Presented To You By: A Fangirl

don't get me wrong i love the fact that shane and ilya retcon their relationship to be love at first sight. like good for them!! but when i look at the source material im like .. you were charmed. you were jealous. he had everything you wanted (supportive family and his country behind him, able to be big and brash and move through life with ease) and you wanted to see if you could make him feel good (can you debauch the golden boy, can you be good for the man who's had everyone) but the love didn't come until you started to take apart the things that attracted you to this person in the first place. shane fell in love with the ilya who checked in on him and with the sweetness behind the barbs and with the ilya who couldn't stop kissing him in that stairwell. and ilya fell in love with the shane who thinks buffalo is stupid and can barely get his shoes off before he throws himself at ilya and can't tell his parents he's gay because he's suffocating behind his own image not because he thinks they don't love him but because he wants to honor everything they've done for him. and so it's really nice that ilya goes "i loved you from the first time i saw you" but i, omniscient reader, call bullshit. i think you love that boy now because no version of you could ever not love any version of him. but at the time i think you were mostly just curious and then the love grew despite all odds in the most hostile of circumstances because everything you learned about each other made you want more and more and more. and also probably that's even MORE beautiful. so.

always chewing on characters who would Never do anything as vulnerable as admit what happened but the signs are all there. stark, shiny scars they brush off concern for. pains that crop up at strange times. obsessive habits they refuse to break and aversions they won’t explain. bags under their eyes and a thin face, no matter how competent they are at whatever task is set before them. a worn cog still turns. even if everyone can see the damage, it doesn’t need to draw attention. really.

i dont mind the boxing day fight what i Mind is that tje book seems to resolve it with "omg you could have died lets get married" and not "Ilya switches to a trauma informed model of therapy to learn how to process the turbo amount of trauma he has bottled up" but i know its Book not Life

‘i wonder how jacob is going to adapt the boxing day fight… i really hope he takes all the toxicity out and especially the part where ilya backs shane into the wall :(’ okay well i actually love that ilya’s been bottling up all his anger and resentment and fear and communicating in passive aggressive eyerolls for months and blows up out of nowhere during a nice boxing day afternoon and then shane responds by saying the nastiest most hurtful most breathtakingly clueless thing he can think of like a cornered animal and then ilya pulls his usual emotional cutoff and tells him to get the fuck out of his house because he’s done with the fight he started now and then shane refuses to leave and keeps repeating the same question over and over again and then ilya straight up has a cptsd rage blackout and realizes in a very visceral and horrifying way how deeply maladaptive his coping mechanisms are because by refusing to acknowledge that he has any needs at all in order not to hurt shane he is now HURTING SHANE <3 like i know it makes both of them cry and have to take a very hard look at how they’ve been acting as partners and people but it makes me happy to get all that catharsis so :)

Boston WAG chat this, Montreal WAG chat that, give me the fic where Kip and Kyle drag Fabian into a groupchat for "Normal Gay Boys Who Did Not Ask To Be Dickmatized By Hockey Jocks, AND YET"

bbc merlin has its issues but I don’t think any other media has really done “it was all inevitable and all his fault” in such a powerful way