#snapping birch

So I legitimately cannot let myself think about or engage with the ending of the long game because it makes me too physically angry.

Which is a really weird reaction for me, if I’m being honest. Like, sincerely, I usually maintain more of an emotional distance from the media I consume. I do not get super heated about stories. I don’t get angry or sad, whether I like how the story was written or not. I like rotating them in my head and picking them apart but I don’t usually have like, a lingering emotional reaction to them. If I don’t like a book, I can usually just be like “oh. That kind of sucked” and leave it at that.

The ending of the long game makes me physically angry.

It is simply not a happily ever after to me. It is such a cruel humiliation ritual that I just can’t see it that way. I would be so much more okay with the ending if Shane had more of a choice in going to Ottawa. But he didn’t. He was forced out, and that fact is barely even acknowledged, let alone processed by the narrative.

If Shane had looked at his life and said “hey, I could stay in Montreal and win 7 Stanley cups and retire here like I always dreamed of, but my life with Ilya is more important to me so I’m going to leave my old dream behind so we don’t have to be long distance anymore,” I would be so much happier about the ending. Because he gets the narrative benefit of it being a sacrifice. There is decision in that. There is autonomy. There is dignity in the fact that he at least gets to choose.

There is no dignity in what happens to Shane.

He gets forced out by homophobia. He is accused of something he does not do. The media eviscerates him. His teammates, who had already reacted poorly to him being gay, who were already icing him out because of his relationship, completely abandon him. His legacy is destroyed. His reputation is trashed. All of the respect he has spent his entire career earning is gone.

Shane leaves Montreal in disgrace. He loses his home of more than a decade. He loses his team. He loses his captaincy. He loses his legacy. He loses almost every friend he has ever had.

But it’s fine. Because his husband already has friends and he can share. It’s really good that all of this happened, really, because Shane gets to go off to the Gay Hockey Oasis, where twinks can frolic freely.

Everyone fucking clap.

There is something so fundamentally repulsive to me about the idea that the answer to being retaliated against by your homophobic teammates is to leave and Go To The Land Of The Gays Where You Will Be Happy And Free. Your homophobic teammates will be keeping the team you spent your entire career building btw. They get to stay. They get everything you built. You go and find happiness with the people who already accept people like you. There is no fixing homophobia :(

Fuck. That. Noise. I will never be happy at an ending that happens because a queer person is forced out of a space. I can’t be happy about that.

I think one of the things that upsets me so much about the long game and its ending is that there is no ability to emotionally process what Shane’s teammates do to him because the entire ordeal is basically brushed off. A lot of it happens off camera. The effect it has on Shane is given next to no attention. Nothing about it is processed by the narrative. There is no cathartic relief. And so I am left fucking angry.

I think it’s helpful to think about catharsis through the lens of its original meaning. The concept of catharsis is rooted in Greek tragedy. In Ancient Greece, they believed that stories and specifically tragedies were important because they helped the audience process and release negative emotion. You left that story feeling relieved even though bad things happened because the stories helped you understand and process your own negative emotions. You get cathartic relief. They believed so strongly in the importance of this that they would build amphitheaters by hospitals because they thought it legitimately had health benefits.

You don’t get any catharsis out of Shane’s storyline. Because the fact that something tragic is happening to him is barely even acknowledged.

Shane comes out to his teammates off camera. We do not see what happens in the room. He has a single sentence about it in the epilogue and told in retrospect. Oh, by the way, he came out to his fucking teammates. No biggie.

Later, we know coming out made it awkward between them. We know sometimes they still use homophobic words around him and it makes Shane uncomfortable. Nothing is discussed in detail, and most of it is brought up retrospectively. Most of it happens off camera.

We also know that Shane’s sexuality is an open secret after. It is the unspoken something that the whole league knows. People didn’t know before but they sure do how.

That knowledge did not come from nowhere. Someone fucking outed him. But we will never talk about it. It is all off camera. It is barely even addressed.

Now, Shane also comes out off camera in snapping birch. But there, it is treated like a horror story.

When writing that text exchange, I broke my usual convention. If there’s a break in the texts, I don’t usually re-show parts of the text exchange that have already appeared—I just pick up where the last texts left off. But when Shane comes out, I copy and paste the texts you’ve already seen before you get to Dave checking in on him again.

Because I don’t want you to just see the silence. I want you to see his father’s encouragement. I want you to see Shane’s nerves. And I want you to see him overcome those nerves. He was afraid and he trusted them anyway. I want you to see that, and then I want you to see those empty fucking time gaps after.

The horror is in the lack of knowledge. It is in the fact that Dave is not there and does not know if Shane is even safe right now. You are meant to feel like a terrified parent reading that conversation back again and again and wondering if he is okay.

That’s not the treatment that Shane’s coming out in the books gets. It’s not off camera because that’s the point—it’s off camera because the details are unimportant. It is the only time in his entire life where Shane gets to choose to come out, and it is an afterthought.

Shane is so often an afterthought in the scenes that should be significant to him that it drives me nuts. Shane’s best friend accidentally outs him to the world, and Ilya, who already wanted to come out, is the one who gets to say it’s okay. And to be clear, I am not trying to diminish the fact that Ilya got outed. The fact that he wants to come out does not make his outing any less violating. He has the right to pick how.

