All fandom all the time. Mostly Cherik, Captive Prince, Star Wars, Marvel (Irondad & Loki & Thor, mostly), Lymond. A smattering of other things because I've been doing this for a very long time.
Sometimes there’s an elaborate bit, and then you commit to it and put a lot of time into creating something with it, pick up a new hobby or two… anyway. Here’s Gatsby Great The
You have been offered a full-ride scholarship to get a four-year degree in this field, specifically. Upon graduation, you will be guaranteed a job in this field at the 75th percentile of average salary for the field, with the possibility of further advancement as the years go on.
However, you will never be able to get a job in any other field.
the thing is that the hockey is the foreplay. the thing is that they know in advance when they’re going to see each other. they get more and more excited for it the closer it gets. they flirt (badly) via text message in the days/hours prior. the thing is that when you don’t see someone for weeks at a time, and you want them so badly, even knowing they’re in the same building as you can make you crazy. the thing is that one of them is going to win the game. the thing is that they’re going to tussle and they’re going to one-up each other and they’re going to sweat. ilya is gonna get rough and he’s gonna talk shit. shane is gonna get riled up and he’s gonna work hard. and one of them is going to win. either way, shane is getting fucked. but the context of it changes. if shane loses then he’s probably annoyed/mad, which ilya loves, and shane gets the catharsis of sex. if shane wins then that means ilya gets to take his power back at the end of the night by fucking the shit out of shane. i promise you that by the time they get to the locker room pre-game they are absolutely already worked up. they’re nothing short of ravenous when they finally get in a room alone together. they did the foreplay already. shane’s drooling for it already. sports is sex. flirting is sex. anticipation is sex. being annoyed/annoying is sex. i swear the hockey is part of the sex. and then sex is also sex, which honestly feels too on the nose in the grander context of their relationship. it’s all sex. all of it? the whole time.
whoever first pointed out that ilya americanises his accent around other people but not around shane i owe you my fucking life
also the idea of like when its just the two of them ilya can like just slip back into the more comfortable rudimentary accent he had at the start of their relationship :’) and that in itself being nostalgic for shane :’)
this would also be linguistically accurate!
i speak english the most in day to day life and also think in english sometimes. my accent in english is americanized, pretty indistinguishable from a native (excluding sets of certain phonemes like /rl/) .
but if i’m really tired or spending time just around my wife (with whom i speak english), i sometimes switch to what i call ‘lazy english’.
what this usually consists of is i allow myself to speak english with the russian /r/ phoneme that is more natural for me, i drop articles, replace continuous and future tense with simple present, use the ‘….,yes?’ construct, avoid contractions (bc the verb ‘to be’ is dropped/implied in russian, so contractions aren’t always natural)
for example, when i’m in ‘lazy english’ mode, this is how my speech varies:
‘i’m making the bed’ = ‘i make bed’.
‘you’ll help me later, right?’ = ‘you help me later, yes?’ (for this one, in russian, the same phrasal construct ends with the word ‘yes’ instead of the word ‘right’)
‘can you give me a tissue?’ = can you give me tissue?’
‘where’s the pen? do you have it?’ = ‘where is pen? you have?’
if you pay attention, you’ll notice that a lot of these patterns also occur in ilya’s speech, especially earlier on. that’s why i’m particularly impressed with the writing of his dialogue — it doesn’t come across as stereotyping/caricatural because the way he speaks english is consistent with russian linguistic/grammatical rules. this is often how russian-speaking people speak english when it is their second language and they’re still learning.
i like to imagine ilya reverting to ‘lazy english’ or speaking in a similar manner to me around shane. it is linguistically consistent and a sign of comfort/deep familiarity with the person.
The next layer of linguistic accuracy would be for Shane to start occasionally modulating down into a similar “lazy english” that’s reflective of Ilya’s style. I forget the technical term for this, but it’s a legit thing in linguistics – if there’s someone you love/admire/respect and you spend a lot of time with them, you unconsciously start picking up and mirroring a couple aspects of their idiolect (like a dialect but rather than being spoken by a group, it is a single person’s unique linguistic fingerprint), whether that’s gestures, vocabulary, or speech patterns.
So when Ilya says something like, “Where is pen? You have?” then over time Shane’s response might naturally shift towards, “Yes, I have.”
being in the heated rivalry fandom rn is like witnessing the olympics of gay fan fiction. authors who have been training for years in their respective fandoms all coming together to contribute some of the best work i’ve ever seen to this beautiful show. what a joy, what a privilege
