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NEURODIVERGENCE

What did the screenshots say about Shane?

RR said she “REALLY regrets suggesting that he may be autistic”, before immediately (in what may appear to be a contradiction, but isn’t! more on that later) saying she thinks he probably is on the spectrum. For context: she has said on a number of occasions that she realised Shane was on the spectrum between HR & TLG. She has received a great deal of praise for the autism portrayal in the show and Hudson’s acting. In the last few days even, she’s been part of an autism fundraiser. 

This statement has to be then taken in the context of a number of other things she’s said about Shane in these screenshots :

“Shane’s biggest flaw is that he can be focused to the point of being self-absorbed”.

Screenshot: Shane’s response to the plane texts: “Huh, weird” [RR commentary: “what an idiot”].

Shane not telling JJ - RR commentary: “Shane is stupid”.

On the foundations of TLG: “Going into TLG my main notes were all the ways Shane had been selfish. It was important to hold on to that. It’s not an impossible thing to overcome, but it needed to create a conflict.”

In addition to the screenshots, the TLG notes list: “Ilya is very intelligent. Shane is not.” “Ilya is very observant and perceptive. Shane barely notices his own feelings”.

And, the recent Swooon article: “Shane’s a little bit selfish in this book, or he’s a little bit self-centered, a little bit unaware … He needs things spelled out for him, and Ilya is not spelling them out. I wasn’t too surprised that people didn’t like Shane’s behaviour in the book, but it was kind of necessary for the story. He had to have an arc where he figures out what he’s doing wrong and fixes it.”

Basically, you have a character who you yourself now believe is autistic, and who you’re going to write as such. And then you set out to - in your words - make his “selfishness” the primary conflict of your two-person romance. And the way you do that is by conflating “selfishness” and “self-absorbedness” and “what he’s doing wrong” with needing things to be clear and being hyper-focused and sticking to a plan. And in addition, your guiding notes for the book are also how he is not “very intelligent” and “barely notices his own feelings”.

And in your cutesy “apology” video to your fictional character - not to the fans hurt by all this - all you say is you know you shouldn’t joke about him being stupid and an idiot because he’s autistic. Which you, incidentally, wish you hadn’t publicly said explicitly. 

There are many conclusions to draw here, and again, I’m trying very hard not to draw the most uncharitable ones. But it is bloody difficult not to, actually.

Because how it looks is that you’re calling your character selfish, self-absorbed and unintelligent in a way that you are linking directly to the very same qualities that you have written into him as a person on the spectrum. That the logical progression from what you’re saying is that what he’s doing wrong in his own love story is being autistic. That you seem to not have any good things to say as well about him or his autistic qualities. That you’re dismissing it all as just jokes when there is visibly more to it.

And, also, that the only reason you think it might be bad to call him all those things out loud is because he’s autistic - which you wish you hadn’t explicitly said. Is this because then you can’t use those qualities to call him selfish and unintelligent? Because then you have to take accountability and not just praise for autism representation? Because then it becomes not just about this fictional character who’s fictionally forgiven you, but all the very real ND people who feel gutted at having harmful attitudes reinforced?

I get that Shane is fictional, and I get that I’m over-attached to this character. But I think it’s safe to say fandom spaces in general have a lot of real neurodivergent people, and perhaps this fandom even more than most, and that the show and the books have reaped the benefit of that in every way possible, and a lot of it is because of people seeing themselves in Shane and Ilya. And you cannot claim that huge support and praise for inclusivity and representation and then deflect the very real impact when you fuck up as well.

QUEER AND ASIAN REPRESENTATION

It’s not just ND representation that’s being let down, but how it intersects with the rest of Shane’s life: a biracial, closeted gay man in a deeply conservative field.

When she says he’s “stupid” for not telling JJ, and especially “selfish” (because that one wasn’t a joke). She doesn’t specify how he’s selfish, but as we know, the conflict in TLG is (a) about him not guessing how Ilya is feeling and (b) not wanting to come out sooner. Calling the latter selfish is to me a vast oversimplification of the lives of queer people and how they navigate coming out. It also completely ignores - again - the pressure he would already be facing as a POC: why an anxious, neurodivergent, innately private person would have extra reason to be apprehensive about coming out in a world where he would already be facing microaggressions, stereotyping, model minority pressure, outright racism. 

I live in a place that’s fairly liberal (nowadays, anyway - same-sex marriage and abortion have only been legalised within the last decade). I’m thinking of my friends who haven’t come out, because they fear being treated differently by their family and friends and colleagues, because they worry about the harmful attitudes and covert discrimination that still exist, and because it is their decision to come out when they are good and ready. I can totally understand if being at different points in that journey causes friction within a relationship, but I would never call anyone “selfish” or “stupid” for whatever point they’re at in their lives. 

Shane, as a gay Asian man in an extremely white, conservative and heteronormative field, would be feeling even more immense pressure at the prospect of coming out. RR can say he’s unaware of the “dark side” of hockey and has no “trauma”, but her books are based directly on the NHL and on the real world. He has every reason to be anxious.

And then it makes me look twice at how the story she wrote actually bears his fears out, even if the lack of attention given to the Montreal locker room pre-Fanmail ends up framing it as being about Ilya instead of about homophobia. When he’s traumatically outed, and when he suffers the final humiliation of tripping and being held responsible for losing the playoffs against his partner, his team - including JJ - immediately question his integrity. We are told the fallout is vicious online (though barely shown it). He loses his team, his captaincy, his first line position. Most painfully of all, his reputation has taken what we can only imagine is a lasting hit, through no fault of his own.

