can you talk more about hockey and hollanov! I don't have any specific questions sorry, but you're one of the few blogs I know that seem to a know puck and b talk about it
yessir. for anyone looking for all my hollanov hockey talk: #hr hockey tag. also a lot of my general HR analysis posts touch on masculinity/cultural stuff too, even if they aren't tagged under hockey specifically, so it's still kinda related.
ok so for my recent hockey thoughts i’ll admit i’m not really thinking abt lines or playstyle rn like i have in the past, more hockey culture stuff....i keep seeing fandom (& sometimes even rachel ngl) lean into hollanov as actively feminist kings/enlightened hockey men & i need us to be serious for two seconds bc hockey did not raise feminist kings......it raised emotionally constrained men w good edges and worse coping skills lol. they’re expensive products of a machine, not outside of it!!
this hits differently if you sit with the fact they weren’t built by the same system. ilya is CSKA/russian elite pipeline, shane is OHL/ontario junior hockey..these aren’t just different countries, they shape different ideas of what a player even is (sooo what kind of people they are too)
CSKA isn’t individualist in a western sense but it isn’t cozy collectivist either. it’s system-first, coach-driven, rigid, but the baseline assumption is you are already elite. you were selected for technical excellence so now you execute inside structure. nobody’s asking you to explain yourself in a locker room, nobody’s building identity through peer approval. so ilya shows up in the NHL like why would i explain myself to you...and the league is happy to turn that into “mysterious arrogant russian,” which does half the work for him anyway. (and the NHL being weird/xeno toward russian players historically speaking just reinforces it ngl)
OHL is the opposite pressure. social survival inside an individually tracked system. you’re an asset on paper but constantly tested on whether you belong there. rookies develop skill AND room-reading instincts, vets & captains run the room, & everything is earn your place or get flattened. for shane that starts even earlier bc he’s already the japanese canadian prodigy kid in ontario junior hockey (obvi not an NHL problem/v juniors specific but u know, gotta get thru that to reach NHL), so belonging is conditional from the start, maintain that shit or good luck
so by the time they hit the NHL the split is basically: ilya learns act don’t talk. shane learns perform and talk correctly
then we got the NHL era. ilya goes to boston and is slotted in immediately as what he already is on paper: elite russian import, high skill, low explanation required. he’s not pushed into constant social translation, so he just doesn’t do it lol. not freer than shane but differently constrained?? he’s evaluated thru output more than interpretation
shane goes to montreal and stops being just a player and becomes a symbol hello sanctified mythological figure. montreal isn’t normal NHL experience crucially if we’re using habs culture (we are lol). legacy pressure, media saturation, bilingual interpretation, historical comparison all stacked together. a slump is never just a slump, a bad game is never just a bad game...everythigs got meaning. he’s being perceived before he’s being understood. & shane's already someone who overthinks everything so yeah. brutal combo </3
so the imbalance is simple imo: ilya is under-interpreted, shane is over-interpreted. that gap is where they misread each other. ilya moves without explaining bc explanation was never the point. shane explains constantly bc explanation is how he tries to control how he’s seen sigh
neither of them rly developed neutral social perception. people are read in terms of function and structure, not who they are outside the system andddddd that carries into how they see women too (sorry if that's a tough pill to swallow but yeah man. ur favs are problematic which is ok it's interesting!!)
shane’s world treats women as structure. optics, stability, what does this say about me. very yuna-coded ngl. hockey logic mixed w media logic where relationships are also image management. hockey alr trained that into him, & being closeted makes control even more central. mothers not being “women” in hockey culture is part of why yuna fits so easily into it too but that's a convo for another time kinda
ilya’s vers is diff but lands in a similar place. women exist around the system not at its center. most emotional life still routes thruhockey spaces, teammates, coaches, hierarchy, performance...so “peer equal” isn’t really a category his world taught him to prioritize. even svetlana doesn’t disrupt that, she’s inside the same logic, not outside it imo (again internal misogyn sveta a convo for another time tho)
so when shane & ilya try to build smth btwn them, they’re still using the only tools they actually have. words are performance for both of them, touch carries less weight bc it slips under that layer (overused/extremely normalized in hockey bro culture) & doesn’t immediately read as exposure the way speech does
& that’s why the feminist kings/activistic/sticking their necks out for random stuff/even just extremely self aware framing doesn’t hold #to me (also i find it boring, simplistic, just like. idk. crazy LOL). we got two pipelines, same kind of limits even if looks slightly diff. hollanov meet & it's there's just some recognition there. nothing to push against it. this is not to say they don't grow as ppl throughout the yrs but i do think there is a limit on all this
