hysterical actually. we’re out here debating and meanwhile the book just straight-up says “yeah Galina might be shit at her job, Ilya wouldn’t know”
Shane’s sneezes are the loudest sneezes known to man and Ilya snores like an entire camp of lumberjacks but they both drool when they sleep and swear on their lives that they don’t and that’s marriage
idk I too would really like it if a professional told me what to eat and what to wear and how to exercise and how to furnish my house based on my preferences and needs and lifestyle. I don’t know how that stuff works but someone else does! why not benefit from their expertise and make my life easier!
I know it’s tacky to talk about numbers but: the fic I posted a month ago already has more kudos than any of my other fics but doesn’t make the top five by comment threads and has almost four times as many bookmarks as comments. 4.5% of people who left kudos wrote a comment. I know I’m used to smaller fandoms where people are just way more chatty in general, but oof.
moment of intense respect to kyle swift for looking at quiet, serious, his-body-is-a-temple eric bennett and correctly diagnosing that he’d be down for kinky shit. that man lives like a monk and didn’t even know about edging until five minutes ago and kyle just swooped in and went “bet you’d like being tied up” and he was right
I do find it interesting how many times I’ll see discourse about a particular scene or line from one of the books (especially TLG) and then I go to look it up and that’s straight-up just not what it says
my new tattoo is healing really well and I am still madly in love with it but I am a bit tired of leaving a thin film of panthenol on everything I touch
re: Hollanov getting outed, narrative structure, and the story you want to tell
Stories (such as romance novels) are all about tension. There is a conflict which the characters are affected by and at some point, that conflict and the tension created by it as resolved (not always positively!). In romance novels, that conflict is also called “the barrier between them"¹ because the central problem is not whether the protagonists get together and live Happily Ever After, but how they overcome the internal or external obstacles that are keeping them apart at the beginning of the story.
In The Long Game, the main barrier between Shane and Ilya and their HEA is homophobia in hockey generally and the fallout of their relationship with each other as Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov specifically. This is an external obstacle that was already present in Heated Rivalry, but that book focused on how the external obstacle also created internal barriers, making them unable to believe that they could ever be together, and the resolution there is "we can’t overcome the external obstacle, but we can accept that we love each other and that acceptance makes us happy.” It makes a lot of sense for this story to focus on the internal conflict because the external conflict is basically insurmountable.
The Long Game has to end with Shane and Ilya publicly out and in a relationship with each other because this second HEA needs to be a progression from the first one, because otherwise the story stagnates. So there are three options for when in the book it happens: the beginning, the middle, or the end.
ALTIf the outing (labelled “bradgate” in the above, extremely scientific illustration) happens at the beginning of the book, it has to be the inciting incident for the story and the main conflict would then be about navigating the fallout of getting outed, leading to some kind of climax that resolves the resulting tension between Shane and Ilya and brings them back together.
If it happens in the middle of the book, there would still need to be a conflict leading up to it because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story. So they would be not out for half the book, dealing with something else, then get outed and spend the other half of the book dealing with the fallout of getting outed. I’m sure it would be possible to make this work somehow, maybe if the first half was also about information being leaked, but generally this would be bad storytelling practice for genre fiction and especially romance, which prioritises the protagonists’ relationship over external plot and therefore usually keeps the latter to a minimum.
The third option, the one we ended up with, positions getting outed as part of the resolution to the tension created by the protagonists’ relationship. The Long Game primarily revolves around Shane and Ilya realising that their previous HEA doesn’t work for them anymore and trying to negotiate what they want (to stop having to hide their relationship) with the external obstacle represented by the league and the threat to their careers and safety. By the time they are outed against their will, they have already decided to come out themselves in a couple of months and are so secure in their relationship that they are willing to accept the negative consequences. Bradgate then functions to increase the stakes so the story doesn’t just trickle towards an ending (if they had been in control and come out after the season ended, the realistic and in-character plan, the outcry wouldn’t have been so immediate; it would all have happened online and in meetings with lawyers during the off-season, which would be boring to read about).
If The Long Game started with Shane and Ilya being outed against their will, it would be a very different book. Diving deeper into the consequences and backlash would be a really compelling and emotionally intense story, but it would be a complete tonal shift from the rest of the series, which prioritises queer joy as an empowering force while acknowledging the limitations of the main conflict (homophobia in men’s sports). The Long Game as it was published instead centres the protagonists growing both as individuals and as a couple so that they are able and ready to stop hiding, because they love each other and are choosing their love over the potential negative consequences. All of the couples in the series actively choose to be together (and the closeted characters choose to be open about their queerness) because that’s what makes them happy and gives them the kind of life they want, and The Long Game ultimately lets Shane and Ilya make that same choice before Bradgate accelerates their timeline.
As a book, it definitely has its flaws! Not every part of it is executed as well as it could be and the constraints of the genre mean the ending feels rushed because there are a lot of loose ends to tie up. But Shane and Ilya were always going to be out and married at the end of it and the choices made in the construction of that narrative make perfect sense to me. This is not the only possible version of the story, nor is it the only good version of the story, but it is consistent with both the genre conventions and the author’s other work and successfully does what it sets out to do.
¹Pamela Regis, The Natural History of the Romance Novel
I’ve been taking lisdexamphetamine for maybe eight or nine months now and I still can’t decide whether it’s working for me or not. Some days are great and I can clean my house and answer emails and I feel fine, other days it feels like my brain stops working entirely and I am randomly hit with bouts of despair. I know some of it is about managing things like sleep and food and what I’m doing when the effects kick in but it’s kind of hard to figure out how to do that and it’s really frustrating. It’s also really not helped me with the work/focus processes for my dissertation, which is kind of the main problem I need help with.
I tried methylphenidate for six weeks last year and loved how quiet my brain was and I think it worked better for my work processes, but it also made my heart race and I could barely eat while on it. So I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do here.
it’s the semester break right now and all my colleagues either have a) significant commutes b) school-aged children c) both, so I have our this entire corridor to myself at the office. It’s great because I can play music out loud and take a floor nap if I want and walk around with my phone stuck in my bra and nobody’s here to care, but I do miss talking to real human people sometimes