When you're trying to forget your years old situationship but his manager is Yuna Hollander so you see his face everywhere...

[ilya rozanov voice] okei

throws my heated rivalry scribbles at you (more under the cut)

Keep reading

little ilya with his mom

80% of unrivaled has to be ilya being incredibly uncool at all the casual intimacy he gets to have with shane now. they go to a bar with the team and shane puts his hand on ilya’s knee midsentence and ilya chokes on the rest of it. at the grocery store and ilya is holding up an avocado to see if it’s ripe enough and shane walks up behind him and puts a hand on his hip and ilya drops it. yes they’re having freak sex but now it’s because shane was on the phone with the dog groomer and they’re asking about appointment times and shane says “hold on let me ask my husband—“ and now he’s face down ass up in the middle of the kitchen and ilya is like say that again say that again say that again say that again

#flirting

they said i love you and ilya turned into a level 3000 husband instantaneously. he’s doing handstands in the water while his man watches, he’s calling shane brave, saying “gimme kiss” with a goofy smile, offering unconditional support, and demonstrating with complete and total sincerity his loyalty and adoration. bless this man.

That man does not know about grays

He goes from 0 to 100 and I love that for him

'I was excited about last night. I'm mostly mad at Marlou for fucking that up.'

yknow what i think about all the time?

“montreal is nice, yes?”

“boston is nice too?”

he was just a kid and he was genuinely trying to connect with a peer and someone who had reached out to him and he felt a genuine connection to and he was looking for comfort and reassurance that he had made a good decision and would be happy

Just one tiny thing to add, a player doesn't have any control where they're drafted, the teams pick. So it isn't so much a decision he made as a whole bunch of things out of his control happening to him all at once. He could've ended up anywhere based on draft picks that year, and he ended up in Boston, a city he's never been to in a country he doesn't know well that speaks a language he isn't fluent in. And he asks "This'll be okay, right? This place I'm going, it's nice? I'll be okay there?" And Shane says yes and then here, finally, is someone he trusts telling him it's an okay place to go.

And Shane drinks when Ilya tells him. That detail is as important as anything else. Pretty much everything is out of Ilya’s control except this weirdo who’s staring at his crotch. Shane, meanwhile, is at the absolute height of “PLEASE TELL ME I’M A GOOD BOY I AM TRYING SO HARD I WILL DRINK WATER.” He’s so young, too, and practically ready to dive face-first into Ilya’s sweaty groin if it means getting to shut his brain off for two seconds.

Yes, all this. And I simply MUST peer review the tags, because they’re stellar.

First off, @jahsontodd

Next we have @thoughtfulgardenerpirate

Then @agoodsoldier and @parcai

And next @mybloodstream-caffeine

Next up @tsitpfrvrbonrad although I must correct them. When they first met in December 2008, Ilya and Shane were only 17. The draft was June 2009, and Ilya’s date of birth is June 15, 1991. So they had both just become legal adults (Shane’s is May 10, 1991). Depending on when in June the draft was held, Ilya might have still been 17 in the gym scene.

Then we have @myarchiveforme and @bedalk

Just below we have @swords-n-spindles who is breaking my heart into tiny pieces. This cute Canadian boy with the freckles is the first person in North America Ilya has had a positive interaction with. But the league, their new teams, and the media have decreed that they should have a professional rivalry.

So they can’t be friends. And even though Ilya was already attracted to Shane here, I think he would’ve settled for a platonic friendship with the first kind person he’d met on this continent. If that was all that was on offer. But he can’t even have that, because that would ruin the heated rivalry narrative their new bosses are busily constructing around these two teenagers.

Neither of whom are yet old enough to drink legally in most provinces (in BC and Ontario, at least, it’s 19). They’re just barely old enough to vote. Not that I think voting matters much in Russia, but you know what I mean.

SHANE HOLLANDER EXHIBITIONISM WHEN

ilya rozanov funny moments pt. 1

She would have loved you. Like I love you.

ILYA ROZANOV | He has a problem. A slow fucking hockey player with beautiful freckles and a weak backhand. He also drives a terrible car. But he doesn’t want that problem to ever go away. Is a terrible problem indeed.