"love takes miles" dvd commentary
Dec. 25th, 2025 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrocklove takes miles / gcu (6.9k, t)
weeee this was so much fun!
i conceptualized this fic after tanya and i finished (re)watching the first 2 eps in my hotel room in dallas when i was visiting for katseye. i was like "i want to write an ethnographic fandom study fic that encapsulates their 10 years of seeing each other but through the eyes of different generations of fandom" and she was like Omg Yes I Will Eat It Up and so kindly and generously enabled me, which i am forever grateful for.
honestly this was mostly an excuse to code extensive amounts of ao3 skins, but hollanov were the prime vehicle for several reasons. what i like is that they're perfectly aligned with the ups and downs of hockey rpf/fandom—of course the caveat is that this IS a fictional hockey world so you can't do 1:1 comparisons, for ex the blackhawks drew in a lot of hrpf fans in the early 2010s and ycp was a big part of the conversation for Gay Visibility in hockey, and i was like well i can't just put the burke family in my game changer universe fanfiction. so there is no ycp. basically there are similarities in tone and fandom growth, but obviously the actual journey has to differ.
but anyway again what i like about hollanov is that i just kept thinking about how fans will naturally fade in and out of fandoms, and how 10 years is SUCH a long time to be into something and inevitably there has to be someone who "grew up" with them and then moved on with their life, got married, started their career, had a child even, etc. while hollanov were perpetually suspended in the secrecy of their identities and affair. like it's a classic closeted athlete experience wherein first of all you're inherently emotionally stunted because you didn't go to college, your whole life was sport, your parents/coaches dictated everything you ever did, but then on top of that you can't even be "authentically" (to some degree of the word) yourself because you're constantly performing a persona. which isn't unique to sport obviously but there is that element. like those 5 times a year that they see each other could literally be one week of heterosexual dating, so they have to discover all these little things about themselves and each other over the course of what would be 3 months for a straight/Normal/pedestrian couple but is literally 10 years for them. >>> this is what i try to explore with the sophie ask where she's like "no i can't even imagine 2481 being real because they'd see each other like 5 times a year max? that's CRAZY." because literally a nice normie straight person would see their relationship and be like damn bitch you live like this...
also what i like is that their career timeline is perfectly aligned with sooo much modern internet + fandom history growth / millennial vs. gen z takeover—like the migration toward ao3, social media ux universally becoming more sleek and kind of indistinguishable from each other (twitter and tumblr looking almost identical at the end... more on this lol), the way the 4th wall is continuously challenged in New And Terrifying Ways ! etc. and i loved the idea of introducing an Older gen fan and a Newer gen fan who have completely separate experiences and who view fandom differently but are still tied together by their love (whether current or past) of this Thing, and i had a lot of fun making the new gen fan "uncover" all the existing/aforementioned lore and fanwork in her fresh exciting shiny new fandom (the primer, the older fan's fic). because the internet is forever and everything is full circle!!! i think especially as an older gen z who is very much between these two worlds it was fulfilling to switch between voices.
it took me a while to really get this fic going because i was kind of like "hmmm that would be cool, i want to do this at some point" and jotted down a few one-word bullet points and then i did Not write anything. it wasn't until dec 21 that i actually started filling out these scenarios and fleshing out the two characters (miss rollingwaves and miss holl24nder—another cultural thing i wanted to allude to is how a lot of writers back in the day didn't have fandom-specific writing names but now i feel like it's more common lol. Or well that's kind of a generalization but it felt accurate to this little pocket of hockey fandom specifically) and planning the timeline in earnest. something that bothered me majorly about rr's timeline is that shane and ilya, allegedly two of the most incredible hockey players of all time, did not start their rookie years right after they were drafted!!! but i respect the canon and incorporated these dates anyway. the years were a lot to keep up with (and i fudged some ages but am too lazy to correct them), so i actually made a gsheet so i could keep track of everything... i just realized i did nawt mention the plane incident at all LOL i admittedly got rather lazy around 2020 because i was like "whatever i can figure it out once i get there it's all fresh in my mind" but the problem is that the long game hasn't been adapted so there's a dearth of visual content and i'm kind of swimming in the dark in terms of presenting the fandom side. it is what it is...
also i learned through this that imgur has been restricted in the uk as of september??? which is stressing me out because i use imgur for EVERYTHING. for the fic specifically i ended up hosting on tumblr because the other option i tried was compressing things but all of my dw posts use imgur... this is a problem for another me.
