"A Government for The Horses, By The Horses"

And everything else is a type of distraction that Lestat WANTS us to be distracted by.

In previous seasons, Danny Molloy talks about how Louis uses third person "him" or "one" when he's trying to distance himself from his actions. Danny is good at catching this stuff!

Lestat is a master of DISTRACTION. Look at the visual difference in the third season (a naked woman showering in the background of a shot, switching from documentary style to colour, time skips, so much modern slang it's almost hard to understand).

Danny repeatedly throughout the episode asks Lestat if he was a stutterer as a kid. (the repetition also kind of mimicking the act of stuttering). He's hammering him. Don't get distracted! Stay on point (both Danny and us, the viewer)!

And what happens at the end of the episode? Lestat stutters as he sees his mother; and it looks like we're going to start delving into his childhood. That's where the pain is. That's where the story is.

Race absolutely matters. Racism absolutely exists. But different racial groups are stereotyped in different ways, and those stereotypes can produce completely different social expectations.

For example, I’ve seen people criticize Rachel and Jacob for joking about Hudson being unintelligent because he’s a person of color. If Hudson were Black, I would understand that criticism more, because there is a long history of anti-Black stereotypes portraying Black people as unintelligent. But Hudson is Asian. Asian men are stereotyped in almost the opposite way. They’re often assumed to be intelligent, studious, and academically successful. The stereotype is still racist, but it’s a different stereotype. It doesn’t suddenly become an anti-Asian stereotype just because we’ve replaced “Asian” with the broader category of “POC.”

The same thing happens constantly in fanfiction with Shane.

A lot of writers portray Shane as being afraid to fight because he knows he’ll be judged more harshly than white players. I understand where that idea is coming from, but as a black person I’ve never found it particularly convincing.

If Shane were black, that analysis would make more sense to me. Black men are often stereotyped as aggressive, which means behavior that is considered acceptable from white athletes is often interpreted differently when black ones do it.

But asian men occupy a very different place in the racial imagination. They’re frequently stereotyped as passive, non-threatening, weak, nerdy, emasculated, etc. If racial stereotypes were influencing Shane’s approach to hockey, I could just as easily imagine the opposite dynamic: feeling pressure to prove he’s aggressive enough to belong. Maybe he’s fighting TOO much.

But that doesn’t make sense for Shane. He’s the league’s golden boy. He’s polite, media-friendly, and heavily inspired by Sidney Crosby. He’s a superstar. Fighting is often delegated to players lower on the depth chart whose role is specifically to provide physicality. Star players generally aren’t expected to be enforcers. Teams usually want their elite talent scoring goals, not sitting in the penalty box after dropping the gloves.

So Shane not fighting much doesn’t strike me as evidence of racial pressure. It strikes me as evidence that he’s Shane Hollander.

Crosby is a useful comparison here. For years, people mocked him for not being physical enough (and for talking to the refs too much). They questioned his toughness and masculinity. They called him “Crybaby Crosby” or “Cindy Crosby.” Fans edited photos of him in dresses or makeup. The criticism wasn’t really about hockey. The joke was that he wasn’t a “real man.”

And that’s a white player.

Imagine how much worse those conversations could become if the player in question were Asian.

That’s the kind of racial dynamic I could actually see affecting Shane, not him worrying about people thinking he’s too aggressive, but people questioning whether aggressive ENOUGH.

There’s a good chance that if Shane fought exactly like many white players, he probably still wouldn’t be viewed as tough enough. Meanwhile, if a Black player fought exactly like those same white players, he might be interpreted as more aggressive.

People often criticize Rachel for not doing much racial analysis in the books. But sometimes fandom fills that gap with racial analysis that feels disconnected from both hockey culture and the specific stereotypes that affect different racial groups.

Not every POC experience is interchangeable.

A stereotype that affects Black athletes is not automatically a stereotype that affects Asian athletes. A stereotype that affects Latino athletes is not automatically a stereotype that affects Indigenous athletes.

If we’re going to talk about race- and we should- we have to talk about the actual racial dynamics at play, not just substitute “person of color” for a more specific analysis.

Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.

“Heated Rivalry” often focuses on the flirtations queer people recognize instantly: the charged eye contact at the opening face-off, boyfriends nudging feet under the table during a coming out, a glance across a crowded gala. The literary critic Richard Kaye has argued that flirtation has long been central to Western literature, a serious erotic mode in novels from Jane Austen to E.M. Forster. Seeing that tradition evolve onscreen between two men — not as subtext but as text — feels like a revolution.

What feels especially new is the way that flirtation becomes true intimacy. When another player in the league comes out by kissing his partner on the ice — a game changer in every sense — Shane’s phone rings. Ilya tells him he’s coming to Shane’s secluded lakeside cottage. Not for a night. Not for a postgame hookup. He’s choosing to step into Shane’s life, transforming their yearslong relationship into something with a future.

