✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here
happy holiday szn everyone...... hope you are staying warm anad cozy!!!

the initial reactions to the show have been so fascinating... i remember in one interview jacob tierney was like i'm not too worried about marketing the story to men because gay men will literally watch anything and i was like ok wow what a condescending bitch, speak for yourself, but now every time i open twitter i am immediately hit with a 4k gif from a twitter gay who can't shut up about cstorrie's ass. like Okay Fair

also i feel like... yes people have no couth and we should be classy about this sort of thing and i genuinely don't care if a straight man wants to cosplay omega bottom, but also i roll my eyes when everyone is like omgggg don't turn this into a kit connor situation when anyone gets even a tiny bit nosy with it because like poor kit was a little 18 year old baby on a cutesy ya show when he was forced to come out while connor is a 25 year old man with an extensive gay digital footprint who couldn't be faggier if he tried. and THAT'S FINE! it's a beautiful thing to be an alternative LA bottom terrorizing grindr and taking on gay sports roles! why does it need to be a thing. #letmenbegay #letusacknowledgegaymen

i really do think their personal archetypes are sooo funny because they're almost parodies of themselves. hudson is just a run-of-the-mill pretentious artsy korean-canadian straight raver theater kid from van, which i think is rather funny even if his friendship with connor is ultimately quite sweet. the fuckass fujo layers of being his gf and doing matching sex sells tattoos on his and his gay co-star's thighs... lmfao. meanwhile connor is like, the funniest gay boy to ever exist, he's just classic socal gbf who clearly romanticizes non-american culture sooo badly because he thinks being from texas is kind of stale and boring and he wants to experience Haute Classe european debauchery. i like that they clearly are comfortable with each other and with intimacy in general and it is endearing that hudson is all like Connor is a sensitive baby flower and if you're not nice to him i will kill you

anyway, my assessment is that ultimately i do quite enjoy their performances and their overall casting in the show. i think connor especially knocks it out of the park and is clearly the stronger actor between the two of them, which Is What It Is, in terms of line delivery/effortless body language and also obviously accent work, not that hudson really had to work with anything there. my gripe with hudson is that i do feel like his delivery falls flat at times EVEN with the consideration that shane is supposed to be awkward, repressed, neurotic, autistic etc. but i don't even know how much is through his own interpretation and how much is explicitly directed by jacob, because they've joked about jacob always telling him to change things in the bts and it's kind of like hmmm well ok. like wait i actually do want to see what a nervous tic would have looked like on shane bring on the bloopers so i can analyze LOL.

what i will say is hudson has some very strong microexpression work and that it helps that their chemistry is fairly solid. he's great at surfacing shane's internal turmoil which obviously we lack direct access to in a narration-less show. and sometimes the stilted delivery Does work in a very like ohhh okay so there's a weird 22 year old canadian here, but sometimes i don't think it hits the mark he's aiming for. not that big of a deal though. also it is funny that people are like why does the show have so many d/s overtones but if you crossref the dialogue in the book it's the same... you're just bewitched by shane's omega eyes and das ok.

the pacing especially with only having 2 episodes out right now does suffer because of how fleeting their encounters are in the first half of the book, although obviously this will inevitably slow down now that we're reaching the core emotional development of their relationship, and i have high hopes for ep5-6 and will be sharing strong words if my expectations are not met... again mostly i am enjoying myself within the extent of the clear, slightly-low expectations i set for the show from the get go. also i think jt did shoehorn the racial aspect a little bit but i respect that like, this is in the context of late 2000s mtl media, and that ultimately making yuna a bit of an overbearing momager does help flesh out his relationship with his family more.

it is quite interesting that he cut out the early year hookups and repurposed a lot of dialogue differently to lend more weight to their first time in the mtl apartment. i did love the back-and-forth of the sexting scene and the way they demonstrated ilya's affection for shane's earnestness and that they're clearly building up ilya's rapport with marlow as his best friend on the team so that the concussion scene has more weight. jt is also playing a lot more with them getting Clocked by their friends/acquaintances (scott + svetlana) and i'm curious to see whether that awareness bleeds into scott's episode or if it'll just be the straightforward skip storyline interspersed between hollanov moments (or no hollanov at all? also possible).

current timeline

episode 1 - part 1, starts in 2008 and ends with 2011 awards, except they don't have their first time in the initial mtl hotel hookup
episode 2 - part 2, starts in late 2013 and ends with ilya winning the cup and 2014 awards

part 3 is the longest in the book so i wonder how much time will be devoted to it. the problem is that scott's storyline begins in 2017, but tuna melt/ilya's penthouse scene is at the beginning of part 3 and takes place in 2016 and will most likely be in episode 4 going off promo... so idk how they're going to do this.

predictions ???

episode 3 - probably straightforward skip episode with scott seeing kip at the gala, freaking da fuck out in da car, the sex scene in his apartment etc. (the remaining clips in the trailer). idk whether they're going to cliffhang on kip being frustrated with their relationship and then leave the cup scene for ep5 ending lmfao. i can see some scott & shane awareness stuff being woven in from how jt has set up scott's character but that could also just be because it was easier to use him as a stand-in in tv

episode 4 - part 3, late 2016 to early 2017, penthouse scene + meeting rose + club scene + florida asg + semi-confession + possible cliffhanger for ilya going home. they'll probably put in more solo scenes of family stuff with ilya to drive home his father's illness and the pressure he's under

episode 5 - rest of part 3, early 2017 to summer 2017, ilya in russia, calling shane and confessing to him under the bridge (clip from the trailer), skype sex, marlow hit + concussion/hospital scene, cottage Negotiations and scott coming out

* actually the asg stills are from EPISODE 5 what the hell. how are they going to fit everything into one episode 😭 i think the theory i saw that they're going to change the catalyst for the cottage from the kiss to the hit might be right but also then it's like if you do that why did you do episode 3... what on earth

episode 6 - 100 million thousand Sexies at the cottage. loon scene. david walking in on them. ottawa. you know the rest

looking at it this way it seems pretty straightforward and i actually think there might not be any hollanov at all in ep3 other than ilya stirring shit in his game changer moments. hmmm. but it does seem like jt followed the book structure pretty closely and the timelines match up conveniently. also i hope they include the epilogue in episode 6 :') anyway we shall be observing and experiencing.