But it is Shane’s best friend and Shane’s biggest fear. And the narrative never processes that. It’s just fine.

The exact same issue is found in the teams’ reactions to the reveal of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. We get to see the Centaurs react to Ilya. He is greeted with laughter, and that is fantastic.

Shane is greeted by silence. He describes the tension as being like he’s playing a game of operation waiting to get buzzed. They are not happy for him. They do not accept him. Even before the trip, they ice him out. But we do not address that in any real capacity. It just happens, and then he is forced out, and that’s it. We do not process it. The point is not the rejection. The rejection is a means to an end, and the end is fucking Ottawa.

To be so, so clear—I am not upset that Ilya got accepted when Shane wasn’t. I am glad Ilya got accepted. And I’m not upset that Ilya gets the narrative attention that he does, because I love Ilya’s character and I want to see him get that attention. But if you want to tackle the kind of topics that Shane’s storyline in the long game raises, you need to give it the necessary narrative space.

And like. I’ve heard all the rationales the internet tosses around about this already. Each book focuses on a specific character and the long game is Ilya’s story, not Shane’s. Shane is not meant to get the same narrative attention because it isn’t his book. The author has said that she never intended for it to be that deep.

She should have written a different story then.

One of my biggest rules of writing is that you do not get to escape the logical consequences of your own narrative. The audience is not fucking stupid. You cannot dodge the weight of the writing decisions you made, so you have to fucking deal with it or you cheapen the narrative.

Take Svetlana’s absence in snapping birch, which I’ve talked about in other posts. I love Svetlana. I want her in the story. But if I include her, it necessarily has narrative consequences.

Russia is a source of conflict because it is illegal for its citizens to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Svetlana is a Russian citizen who regularly returns to Russia. If I have her out here tweeting in the defense of her friend’s bisexuality, then either Russia isn’t that big of a threat, or Svetlana is fucking stupid. That is the logical consequence of the narrative decisions, and I cannot ignore the logical consequences.

As a result, I cannot include Svetlana without cheapening the conflict or her character. So I have to exclude her even if I want her there. Because the reader is not a fucking idiot, and if I can figure out Russia Bad, so can they.

If you do not want to deal with the consequences of writing a storyline about a queer character getting outed and rejected by his loved ones, then do not write that story. Develop it in accordance with its logical consequences or pick a different story.

The logical consequences of Shane’s ending in the long game are fucking tragic. And it is never truly discussed or processed. The narrative gives you no catharsis. Because it is not treated like a tragedy.

Shane is completely rejected by every single person in that locker room. The only person to say something even remotely in his favor is Hayden, who fronts his defense with how fucking weird Shane’s relationship is, but hey, he’s still our captain. Great job, Hayd.

Shane says explicitly that he hoped for better from the people he loved so much. He loved them. They turned on him. And they do not apologize. He loses them permanently. Over ten years together and only two of them come to his goddamn wedding.

And the narrative’s solution is to have him just leave and go somewhere that appreciates him, i.e., his husband’s team, and we should be happy about that. Never mind that he gave Montreal everything. Never mind that it was his dream to see his number retired to the rafters. Never mind that the team he goes to doesn’t have the cap space for him and he wants to be paid what he’s worth. His rich fucking husband will provide. Ottawa gets him at a goddamn gay discount.

Play out the logical consequences of that one. It does not matter if you’re the greatest hockey player in the fucking world. If you tack on enough minorities, then you get him on goddamn fire sale. Too Asian, too autistic, too queer, so he goes for a fucking song. The greatest hockey player in the world, and he is paid less than Troy fucking Barrett.

And I know that’s not why Shane has to take a massive pay cut at the ending. It’s because they do not have the cap space for him, not because they value him less. But that is not what people are going to think when they look at his salary. They are going to see a queer poc with three goddamn Stanley cups getting paid less than every single one of his teammates, and they are going to think they know why.

And maybe you say it doesn’t matter what people think. But I’d say it matters a whole fucking lot to the queer pocs who are wondering if they will ever have a place in this fuck-off white, aggressively straight sport. I think it’s going to matter a whole fucking lot to them when they are negotiating their own salaries and suddenly are finding themselves valued a lot less.

After all, look at what they pay Shane fucking Hollander.

I am not saying that queer people should feel obligated to remain in a hostile space. But I am saying that if they are forced out, you need to treat it like the tragedy it is. Do not write an ending that happens because a character is outed and spat on by his friends of more than a fucking decade and tell me to goddamn clap. Do not call that a fucking Happily Ever After. And I know that’s what it’s meant to be, because that is what the author calls it on her goddamn blog.

As you can probably tell, I feel strongly about the subject.

I don’t fuck with a lot of fandom’s characterizations around the entire thing, to be honest. Like, you nailed all of my issues with it perfectly. I hate the idea that Shane wasn’t friends with his teammates. I hate the idea that he was always a bad captain. Because that is all meant to make the fact that he was forced out somehow more okay. It is meant to make the loss he felt somehow less.

