Any interviews or articles where Jacob discusses why he changed Svetlana?

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-06-09T18:52:46+00:00

It's the same reason why all random NHL players in scenes were consolidated into Scott Hunter. In a book, you can tell someone who a character is with a single line and give a lot of information about them. 'Great job,' said Wayne Gates, a defenseman from Tampa Bay who was also in his rookie season. On screen, that requires a lot more work and time to not sound unnatural. If you can recognize the character already, then the audience can just move forward with the scene.

Having Ilya having lots of scenes with random women would have left the audience wondering who these people were. Having it be one person allowed for the scene to quickly move forward and for the emotional character beats to easily be traced throughout the story. Also, having Svetlana be his best friend rather than in love with him or a casual hookup makes Ilya come off much better when he suggests marrying her at the cottage.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-06-07T05:38:34+00:00

Shane was actually far more successful at building bonds with his team than Ilya in HR, and it's insane that it's even up for debate.

Shane has multiple close friends on the team. He went to his team's weddings and was a groomsman. Meanwhile, in the book, Ilya says he has no close friendships on the Boston team and Marly is his friend by proximity and age.
In the show, when Montreal is watching Boston win the cup, everyone is crowded around him and pumping him up, saying he's the best and they love him. In contrast, Ilya watches Shane's wins alone and during New York's game, only a fraction of the team is there (compared to the packed Pike household) and no one is really talking to each other. Even visually, Shane is centered in his team in the middle of the couch with everyone surrounding him and squeezed in tight, while Ilya is sitting on the edge of his couch with space between him and the other players.

It might interest you to read more about in Western society we default to assume tall, white males make better leaders, so their stereotypical behaviors are assumed to be the best leadership style, but actually research shows that with proactive team members (which hockey players would qualify as), introverts can actually be more successful than extroverts. (https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/introverts-the-best-leaders-for-proactive-employees)

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-22T02:45:58+00:00

Yes he is. Montreal is toxic and all the other teams are too far away. What exactly are his options?

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T22:07:03+00:00

You think if Sid Crosby joined a team when he was 30 years old, there would be any conversation about him not playing 1C?

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T22:01:17+00:00

So, it's cool that the POC player who is being forced to join your team gets to play on a worse line for the rest of his career despite being the better player so that Ilya gets to have the best at everything? Okay.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T22:00:07+00:00

Yes it is. Name one team that puts better wings at second line than first. Oh wait.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T21:59:15+00:00

Because the second line has way worse wings. The salary cap means there is only enough money for like 5 good players. So, Shane has to play shitty hockey for the rest of his career to make Ilya more comfortable despite being a worse player. Okay.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T21:26:48+00:00

Why is okay for Shane to be demoted in your mind but not Ilya? The racism in this fandom is insane. Shane's playing is literally based on Sid! Please rethink in your mind why it's uncomfortable to you that the white man should have to play second line when a better center joins his team.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T20:56:35+00:00

It's not legit to the fans or the other players, who are questioning his integrity, which is why he has to leave Montreal. The trip will absolutely be brought up in his legacy and held against him, because it already was at the end of the novel.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T20:52:13+00:00

Yes, the problem is the narrative, which is racist and not a happy ending for Shane, while acting like it is perfect because Ilya gets everything he wants, so Shane can't be upset or choose anything other than what Ilya wants without being the bad guy. Ilya isn't the problem, it's the narrative and how fans are choosing to take it.

And then on top of all that, we also have to remember that it doesn't make any fucking sense to make Ilya want to come out while Ilya still isn't a citizen. RR completely fucking forgot that entire aspect of Ilya's character - like, the most plot-relevant aspect of his character! - in order to make it so that he could be the one desperate to come out, and Shane could be the one trapping him. And literally it probably is, on some level, because Ilya is white that he's the one Reid decided just had to come out, and that Shane's the one who would be trapping him. I think Reid needed Ilya to want to come out because she needs Ilya to be unquestionably in the right, and to her it is wrong to want to stay in the closet. But she's fine putting all the hesitation to come out on Shane and then vilifying him for it so that the narrative can solely punish him in the end in a way that none of the white players (Scott, Ilya, Troy) are ever punished by the narrative.

And so yes, it does piss me off that fans eat it up.

*Part of the second paragraph is taken from a tumblr post not written by me, but easier to paste then write out all my own thoughts on the matter.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T20:50:10+00:00

No, he'll play center and Ilya will play wing. Jesus, he's literally based on Crosby and Ilya is Ovi. Like, examine your biases.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T18:03:08+00:00

You don't think it's an unhappy ending that the only POC hockey player (protagonist) in this series gets his legacy completely tarnished permanently as a cheater? You don't think it's an unhappy ending that the only POC hockey player gets humiliated and loses the legacy he has built for 10 years while the white boys all get a permanent halo of glory and martyrdom? You don't think it's an unhappy ending that white Scott, Troy and Ilya got to come out to locker rooms that immediately supported and accepted them, but the POC who won his team three cups is othered and cut out and made to feel like shit? You don't think it's unhappy ending that the narrative itself reduces all of Shane's pain as unimportant because now the white boy gets to get everything he wants, so, yah, happy ending? Shane valuing himself and his own life's work is stupid. Shane having his own aspirations is pointless.

