#m.anon

Because wow! Shane sees something in him? That apparently makes him feel safe enough to be vulnerable and honest about his desires. He wants ilya to be assertive. To take control. He immediately trusts ilya to be in charge.

Ilya is so honored shane is willing to submit to him and shane is only able to do it because he knows ilya doesn't think of it lightly.

i've been chewing on this for a bit bc i don't abjectly disagree or anything, but i think ilya & shane's story is less two people trusting each other and more two people liberating each other

trust is inherent to healthy kink + d/s, so i agree in the sense that shane is trusting ilya just through the motion of subbing & ilya is taking that trust seriously through the motion of domming (and doing a good job. crucially)

but i don't think ilya believes shane sees something in him bc i don't think shane is assessing whether he can trust ilya to dom him. it's why they're actually very reckless when rendered as a dominant & submissive pair. shane Does Not Hesitate even when he maybe should & ilya is high as balls abt it n just intuits his way forward from sheer natural skill

i see their trust dynamic more like shane obliviously inciting a protective streak in ilya. shane is earnest to a fault, shy, awkward. lays himself at ilya's mercy without even thinking abt it. and he's incredibly sweet + fairly sensitive

he nuzzles right into ilya's soft spot without even meaning to, which is a place most people cannot reach (and ilya will not let them reach). it's equally disarming and tantalizing. liberated from his walls/power games, ilya realizes he gets to do whatever he wants (dom him into oblivion) & shane literally needs him to

he's cruel to shane in sochi in the same way his brother and father are cruel to him. it's meant to cut and hurt shane and make shane feel small and needy.

that doesn't cancel that ilya is having the worst time of his life.

oh my god. he shut shane down because they were in fucking russia, at the sochi olympics, in the olympic stadium, in public, during ice skating. anon i don't blame you for just not knowing something, if that's why you sent this, but oh my fucking god

the show specifically references the sochi shitshow with the black mold comment, immediately followed by a statement that it's unsafe for queer people in russia. this was a massive concern for participating athletes & visitors irl, for years beforehand. tierney was alive to witness this. we're intended to read the fictional setting of the olympics in 2014 in hr as, at the very least, similar to the real life event

winter 2014 was the middle of an especially fraught period for queer russians as i understand it, a lot of which circled the olympics. sochi was an absolute political shit show all around. russia fucking invaded crimea 4 days after it ended

shane walked up to ilya, who already lost to an opponent eastern european nation in one of russia's most popular & politicized sports, in public view in the fucking olympic stadium. during the most popular event

he endangered both of them, especially ilya. there's a real chance ilya was being monitored

and it was stupid. yes he's autistic, yes he didn't know. that's not an excuse, he should've known better than to walk up to ilya like that in the political environment of the sochi olympics. he was ignorant & privileged here, despite his innocent intentions. that's the point

And later they develop feelings and neither of them knows how to deal with this changed status quo.

Anyway you have extremely correct takes on them as far as I'm concerned. Another doms perspective is so interesting because a lot of fans aren't familiar with the d/s dynamic at all so they make Assumptions.

i'm touched you enjoy my takes. i'm ultimately just a fucking nerd abt story/narrative & a queer freak, but it's really cool (and fucking weird) to have a story where the d/s kink features as like...actual thematic fascia i can examine, holistically in the narrative, and have personal insight into bc of my overlap with a lead character

as for hollanov—

textually speaking it starts with the water bottle. you can also interpret it in the bike scene less straightforwardly. i'd even argue ilya starts trying to dom shane with "see you at the draft". the shower scene in its cnc glory is the payoff, though

big agree that sharing such a specific niche (top child prodigy athletes in the world for their sport) + shane's skill feeds both ilya's interest in him & the liberation shane's lamb-at-the-alter ass behavior creates

I do feel like Ilya has to have some measure of shame fueling his desire for Shane, though. What else is the thrill of despoiling Captain Canada, Golden Boy of hockey? But maybe if I think of shame as a logical emotional reaction to powerlessness.... Ilya does not have the power to make his family love him, so he will both reject and internalize their hatred for him to a certain extent in order to keep loving them. Ilya is powerless against his orientalization as a Big Bad Russian, so he will embody those racist stereotypes as best he can in order to get the fame and money that will keep him safe.

