sorry guys the rpf begins now ig

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@cellyromance
sorry guys the rpf begins now ig
okay so due to my well-documented character flaws, preoccupations, &c. i checked the gay hockey book that they made into a tv show out of the library
okay so obviously the writers of this kind of romance themselves do not especially appreciate being read this way but i cannot help it: i am reaching through the text on the page to recover the rpf that came before it. i am reconstructing rpf antecedents like a really annoying philologist with a terrible ao3 history page making the most cursed stemma imaginable. this is an interesting variation on reading a book with a fandom vibe to figure out what fandoms the author was in/if the book began life as a fic, because hockey rpf is kind of federated in a way that e.g. supernatural fandom isn't. you can have two people in the same broader fandom who literally never read about the same people. but there are still shared & established tropes for how people tend to write about things broadly in hockey rpf, in addition to the distinct trends in the subcommunities. which is why i say with such confidence that although the trailer for the gay hockey show absolutely reeks of 2015 draft class, the book is indebted deeply to 2015ish sid/geno and sid/ovi fic, and reading it is really punting me back to ca. 2017 when i read basically nothing but hockey rpf. was this good? no. but i was in college
anyway! the book! heated rivalry! the basic plot summary is that there are two hockey guys. one of the guys is a japanese canadian who is drafted by the montreal [mumble], an NHL team with an established rivalry with the boston [bleep], an NHL team which includes on its roster the other guy, who is russian. they both play the same position and have very similar stat lines; they are drafted in the same year; they play for teams that hate each other. so they have a rivalry. they also spend 7 years hooking up with each other. okay great that's plenty of premise. they end up in love at the end or whatever, it works out, beautiful
what interests me about rpf & rpf-adjacent stories (i am thinking here of ✔️ please also, among others) is their relationship to reality. professional hockey is a real industry, and there's a lot of writing about it; however, the people who read hockey romances, rpf and otherwise, are usually people who have no direct connection to pro hockey, and often no particular interest in it. but where original romances must invent characters & so on, rpf is structured by information that we get from the real world, primarily from journalistic sources (famously, deadspin; now, the athletic), game tape, PR footage, and interviews. some authors are only tangentially interested in these facts, but there is a lot of rpf that is very interested in the specifics of the available information. there is a lot of tension around rpf fandoms & the question of whether the people in them believe that the romantic relationships they are writing are also real, which is mostly condescending & obnoxious. the party line is usually that they are writing fiction about the public personae of real people, which is distinct from the reality of the person themselves; in hockey rpf, which is the only kind of rpf i have read in substantial quantity, a lot of the writing is interested in the kind of pressure that produces a wide gap between a persona & its animating person. hockey is particularly famous for its players' flat, repetitive interviews. so a lot of the appeal in an rpf story is the idea that there is something complex, interesting, & suppressed happening behind those rote answers, and most often the proposed explanation is that the NHL & its mainstream fans are deeply homophobic (um. true), which forces players to hide parts of themselves & their lives from the public (&, usually, their coworkers) for fear of reprisal. even in imagined settings which reduce or remove homophobia, there is usually still an intensely loaded system of normative gender in play, which produces part of the erotic imaginary of the story (not just omegaverse but, obviously, omegaverse). i think this set of tensions is interesting.
sports romance is not the same as hockey rpf, because online rpf fanfiction is supported by a community of readers & writers who are very aware that they are doing a weird thing for fun and because romances are unmoored from the timeline of facts they have more latitude to decide what parts of hockey to include. i joked about this trend earlier this year, but i think sports scenes in sports romances are funny or maybe productive to read next to sex scenes, because there are similar, established ways of writing both (their tongues battled for dominance; he lost the faceoff; etc.): it's difficult to express physicality in a way that is grounded, true, & emotionally legible, so common scenes are often reduced to a set of common gestures described in familiar ways. this strategy is completely reasonable, it's just also boring & unspecific, which is to say it's unromantic to my eye. but we're still having fun! published romances have another problem that hockey rpf generally doesn't, which is the house rules of the publisher. specialized romance publishers will often proscribe certain things from the books they publish (famously, romances must have happy endings; they often also preclude certain kinds of sexual violence, bracket certain sexual practices with on-page negotiation between participating characters, and avoid situations which readers are likely to find very upsetting, or include content warnings at the beginning of the book for them). heated rivalry was published digital-first by harlequin, which is one of the largest & most established romance presses. i don't know exactly which rules were in force, but i suspect that the general attitude that romance is intended to be pleasurable to read for a presumed-female audience was in force.