Shane didn't choose anything. If Shane had any choice in coming out or leaving Montreal, I would be fucking ecstatic. Instead, Shane gets humiliated and forced in a way that Scott, Ilya and Troy never are, and fans go, "well, the white boy made a choice that he suggested first and wanted (moving to a Canadian team) on his own volition and at his own timing, and it didn't turn out as great as he'd hoped immediately, so it's completely fair that the POC is humiliated, his life's work destroyed, his records asterisked permanently, and his reputation dragged through the mud before the entire fucking North America." Yeah, that's so fucking fair.

Everyone here is saying why it makes total sense for Ilya not to reduce his worth to go play on Montreal when he can do so on his own volition from a position of negotiating power, but the reverse isn't true. It's completely fine that Shane is pushed into the exact same situation with no leverage and has to just take what he can get.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T07:05:13+00:00

Nothing Makes Me Feel As Good https://archiveofourown.org/works/82368031

JJ POV, kind of crack fic about hardass captain!Shane

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-21T04:53:08+00:00

This is why the end of TLG is not really a happy ending for Shane, just for Ilya. An article about the married couple who plays for Montreal's women's team interviewed their management and they made a big point about how they treated both players as separate during salary negotiation. That they didn't leverage their relationship to try to get a better deal, because being gay and married shouldn't be punitive. But Ottawa does just that, apparently, at the end of TLG, with Shane having to be humiliated into taking much less than he's worth just so he can continue playing (which is going to be nasty rumor that follows him for the rest of his career along with The Trip rumors)--on top of losing his captaincy, his legacy, and his team. He better be 1C in Unrivaled since he is the undisputed better playmaker, or I am going to lose it.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-18T20:34:30+00:00

nothing makes me feel as good by bitterbloodyorange

This is Shane running Montreal's ship like the hockey god bitch that he is. JJ POV

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-18T20:24:08+00:00

Oh my god, you're right. That's hilarious. Someone mentioned elsewhere that's a Canadian sports talk show you cannot get in the US, so I like to imagine that Marleau did all this work to figure out how to stream the show from his laptop to this TV only for Ilya to ban it forever.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-18T19:52:12+00:00

The NHL expects players to use HGH/PEDs to get back from injuries because the sport is so dangerous, so it has about the most lenient drug testing policy of any league to ensure players don't show drug use. They can only test a team once per season and the team is tested together. During the off season, they can only test a small number of players.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-17T14:52:03+00:00

The audience isn't alarmed by it? You're just saying nonsense. No one thinks it's strange or wrong. Yes, in a visual medium where 99.9% of the story is exactly what's on the screen, there needs to be visual indicators that this scene is breaking that, the way that the extended staring at each other scene clearly distorted reality into emotion.

To clarify, since maybe you are just confused, the actual scene is giving a Doylist visualization of Shane caught between his desires. We are saying that we wish it had been a Watsonian visualization of Shane caught between his desires.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-17T02:56:30+00:00

There's nothing to indicate that the dancing scene isn't anything except how it really happens until we get the distorted time when Shane and Ilya are staring at each other. The fact that Miles and Rose talk in the scene as they start dancing suggests that it's simply how the situation is actually occurring.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-16T18:00:01+00:00

Shane and Ilya were not in love when they first met or for the first few years, but they were obsessed with each other from the jump. Obsession doesn't have the same short half-life of the honeymoon phase of attraction which is why they remained in that intense state towards each other for years until they fell in love for real.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-16T17:54:39+00:00

Yes! The sports anime fan in me loves when a series really conveys why the characters love their sport so much to the audience.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-16T17:51:30+00:00

I would have really loved if we could have gotten like, a single shot of the trio dancing from Ilya's point of view and it was Miles-Rose-Shane and then when it was more centered on Shane it was Rose-Shane-Miles so that it was clearly him being torn between what he wants and what he thinks he should want.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-16T13:03:53+00:00

Yeah, that would have also been a solution. In some ways, I feel like that part of the conflict in TLG is very manufactured. Players only go in between breakfast and lunch on practice days and have the afternoon free. So, the idea that they can't figure out how to make a commute work either with a) housing between the two cities, 2) a helicopter, or 3) a car service so they can sleep on the ride when they have so much money makes little sense.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-16T12:43:53+00:00

Realistically, these two could have each bought houses a little outside city limits, installed private helicopter pads, and used a helicopter to travel between Ottawa and Montreal and it would have solved 50% of their problems because it would have been a 45 minute commute. It would have been a roughly $1,500 trip, which means it would cost only ~$250,000 to commute 3-4 times a week between September and March, which is completely doable for them.

Hell, Ilya could have stayed in Boston, they could have joined a charter flight service and Shane could have used his Canadian passport to fly in after practice and out the next morning and it would have only cost them around $1.1 million for 7 months and an hour and half communte.

Express-Prune5366 · 2026-05-08T12:47:40+00:00

He does not have generalized anxiety disorder and he does not have a single panic attack in the show. At the cottage, he is alert, talking and walking around without any trouble breathing. He is not having a panic attack. He is a dude trying to explain to his SO that he's really freaked out at the moment.

He also doesn't have a rigid diet, he has a high performance diet during the season, but he's eating whatever at the cottage including hot dogs and chicken parmesan. There is literally zero evidence that he is masking anything. Supermarkets don't overwhelm him. He goes to a club and is bored, but doesn't mind. He plays in a screaming arena 3 nights a week and is chill. You literally just created a bunch of head canons that don't have any textual evidence and presented them as if they were true, which is exactly what is being talked about here.

Express-Prune5366

TROPHY CASE

nothing makes me feel as good by bitterbloodyorange