the last banana hairdo

Because, like … the alternative is also a romance novel! A player who is able to happily stay for his entire career with the team that drafted him is basically the main character in a true love that grew out of an arranged marriage.

IIRC there was a post a while ago that was like ‘Shane would Never come out to his team he knows OpSec’ (I thiiink you made that post?) and its like. Yes exactly. They Both know OpSec. They’ve been in the professional hockey pipeline since before puberty they know the material conditions at play.

Honestly the secretly is part of the enrichment for them, in terms of the insane separation of public persona and private self and also their intertwined rivalry and existence in the public eye?

Like not to Skip Divorce Post in my semi-serious meta thoughts but Skip’s preoccupation with being out vs the closet is one of the underpinnings of Skip Divorce in my mind. Meanwhile Shane and Ilya have rented a villa on an entirely private Greek Island and are doing saw trap shit to each other in their blissful privacy. Like, it feels very much like ‘being closeted’ vs ‘coming out’ as like, end all be all concepts stems from RR herself’s very base-level assumptions about queer relationships.

The very Most I can ever imagine either of them ever coming out is Ilya, once he’s safely shed his Russian passport via whatever means, very quietly leaning in to being more of a mean femme jock and not obsfucating his bisexuality as much but like Crucially there is no announcement there is no Post he just lives his life a little more cuntily.

Which is I think the reason that the Ottawa of it all strikes such a sour note for me because Shane and Ilya’s dynamic is so Winners Who Fuck About It that I can’t believe Shane would ever endorse a plan that hinged on Ilya deliberately Losing. Not to mention Shane’s own horror show in TLG of being stripped of Everything and it being called ‘good’ since now he’s ‘out’. I think they should have been allowed to conveniently fix Ilya’s citizenship and then carry on as Original Six Captains while inventing new and insane ways to do phone sex in a healthy long distance relationship and then disappear off the face of the earth during the summer to do absolutely diabolical sports conditioning sex roleplay.

Like they can live their unique truths but I just do not think that they are people who would ever live their truths Out Loud to a social media following of Millions? Shane back to Ottawa already so fucking fraught for him? Why Should either of them have to give up anything when i do think they were purpose built freak4freak MFEO and their insane long distance secret affair?

hm the opsec post wasn’t me.

i mean i understand what you’re saying and i don’t entirely disagree but also 1) reid is bisexual 2) she is writing a niche market mm romance with a very very narrow definition of happily ever after that has like strict repercussions if not met. if shane and ilya had stayed closeted then carina press would not have published the book, because there is 0 audience, and it would likely lead to other reid books being boycotted. so we can argue about it not being a good ending within the text but like outside of the text there’s other factors at play here. and not that bisexual people can’t have reductive views of queer relationships but i am kinda done with the “woman author doesn’t understand queer men’s romantic relationships” narrative. she’s not aiming for realism. she’s aiming to write a fun light romance novel after work it’s hardly her fault that it became a global phenomenon and it doesn’t seem fair to me to judge it for not meeting parameters it never set out to meet. there are flaws in her work but i will defend the ottawa ending being an institutional genre flaw and not a failing of reid’s.

and then like also yes shane and ilya understand opsec but like there is a post in my drafts i will now quote despite having not published it before, which is: in real life, if we are ascribing to realism, this would be a tragedy. and so if you don’t want it to be a tragedy, you’re going to need to let go of some elements of the realism.

Like, being closeted is an artificial condition. People choose to/need to stay closeted for lots of valid reasons, but sometimes it's like people conflate that with having a natural tendency toward wanting to keep your personal life private or your relationships siloed. And that is just not the same thing.

The Centaurs are playing in New York and Shane doesn’t travel with the team because of some, like, very minor injury, don’t worry, he’s fine. Scott asks Ilya to get a drink afterwards, but not at the Kingfisher, somewhere else, no reason. He is absolutely miserable to be confiding in fucking Ilya Rozanov about this, but he eventually confesses that he and Kip are getting divorced. 

He says that after he came out, there was all this pressure to make sure the story had a happy ending. He was with Kip when he came out, of course they had to get married! Maybe he didn’t really think about what it meant to actually be married, though. Everything just happened really fast. And, like — Shane and Ilya got married right after they came out. Does Ilya ever feel like they rushed into things? Did he feel that pressure to get married to make the whole thing more palatable? 

(For our purposes we are in book canon, Scott and Kip went from getting together to coming out in like six months and Scott doesn’t really know how long Shane and Ilya have been together.)

And Ilya is like, “Cool story, but my relationship has traveled more roads and suffered more obstacles than you could ever possibly imagine. One time Shane had to google because he didn’t know that the word for what he was trying to describe was ‘microagression’ and then he had to get out his Russian dictionary, but there’s no Russian word for ‘microagression’ so he kind of invented one, and then we could finally finish our argument about whether the Voyageurs were being a shitty team and also we were doing all of this over FaceTime because I was in Ottawa and Shane was in Pittsburgh. Actually getting married was a footnote at the end of the 200 page dissertation of things that we did to make that relationship work.” Because obviously a central tenet of Shane and Ilya’s relationship is that they do kind of think their relationship is better than everyone else’s and I don’t know, maybe they make some valid points! 

I also like the idea of Ilya being utterly baffled, like, “I have literally only ever made romantic choices that I knew would make the rest of the world unhappy, you’re asking me if I felt pressured to get married? And you think I would care about that? Grandpa, I cannot relate.” 

Okay, but we don’t talk enough about how exactly this transpired. Feel like there are three most likely scenarios for why Shane asked Scott for gay vacation recommendations and they are all pretty funny:

(1) At some point in the four years prior, Scott's gay vacation sexcapades became public knowledge because his hookups talked, basically @gurlsrool's ten out of ten on a sped-up timeline.

(2) At some point in the four years prior, Scott dropped the dime on HIMSELF talking about his tortured closeted life in a sad wet dog interview that Shane read with a mixture of revulsion for Scott's weak ass and a longing that he did not care to investigate further.

As for why Shane asked I think its gotta be #3. I think Shane was just like. This is the only out gay man I know with money. Because I think Shane "forgot Troy Barrett is gay" Hollander wouldn't remember Scott Hunter's gaycation past even if he did hear about it somehow, nor connect it to his own honeymoon. Shane just doesn't care about other people's experiences that way.

There’s also the part that’s very funny that I have observed from my dad playing golf where it is absolutely just an excuse for straight men to get together and gossip with that gossip being periodically broken up with a socially-acceptable act of briefly Doing a Sport.