He spent over ten years with those people. He loved them. They all turned on him. And they did not apologize, and they did not come to his wedding. He still invited them and they did not come.

That is supposed to hurt.

If what happened to Shane happened to me, I would be angry for the rest of my life. I would not be able to get over it easily, if I ever got over it.

Ottawa isn’t a happy ending to me. It would have been if Shane got to choose to go be with Ilya instead of getting forced out. But he was forced, and that is what makes it goddamn tragic.

I am not saying that I wanted Shane to stay in a hostile environment. I am saying that the happy ending to discrimination is not to put the high achieving minority out to fucking pasture in the land of the gays where everyone accepts him already. Shane should have gotten to choose where he wanted to be. If that is Ottawa, let him actually choose Ottawa. It is not a choice if you have to tear away the option of Montreal so he’ll make it.

The answer to homophobia is not to segregate the fucking gays in happy centaur land. It is to get rid of the fucking homophobes. Do not tell me that the system is homophobic and you can’t change that. Skill issue. If the system won’t change?

I explain it first in this post, but I am lying to you constantly in snapping birch. Snapping birch is meant to simulate two competing PR campaigns. The NHL camp is lying to you. The Hollanov camp is lying to you. A lot of the information you receive is going to be inaccurate, biased, or misrepresented in some way. Because this is a fic about the internet, and that is what the internet is like.

A lot of the news sources in snapping birch are very biased in favor of the NHL. Because those news sources all have press passes that the NHL commissioner’s office can and will revoke if they don’t play nice. Or because they’re owned by a megacorp that also owns a fucking hockey team. Or because they’re just a conservative sports blog who’s just pissed that the hockey boys turned out gay. A lot of news sources have reasons to mislead you and they will do so shamelessly. And those news sources all have reasons to rush into the fray early and set the tone. But Camp Hollanov does not have a fucking newspaper at their disposal. They cannot put pressure on the news to report in their favor early, and the most unbiased news sources would be more careful about conducting an investigation in the immediate aftermath. They would be more thorough and follow up on sources because they don’t want to fuck around with a defamation suit from the goddamn NHL. As a result, a lot of the official news articles you see at the beginning of the fic display a heavy bias against Shane, Ilya, and Co.

When you’re reading the news articles in particular, don’t believe everything they tell you, especially if what they’re sharing can be construed as someone’s subjective opinion. Subjective opinions can’t really form the basis of a defamation suit—you need more objective falsehoods for that. “Hayden pike is an unremarkable player” is a subjective opinion. They can get away with saying it even if it’s not really true.

Inspect the language each article uses carefully. Does the author exhibit a bias towards one side? What language do they tend towards using? Is it inflammatory?

What would they have to gain by misleading you?

The article that line is found in is interesting. Because it’s a biased source interviewing an unbiased source. Most of that article is just them quoting a historian who’s spewing straight statistics and historical facts. There’s not much bias in what he’s doing, so the article appears mostly unbiased. But if you look at the scant few paragraphs that aren’t just quotes from the interview, that article displays a heavy bias towards the NHL.

Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

The hockey world took another blow this morning when the NHL’s first openly gay player, Scott Hunter, seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike on the NHL in response to its investigation into fellow gay athletes Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Hollander and Rozanov, who have long marketed themselves as bitter rivals, have been accused of concealing a homosexual affair to rig games against each other.

Immediately, the opening sentence should raise red flags of bias. The strike is framed as a “blow” to the hockey world. It’s framing Scott’s actions and the strike as negative from the outset. It wants you to favor the NHL.

The writer displays an implicit skepticism towards the strike. They’re trying to make the reader doubt its legitimacy and likelihood of success from the jump. Scott Hunter “seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike.” Like. Buddy, there’s no seeming about it. He said straight up “I am not playing until they are allowed to play” in conjunction with another player. The intention’s pretty clear.

But the writer wants you to be sitting there thinking how half-asses this attempt is. Look, we can’t even tell what they’re doing. Meanwhile, the NHL’s actions are framed with a neutral “investigation.” It gets none of the added negative commentary that Scott’s actions get.

Lastly, that first sentence implies the conclusion that it wants readers to draw. First gay player does this for his fellow gay players. Oh, okay. So this is just the alphabet mafia ganging up together.

There’s other descriptors that Scott, Shane, and Ilya have in common. They’re all top NHL players. They’re all NHL captains. They’re all recent Stanley cup winners. But the article doesn’t headline that. They want you to think of this “a gay man is here to back whatever the hell his fellow gays have done.” They want you to doubt the genuineness of Scott from the start.

Then go to the next sentence. The bias is again clear. The writer says that Hollander and Rozanov have marketed themselves as bitter rivals. They did this. It was their choice. It wasn’t their teams, who, you know, are in charge of most of the marketing when it comes to them in their official capacity. It wasn’t the NHL that modeled All stars weekend around their “rivalry” and just sort of told those two 19 year olds to show up to it. No, this was a lie that was personally marketed to you by Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Lie the blame at their feet.

Then you get to the end of the sentence. Shane and Ilya are not in a committed relationship of eight years, no. They’re concealing a homosexual affair to rig games.

