The Sign of a Teaspoon

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

it is actually devastating to me that ilya is being so sincere here and shane filters their interactions through the characters of rozanov and hollander The Rivals for SO LONG that it literally sets them back years.

this got. long so the rest is under the cut

Shane’s comphet and compartmentalization of his sexuality and true self outside of a few frantic encounters with Ilya a few times a year is devastating. His refusal to tell anyone in his life - his teammates, his parents, friends he doesn’t have - what he truly wants because he can’t even admit it to himself.

Everything is hockey, everything is brand deals. No, he can’t have a glass of wine because he can’t do anything that’ll potentially impact his performanceon the ice. He can’t date because everything is about his career and when it’s the off season, he locks himself away at his cottage where he spends most of his time alone. Hayden is the closest thing he has to a friend, but if Shane can’t even admit to himself how he feels, how is he supposed to confide in Hayden?

He can have sex with Ilya behind closed doors without words exchanged, but the second it begins to resemble something real, when Ilya starts trying to figure out what Shane really wants, Shane panics and forces himself into a relationship with a woman, because what he has with Ilya doesn’t make sense or fit into any version of himself that he can foresee.

One of the best decisions Jacob Tierney made in the show was showing Shane be intimate with Rose and frame it as devastating and stomach churning. Shane’s performance of heterosexuality is painful. It actively holds him back from being his true self. The book glosses over it and mentions Shane has shitty sex with Rose a couple of times, and doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about how Shane, a gay man in love with another man, forcing himself to have sex with a woman to perform heterosexuality would be extremely difficult and unpleasant for him.

The scene in the show is unpleasant and heartbreaking. We see and feel how much Shane doesn’t want to be doing this, but he feels like he has to.

Shane’s break up with Rose is 10 tens more emotional and impactful in the show than it is in the book, because Shane’s clumsiness with women is not portrayed as a punchline. We see him processing in real time that he can’t just keep faking it. Shane thinks he is good at hiding and compartmentalizing, but it only took Rose two sexual encounters to figure him out. He’s forced to reckon with the fact that he can’t just keep ignoring who he really is and what he really wants.

The scene where we finally get a glimpse into just how painful everything is for Shane is another scene that’s not in the book - Shane’s conversation with Yuna outside.

“I tried. I tried really hard. I just can’t help it.”

Now that he’s finally starting to let go of the performance and separation he’s tried to maintain all of these years - Shane Hollander Hockey Player versus Shane Hollander The Person - he can admit that there’s nothing he can do to change who he is or how he feels, but that will never erase the pain of all those years of trying, of trying to be who his mother wanted him to be and who the MLH wanted him to be. He denied himself the ability to be fully human and fully himself for so long and he’ll never get that time back.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

i speak english the most in day to day life and also think in english sometimes. my accent in english is americanized, pretty indistinguishable from a native (excluding sets of certain phonemes like /rl/) .

but if i’m really tired or spending time just around my wife (with whom i speak english), i sometimes switch to what i call ‘lazy english’.

what this usually consists of is i allow myself to speak english with the russian /r/ phoneme that is more natural for me, i drop articles, replace continuous and future tense with simple present, use the ‘….,yes?’ construct, avoid contractions (bc the verb ‘to be’ is dropped/implied in russian, so contractions aren’t always natural)

for example, when i’m in ‘lazy english’ mode, this is how my speech varies:

‘i’m making the bed’ = ‘i make bed’.

‘you’ll help me later, right?’ = ‘you help me later, yes?’ (for this one, in russian, the same phrasal construct ends with the word ‘yes’ instead of the word ‘right’)

‘can you give me a tissue?’ = can you give me tissue?’

‘where’s the pen? do you have it?’ = ‘where is pen? you have?’

if you pay attention, you’ll notice that a lot of these patterns also occur in ilya’s speech, especially earlier on. that’s why i’m particularly impressed with the writing of his dialogue — it doesn’t come across as stereotyping/caricatural because the way he speaks english is consistent with russian linguistic/grammatical rules. this is often how russian-speaking people speak english when it is their second language and they’re still learning.

you still want?

i still want

But I love how he says the show hooks you in with so much smut on the first couple of episodes, only to hit you with the emotional payoff in 5 and 6. Because it’s such great way to mirror the audience’s experience with what Shane and Ilya are going through.

DO NOT CALL THE REGULAR POLICE.

If ice wants access to someone on your property, do NOT hand them over unless you are shown a warrant signed by a judge! Make as much noise as you can to attract bystanders - it was the fact that a crowd gathered and started yelling at them that made ice leave in the video. And DO NOT expect the regular police to help you - they are just another arm of the state and will only do or say whatever they think is necessary to make you comply.