Verushka70

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!

this concept of 'being a fangirl' as something to strive towards is incredibly new in the marketplace. like, it has to be since 2020 that it became such a public and widespread conversation topic that is actively being talked about in the news as some new lucrative market that has yet to be tapped into. it did not used to be like this!!!!! being a fangirl was actively looked down upon and sequestered away into their designated corners of the world. when fangirls were talked about in the press it was usually deragatory or talked about as some kind of baffling enigma. we had JUST gotten to the point in 2014 where it was considered 'cool' to be a geek or a nerd.

Because Scott was potentially in a position to lose it all and after just a few weeks, Kip couldn't handle being a secret and was basically like "call me when you can come out" (and risk your career).

Oh i have some THOUGHTS

Fundamentally, you cannot ask someone to come out of the closet for you. If you think you (or a character) can demand that you have a concerning misunderstanding of the queer experience and the difficulties associated with coming out. I personally don’t like the out/closeted plot line EVER in media because it is rarely handled well. Skip isn’t the worse example, but it doesn’t exactly make it an easy watch. I don’t like the ‘omg why can’t you just come meet my friends’ as it reads as very immature / unaware and is definitely putting pressure on Scott (even if it’s not to come out directly). The “coming out + now we can be happy”-ness of it all is problematic but thats another post.

What I think makes skip more complex is the point in which Kip realises it wasn’t going to work for him. It appears that he knows he can’t demand Scott to come out but has also realised he can’t handle being with someone so closeted.

Now, I don’t really think any queer person with that much community and (implied) experience would ever think they’d be happy to go back into the closet. Thus I have a hard time believing that Kip thought this was something that could work. On that basis, he never should have dated Scott in the first place and it is unfair to enter into a relationship with someone closeted and expect that to change. I might have something to say how money influences this (power)dynamic but that is also another post.

Nothing really suggests Kip had ulterior motives so I guess we can just proceed on the assumption that he came to realise he couldn’t handle it and was just stupidly naïve. To that, I don’t think it is wrong for him to leave. I do think it is wrong for him to frame it as an ultimatum (eg/ “either come out or we are done”) but I don’t really think Kip did that explicitly. It is a really hard situation but ultimately if the relationship is causing unhappiness it should end. In its ending, there cannot be any blame or pressure put on Scott — Kip knew exactly what he walked into.

It’s the same with the career question. It is absolutely fair to realise that you cannot be happy dating someone who prioritises their career over you. It is not okay to accuse or shame someone for that decision and attempt to guilt them into changing it. Of course wanting to break up for a particular reason does put pressure on the other party, but I don’t think there is a better outcome because staying in an unhappy relationship will eventually lead to bigger problems. The best thing would be to never enter into the relationship but hindsight is 20/20

I know it was dramatized that way in the series - which is why he's getting dressed when Scott asks "what're you doing?" & "can you stay?". But I have a vague memory that that was Kip's thinking in the book too, or maybe it was Elena who said something like "you were supposed to hook up for a few weeks" like as an ego boost for Kip. Which then puts them in the "accidentally fell in love" trope.

I found Reid's timeline for Scott/Kip -> Scott coming out ridiculous. I know many people are like "they fucked up the timeline!" & that Jacob admitted they fucked it up in post-production...

But frankly it's WAY more realistic that it took Scott 3 years to fully come out, than 4 months. I'm supposed to believe that 1) a pro hockey player, who's been 2) deeply closeted his entire life and career - except for the 3) couple weeks a year in non-hockey playing countries where he has all his gay hookups to get him through the rest of his year - can & will go from deeply closeted (such that NO ONE KNOWS he's gay except Kip) to 4) "I'm gay, teammates/team/world! & here's my boyfriend I'm kissing on the ice after winning the Cup" IN FOUR MONTHS.

Oh, and iirc book!Scott is also basically fine with this - he's very nervous but he's 1) not at all crippled by fear, anxiety, trepidation; 2) he doesn't need (or get!) any professional help or prescription pharmaceuticals to help him live those four months (or three years) of a crazy double life, 3) while hiding his hot boyfriend he can't stop smexin', and 4) presenting himself as a diametrically opposed straight-acting hockey captain to all of New York. 5) He has no queer friends other than Kip, he has no community, no family other than his teammates (who havr no idea he's gay) - yet 6) Scott just manages to do all that and come out as gay in FOUR months with 7) no emotional support other than Kip's twue wuv...? Rilly??

For one, the city isn't some random city that wouldn't care about queer rights. Montreal's protest against police violence led to Québec becoming the first jurisdiction in canada to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Fierte Montreal festival is the largest pride celebration in the francophone world. It has the largest queer district in NA after the Castro. The fact that this is the city being tarred and feathered by the fandom is... it's not great.