The language is purposefully evocative of scandal. It’s not a relationship, it’s an affair. It’s not private, it’s concealed. It is meant to set you against shane and Ilya. From the first paragraph, you should doubt every opinion the writer of that article is sharing with you.

Now jump down to the sentence where Hayden is called unremarkable:

To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action: Hayden Pike, a mostly unremarkable left-wing for the Montreal Metros whose most noteworthy attribute appears to be his friendship with the scandal-plagued Shane Hollander, joined the strike within an hour of Hunter’s declaration.

Again, huge bias from the jump. “To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action—”

Like Jesus Christ, what do you mean to date? This happened today. This happened five hours ago. You probably wrote that paragraph twenty minutes after Hayden joined the boycott. Some NHL players haven’t even woken up yet.

But the article doesn’t frame it like, “This is an unexpected and fast-developing situation. We are waiting to see how the League’s players respond to Hunter’s call to action.” No, it frames it as “oh my oh me, even now, we only have one person and he’s not even that good. Nothing remarkable about him, no. No, no, don’t think about how he’s alternate captain for the team that won back to back Stanley cups not that long ago. The only remarkable thing about him is that he’s friends with Shane Hollander. He’s only in this for his friend.”

Because the strike suddenly looks a lot better if you frame it as, “In a three-hour span this morning, the NHL lost three captains and one alternate captain from its three most recent Stanley Cup winning teams after it launched a hasty investigation into its two most decorated players.”

The words you pick matter. The impressions you leave the reader with matter. The writer of that article wants you to think it’s not a big deal if Hayden Pike strikes because he’s not even that good to begin with, and also he’s only doing this to help his scandal-plagued best friend.

Shane Hollander is not fucking scandal plagued. He’s got the cleanest reputation in the fucking league. This is one of the only scandals he’s ever been in. But they don’t want you thinking “fuck, hollander’s reputation is stellar, could he really do something like this?” No. They want all of those people who didn’t really watch hockey before this and who don’t already have an impression of Shane Hollander to walk away with the idea in their head that Shane Hollander is constantly finding himself in the middle of a scandal, so maybe there’s something to this one.

Canon suggests that Ilya is a big deal in Russia. He is the captain of their Olympic team at a very young age. They pick him over every single athlete actively playing in the KHL. His family is politically connected. He is personally and publicly linked to Putin’s Minister of Sport, and he is attending functions with him and his family while people go “wow, wouldn’t it be great if Ilya married his daughter?”

Again, hockey is very tied to Russian state propaganda. Hockey players are used to promote a sense of nationalism. Ilya has very likely been plastered over state propaganda for years. He has likely been photographed with Putin himself. Sincerely, what the fuck happens if the guy you’ve been pushing as the nationalist ideal citizens should aspire to defects from the goddamn country to go make passionate gay love to Canada’s own special hockey boy?

It would be very embarrassing for the Russian government. Legitimately, I have no idea what would happen. I don’t personally see them just taking it lying down.

And I think the conflict grows more interesting in the the sense that I think that canon is at least open to the interpretation that Ilya’s family purposefully pushed his hockey career as a political measure.

Canon suggests that Shane is someone who entered hockey out of genuine love for the sport, and that led him to achieve at a high level, and he ended up getting promoted because of that. But it also suggests that Ilya was someone who exhibited a talent for the sport and did not have much choice in pursuing it. His family was in control of his life, career, and training. His family was the driving force behind his career, and they continued to exert control over it even after he joins the NHL.

Why does his family do that?

The easiest interpretation is that it’s just about money. He is their golden goose and their cash cow and they will milk him fucking dry. But that interpretation is interesting in the sense that his family already seems to have money.

His brother has money troubles, to be clear, but that’s different from his family having money troubles. His brother may just not have access to the family accounts, and his brother was not the one to make the initial decision to push Ilya’s hockey career. That was most likely his father. And he doesn’t seem to have money troubles—I can’t even remember a time in canon where he asks Ilya for money.

Like. He lives in a fucking estate. His family home is palatial. That’s not mutually exclusive with money troubles—maybe it’s generational wealth that’s started to run dry—but I think canon’s at least open to the interpretation that the decision to pursue Ilya’s hockey career was not initially about the money. And I personally like the interpretation that the family saw it as a way to potentially climb the political and social ladder.

Sergei Vetrova achieved at a high level in hockey and became Putin’s Minister of Sport. And Russian hockey players are an important part of state propaganda. If they have a family member who’s succeeding in that space, that may be a way to integrate themselves even further with the government’s leadership. Here’s my son and his historical talent—put him on your posters, make him the captain of your Olympic team, tell the whole country to be like him. There is political capital that comes with that. I personally like the interpretation that Ilya was pushed so hard to achieve in part because his family saw an opportunity to exploit his ability for their own careers and social status.

And Ilya would know that. It would inform why he doesn’t want to come out or risk pursuing a real relationship with Shane in heated rivalry perfectly. But it cheapens all of his later actions in the long game.

Yuna’s lore as “The Truck” was in part made to directly contrast Shane’s “Mr. Canada” image. Yuna appears to be the primary driving force behind Shane’s squeaky clean image. He has a lot of kids looking up to him, so behave and wear your Reeboks. You do not get to be like everyone else. You have to be better and do better because no one will give you the benefit of the doubt.

