horror movies are so much scarier when the actors look like an average sampling of the human population. and the house is a little messy
when everyone has veneers and the house is pristine and tastefully decorated: (in the back of my mind) these people were hand-selected for visual appeal. this is a set. this is a story
when the actor has a little acne and there are dirty dishes in the sink: aaaaahhhhh this is just like Me and My House ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!
when everyone has veneers and the house is pristine and tastefully decorated: (in the front of my mind) these people had it coming
Y’know what gets me? What absolutely TAKES ME OUT? Is the table scene in ep 6 of heated rivalry when David calls Ilya “Rozanov” and Ilya immediately corrects him with “Ilya”. It’s such a simple thing but SO telling. “Rozanov” implies a distance, a wall, between Ilya and everyone else, just like it does with Shane and “Hollander”. This is extremely evident in ep 4 post couch when Shane freaks out about Ilya moaning his first name. It’s intimate, familiar, and Ilya fucking CRAVES it. He wants so badly to be a part of Shane’s world, to tear down the walls and be a part of the family, that the second he has a chance, he puts Shane’s parents on a first-name basis.
not many people know that sanity and insanity are legal , not psychological, constructs which are assessed in relative proximity to a consensus reality. and even fewer people truly understand the implications of this fact. sanity is, over everything else, the determination that you are entitled to a privileged legal status, one in which your agency is not compromised and in which your consent matters. the mad must be understood as a politically marginalized class because, among other more abstract reasons, our class is constructed explicitly as such by the letter of the law.
it is no coincidence that the rise of Black radicalism in the US in the 1950s was closely followed by an abrupt demographic shift in schizophrenia diagnoses (typically treated with psychiatric incarceration, powerful sedatives, and a variety of experimental surgeries). which had once been a disciplinary label for inadequate white housewives was now assigned to black men whose politics often so happened to draw the wrong attention. but even now, the idea of a psychotic inmate whose conspiracies are proven true is a stock character - a twee bit of comic relief when aliens are afoot or a too-sincere premise of a syfy original - rather than a literal reality suffered by so many (typically multiply oppressed) mad people.
the ep2 emotional first time anal is really absolutely fucking insane. the way they’d both been thinking about this for months. the anticipation. the teasing. the full fucking hockey game that just occurred. ‘you meeeessed me’. the race up the stairs, always trying to one-up each other. shane letting ilya into his home and his asshole for the first time. extremely vulnerable but he’s so eager for it. the way ilya keeps checking in. the cum up to shane’s neck when they’re done. the way he lies back and smiles when no one’s looking. the way ilya melts at the praise when shane says that was so fucking hot. how softly shane kisses him. the way you can see in ilya’s eyes how he has to force himself to say i have to go. the way they linger on the stairs, his cab is definitely here, they don’t want to part. shane’s fluffy hair under his hoodie. the way ilya murmurs ‘good trick’. that kiss. they’re so lovestruck i-
i think a very important part of shane hollander is that he never talks things out out loud, he figures them out fully in his head and THEN he will share, in tampa shane only approaches ilya when he has fully thought out his side of things, at the cottage shane only wakes ilya up to tell him the plan when he has every detail straightened out, he’s a very “just right” kind of guy, and like every single detail!! he’s not like “okay maybe you could play here or here and maybe we start like a thing together” NO! “ottawa. charity.”
and he gets visibly upset and unsettled when somebody tries to coax problems out of him before he has already essentially solved them, like when ilya suggests they hook up in montreal, when hayden brings up lily, when ilya tries to get them acting like a couple in boston, and when rose basically talks him into coming out
he freaks out at the fact that he can’t control every piece in the interaction and he feels he can’t sufficiently discuss these things out loud when he doesn’t have a grip on them himself
he never takes his problems anywhere, or to anyone and he’s very secretive about his interiority (and this isn’t just an ilya thing, he doesn’t have anyone he does this with)
and thats why its so special when david walks in on them that for once shane is actually forced to plan out loud and have somebody elses input and support into how he’s going to approach a situation that he’s not actually ready for
(and i think this is very important to bear in mind going into the long game, shane is a fixer not a talker, he doesn’t want to talk about problems until he already has a solution to them)
(and and because it always comes down to the fucking im sorry its also why he likes submitting to ilya, its all about giving up not only the control he has to exact over his life and material reality but also the control he experiences in his mind literally all the time)
I could write an entire essay about the power dynamics in Heated Rivalry, but if I did, there would be an entire sub-category devoted to Ilya giving orders that double as temperature checks.
