I’m so sorry, I know I’ve made posts like this before, but I really can’t stop thinking about the potential inside a Hollanov BNF Tumblr AU circa 2014. I’m talking intense shipping wars that Shane and Ilya are on opposite sides of, and chronically online Ilya fights kind of dirty about it, while Shane is posting 10k words of perfectly edited meta about how Ilya’s ship isn’t just not canon, it’s Wrong, Actually.
And the whole time, Ilya’s blog is part fandom stanning and part his own thirst traps. He’s known to have had quite a few online-only flings with other people in the fandom, but while everyone knows Shane lives in Montreal, how old he is, and that he’s out online but not IRL, his personal life does not feature on his blog because his blog is Serious. Immaculate tagging systems, a queue, everything. Meanwhile, Ilya posts in rapid-fire, untagged bursts at any hour of the day or night, and Shane can see that Ilya is hot, anyone with eyes could see that, but he just makes Shane so mad with his stupid blog and his stupid fanon ship, and yeah, Shane could just block him, but he needs to see what the Other Side is saying about the show so his meta posts can be timely and topical.
So it goes on like this for months, and things are getting dirtier and more pointed. Shane’s meta posts are responding directly to posts from Ilya’s blog, complete with carefully edited screenshots to remove Ilya’s username, but everyone knows who wrote them. And Ilya just starts tagging his thirst traps with Shane’s username to rile him up, writing things like this is what hot man looks like, Shane (because one of Ilya’s shipper arguments is that the guy Shane ships with the main lead isn’t hot enough for him).
And eventually, at the height of the ship wars, Ilya comes into Shane’s inbox and just says:
And we get the "fuck you, you suck my dick" exchange from Vegas here except in a different font because Ilya is a little surprised and a lot turned on that fandom golden boy has such a dirty mouth. So Ilya says, "If you want me to suck your dick, you’ll have to be a lot nicer than that," and Shane says, "What do you want?" and Ilya is like, "Stop posting such boring metas. They put me to sleep, Shane." And Shane’s like, "So you do read them," because Ilya has this ongoing fandom joke where he reblogs Shane’s posts with tl;dr, and Ilya says, "Ah, is just to help practice my English," but Shane’s like, "Your English has gotten pretty good," because keep in mind he’s seen Ilya’s posts daily for months at this point. And Ilya’s like, "Is easier in writing. I will show you."
And that’s how Ilya gets Shane off for the first time, sending him the filthiest messages in a steady stream and making Shane blush and tremble as he touches himself. And they continue like that for a while, hating each other in public and getting each other off in private, and the fandom wars kind of settle into an icy stalemate. Neither side is willing to budge, but the anon hate is better, and Shane backs off Ilya’s posts a little, and Ilya stops rage-baiting him quite so often.
And at first it was just sex, but then one day Shane sends Ilya a fan edit he’d seen of Ilya’s OTP with the comment, "This isn’t bad, actually," and that’s how they start talking about other things, like how they got into the show, or other ships they’ve had in the past, and that turns into Ilya sharing how much he misses his mom (they used to watch TV together), and Shane’s fear of coming out to his parents. And Shane doesn’t know what they are, but he knows Ilya is so much more than how he seems in his posts. And Ilya knows he likes talking to Shane more than anyone else in his life.
And they might have just continued like that for who knows how long, except Hayden logs into Shane’s account one day to check something in the inbox of a now-defunct side blog they used to co-run (it was like one of those postcard confessions websites, except from the POV of the characters on their show; it burned bright and hot for a bit before submissions dried up). Except he ends up seeing it all—the months of back and forth, and the personal stuff too, stuff not even Hayden knew.
And he’s furious, convinced Ilya is just doing this to fuck with Shane, some cruel extension of the ship wars gone way too far. And he goes to reply to Ilya’s last message and tell him to leave Shane the fuck alone, but instead of responding privately, he posts the response to Shane’s main blog, to all the thousands of followers he has there. And even though he deletes it almost immediately, the internet is forever.
The fandom explodes. It would be one thing if Ilya’s message was horny—he’s known to carry on those types of relationships across the fandom—but it’s not. It’s sweet and earnest and nothing like the online persona people are used to. And suddenly the fandom is scouring through Shane and Ilya’s blogs and finding months of posts with secret nods to each other, like tags in a thirst trap that people thought were references to Ilya’s ship but now seem meant for Shane, a whole meta post from Shane about enemies to lovers that went viral for how many people it convinced to jump to Shane’s ship, now seemingly all about Ilya.
And their relationship is out there for everyone to dissect before they’ve even defined it for themselves. And Ilya is so worried that Shane will delete his blog and disappear from his life entirely, but when Shane logs on to see the damage, the first thing he messages Ilya is:
"Do you think we should meet?"
dededos
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
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