media (God forbid anybody conflate the three). 

They can tell you the prejudiced and privileged behaviour of huge swathes of Fans - who are so happy to consume and dominate conversations - have driven Fans of Color out of the very spaces where they’re supposed to belong. 

This issue could be seen as microcosm - an unthinking replication of the structural violence that permeates our everyday lives. So in that case - yes, we could quit Fandom anyday - and this would not diminish the microaggressions and the real threats of violence that we face for the crime of existing. 

All we are asking is the basic humanity and respect that people seem to be able to understand when engaging with misogynistic texts. 

If you can understand why reproductive violence, unequal emotional labour, threats of retaliation when whistleblowing - or the objectification of women is wrong -

Guess what it sounds like, when the voices of Fans of Color - are labelled an overreaction of “too sensitive, emotional and irrational”, that we’re “unable to take a joke” - and be told to get over ourselves. 

Which side of the equation you’re on, when you repeatedly refuse to do the work on your own biases? 

I’m tired of being asked to be nice. 

It’s as this quote by Brown (2018) says - “When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework—besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people—is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful. I am expected to come closer to the racists. Be nicer to them. Coddle them.” 

-🍏

hi, this is so well said, thank you so much. i don't really have anything to add. i agree with all of it.

Maybe I’m projecting but I just can’t see them letting him fall behind or not have back up plans even if they truly and earnestly believe in his hockey career. At the very least he would have grown up in nurturing household with well educated parents. Idk the insistence that Shane must be bad at school because of the stupid jock stereotype reallyyyy doesn’t sit well with me. I know you’ve talked about how sometimes people overcorrect when trying to avoid stereotypes without realising the implications but genuinely the amount of people who insist Shane is “a stupid jock with no interests outside hockey” (despite being shown enjoying things like reading, movies, other types of sports, architecture and business), with Ilya getting all the “intellectual” headcanons and other interests (despite there being relatively little evidence of this in canon, or at the very least not more than there is of Shane having other interests), it’s just tiring.

i completely agree! especially because the hcs i've seen about him being a bad student just seem to be people joking about the asian guy actually being a bad student to subvert the stereotype or whatever

which like. i'm sorry but that does nothing for me. as an asian kid who was bad at school, the lived experience of being an asian kid in north america and being a bad/uninterested student is teachers looking at you weird when you don't understand something. teachers automatically assuming you'll know the answer to everything. kids asking you to do their homework for them because "you're supposed to be smart", and then calling you a name when you don't know an answer. overhearing kids say they're "set" when they find out they're sitting next to you in class. hiding test papers from your parents because you're terrified of admitting you didn't understand something. not feeling like you can ask for help because you're supposed to know what you're doing. everyone from all sides expects you to know what you're doing and you don't. and there's no one you can talk to about it. it's not funny, it's isolating and really painful and i wish people making jokes would realize that.

shane was an asian kid in the late 90s/early 2000s. there is no way yuna and david wouldn't have emphasized backup options. hockey could work out and that would be incredible, but if it didn't he'd need to have a fallback. yuna, big picture thinking, set shane's future up hollander would never have allowed him to completely close the door on school.

and yeah, it especially feels pointed when the ilya hcs are that he's really into russian literature and math and whatever else. shane canonically reads, ilya doesn't. why isn't shane getting the literature hcs? it's apparently better to hc the guy who is russian but never shows an interest in books as really into russian lit because he's russian, but everyone cares so much about dismantling stereotypes. it's just.... very telling how much people actually understand about these stereotypes they think they're subverting lol

thank you! this is really kind. it is delicate and i debated even posting about it because i don't want to be misconstrued. i like the idea of hollanov and d/s a lot, i've read some really spectacular fics about it, and there are a lot of people who handle the topic very well.

i just struggle with these ones in particular. i just feel like sometimes fandom does a decent job of talking about things like homophobia and misogyny (not tackling them necessary, not solving them - fandoms can get really homophobic and misogynistic, i don't want to pretend they can't), while racism kind of fades into the background. it's just as pervasive and just as ubiquitous but it doesn't get talked about with the same fervor, because this website is very white and people probably don't think about it. i think it's important to think about it. people of color will feel more welcome in fandom spaces if more people think about it.

yeah exactly! i don't think anyone's doing this maliciously or trying to be weird about this on purpose, it just feels like the racial implications aren't being considered. and i get that, if you're white, you don't think about it because you don't know what it's like to live without the white privilege that would force you to consider it. but i've read post after post criticizing depictions of queer sex and how queer men actually have sex and what's realistic and what isn't and what being a dom means and what being a sub means and ways heteronormativity can get tangled up in all of it, and it just feels.... weird that the race piece seems entirely left out of these conversations about control and subbing and domming? and no, i'm not saying poc can't be subs, nor am i saying poc with white partners can't be subs, before anyone gets it twisted. but as you said, none of this exists in a vacuum. pretending it does is ridiculous. we're all products of our society, and the society we live in has a fucked up obsession with often fetishizing east asian people. i think that needs to be part of the conversation.

that is awful, i am so sorry. people are so cruel about accents, and otherness in general. i don't know why the inclination is to mock something when you're unfamiliar with it, it's so gross.

but yes, exactly! i've seen a lot of discussion on how differently western vs. eastern european accents are perceived in ways that are deeply classist and racist. it's like you're saying, punishment, reinforcing white supremacy, creating an image of an "other" worthy of mockery in order to feel superior.

oh that's a great point, i hadn't thought of that! they could def be basing it off the russian player (or players) rachel reid based him off of. and you're right, not every russian player is the same. we watch ilya's english get better over time, there is a clear difference between ep 1 and ep 6.

especially disconcerting to me that people are so eager to compare shane to crosby when it comes to like. hockey skills. when crosby was pretty famously a good student despite being focused on hockey from a young age as well. but no shane couldn’t possibly be good at school because his only personality trait is hockey. don’t you know jocks are stupid? /s

it's because they have identified the 'asian nerd' stereotype, and decided that the way to "subvert" that is to make the asian man stupid and a bad student. nevermind that rachel reid also thinks shane is stupid so these people are falling in line with exactly how she sees shane lmao

it can't be that maybe shane is really good at english. he loves books and reading and writes great papers. or he's a wonderful artist. or incredibly knowledgeable in history. no, he just has to be stupid because making an asian man intelligent is ~stereotypical~

this one hits close to home for me because i was the stupid asian kid for a really long time. i wasn't stupid, i just struggled with math and science, and in the eyes of north american society, for an asian kid, that's as good as being a straight d student. i've always been much better at the humanities. i wrote great papers and aced my english classes and had the other asian kids wondering how i was capable of that, but because my interests weren't stem related, i was stupid.