And I thought that would be so much more interesting if Yuna was coming from a place of experience. She knows that Shane cannot get away with half of what his white coworkers could because she sure as hell didn’t.

Yuna Hollander had a historical goddamn talent in a sport that had no space for her.

Canon suggests she has a Hockey IQ that is just as high as Shane’s, if not higher. She’s watching games and able to identify players’ injuries from her couch in fucking Ottawa and Shane and David are like “yes mom with her hockey witchiness.” Shane your hockey instincts have made international news and your mother’s the one with arcane hockey powers?

Yuna Hollander had the kind of talent for hockey that belonged in the goddamn history books. Shane got his historical talent from her. David was good, great even, but he wasn’t generational. Yuna was.

No one cared.

There was no place for her in this sport.

The PWHL has existed for three years. The CWHL didn’t exist until 2007 and it was disbanded in 2019. It’s maximum salary for individual players?

$10,000. The minimum was $2,000. You could not play women’s hockey professionally until three years ago,. The only “professional league” before then could only pay its players pittances. Everyone had to have another job, and meanwhile male hockey players have gotten to dedicate their full lives to the sport for over a hundred years.

Yuna Hollander grows up before even the CWHL. She is a historical goddamn talent in a sport that has no professional league for her. The farthest she could hope to go was college hockey.

She hoped farther. She had the same hunger for hockey that Shane did. If there wasn’t a league then she would fucking build it herself. She was better than everyone and wanted it more than everyone and if there wasn’t a place for her in this world she would carve it out, and that’s a love story, I think. She loved hockey enough to make the world into a place where she could still play it.

She went to a school that had a women’s ice hockey program and her degree path was meant to give her the skills she needed to build a fucking league of her own. She would learn the business and brand savvy she needed to make a carve out her own fucking place in the universe.

So there Yuna Hollander was. Not yet a Hollander. Ready to tear it up on the ice.

She is a slight-figured Asian woman who is the child of immigrants trying to make it in a very violent and physical sport.

The uwufication of Asian people is honestly fucking weird. Men are regularly feminized. Women are babified. It just. It gets weird.

Yuna wasn’t taken seriously. She is supposed to be waifu. Are you lost little girl. Should you maybe pick a different, safer sport??

Yuna decided to give them something they had to take seriously. The Truck will run you the fuck down.

She played hard. She played with unbelievable goddamn skill. She was fast and harsh and so agonizingly talented. And no one ever got away with shit when they were playing The Truck. You fucked with her and you walked away feeling like you were in a fucking car accident.

She got a lot of penalties. More than anyone, even. She was never afraid to fight.

Not all of her penalty minutes were earned.

Time to talk again about one of my favorite books on hockey, Game Misconduct, about all the ways this sport is fucked up.

One of the phenomenons the book discusses is the fact that minorities get treated as irrational and violent for things white players often get away with. One anecdote attested to an all white team playing very roughly with a team compromised of mostly pocs. The pocs got fed up and started giving it back to them. And the person being interviewed about it said that all of the parents of the white players who kept hand-waving away their children’s behavior suddenly became staunch advocates for pacifism. Look At How Violent Your Little Beasts Are. Many poc players in the book describe being treated as dangerous and unhinged for the same behavior their white counterparts regularly get away with on the ice.

Not all of Yuna’s penalty minutes were earned. She was treated like a violent and unhinged player and had the reputation of it. But she wasn’t. She was, above all, skilled. She just didn’t take shit the way people expected her to, and so she was punished for it.

And the people who penalized her often got away with it. She was The Truck. If she could dish it, she needed to take it. She got a lot of penalties called against her, but not so many in her favor.

Anyway David Hollander saw The Truck mowing bitches down left and right one day and he said to himself.

Wow.

What a woman.

I’m gonna marry her one day, if that’s alright with her.

And everyone who knew him said, No Dave.

That’s too much woman for you.

But David Hollander is not a fucking coward.

David was a goalie for the men’s team at McGill. Yuna was a defensewoman for the stingers, which is a real women’s ice hockey team. I did not change the name the way I usually do. Because the stingers are the women’s ice hockey team for Concordia University.

McGill and Concordia are rival schools.

Their romance defied a rivalry.

Honestly their love story shocked everyone around them except for themselves. Dave and Yuna always made perfect sense to Dave and Yuna.

David Hollander had no interest in taming The Truck. He had no interest in imposing his own expectations on The Truck. He liked her exactly how she was, thanks. Would she maybe like to take a walk in the moonlight with him and also spend the rest of their lives together?

Yuna liked Dave for a lot of reasons, but she really liked how he never got caught up in preconceived expectations. He didn’t read her as violent and irrational. He didn’t read her as an uwu princess. He was the kind of guy who would give her the penalties she earned, which is all she’s ever wanted. She wanted fairness. David was always fair. She liked that about him. She liked a lot of things about him, but especially that.

Yuna’s ending is fundamentally tragic. She is taken down with an unbelievably dirty hit that destroys her knee. The injury is career ending. She will never play professionally. It does not matter if she builds her own space, because she no longer has a place in it.