where were we. this has literally been my entire lastfm for the past 3 days:
the power of believing in anything until my wolf parades... this fic also came to me at a very cameron winter heavy metal time of my life and it was kind of a non-starter that i would title it love takes miles from the get go... it really does take all those years and all that work and then some.
coding / construction
i am very extremely touched by people being like "i can't imagine how long it took to code this" but i also feel bad because it really took < a day... i reused my reddit + newgen tumblr from my luca fic to make my life a bit easier, but after writing up all the text i created a note to track the skins i needed and worked very methodically within my gdoc by fleshing out each block via html/css one at a time (the only problem with coding directly in gdocs is that i was constantly pasting shit into Unclosed Tag Checker LOL i make my life unnecessarily difficult). i started with the easy/unique bloggy ones and then did tumblr dash and twitter last... by the time i got to twitter i was kind of like Meh because initially i wanted to do two different twitter skins but at that point i was like it doesn't even look that different and i can't use the og twitter font so who even cares. also once again i could have put more pfps in this fic but i was like... does it matter? it's still legible without them and adding in all those pictures would have just taken way too long. i made the executive decision that the experience was already sufficiently immersive.
i was supposed to have macie's tweet about sophie's fic be a screenshot of the actual fic, but i was too lazy to write a segment that was objectively Good and warranted a screenshot because like what if my fake excerpt was really bad and people laughed at me. e.g. when people write about songwriter/poet characters in books but then the fake hypothetical lyrics are bad... I MAINTAINED THE MYSTERY. THE INTRIGUE. the bad low-effort summary was already taking it far enough asdflkhdflahsdf
i also worked very hard to make the gifs and dimensions fit their era. i compressed the gifs from 2012-2015, either desaturated (b&w gradient map set on soft light) or oversatured them, put ugly arial/calibri font subtitles, etc... also gifs Pre-2015 Tumblr were 250px/500px while gifs Post-2015 tumblr were 268px/540px!!! (which is reflected in the dashboard sizing change/the padding around media in posts disappearing.) like i hope that it felt "real" that this gif was from ~2011 and this one was from 2016 lol.
ermmm what else... the "terrible" reaction meme comes from one of my fav bedard memes that i had on my desktop and i sent it to hailey like omg i wish i could include this in my fic and she was like you literally can. and i was like Wait i literally can. so i whipped up the graphic in photoshop lmfaoo
the player tribune article was just inspect element on an existing article + screenshot. the shane stat card i think i used like a mix of robo or mcdavid or mackinnon as the bases and then also rewrote stuff myself with the font (barlow condensed)... i don't really remember anymore. i should have put more thought into it but it's that saying of don't draft mid-res because then you'll get complacent and be satisfied with it. i felt kind of bad stealing jfresh content for hockey yaoi but i literally am subscribed to hockeystats on patreon so it's kind of my right LOL. as a patron! a consumer! a customer!
for the site skins... ok so everything was very very easy to code except for the tumblr/twitter feeds because those don't exist anymore. like it's easy to emulate default dreamwidth skin or a blog that has stood the test of time because you can inspect element/check fonts, but with the actual First Person Dashboard View i had to look up old screenshots and infer from super blurry 360p data. hence why the tumblrs are kind of ugly...
credits
other than that there's not much... i did way less than i thought i did!
easter eggs / references
first off stuff i considered posting but couldn't really fit in... i try to make sure that my social media elements are actually contributing to the narrative (especially when they ARE the entire narrative) so i don't want to put like extremely contextless Fluff posts and tweets and also some of it was just a matter of bandwidth. the one thing i did include that i worried was kind of random was sophie's answer about omegaverse, but ultimately i kept it in because i wanted to elucidate why she felt so strongly about the ship/the ways in which shane's internal/external contrasts are appealing to the rpf consumers in this universe, and i also just thought it was really funny to immediately follow up with a less "respectable" fan going SOMEONE NEEDS TO BREED THIS OMEGA HOLE in poor op's tags lmfaooo.
but yeah:
— imagine 2018 post that goes: tumblr is banning porn now? does that mean no more compilations of shane going top shelf?
— i wanted to do BIG IMPACT FONT 2012 hockey memes (see example) but i'm not funny enough and couldn't think of anything.