In the early 20th century, gay men gathered in a cottage in rural Maine to share stories about Walt Whitman, tracing desire across generations. The artist Marsden Hartley learned from men who had known Whitman and Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier who became Whitman’s partner, inheriting their memories like a family tree without blood. The impulse, to find ourselves in the historical record, carried into the 1970s, when writers in the gay magazine The Body Politic documented Hartley’s world to teach gay readers that our history was a ledger of longing.

For so long, we looked for stories that proved we were real. The archive shows that we existed; it doesn’t always show how we loved.

“Heated Rivalry” resonates because it embodies our lives. After the religious right pathologized us during the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, we reclaimed the sex story by reviving bathhouses and sex parties, by unapologetically embracing hookup culture on apps like Grindr, by celebrating eroticism in our fashion and nightlife. And slowly, we became more visible in family life and at work. There are queer politicians and lawyers, Olympians and celebrities. But representation is not the same thing as intimacy. We still need more stories about us, our relationships, our romances, our desires.

As the show has gained popularity, the cultural conversation has veered, perhaps predictably, toward straight people’s responses to the show. Articles, TikToks and morning shows have fixated on the thrill of being, say, a straight woman witnessing two men falling in love. This commentary has felt uncomfortably reminiscent of bachelorette parties in gay bars — our spaces becoming someone else’s spectacle, our bodies becoming someone else’s backdrop.

But if straight women like the show, that is fine. They should enjoy it. After all, it was adapted from a novel written by a woman. Her stated goal — to make a sweet, sexy, happy love story between two men in which, as she says, “the sexual tension and romance isn’t subtext or a tease or something that ends in tragedy” — fits what so many of us have been missing. Her willingness to write toward our joy feels rare, and so does the result: our intimacy made central, not symbolic; love scenes that are not lessons; desire that doesn’t apologize for itself.

We do not need more stories to prove that we exist. We need stories that capture how we live — in the touch, the embrace, the everyday if boring intimacies that were never meant to be translated. Our next frontier is not mere acceptance but depth.

the "middle-classification" of professional athletes is something thats really bothered me in hockey rpf for a while and now its in heated rivalry too. let me give you some examples of how outsourced their domestic lives are. they have:

professional chefs who come to their house and meal prep all their meals (except maybe breakfast) for the entire week. they leave instruction on how to heat them back up. shane and ilya would also have meals at the arena prepped by professional chefs and dietitians who formulate their diets based on their needs and preference

household managers who handle basically everything lmao: they hire other domestic workers, they put out holiday decorations, they do all daily chores like dishes/sweeping/cleaning the kitchen/etc, they organize the house, they do all the family's laundry (including changing sheets 2-3 times a week), they go through the pantry and get rid of expired foods.... like everything that needs to done around the house, the HM will do

a dog walker who takes the dog out several times a day (2-4 times typically) for 30 min to 1 hour long walks

housekeepers who come once a week or once every other week to deep clean the entire place

nannies, sometimes one sometimes two depending on how often the parents want to/are able to be in charge of sole childcare without help (they also have night nannies or night nurses during postpartum so they dont have to get up all the time, and postpartum doulas)

landscapers who take care of all outdoor plant needs

im probably forgetting some, but the perk of being rich is that you dont have to do anything around your house. this is all like.... extremely normal for rich people!

now single guys like ilya or shane might not have a house manager come every single day, but they definitely have one. ilya might like walking his dog, but only when its convenient for him. otherwise the dog walker is there at 8:00, 3:00 and 7:00 to take her out.

so many people in fandom spaces are allergic to nuance when it comes to their internal biases— especially in regards to racism (which, i know the original post wasn’t explicitly about, but i feel it’s important to name).

i've mainly seen this on twitter (of course) but when someone asks “hey, isn't it strange that most fanfic is centered around white men? even in media with women and people of color?” hordes of people who feel threatened will always show up in the comments to argue that “people have preferences!!! why do i have to write about something i’m not interested in???”

take sinners for example. 99% of the cast in the movie is black. but when you look at fandom spaces, you'll see an insane amount of focus on remmick and mary—the white/white-adjacent characters. before i watched sinners, i thought mary would play a much larger role given all the talk about her.

i don't think it's wrong to enjoy remmick and mary as characters, but i just think it would be helpful for people to take a step back and ask themselves why fandom is like this.

It's the exact same as the gamers who complain about too many people of color in AAA games since they want it to be "their fantasy", only more insidious because it's wrapped in the "fandom freedom" discourse.

Like, just look at the stats released for Ao3 fanfics every year (x x x x); there's only ONE (1) Black man whose ship even made it into Ao3's Top 100 fics in 2025. 100 ships, and only ONE has a Black man in it--and it ain't even anyone from Sinners! 💀🤦‍♂️

I'm in AMC's Interview with the Vampire fandom, and the anti-black racism is off the charts. Louis de Pointe du Lac is the main character, the first major Black male vampire in pop culture since Blade, and yet even in his own show's fanfics he's given the most pisspoor whitewashed "representation" ever, as the predominately cis white female fanbase struggles to even pay him the bare mimimum respect of acknowledging that he IS Black in their fics--instead, they refuse to describe his physical features (his brown skintone, curly hair texture, big nose & lips, etc), and lazily/sinisterly leave it up to the reader's interpretation to just imagine whatever character--or self insert--they want in Louis' place. It got so bad in the fandom that I finally had to create a chart demonstrating which fics in the fandom color-consciously described Louis, vs the other fics that gloss over his looks.