I also am thinking of the sense of...corruption or innate badness that abused children often exhibit, which we often categorize as shame. But I could maybe see that as a logical emotional reaction to being forced to carry a truth that society has decided is unacceptable to acknowledge - that child abuse is baked into the concept of childhood as we currently define it, both legally and culturally. For Ilya to be 17, speaking in his second language, already planning his escape/exile and to have the man who has been posited as his exact opposite show up to watch him with his ever-present (apparently loving!) mother-manager.....

Anyway anyway, sorry for random rambles in your inbox. Thank you for your analysis, I look forward to more!

the kind to the unkind resignation is sooo central to him, i'm so excited you think it's good!! i have sm to say that i started responding to this and recognized i'd just end up writing an ilya thesis lol

i'll give some zoomed out thoughts. i enjoyed your rambles a lot, don't apologize. i'm glad i made you think, sorry i can't comb everything

like i said in those tags, shame shapes us in abstract ways if not directly. the concept of "should" is something everyone has a relationship to, including ilya. my point isn't that shame doesn't exist in his inner world. just that it's not part of him as a narrative device & it's misguided to define him by it

there's a measurable, and remarkable, difference between the internalization of shouldn'ts and of shoulds in trauma that's relevant here I Think

this attitude toward yuna is ignorant at best & racist at worst, in my opinion. it demeans the deliberate humanity she's depicted with in the show to asian tiger mom stereotypes. the love she incubates for shane is palpable by the end. the problem between them is not that she commodifies him, it's that the commodification is her aegis. because he's her son above all else, she demonstrated that in ep 6

she reminds me of the various asian parents i grew up around, and their relationship reminds me of my friends' relationships with their east asian immigrant parents throughout my life. it's something i've seen most asian reactors comment on & have strong feelings for because the fiction has roots in the earth of real households

yuna & shane (and david) is too dense a thread for me to unspool in a post-midnight word salad, but my thoughts can be abridged by this post + my tags

you must be from the fandom tag? i don't think i've said anything sober abt shane to indicate i think he's stupid. but i've talked abt ilya a lot ig

that post is facetious. i don't actually believe in stupidity (it's an ableist/racist/sexist/etc construct when taken seriously, as you intimate) & was using the language fondly + colloquially as i would w any character

i'm reluctant to take what is, from my seat, a random accusation seriously + it's too early in the morning to be articulate but out of respect for the topic my rough, horizontal in bed take:

shane does dumb things smtms bc he's smart enough not to, not bc he's helplessly inept or intellectually inferior. he has full capacity to be highly competent & intelligent & demonstrates his mastery. i wouldn't describe him as dumb outside affection/jokes/informal shorthand but i would describe him as naive & a jock

in terms of racialization that's more subversive than the perpetuity of his Genius Hockey Mind/IQ, in my experience of racist east asian caricatures (especially of men, especially of autistic ea men, especially of ea men in sports). his intelligence is nuanced, which i appreciate in general but particularly in the depiction of a non-white passing wasian/jpn athlete in a contact sport that adheres specifically to conservative white masculinity & treats non-white passing asian players like puny/wily nerds. in autistic ableism terms, i prefer the nuance that his autism smtms directs him to do dumb things or exacerbates his own au naturel human stupidity. and that it influences him to make genuine mistakes. it's humanizing + real, the intersection of these two themes even more so

i don't think it's that interesting lol. hockey understanders can correct me, but ilya was training for the olympics in russia. shane also would've been training. logistics + they don't text persistently atp

still. dilating the scope, there's a lot to be said about how being in russia again would sink its teeth into ilya

russia, per my vague knowledge, was a different place for queerness in 2009/2010 when he began his thing with shane. homophobia rampaged, but didn't rule in law (like now, at least). that changed in the early 2010s

this puts ilya back in an abusive home for the first time in years, training for a politically beleaguered olympics as captain under the thumb of a regime converging on queerness. the political centerpiece of queerness at sochi, the swarm of dissensions, the doping scheme, the invasion of crimea/ukraine, the...everything. it's a deep, dark well to frame the character in