As I’ve said before, I have tried to take the “hero’s arc” argument in good faith, that Shane’s journey is about learning to prioritise love, being true to yourself, standing up for your loved ones, etc (there are questions that can be asked over that framing, but that’s for another time). But given that those screenshots and that interview now explicitly say Shane’s “selfishness” specifically was set up to be the major conflict in the novel, it is also now harder not to interpret his outing and subsequent bringing-down as him also being narratively punished for hesitance that would in reality be logically inextricable from his being a neurodivergent anxious gay Asian man. His “selfishness” is corrected for him. And it’s immediately reframed as a happy ending. It just all shows a staggering lack of awareness of multiple parts of his identity.

(I’m not going to talk much about the “Ilya consider Svetlana” and the Ilya/Shane/Svetlana threesome comments, because I do doubt she actually wants that. But it’s a joke in pretty poor taste, given that a major part of Shane’s journey throughout HR is (a) realising he’s gay and not bi and (b) confronting his own insecurity that Ilya could opt for a straight-passing life without him.)

EATING DISORDER

A last screenshot: “the performance enhancing diet (which we all know is ridiculous) is mostly in the book as another thing that Shane focuses too much on instead of actually important things (like his very sad boyfriend)”. 

Feeling guilty for tasting traces of lemonade on your boyfriend’s lips is not just a performance-enhancing diet. It does not matter if she intended to write it as an eating disorder, it categorically is. It actually makes sense that Shane’s perfectionism, especially under pressure, would lead to this - just as Ilya’s feelings of isolation exacerbate his depression. But it isn’t written that way, sympathetically - it is written as another example of supposed self-absorption. She writes it as making Shane miserable in his own right throughout TLG, and yet she is on record saying the reason for including it at all was for Ilya to goad him about, and to show what a bad boyfriend he is to Ilya. I’ve seen a number of saddening posts from people who’ve suffered with EDs and how they feel about that.

(And again, the fact that Ilya is “very sad” is something he keeps failing to communicate to Shane throughout the book. Yet, despite being explicitly characterised as someone who benefits from direct communication, Shane is the one whose biggest flaw is being “self-absorbed” by not guessing this. Ilya’s biggest flaw, incidentally, according to RR, is that he’s “too afraid of being hurt”. It’s honestly impossible to deny the uneven treatment, and how the responsibility consistently falls on the POC ND character to anticipate and orbit around the needs of his partner.)

ON THE AUTHOR

I understand that Rachel Reid never expected her books to blow up in this way, and it must be immensely daunting to think of so many people scrutinising your every word. I believe she generally meant well and that this shows in many parts of her books, and I am glad and grateful that she gave us these characters in the first place. 

But when you do write and gain praise for writing real-world issues into your books, you have to accept real people are going to be affected if you deal with and talk about them in a harmful way. And what you should not do in the face of that is dismiss and mock their pain, because that video honestly felt like a slap in the face. 

It seems to me a little ironic that RR wrote TLG as narratively berating a neurodivergent POC for taking his time to come out to the world, despite the amount of different kinds of abuse and backlash and pressure that he would inevitably have to brace for - but that marginalised communities’ valid scrutiny and criticism of a white NT woman’s mere writing is being condemned by many as unfairly dogpiling her. Just juxtaposing those. And I categorically condemn and am disgusted by any threats, insults, ableism, harassment directed at her! But the majority of what I’ve seen online over the past couple days is valid, heartfelt and respectful - even if in many cases upset and even angry - commentary.

Anyway. This has honestly all just made me pretty sad. And yes, I cancelled my preorder for Unrivaled. I still hold some hope for S2, and genuinely really hope the show’s creative team is seeing and more importantly taking onboard what the people whose communities are represented by Shane are saying. About how the creative decisions taken around this fictional character can reflect real attitudes and biases and stereotypes, and why that matters to people.

EXTRA NOTES

This is a response to those godforsaken screenshots, and the subsequent shitshow (debacle!) that has been RR’s response, so I haven’t gone into what’s not mentioned in them. 

But a few points on context important by omission wrt how she treats Shane specifically: an evergreen reminder that the “selfish” plan was actually canonically agreed on in HR largely to protect Ilya because Russia: the fact that TLG actually ends up having multiple instances of Shane being observant and Ilya not being so as regards each other but Shane is still the one singled out for criticism as self-absorbed and clueless; the fact that Ilya’s depression is never spoken about by RR in a comparably insensitive way to Shane’s autistic traits; the fact her video made light of people being upset over fictional Shane but that she has said it hurts her when people call the equally fictional Ilya’s behaviour a red flag; the fact that it seems Shane alone out of her characters comes in for this amount of criticism from her, both in how she structured her book and the jokes she makes.

Again, I’m just feeling a bit sad atm, as one of the many many people who have found joy in this show and in a character like Shane.

It feels like a switch has been flipped. One moment, there’s the warm light that it felt like seeing someone like Shane depicted as loving and being loved as he is in HR (in the show especially, but also in the book). A whole imperfect and valid person, an equal half of the push-pull and painful but positive growth that is his relationship with Ilya.

The next, the cold realisation that AFTER realising he was autistic, RR appears to have conceptualised every foundation block for his TLG characterisation as making him the selfish, stupid, sole cause of the conflict (even when he literally isn’t or logically wouldn’t be). That there is no way to disengage that now, after these statements.