This tied with the fact that this is a city known for its hockey riots and for standing by their players when they are being treated terribly by the front office or the coaches (See PK Subban, Patrick Roy). That nothing is mentioned about how this city reacts to Shane's outing and a reader is generally led to believe that the reception is so terrible that Shane 'didn’t think he could ever feel good about representing that team again' is just. 😬😬😬

There is also. how characters that are presumably quebecois are portrayed. Quebec as a province has a history of facing assimilation efforts from English canada and also economic disenfranchisement of french speaking canadians. (Caveat, both english and french settlers are equally culpable in the cultural genocide of the first nations, but the descendents of the french settlers also faced oppression from the english)

So given how Rachel Reid treats Shane's experience as a POC (which is by pretending there is no such experience which is a crazy thing to do) I can't help but be kind of weirded out by how we see her portray the quebecois.

The three characters on page accusing Shane of tripping is J.J. Boiziau, Drapeau and Comeau. All francophone names. It might be possible that she just went with more quebecois names for players in Montreal but them being the ones that are primarily accusing Shane and the only one on his side being Hayden Pike... it does not inspire a lot of confidence in me. I don't think its intentional but I also don't think how she writes shane as an almost caricature is intentional. It's more like there was no further introspection done on the implications on what was written. I am not saying that Montreal's players or it's front office cannot be homophobic, but that there seems to almost be a bias in which of them are being shown as the face of that homophobia. But one could argue that JJ redeems himself (it's off-page if I remember correctly but it's something).

There's a great true crime podcast called The Village about the intersection of violence against LGBTQ+ communities and victims, and law enforcement (or lack thereof...). S3 of The Village focuses on the serial killer preying on gay Montreal men in the 1990s, and the fact that the Montreal police couldn't be bothered to actually investigate until gay activists got together to pressure the police and increase awareness in the community. Activism around AIDS and the Montreal serial killings of gay men helped solidify the Montreal gay community as it is today, from what I've read. (There was also a serial killer preying on gay men of immigrant backgrounds in Toronto - also covered in S1 of The Village CBC podcast - and the Toronto police basically ignored the reports of missing men and lackadaisically "investigated" to the point that they, at one point, had the serial killer in for questioning and they let him go.) So while Canada as a whole, Quebec and Montreal specifically, have made greater strides towards LGBTQ+ rights = human rights, they are not without their very recent problems. Like most big cities with thriving gay scenes, Montreal's LGBTQ+ community still suffers from homophobic law enforcement.

2) Religion is also a factor imo. Of those who consider themselves religious, the majority of Montreal is Christian, and the majority of those Christians are Catholic (per Wikipedia). Conservative observant religious (including Catholic) groups are typically homophobic. They also tend to whine that attempts to control hate speech stifle "free speech," as if it's perfectly fine to verbally abuse people. Very Christian of them, no? 🙄 When the Montreal group Gai Écoute tried to create a registry of homophobic hate crimes - that included verbal assault with homophobic slurs/hate speech - in order to study the scope of homophobic hate crimes in Montreal, because they got financial support from the Quebec government, various Canadian religious groups protested this use of tax dollars. Which is probably why I could never find the results of that registry and the study they were going to do. It may have been shut down due to pressure or government budget cuts, which always disproportionately affect minority and marginalized groups first. (Or it may have been published in French, which I can't read. But the study results would've been covered in the English Montreal/Quebec press as well - and I never found the results in English, either.) Quebec/Montreal school initiatives to increase tolerance/decrease homophobia in schools have also been cut (for "budgetary reasons").

3) Lastly, Quebec, Montreal, and the rest of Canada are no less vulnerable to the rise of online social media-spread hate (manosphere, fascists, right wingers) and negative engagement-prioritizing algorithms (which all social media platforms use) than any other part of the world. Researchers found that homophobic sentiment more than doubled between 2017-2018 and 2023-2024 among Quebec high school students. (https://montreal.citynews.ca/2025/01/16/intolerance-2slgbtq-increasing-quebec-schools/) Considering how many traditionally liberal-social-values-espousing Western nations have struggled with rising divisiveness, hate, and fascism in the past 10-15 years - and within the time frame the GC books cover - it's really not surprising that Canada (and Quebec, and Montreal) would too.

4) Also factor in that players on sports teams aren't necessarily from the cities where their teams are - in fact most are not - and they may not have the same values that the city of their team espouses. They might be from countries, small towns, and/or rural areas where homophobia is alive and well and by which they were indoctrinated starting very young. Hockey as a sport is not particularly open-minded, even in Canada, if this report is anything to go by.

All of that having been said - it is highly sketchy that Reid wrote all the Quebecois players as homophobics who turn on Shane, and Hayden as Shane's sole supporter. I'm not sure if that's because of her writing, or because the romance genre in general has major inherent limitations (even m/m sports romance) due to publisher preferences (requirements, in many cases) for cliche-ridden, trope-dependent, formulaic content that generally relies on one-dimensional villains and easy, unrealistic solutions to get to the HEA (happily ever after). Maybe it's a combination of Reid's writing and the genre itself.

As you put it yourself, It's more like there was no further introspection done on the implications on what was written. Which is exactly my problem with the genre itself, including Reid's writing.