— i wanted to include more stat posts, either stat cards/nhl.com stats or like ship graphs from fandom to show the evolution of different ships over time. the struggle with the latter idea is that there just AREN'T enough identifiable characters in this universe, like i can't keep using dallas kent as the only recognizably "bad" person in the series, and i'm sure there's a handful of other popular team ships that would exist but i didn't want to like, take the time to contextualize them and invent these random players. i did invent metros players for the tumblr user to yell at in the end but that was about it
— in the vein of player stats, i thought it would have been funny to do like You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about with ilya/hayden's stats, or just include a few hayden fangirls who are REALLY into their emotional support 4th liner and won't shut up about him. honestly icb he's been on that team for so long it's crazy. but yeah this didn't really fit in and i also got lazy
— i wanted to do an rmnb blog sooo bad (i was thinking rmas, russian machine always scores) but i couldn't make it work because he literally leaves boston. like that would make no sense. but the idea tickled me
anyway actual references:
happy holidays. WHO UP GOING TO THE COTTAGE !!!
weeee this was so much fun!
i conceptualized this fic after tanya and i finished (re)watching the first 2 eps in my hotel room in dallas when i was visiting for katseye. i was like "i want to write an ethnographic fandom study fic that encapsulates their 10 years of seeing each other but through the eyes of different generations of fandom" and she was like Omg Yes I Will Eat It Up and so kindly and generously enabled me, which i am forever grateful for.
honestly this was mostly an excuse to code extensive amounts of ao3 skins, but hollanov were the prime vehicle for several reasons. what i like is that they're perfectly aligned with the ups and downs of hockey rpf/fandom—of course the caveat is that this IS a fictional hockey world so you can't do 1:1 comparisons, for ex the blackhawks drew in a lot of hrpf fans in the early 2010s and ycp was a big part of the conversation for Gay Visibility in hockey, and i was like well i can't just put the burke family in my game changer universe fanfiction. so there is no ycp. basically there are similarities in tone and fandom growth, but obviously the actual journey has to differ.
but anyway again what i like about hollanov is that i just kept thinking about how fans will naturally fade in and out of fandoms, and how 10 years is SUCH a long time to be into something and inevitably there has to be someone who "grew up" with them and then moved on with their life, got married, started their career, had a child even, etc. while hollanov were perpetually suspended in the secrecy of their identities and affair. like it's a classic closeted athlete experience wherein first of all you're inherently emotionally stunted because you didn't go to college, your whole life was sport, your parents/coaches dictated everything you ever did, but then on top of that you can't even be "authentically" (to some degree of the word) yourself because you're constantly performing a persona. which isn't unique to sport obviously but there is that element. like those 5 times a year that they see each other could literally be one week of heterosexual dating, so they have to discover all these little things about themselves and each other over the course of what would be 3 months for a straight/Normal/pedestrian couple but is literally 10 years for them. >>> this is what i try to explore with the sophie ask where she's like "no i can't even imagine 2481 being real because they'd see each other like 5 times a year max? that's CRAZY." because literally a nice normie straight person would see their relationship and be like damn bitch you live like this...
also what i like is that their career timeline is perfectly aligned with sooo much modern internet + fandom history growth / millennial vs. gen z takeover—like the migration toward ao3, social media ux universally becoming more sleek and kind of indistinguishable from each other (twitter and tumblr looking almost identical at the end... more on this lol), the way the 4th wall is continuously challenged in New And Terrifying Ways ! etc. and i loved the idea of introducing an Older gen fan and a Newer gen fan who have completely separate experiences and who view fandom differently but are still tied together by their love (whether current or past) of this Thing, and i had a lot of fun making the new gen fan "uncover" all the existing/aforementioned lore and fanwork in her fresh exciting shiny new fandom (the primer, the older fan's fic). because the internet is forever and everything is full circle!!! i think especially as an older gen z who is very much between these two worlds it was fulfilling to switch between voices.
it took me a while to really get this fic going because i was kind of like "hmmm that would be cool, i want to do this at some point" and jotted down a few one-word bullet points and then i did Not write anything. it wasn't until dec 21 that i actually started filling out these scenarios and fleshing out the two characters (miss rollingwaves and miss holl24nder—another cultural thing i wanted to allude to is how a lot of writers back in the day didn't have fandom-specific writing names but now i feel like it's more common lol. Or well that's kind of a generalization but it felt accurate to this little pocket of hockey fandom specifically) and planning the timeline in earnest. something that bothered me majorly about rr's timeline is that shane and ilya, allegedly two of the most incredible hockey players of all time, did not start their rookie years right after they were drafted!!! but i respect the canon and incorporated these dates anyway. the years were a lot to keep up with (and i fudged some ages but am too lazy to correct them), so i actually made a gsheet so i could keep track of everything... i just realized i did nawt mention the plane incident at all LOL i admittedly got rather lazy around 2020 because i was like "whatever i can figure it out once i get there it's all fresh in my mind" but the problem is that the long game hasn't been adapted so there's a dearth of visual content and i'm kind of swimming in the dark in terms of presenting the fandom side. it is what it is...