The person who does it to her gets away with it.

The ref that was on that day fucking hated her. He had a history of calling penalties on her that she didn’t commit and letting people get away with penalties against her. He didn’t like that she was Asian. He didn’t like that she refused to take shit. He didn’t like that she was the best player he had ever goddamn seen.

The person who did this to her gets a double minor.

Four fucking minutes in the penalty box for destroying her entire goddamn world. It nearly fucking kills her.

But it doesn’t. She lives. Dave helps her do that. She doesn’t start the league. She is too angry. All she can think about is the girl who did this to her who still gets to play, and all of her fellow players who waffled about it after.

She’s The Truck, after all. She knows that sometimes you get run over. Can she really be upset?

But Yuna didn’t give out hits like this. She was fair. She was brutal but she was fair. She would have never fucking done this to someone else and how fucking dare everyone pretend she would have.

She is so unbearably angry.

She is angry every single day of her life.

She marries Dave. She finds new things to love. They are not nearly as good as hockey. It takes her years to even watch a game again and she still is able to understand the molecules of the sport better than any player on the ice.

She is still angry.

She and Dave play hockey at the lake, just the two of them. It feels like an astronaut coming back to earth. It feels like she never quite reaches the ground. She cannot skate the way she used to. She will never be who she once was. She can play again. But at the same time it is gone forever and she cannot get it back.

She is so goddamn empty sometimes.

She can’t have a baby. She has one anyway. She won’t have another, the doctors promise. She’s got one shot at this motherhood thing. Don’t fuck this one up. There are no redos.

Try not to make him hate you.

Little Shane Hollander sits in her lap as she watches hockey. He can barely hold up his own head, but his eyes still track the puck.

Yuna knows he has the same special something in him that she had in her before she ever puts skates on his feet. She knows hockey will be to him what it was to her.

There’s just something in him that needs it like lungs need air.

Yuna puts so much pressure on Shane because she is trying to save him from the biggest agony of her life. She knows what it means to be a minority in a space with no room for you. She knows what it means to have to fight everyone’s expectations. She builds his image like a goddamn suit of armor because she is trying to make him a protection they cannot destroy. No one is ending Shane Hollander’s career too soon, but if they do? They will fucking pay for it. No one will say he had it coming. She will not give them the fucking room for it.

So he needs to be Mr. Canada. He needs to be the Goodest boy to ever roam the ice. He needs everyone to love him and respect him and know he is beyond reproach. People that look like them do not have the luxury of otherwise.

Trust her, because Yuna knows.

Yuna’s hyper-management of Shane and his image is fundamentally damaging to their relationship but at the same time, it is meant to be a love letter.

I will not let them do to you what they did to me. I will not let them do to you what they did to me. I will not let them do to you what they did to me.

And Shane knows that. He sees so much of himself in his mother that it kills him. He sees the ache and the absence and the emptiness left since she lost hockey. He knows why she’s so hard on him because he knows she’s trying to protect him from her own existential loss.

It’s why he’s so afraid to come out to her.

It’s why he apologizes to her. It’s why he tells her he tried.

He tried so fucking hard to be something that got to still play hockey. He tried so fucking hard to be anything other than this. Because this is not something that has ever safely existed in the nhl. This does not get to keep playing.

More than 100 goddamn years, and not a single gay player until Scott Hunter.

He feels like he betrayed everything she tried to give him. She poured so much into protecting him and he had to go and be the one thing she could never protect. No one ever could. He cannot imagine a world where this comes out and he still gets to play.

But Yuna Hollander is the kind of woman who will rebuild the world to make space for herself. And she is still writing her love letter.

She will not let them do to her sons what they did to her. If this league doesn’t have space for two queer hockey players in love, then she will turn it into fucking scrap and build a new one.

The autism diagnosis has only been mentioned in that first Reddit post so far. From that post, we know that Shane was diagnosed when he was 8, that he had a friend he told about it, that friend told the rest of the team, and whatever his team did to him after made Yuna and David pull Shane from it entirely. And, critically, Shane did not tell his parents about his teammates bullying him. His coach had to be the one to do it.

I know in canon that Shane’s autism is undiagnosed. I changed that for this because I thought it added narrative depth to the events of the fic.

Specifically, Shane’s autism diagnosis is the first time that he learns that he needs to hide himself to play hockey.

Shane can’t hide skin color. He learns that he doesn’t fit in because of it. He learns he has to hide away the parts of himself that aren’t “white” enough. And he can hide some of the ways being Asian makes him culturally different from his teammates. But he never has the option to fully excise his skin color the way he has that option with his sexuality.

Shane has the option to hide his autism. And he learns that he needs to quite literally the first time he ever talks about it.

Shane hides because it is a learned behavior. It’s like when a toddler touches a hot stove and gets burned. Didn’t that hurt? Don’t you never want to feel that way again?

Okay. Don’t ever do that again, and you’ll be safe.