heated rivalry has a very weird relationship to homophobia. the characters behave in ways that only make sense if they are threatened by homophobia, but that's not present in the story. the russian character vaguely asserts that it is 'worse for him', but he never thinks of anything specific; at one point someone calls him a homophobic slur and he's thinks 'well, half-true' and doesn't care. meanwhile, you have two people who never come out to anyone in their lives and do not have any gay friends at all who are hooking up with each other for seven years in secret. i'm not saying that no one would ever behave this way, i'm just saying that it feels kind of incoherent for them to choose to behave that way if there are no real problems. most of the way through the book a different hockey guy (probably has his own book in the series? idk) wins the cup and, of course, comes out by kissing his boyfriend at center ice, which is a huge trope in hockey rpf & also happens in ✔️please. hate this trope. anyway, they agree that he is "brave." there is no more information on how that went for him, and they don't talk to each other. it's very lonely. also, and this made me SO ANNOYED, one of them decides that he's going to leave his team in free agency so he can live closer to the other one. at no point does he speak to his AGENT. he's just like, "yes, i can definitely go to a different, specific other team, no worries." bro! are you both stupid! and his boyfriend's mom is like 'it kind of bothers me how disloyal to your team that is.' just absolutely vile, nonsensical little aside. they're not concerned about any kind of reprisals from their employers, but they probably should be. in such a situation one might contemplate contacting one's union rep, but fortunately this NHL is free of a players' association, or at least our heroes are unaware of it. the whole book is like that. there's no you can play; there are no pride nights; there is no brock mcgillis; we're just told that the NHL 'likes to look progressive,' which is an extreme moment of citation needed. there is no labor negotiation. the only hockey we see takes up, all together, probably less than three pages, and it's squeamish about hockey violence (one of them gets hurt while their teams are playing each other; even though this is a fabled rivalry, & in real life the bruins & the habs skate out there like they're trying to kill each other, the guy who made the hit clearly did so accidentally). it's entertaining to me, i guess! they might as well have been playing spaceball on the moon for all that their context seemed to matter.
there are hockey rpf stories that are deeply uninterested in hockey, of course. fandoms agglomerate around narratives, themes, & artists that are compelling to their members, & fanon often wanders far away from canon. there are always at least a few people in a fandom of any size that haven't read or watched or whatever the canon in question. the interesting thing to me about that phenomenon is figuring out which parts of a fandom are compelling to its members. i can list things that made hockey rpf interesting to me (labor negotiations; gender treated as a painful required performance; the complicated relationship one might have to one's body & its athletic prowess), but i'm not sure that that's what other people were getting out of it. some people just think hockey players are hot & want to think about them kissing, which i think is heroic of them personally. one thing that fandom excels at is finding a cis man and doing misogyny to him, and hockey rpf has a bunch of really peak cis-man-gets-misogynized content; this element is absent from the sports romances i have encountered. i don't have a great definition for what i mean here, but a lot of it is being talked over or undermined by employers or coworkers because of some aspect of a character's gender (omegaverse is a great vehicle for this kind of story, but it is not the only one). sports romances tend to treat the emphatic masculinity of their characters as a selling point, not grounds for inquiry. um. that sentence was maybe unhinged.
