Will sell you my left kidney for more analysis of Daddy kink lwc bc I don’t think I’ll ever get over chpt 17. The way Shane keeps pulling away and fighting just to make sure Ilya will still come after him, the way a child storms out of a room just so someone will follow them. Everything so fucked about that dynamic and them both choosing it over and over bc nothing else makes them feel that way. The grabby hands. Ilya holding him on the dock because no one ever just held him for long enough. Fuck.
please do not give me your kidney, i will give you the analysis for free. throughout the fic we see shane being infantilised by pretty much everyone around him, but in very different ways. yuna's version is purely transactional, concerned with his career and public image, with the actual emotional care conspicuously absent. hayden's is conditional, expressed only when shane behaves in ways that fit the version of him hayden has decided to understand. so shane craves this dynamic, desperately, but nobody in his life has ever been able to deliver it in a way his body can actually receive.
and because he's been starved of it for so long, when it does come, he doesn't know what to do with it. imagine being taken to a buffet after years of famine, you wouldn't know where to start, and if you did manage to eat, you'd probably get refeeding syndrome. so he pushes people away, fights, throws tantrums. screams at his parents, tells hayden and j.j to fuck off, doesn't communicate with rose. part of that is genuine overwhelm. but part of it is also testing, checking how far he can push before they give up on him. and so far, everyone has. which is why he likes to be a brat, storm off, throw things, run, because he likes to be chased. he likes the confirmation that ilya will follow regardless. the problem, of course, is that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between shane actually saying no and shane just playing. i think even he doesn't know. and ilya doesn't care, it's the same thing either way for him.
because ilya has a thing with chasing. growing up, he couldn't trust the words coming out of his mother's mouth, couldn't take "no" or "get away from me" at face value, and learned instead to give people what he'd decided they needed. boundaries are a vague concept for him with the people he loves. he thinks he knows them better than they know themselves. and what's more validating than when shane curls into his arms after ilya refused to listen? beyond all of that, ilya parents shane. like it's not just a sex thing for them. the lake is baptism. surviving a suicide attempt leaves you in an extraordinarily regressed, childlike space, very pliant, your whole worldview cracked open. and ilya steps into that space the same way his mama did in his hallucinations in chp 15, not just physical care, no, he basically says "shane, the world works like this now."
