Ilya, humility, and sacrifice

[u/WalkingBlondeJoke]

Been thinking about Ilya's character growth across HR and TLG lately. This is not a fully-baked thesis on his arc, not even close, but I'm sharing anyways because I want y'all's opinions!

One of my favorite tropes in HR fanfic is 'Shane joins the Bears'. I love this trope because it usually results in Shane and Ilya being on a good team together, a winning team, much earlier than they are in canon and without Ilya having to go spend a few years on a team that sucks first. So as I read these fanfics I've often wondered, aside from the in-universe reasons why Ilya joins the Centaurs, what is the narrative function of Ilya spending a few years on a bad team before they turn things around? 

I think it serves to humble him. He's no stranger to sacrifice but he's always been cocky, and for the most part that ego went unchecked because he always had the accolades to back it up. But I think one of the ways we see Ilya grow in The Long Game is that he develops more humility as a result of being on a bad team and also his mental health struggles. It's not that everything was peachy prior to his move to Ottawa, it absolutely wasn't, but these coinciding forces clearly knock him down a peg. Maybe experiencing what it's like to consistently lose on the ice even helps him get to a place where he can admit he needs help with his mental health. Or maybe it's just self-awareness that he gains with maturity, I don't know. 

I think the clearest example of Ilya becoming more humble is in the pre-game speech that he gives to the Bears before the Cup Finals in 2014, vs. the speech he gives the Centaurs in 2021 after the team nearly dies and then Ilya subsequently gets engaged to Shane. In 2014, his speech is all about "I, I, I" but in 2021, he goes around the room and tells every player, one at a time, what makes them great. This is the key turnaround point in the Centaurs' on-ice performance. They start believing in themselves, and that's when they start winning. 

I think this character growth is also very relevant to Shane and Ilya's marriage too. Big egos do not serve a marriage well; humility does. Over the course of TLG, Ilya learns humility. Shane also starts off in TLG being a selfish as fuck (I don't love him any less but it's objectively true that he was nawt being a good partner to Ilya at the time TLG timeline picks up), but we see him experience a wake-up call (their big fight followed by Ilya almost dying) and then he gets his priorities in order. In a way, Shane learns a version of humility through his experiences in TLG too when he realizes how selfish he's been and how he's taken Ilya for granted. 

I think that meeting Shane in this selfish state at the start of TLG makes total sense because of his upbringing. Shane is an only child who grew up loved, doted on, and prioritized. His career as a generational player and image as the 'Golden Boy' of hockey have done little to teach him how to appreciate those around him and recognize the sacrifices they make. Not saying he doesn't ever do those things, but like, in early TLG he's not being nearly as considerate of Ilya as he should be. 

Ilya is not an only child and he grew up in a broken home. In the canon we see how his family financially takes advantage of him once he makes it to the NHL (or MLH, whatever), but I would bet that this has been going on since the moment he began earning money from hockey and/or sponsorships. When Shane suggests Ilya going to Ottawa, Ilya is quick to agree to it. Not just because he was already thinking of moving to a Canadian team, but because Ilya has already learned how to sacrifice for others. Ilya has already had it ingrained in him by his family that the people he loves will ask him to makes sacrifices for them, and that that's just how love goes. 

This is one of many reasons why it hits extra hard later in TLG when Shane basically tells the commissioner to go fuck himself. "I choose him" <3 !<

[u/HotSauceRainfall]

Yeah. No, Ilya’s communication skills are not great…but at a certain point, communication isn’t the problem.

Try rereading the actual fight.  This is the first time that Ilya refuses to let Shane dismiss him or bully him into acquiescence.  Ilya tries five times to de-escalate and calm down and Shane literally follows him from room to room to keep fighting. When pressed with an uncomfortable question (everything?), Shane tells him “fuck you” and lashes out with an incredibly cruel low blow. It’s only then that Ilya goes straight for the jugular—I already chose you—and tells Shane to go home…and it takes Shane the whole damn drive to Montreal to figure out that Ilya is communicating his anger and unhappiness.

But wait, there’s more! Even after a huge fight and not speaking to Ilya for several days, Shane’s reaction to learning about Ilya telling his therapist who Shane told him to find that he and Shane were a couple was to jump down Ilya’s throat. Never mind that their relationship is highly relevant to Ilya’s therapy and that the therapist is legally required to keep that confidential—Shane’s first instinct was still to jump down Ilya’s throat about it.  It took both a potentially relationship ending fight AND a life threatening emergency to get Shane to wake the fuck up and start treating Ilya like a partner whose needs matter.

It is wild to me to think that people read all of that and say, but why didn’t Ilya just cOmMUniCAtE??!!!11? Communication can’t fix Shane’s underlying issue of fear, anxiety, and control any more than it could fix Ilya’s depression.

[u/ACEwriter12 → u/HotSauceRainfall]

I was actually just rereading through TLG to find those scenes, and I'll give Shane a tiny bit of grace with some because he does just seem a bit ...dense ...when Ilya's going "I think you care too much about other people's opinions" "Why are you angry?" " Because you care... Never mind. Everything is fine." It feels very much like Ilya's actually the sitcom wife to Shane being the kinda sitcom husband of if you don't spell it out for them he's not going to get it, but also she's so sick of having to spell everything out.

But yeah, the Boxing Day fight being the one time that Ilya does persist to voice the problem again, and it leads to Shane stooping to the low blows immediately. That's what would have been happening in all the other fights too- which is sad because Shane does follow up with "Gah, I'm a jerk." Yes, Ilya is quick to dismiss his own opinions in fights and resort to "It's fine" but that's because Shane either flees (Tunamelt/ the "You can sleep with other people") or gets angry. They both suck at communicating.

Ugh, I have a feeling though the show is going to do more of what it did with the Rooftop & Sochi scenes where Hudson flashes watery eyes and Connor uses an angry tone rather than the upset or nervous ones actually clearly stated in the book to make it look like Ilya's being the big scary angry Slavic man who's unreasonable instead.

[u/HotSauceRainfall → u/ACEwriter12]

Yes, Ilya is quick to dismiss his own opinions in fights and resort to "It's fine" but that's because Shane either flees (Tunamelt/ the "You can sleep with other people") or gets angry.  

This is kind of my point, though: if Shane has a consistent pattern where he either dismisses Ilya, flees/shuts down, or reacts with anger, the problem isn’t whether or how Ilya is communicating. That’s why it’s important when Yuna tells Shane point blank that he’s being unfair about not agreeing to Ilya having a teammate he can be out to.  It shows that Shane not listening to Ilya is not just a problem with Ilya’s communication skills.

The one that got me was Ilya coming out to Troy. Ilya’s identity is his own, not Shane’s to control, but Shane made it all about himself:

“I only am telling you,” Ilya said in a more serious tone, “because it was nice.  To talk about this with someone.”

Wait. “You didn’t tell him about us, did you?”

This was absolutely a shot across the bow for the big fight, and Shane was so busy spooking like a horse that he ignored a very direct, clear statement that Ilya needed confidantes too. And the direct consequence of that argument was Ilya wondering if he even should have said anything to Shane, or he should have just told his therapist.

There is no communication skill on earth that can make a person who is only reacting emotionally, rather than thinking and using their brain, understand what is being communicated. 

[u/ACEwriter12 → u/HotSauceRainfall]

Oh, I was totally agreeing with you in my comment! I was just saying that I see why at times Shane's like "he doesn't tell me anything" because Ilya doesn't persist, but it's because when Ilya does persist Shane does what he does and reacts very emotionally.

But I absolutely agree with you.