Once upon a time, Shane Hollander was 8 years old and told his friend on his hockey team that he wouldn’t be at practice because the doctor thought he had autism and he had to go back to take more tests. He didn’t think to hide it. He didn’t know that he was the wrong thing to be yet. His friend simply asked him why he wasn’t going to be at practice. All Shane did was answer.

He never gets to play on that team again.

Shane is the one who has to leave. He was the best player on that team. He’s been the best player on every team he’s ever been on. He gets hurt and somehow he is still the one who has to lose something after. All of the teammates who bullied him got to stay and keep playing together on the team that used to be his. Shane is the one who has to go.

Word of God, Shane has not acknowledged his autism diagnosis since 1999. He has never told anyone. He refused to talk about it with his parents after, and they eventually stopped bringing it up. Shane does not tell people about it. Shane does not think about it. Shane himself has never processed the diagnosis. It has no place in his self-image because immediately after he found out he was autistic, he excised it from his sense of self.

You do not get to be autistic and still play hockey. They will force you out. That lesson is learned. So Shane has buried that part of himself every single way he could since he was eight years old.

He hasn’t talked about it in nearly two decades. Which is one of the reasons why it is absolutely fucking agony to him that it is public knowledge right now.

Shane has spent his entire life running from how he felt when he was eight years old and had to leave his team. He has cut off every single part of himself that hockey could not accept because that was the only way he thought he could stay. He has been killing pieces of himself for nearly two decades because of this.

This season was the first time in his life he let himself believe that a team could love all of him. And then they just fucking didn’t.

Shane broke himself in a million ways to rebuild the metros from the ground up. He has earned his jersey’s place in those rafters more than anyone who has ever called themselves a Metro.

And then these assholes who haven’t given an ounce of what he’s given decide that he is the one that needs to be forced out.

He put in the work. He bled himself dry. He gave everything he had and sacrificed everything he was to make this team what it is. He gave more and did more and achieved more than any other player in the history of the franchise. And he is still the one they expect to leave. When it is his goddamn team.

Shane has been fighting this for months. He has bore through the pain and the humiliation rituals and the goddamn ice time because he was not going to be the one to fucking leave this time, and somehow he is still the one ousted. It is insult to fucking injury.

And then there’s that fucking Reddit article.

Now the whole world knows. You do not even get to hide that part of yourself. The option was taken from you. And there’s another thing for them to push you out over. Nineteen goddamn years of hiding that part of yourself away and it ends up on the front page of the New York fucking Times.

Don’t you feel like you’re still eight years old?

Doesn’t it fucking ache?

Everything you sacrificed, and you are still the one that has to leave.

Shane doesn’t know at this point that his autism diagnosis was in the leak. But he’s not going to take it well when he finds out. He never wanted anyone to know. He feels like it’s just another reason for people to talk about how different he is.

I think Shane struggles severely with his own tokenism. He wants to be known for his hockey. If Hayden achieves something, people talk about how impressive it is that any player did that. But if it’s Shane, it’s about how an Asian player did that. It’s not spectacular because of his achievement. It’s spectacular because there’s something intrinsically different about him that makes people say “wow, he sure is the wrong kind of guy to manage that.”

Shane just doesn’t want to talk about all that shit about himself that he can’t change. He doesn’t want to talk about how remarkable he is for someone who looks like him, or thinks like him, or is wrong like him. He wants to talk about everything he built for himself. He is the greatest player in the whole goddamn world. And that is spectacular for anyone. Why is he the guy that always has to come with a qualifier? “This is amazing, but especially for a guy like you who is wrong in pretty much every goddamn way you can be wrong.”

Shane doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about it with the public. He doesn’t want to talk about it with his loved ones. He wanted to leave that diagnosis in fucking 1999 and he absolutely hates that people know about it. The last fucking thing he needed was to give people more slurs to pick from.

Ilya didn’t know about that Shane was autistic before now in the sense that he didn’t know about the diagnosis. But he knew that Shane was autistic in the sense that he knew Shane eats a Specific Type Of Yogurt Because That Is The Type With The Correct Texture. He knew Shane came off as kinda flat to people sometimes. He knew that Shane kept his life in a Specific Order and he knew that Shane took off his shoes at every door and he knew that Shane folded his clothes before sex.

Autism is just a word that describes how Shane is. Ilya already knows how Shane is and loves every bit of him. Shane Hollander is simply the most perfect person alive to Ilya. Every single thing he does is the new most charming thing that Ilya has ever seen in his life. He is unspeakably enchanted by that man.

Ilya knew that Shane Worked The Way Shane Worked. The label of autism itself isn’t so much as a blip to him, so he doesn’t care that Shane never told him that specific label. Like, Ilya doesn’t think of Shane’s autism as something that was hidden from him or that it is a revelation to him. Yes he basically knew all that already He Was The One Who Was Buying Shane’s Yogurt. He does not give a fuck if people decided Shane qualified for a special word for it. Ilya just calls it Being Shane and he feels #blessed every day to witness it.

Ilya does care that everyone else seems to care about it, but only because that’s one more thing that’s fucking killing Shane right now. Everyone needs to fuck off and let his man breathe.

Ilya does however have complicated feelings about the fact that Shane never told him about being bullied off his first hockey team because of it.