also i learned through this that imgur has been restricted in the uk as of september??? which is stressing me out because i use imgur for EVERYTHING. for the fic specifically i ended up hosting on tumblr because the other option i tried was compressing things but all of my dw posts use imgur... this is a problem for another me.
where were we. this has literally been my entire lastfm for the past 3 days:
the power of believing in anything until my wolf parades... this fic also came to me at a very cameron winter heavy metal time of my life and it was kind of a non-starter that i would title it love takes miles from the get go... it really does take all those years and all that work and then some.
coding / construction
i am very extremely touched by people being like "i can't imagine how long it took to code this" but i also feel bad because it really took < a day... i reused my reddit + newgen tumblr from my luca fic to make my life a bit easier, but after writing up all the text i created a note to track the skins i needed and worked very methodically within my gdoc by fleshing out each block via html/css one at a time (the only problem with coding directly in gdocs is that i was constantly pasting shit into Unclosed Tag Checker LOL i make my life unnecessarily difficult). i started with the easy/unique bloggy ones and then did tumblr dash and twitter last... by the time i got to twitter i was kind of like Meh because initially i wanted to do two different twitter skins but at that point i was like it doesn't even look that different and i can't use the og twitter font so who even cares. also once again i could have put more pfps in this fic but i was like... does it matter? it's still legible without them and adding in all those pictures would have just taken way too long. i made the executive decision that the experience was already sufficiently immersive.
i was supposed to have macie's tweet about sophie's fic be a screenshot of the actual fic, but i was too lazy to write a segment that was objectively Good and warranted a screenshot because like what if my fake excerpt was really bad and people laughed at me. e.g. when people write about songwriter/poet characters in books but then the fake hypothetical lyrics are bad... I MAINTAINED THE MYSTERY. THE INTRIGUE. the bad low-effort summary was already taking it far enough asdflkhdflahsdf
i also worked very hard to make the gifs and dimensions fit their era. i compressed the gifs from 2012-2015, either desaturated (b&w gradient map set on soft light) or oversatured them, put ugly arial/calibri font subtitles, etc... also gifs Pre-2015 Tumblr were 250px/500px while gifs Post-2015 tumblr were 268px/540px!!! (which is reflected in the dashboard sizing change/the padding around media in posts disappearing.) like i hope that it felt "real" that this gif was from ~2011 and this one was from 2016 lol.
ermmm what else... the "terrible" reaction meme comes from one of my fav bedard memes that i had on my desktop and i sent it to hailey like omg i wish i could include this in my fic and she was like you literally can. and i was like Wait i literally can. so i whipped up the graphic in photoshop lmfaoo
the player tribune article was just inspect element on an existing article + screenshot. the shane stat card i think i used like a mix of robo or mcdavid or mackinnon as the bases and then also rewrote stuff myself with the font (barlow condensed)... i don't really remember anymore. i should have put more thought into it but it's that saying of don't draft mid-res because then you'll get complacent and be satisfied with it. i felt kind of bad stealing jfresh content for hockey yaoi but i literally am subscribed to hockeystats on patreon so it's kind of my right LOL. as a patron! a consumer! a customer!
for the site skins... ok so everything was very very easy to code except for the tumblr/twitter feeds because those don't exist anymore. like it's easy to emulate default dreamwidth skin or a blog that has stood the test of time because you can inspect element/check fonts, but with the actual First Person Dashboard View i had to look up old screenshots and infer from super blurry 360p data. hence why the tumblrs are kind of ugly...
credits
- og blog theme (redux) is still available: https://safe.txmblr.com/theme/preview/433
- "nostalgia" theme by cubicle17, available to install on tumblr themes, i liked theirs the most as one i think a simple millennial writing bnf would keep for years after upgrading from the default one. i considered doing a 3rd theme but decided it wasn't necessary: https://safe.txmblr.com/theme/preview/474
- the actual 2014 ships wrapped, i didn't make the top 5 up i swear!!!: https://fandom.tumblr.com/post/162440764104
- the lj anon meme is like, technically ffa but also not really, because you have to assume that this is a specifically hockey-focused meme that was around in 2015 where people could create a shippy thread without context. but i just lifted the formatting from an old ffa thread... creative liberties!
other than that there's not much... i did way less than i thought i did!
easter eggs / references
first off stuff i considered posting but couldn't really fit in... i try to make sure that my social media elements are actually contributing to the narrative (especially when they ARE the entire narrative) so i don't want to put like extremely contextless Fluff posts and tweets and also some of it was just a matter of bandwidth. the one thing i did include that i worried was kind of random was sophie's answer about omegaverse, but ultimately i kept it in because i wanted to elucidate why she felt so strongly about the ship/the ways in which shane's internal/external contrasts are appealing to the rpf consumers in this universe, and i also just thought it was really funny to immediately follow up with a less "respectable" fan going SOMEONE NEEDS TO BREED THIS OMEGA HOLE in poor op's tags lmfaooo.
but yeah:
— imagine 2018 post that goes: tumblr is banning porn now? does that mean no more compilations of shane going top shelf?