The IWTV fandom is a lost cause IMO. They've been so infiltrated by stan/ship wars that they don't even want to engage critically with racial topics; and the biggest fan accounts actively encourage their people to just block & ignore anyone who tries to make it "The Race Show," because it's not that deep, it's not about race, etc etc. So yeah. 🙄🫩

Early on I was kinda seeing a similar pattern in the Heated Rivalry fandom, too, wrt how little I initially saw fic writers describe Shane Hollander's physical features as an ASIAN man. It was worse in the pre-show fics, but I don't really blame the fandom for that--it's an unfortunate result of the white female author Rachel Reid barely ever addressing Shane's Asian race in the original books' source material either. And whenever she did mention his looks/race, it was to fetishize him as an downright effeminate man with long hair & small features & adorable freckles, cuz ofc Asian men can't grow beards or chest hair or hairy balls like virile WHITE manly-men like Ilya Rozanov can. 😬 Tierney's tv show adaptation is MUCH better, but that's relative cuz the bar was already in Hell, so.

Rachel eventually got called on the carpet for her mess, and finally admitted that her portrayal of Shane did him a vast disservice, not at all a good representation of Asian characters.

And then she had the nerve to double down on her nonsense by saying that Shane doesn't have any trauma & he's not smart, he just has a high hockey IQ; like, istfg if this tone deaf Klanswoman don't gtfo my face.

Like no sh!te Sherlock; your anti-Asian racism's been showing the whole time! She only made Shane Asian to check the DEI box; I'm glad she knows that WE know!

But to HR's fandom's credit, I AM seeing more ackowledgement of Shane's Asian--specifically JAPANESE--race & heritage included in fanfics. They'll emphasize that Yuna's a however-many-generations-removed immigrant who assimilated into Western/Canadian culture and how Shane was given a white name rather than an Asian name. They'll introduce Shane to Japanese-style macrobiotic diets; and highlight that yoga is a culturally appropriated Asian practice. In kid fics they'll often give Hollanov's children Japanese names and have Shane rediscover his roots by trying to learn Japanese alongside Ilya's Russian, so their kids have the full gamut of cultural education, etc. They'll go to Japan on holidays, etc. It's awesome.

It's not about making Shane's Asian heritage "his entire personality"--(ironic AF how no one says the same wrt ILYA as the walking poster boy for every Russian stereotype under the sun, but I'll leave that for white folks to argue about, my concern is with Bipoc representation)--it's about emphasizing his Asian heritage to help REMIND readers that Shane is NOT another default white character catering to the predominately white audience that prefers homogeneously white characters & cultures. It's a refreshing 180 from the ZILCH that Rachel gives him in the source material; that Tierney barely passes muster on in the tv series, but is still a step in the right direction to stop whitewashing Bipoc characters just cuz it makes the white fans more comfortable. Just like Tierney said, it would be "MONSTROUS" to default to making Bipoc characters like Shane white.

They showed us in the CCM shoot they get giggly when things are tense or when a situation can call for seriousness (“intensity”) so why not apply this to them trying to be ‘adults’?

*this is kind of a crack post btw (but also a rant)

I was reminded recently (by this comment thread) of a post I saw probably months ago, which attempted to reconcile Shane’s love for Ilya and existential hunger for competition with his apparently unflinching suggestion that his only rival torpedo his career with a move to a bottom ranking team. Because irrespective of Ilya’s own agency in this, the sticking point for me and many other fans is that he at no point verbalises an ounce of concern for what the Ottawa plan would mean for either of them.

Now, if you’re familiar with my HR rants, you know roughly how much respect I afford to Watsonian “explanations” within the GC series as well as my frustration with the romance genre in general; but honestly that just kind of makes the speculation more fun, and I found this one particularly amusing.

This post (and if anyone has the link pls send) essentially argues that rather than a contrived moment of inexplicable myopia on Shane’s part, this was instead the product of his near idolatry of Ilya and his abilities as both player and captain. They pointed out that Ilya had managed to lead Boston to the Cup w/i 3 years from a similar position in their own rebuild cycle, and in fact had done so even before Shane had with Montreal. That Shane fully believed that Ilya could do the same for Ottawa. And further, given that he does indeed manage to lead them to the playoffs within that same timeframe, that perhaps his faith was justified.

Obviously, this is hc only as none of this is ever spelled out in the text, and as RR tends towards blunt exposition over subtle characterisation of this type, I am disinclined to consider this canon to the books at least. It also reads as rather dismissive of the mental health crises we see both boys suffer over these years, but that’s a separate issue.

What I want to talk about and what I find most interesting about this hc is, if we integrate it into our reading of TLG, what this says about the growing thread of resentment around this exact point in the book. (And what that says about RR’s conception of these characters and their romance)

I want to talk about the block party fight

Spoilers below