Ilya and Shane are still relatively early in accepting being together. Like, they have not been comfortable calling each other by their first names for a full year at this point. Like yeah, they’re eight years down the pipe with this relationship but also most of that was spent fleeing from each other after every moment of stolen intimacy. Shane only found out Ilya’s mother’s name and what happened to her like six months ago.

As a result, Ilya hasn’t told Shane every bad thing that’s ever happened to him. That list is fucking long. Shane does not expect him to have shared every bad thing to ever happen to him. And Ilya knows that Shane has not told him every bad thing to ever happen to him.

He wishes Shane told him about what happened when he was eight. It casts a lot of the events of the last season in a new light. But he wishes more that Shane hadn’t lost the option to tell him.

I feel like Shane and Ilya have always found a certain solace in confessing things to the other. They have both lived under an absolutely crushing level of secrecy. Ilya grew up queer in an abusive police family in goddamn Russia. He risked actually disappearing if his family found out. Shane meanwhile has never felt safe or comfortable sharing his whole self with anyone ever, until Ilya. He hid every part of himself that didn’t fit people’s expectations and he hid it from everyone, even his parents.

They are both so weighed down with all this awful bullshit that they had to carry alone and couldn’t tell a single fucking person about, but then suddenly they could tell the other, and they weren’t afraid the other would spit on them for it. They weren’t afraid at all. It was unimaginably freeing when they got to unburden themselves to each other and Ilya wanted Shane to have that option with this. That’s just another thing that got taken from them.

Hayden cares a little more about the fact that Shane never told him. But not in a “I wish you trusted me with this and I’m mad that you didn’t” kind of way. He cares in a “the fact that you never once felt fully safe in the entire time I have known you has genuinely been keeping me awake at night” kind of way.

At least in the show, Hayden seems to have a baseline awareness that Shane has a particular way he functions and he does not try to change that. What we see of Hayden appears to be legitimately accepting of and accommodating to Shane. Shane wants to keep to his diet and Hayden does not say “dude can’t you just break it for one night it’s not a big deal,” he says, Yes My Best Buddy In The Whole World Is Coming To My House. Honey, Prepare Our Finest Bird Food.

The Pikes are experiencing the mental and physical load that comes with having multiple young and energetic children forging boldly ahead into the Terrible Twos one after another and they still put in the effort to make sure Shane Hollander is comfortable in their home. They keep the fridge stocked with ginger ale for him. They prepare Shane-friendly meals instead of saying “I just spent several hours making three separate dinners for my children who are having mutually exclusive picky phases and then chased it with the hostage negotiation that is trying to get Ruby to eat a singular vegetable even though it was gross because ‘the air touched it.’ Please just eat whatever I shove on the plate in front of you.” I know a lot of people who would not be super chill accommodating restrictive diets. Jackie is. Hayden is. He does not expect Shane to be anyone other than who he is.

Hayden doesn’t give a shit Shane’s autistic and doesn’t think much of it. He Has Also Been Buying Shane’s Yogurt. I think it threw him for a loop for like, four and a half seconds, because he’s a professional hockey player who grew up in hockey circles and didn’t exactly receive an education on the autism spectrum. He associated his mental image of autism closer with the stereotypes, which Shane didn’t fit. When he found out, he changed his mental image of autism to include Shane. But it didn’t change his mental image of Shane himself.

I’m very much trying not to get too much into this because I feel like it risks getting into Things I Shan’t Say, but I feel like it’s fairly obvious right now that the way this last season has gone is absolutely fucking haunting Hayden. He now has a visceral awareness of just how quickly a team can turn on you for being different because he’s had a front row seat to it happening. He’s not out here being like “why didn’t Shane ever tell anyone this” oh he fucking knows why

Hayden is upset that Shane didn’t feel comfortable enough to ever share this. But he’s upset because it means that other people made Shane uncomfortable to begin with. He’s upset for Shane, not at Shane.

I personally think hockey culture/high level sport locker rooms are too toxic to be fully safe for anyone, like from a baseline level hazing is way too common for that, but Hayden Pike is the kind of guy who is about as safe as you can get. He is white. He seems to be straight (though I don’t know if canon outright says it). And despite Ilya’s jabs, Hayden is likely an excellent hockey player. The mere fact that he’s a pro puts him above almost everyone. He’s a first line player for one of the best teams in the country. He’s not in the same league as hockey god Shane Hollander, but he’s fucking good.

Hayden was probably one of the best players on most of his teams growing up. He was just naturally The Kind Of Guy who’s “supposed” to be playing hockey. He has pretty much always been safe in the locker room and he hasn’t ever had to think about what it means to not be safe, until he saw what happened to Shane.

It is driving him fucking crazy that Shane doesn’t get to be safe to way he’s always been.

It is driving him fucking crazy that Shane has had to squirrel away pieces of himself literally the entire time Hayden has known him.

Shane is his best friend. He is the pseudo baby brother who Hayden adores. And Hayden feels a lot of loss around all those years where he didn’t know Shane was gay. He feels like he’s missed huge chunks of Shane’s life and didn’t even know it at the time. And he feels like Shane’s been forced to go it alone. Finding out about the autism just adds to that feeling.