Realistically, who could've Ilya told about Shane
this is always something that puzzled me regarding the discourse about this argument in tlg. like yeah ilya definitely could’ve used someone to talk to about his relationship with shane, but realistically who was “safe” enough to tell? he didn’t have any family besides his asshole brother, he was chill with his boston teammates but seeing as none of them were at the wedding they couldn’t have been that close, the ottawa team is closer but they are still relatively newish additions to his life, and troy had the same issue of being a relatively new friend AND being the very recent ex bestie of a notorious bigot. when you compare this to the people on shane’s side that know (his parents and his best friend of 10 years) the difference makes a lot of sense logically. i guess the most comparable person on shane’s side would be rose, but even then he knew her for like 3-4 years (??? do we know canonically when shane told her about ilya) and she already knew he was gay and proved herself trustworthy before being told. shane just had more safe people to tell and that’s why he had more people that knew compared to ilya.
i think this disparity is what led rr to reconning ilya and svetlana’s relationship between hr and tlg. i never got the vibe that she and ilya were super close from their one scene in hr and i was extremely confused when he kept bringing her up in tlg (i genuinely thought i missed a chapter or something lol), but it makes sense for rr to tweak their relationship as ilya quite literally had zero personal connections outside of hockey and he needed at least one. but even after the retcon for svetlana, she still wasn’t a particularly safe opinion either, as she was still just an occasional hookup that ilya liked slightly more than his other hookups due to her speaking the same language. idk all this to say i think a lot of the hate shane gets for “not allowing” ilya to tell anyone is really undeserved. could he have been more understanding of ilya’s circumstances and feelings? absolutely. but i don’t think he’s a villain for not being comfortable telling people that he (and ilya) aren’t sure are 100% trustworthy