— i wanted to do BIG IMPACT FONT 2012 hockey memes (see example) but i'm not funny enough and couldn't think of anything.
— i wanted to include more stat posts, either stat cards/nhl.com stats or like ship graphs from fandom to show the evolution of different ships over time. the struggle with the latter idea is that there just AREN'T enough identifiable characters in this universe, like i can't keep using dallas kent as the only recognizably "bad" person in the series, and i'm sure there's a handful of other popular team ships that would exist but i didn't want to like, take the time to contextualize them and invent these random players. i did invent metros players for the tumblr user to yell at in the end but that was about it
— in the vein of player stats, i thought it would have been funny to do like You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about with ilya/hayden's stats, or just include a few hayden fangirls who are REALLY into their emotional support 4th liner and won't shut up about him. honestly icb he's been on that team for so long it's crazy. but yeah this didn't really fit in and i also got lazy
— i wanted to do an rmnb blog sooo bad (i was thinking rmas, russian machine always scores) but i couldn't make it work because he literally leaves boston. like that would make no sense. but the idea tickled me
anyway actual references:
- ilya's tweets are inspired by geno, obviously. tomato - fruit??? ilya is obviously ovi-inspired and i leaned into that throughout the fic but i also felt like there were obvious geno moments i could naturally fold into his character so i allowed that to come through
- same with shane being sid, i feel like Canadian Hockey Robot was very much his defining characteristic especially when he was younger so i used that a lot in the dw primer. i wanted to do more like... idk i guess exploration of how he's perceived one-dimensionally by fans/media, and i think that would have inevitably gone into the heritage and race stuff, but i also don't really feel like this fic format had the capacity for that. like i've followed the habs for years and i was saying on twitter earlier that mtl media cares more about francophone Diversity and Representation and would be way more interested in jj being a haitian quebecer than shane being anglo asian... there are many layers and nuances to this, and i do touch on the inherent racism and xenophobia of both the fandom + sport, but yeah idk it's just a lot that i don't think i could have precisely expressed. and i was literally guy who started hockeyofcolor dot tumblr dot com in 2015 lol.
- "no hockey emoji but imagine it anyway 🎿" the 🏒 emoji wasn't approved until unicode 8.0 in 2015! one of the first things i said about this fic concept was WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE HOLLANOV FIRST HOOKUP PREDATES HOCKEY EMOJI BY 5 YEARS. so every single emoji i used here is historically accurate...
- shayden at #71, hollanov at #87, scilya at #97 for the ships post lol. i just needed high-ish numbers because they wouldn't be That Popular and i thought it was funny
- the fake fic rec post!!! this was inspired by FICS I WOULD LIKE TO READ IN THIS FANDOM. anyway Creatures Lurk Below the Deck = king and lionheart lyric because every historical au in 2013 was called king and lionheart. ghosts (dying for you) is the mountain goats song. just a memory is track on pacific rim soundtrack. and MY MOON MY MAN is me being ultra-meta because i love when pov outsider fic has that one person who Gets Everything Accidentally so i wrote in the concept of an in-universe rpf fic that actually covers their whole story and this op is like "omg haha this feels so real. crazy. i almost believed that they're hooking up"
- i use the troy & dallas ship as an example of like... kind of obvious unsavory players who you know are shitty people irl but there is that suspension of disbelief with rpf and athletes and well anyway. and how even homophobic dudes Do The Teammate Intimacy because it literally cannot be read through a non-sports lens so hollanov cheek-kissing is literally a nothingburger and yara is like "my guys do this too"
- steve rogers mention because i had to. sorry
- ron lemon is my greatest achievement... i messaged hailey like "what would gcu don cherry be called. doug lemon? RON LEMON" and the rest was history
- the dallas kent copypasta is like a waste of 200 words but also it's SOOO funny to me because i've never read an anecdotal reddit thread without someone posting it 😭 sorry i had to.
- prince albert rumour = alleged ovi dick piercing
- i feel like that's it i've covered everything else already. ok yay
happy holidays. WHO UP GOING TO THE COTTAGE !!!