The times Shane pushes back playfully (“No, you come here,”) vs. the times he genuinely pushes back because he doesn’t feel comfortable or secure (“You suck my dick,” in the awards ceremony bathroom, and “There are a lot of windows,” afterward in the hotel);
The times Shane doesn’t push back at all (after “Get on your knees,”) when Ilya clearly expected playful teasing in return, and the times Ilya’s looking for reassurance and security himself (“Glasses on,”).
I love the explicit consent checks, they’re so important, but I also love that behind so many orders for Shane to take his clothes off, there’s a silent, “This is okay?” behind it.
10000%. I will never forget how well these two incorporated the power dynamic between them, how it never went away even as their love “softened” their relationship. It was foundational to them, and part of why was because Ilya was so good at creating a safe place for Shane to give up control and be the nasty little freak he is when he unmasks. Consent doesn’t have to be a dry checklist/negotiation that stops things cold. It can be nonverbal. It evolves as they get to know each other’s tells. It can genuinely enhance the sexiness of a scene, and this show/the actors depicted that SO well.
Shane is so real to me bc if someone chased after me for two years trying to fuck me and then very tenderly and thoughtfully took my virginity and then fucking ghosted me for 6 months and told me we were nothing I would also cry pitifully and hornily in a bathroom once they paid attention to me again 🫶
ugh thank you for reminding me of this so I can lose my mind about it all over again. god I NEED fic set in that six month period where shane thinks ilya’s dropped him. the shame the embarrassment!! the sense of painful betrayal shane tries not to feel because it’s so humiliating that he feels betrayed!! because that means that he trusted ilya and that means he fell hook line and sinker for ilya’s whole act. I feel like after the first month or so of ilya leaving him on read shane tries really hard to put it out of his mind and not think about it anymore, which of course just means he’s thinking about it all the time. he’s lacing up his skates wondering if ilya told anyone, if it was some kind of bet or dare, if ilya laughed about taking his virginity after. he’s lying awake during his pregame nap unable to sleep thinking about how the sex rocked the foundations of his world and for ilya it was just another tuesday. he’s at dinner with the pikes passing the salad and flushing hot thinking about how he brought ilya into his home, took ilya inside his body, came without even being touched, and now ilya rozanov will always know that about him: how badly shane wanted it, how hungry he was for it. and the worst part is that now shane knows exactly how good it is!!! and he’s never going to have it again!!!
outside of the obvious reasons why the hollanov relationship reveal must be crazy to shane’s parents, it’s gotta be wild to them that their shy, awkward kid is dating the league slut. their kid, who cannot even say the word “sex” without blushing, has been fucking a man whose sexual reputation is a topic of conversation. for a decade. they are in fact on a sexcation together. if you want to see them, you need to text them that you’re on your way there, because even if they know you’re coming in advance, they cannot keep their hands off of each other long enough to properly keep track of time. david hollander sees things start to heat up between them and knows instantly that they have probably fucked against every window in that extremely glass house.
idk i’m obsessed with how shane bringing ilya home is not just him coming out as gay, it’s him coming out as an experienced sex freak.
The fact that there are multiple times in canon (and obv countless times in fic) where people find out about hollanov and are like “could this affect how they play against each other? Have they ever let each other win???”
And the true and normal answer is, “no, of course not, they are both professionals who take their craft very seriously.”
But the even MORE true answer is, “well, it DOES affect their game, in that they are even more competive with each other, because winning at hockey is a Sex Thing for them.”
I actually don’t think Ilya would identify as a dom I think he just thinks that’s how sex works… I don’t think Shane identifies as a sub but that’s just becus he hears the word submissive and gets so hard he’s nauseous so he just tries not to think about it too much
Shane doesn’t allow himself to indulge in bdsm research because he heard the phrase 24/7 sub lifestyle one time ☝️ and thinks about it everyday to the point of tears so he really can’t for his own good know anything more about it
