Alexei calling Ilya on the phone like

ok i’m rewatching e5 and it’s really getting to me how painful shane’s closet is. like he has to be closeted i understand the logistics and his position. i get it. but he uses it against himself all the time. it’s so painful for him. having sex with women is humiliating & difficult but he thinks it’s necessary. keeping distance between himself and his loved ones is isolating but he thinks it’s necessary. having his emotional and sexual needs only barely satisfied for ten whole years is agony but he thinks it’s necessary. everything he does is calculated, everything he does is a fight to not be Too Obvious. being closeted is hard enough, but shane is torturing himself inside his. he punishes himself for being gay all the time. it’s almost like self harm. maybe if he’s a little harder on himself, maybe if he pushes until it hurts, maybe if he tries and tries and tries and just never accepts failure and just works really hard on it then it’ll be fine. he takes that approach to hockey and it works. maybe if it hurts for long enough, badly enough, then he will become a better man by enduring it. maybe it has to hurt for there to be a positive result. maybe the punishment is necessary. and the only person who can punish shane for this is shane himself. so he does. but every time he goes back to ilya it’s a failure, every time he can’t get hard with a woman it’s a failure, every time he thinks about maybe letting himself be what he knows he is it’s a failure. do you ever want to just cry

not to paraphrase my own post but ilya “likes to cause a hurt then soothe it to know his impact was felt” rozanov and shane “it has to hurt a bit to feel real” hollander. most sexually compatible people ALIVE. AND THEY ARE ALIVE. TO ME

I was very surprised they bothered to name a specific ethnicity for Shane and his mom. I guess they included that line bc it was in the book? But it's clear the original author didn't put a lot of thought into his specific heritage.

And, if I'm remembering correctly, neither Hudson nor the actor playing Shane's mother is ethnically Japanese. (I think they are part Korean and part Taiwanese and Filipino, respectively?) So, like. It's not like we're committing to realism, here?

Like, I DO think Ilya's line mentioning their heritage was awkward and uncomfortable and didn't really add anything to the story, but that's not what I'm talking about rn.

I'm talking about the fact that they could've just not specified at all! 🤷🏻‍♀️ If it literally only came up in a single line, it can't be that important to the story. Often in real life, you may only have a vague, approximate sense of someone's ethnic or racial identity! It's not always your business! We don't need Shane's full ancestral breakdown to understand what's happening in the show!

Especially for it to only be brought up in the season finale? Like, it's not like it's background info we have about Shane the whole time.

I'm not saying it's BAD that it was mentioned, but I guess I just don't personally understand why that choice was made.

(And I did think the line felt true to Ilya's character but also it was uncomfortable and distracting and they could've easily done without.)

it’s awesome they made shane from heated rivalry korean in the tv show #true #real

saw this post by @littlespoonevan on my dash and immediately had to get to work bc i couldn't stop thinking about it:

ill be real though i do hate pretty much any mention of eddies time in afghanistan. everyone get more anti military now

its all fun and games until youre watching your protagonist shooting at faceless characters wearing thobes and turbans, because according to hollywood the lives of brown people in the global south are disposable. but yeah no whatever he saw it in afghanistan haha

and for the love of god stop making army wife buck jokes. keep that bootlicking boner to yourself goddamn

actually. they should have Chris roast Eddie's ass for being in the army like May did with Athena being a cop. that would be delicious.

What, you can't do math?

HEATED RIVALRY The Cabin

when ilya isn’t sure where he stands with shane at the all star game, he doesn’t react when shane uses an english word he doesn’t understand (compatible). he nods along and then looks it up in private. he probably practiced saying it so that he could bring it up again without looking stupid

once they’re in the cottage and his walls are fully lowered he immediately asks shane for clarity when he doesn’t understand an english word (what is narrative?). he even lets himself stumble over the pronunciation

it’s just one of the many delightful little ways they signal their growing emotional intimacy and one of the millions of reasons i love this fucking show

at my dad’s funeral having e-sex with my situationship in his reading glasses

heated rivalry + text [2/?]

Tfw you have to be gay around your family

and bonus Shane:

Shane and Scott’s semi woke friend being like “crazy to be an ice skating faggot at the Olympics am I right. Brave”