i like stories about hockey best when they are interested in being hockey stories, which doesn't necessarily preclude AUs, but it does for me at least require some earnest engagement with the material reality of pro hockey. hockey is dangerous, probably significantly more dangerous than we directly acknowledge (unlike the NFL, the NHL was able to get a judge to decline to certify a class action suit against it regarding head injury; each of those cases has been settled separately, mostly out of the press). it is profoundly conservative, both in its tolerance for violence and in its tolerance for bigotry; it's better than it was, but players of color are still subjected to racist abuse. also you do have to wonder if hockey specifically is the most popular rpf-fodder sport because of its very high proportion of white players. but pro sports in general are also just weird; those guys are living completely bizarre lives, not just in the sense that they're rich. all of these elements except maybe the last one detract from the broad appeal of stories about hockey players, and given how little hockey makes its way onto the page & the viewership numbers for pro hockey (higher than they have been but much lower than football, baseball, or basketball), even hockey itself is a barrier. which is why i keep poking at what's left, when you take the hockey out of the hockey, to be excited about
anyway! heated rivalry the book disappointed me and i will be watching the show as soon as possible
aucember day 8: marcheron + film noir au 🔍
was debating whether to post this but.. dewey in lingerie based off of @karlkapri 's post
obsessed with your story and want to know - do you have any essential background reading to recommend on will & Mack
hello 🥰 great question! i've used this article as a reference because it has their complete college record against each other (will smith hockey's hockey east dick trick beloved). it's also the article where will describes staying up late in czechia to watch mack get drafted. the roMANCE the red string of fate the yearninggg
it must be said that this video of them at a 49ers game is the foundational text that made me want to write them. yap god macklin celebrini vs will 'stoically pretending not to be a patriots fan' smith. the boys are humming indeed
will and mack both have empty netters interviews with lots of lore. the empty netters hosts are generally hit or miss for me but both interviews are pretty good. mack calls them on their bs at one point about who they root for in college hockey and it was a big OH moment for me that mack has this kind of hidden intensity under the goofball yapper persona
i also really love this interview where mack says he's excited to see "prime will smith" in action. just cute to me idk lol
better willmack scholars than i have done some more extensive digging and compilation. @moondoggiestyle has primers on will and his bc lore as well as mack and rick. i have learned everything i know about leno and gabe from her amazing scholarship!
also here's some important lore of mack and will playing against each other when they were 13/14ish which was dug up by @edmoil! in fact just check out their whole willmack tag because they are far more organized than i am!
finally this may seem obvious but if you watch sharks games, the official broadcast is putting in workkkk to give us willmack besties narratives. mack miming placing a crown on will (!?!?!?) and their own personal just-the-two-of-us games of sewerball are fun lil tidbits. the exciting thing about them as a pairing to me is that there are so many new little moments happening all the time! these are the good old days right now
aucember day 6: deweys + flower shop and tattoo parlour au🪴
hey remember when trevor zegras was an apple music guy but then he moved in with fellow rookie jamie drysdale, who only used spotify, so then trevor switched to using spotify so they could put together their shared playlist for watching sunsets on their rented rooftop, and jamie added only 6 songs but one of them was “Lover” by Taylor Swift, and then the summer that trevor got a girlfriend jamie quietly removed “Lover” from the playlist, and then a few months after that jamie got traded across the country and trevor abandoned his whimsical sunset rooftop playlist and replaced it with a playlist called “Sheets” (hockey bro slang for sheets of ice) full of stereotypical generic pump up workout songs. or is that just me
people write sports rpf because ultimately sports are heartbreaking. it does not care for the narratives it itself has set up. and one writes rpf because they try to say that, well, there was love. love will always be there. maybe the team failed, and maybe they’ll never see each other again but there was love in the meantime
aucember day 5: mcdrai + college au 📖
i think we need to go back to the old school “grilled cheesby” style of naming ships btw. i’m not a fan of just mushing names together ala sidgeno or combining them ala mcdrai although it is more readable than the indecipherable number system (187 -> 1/87? 819 -> 81/9?) because there’s really no whimsy involved. no joy. i think ship names should be wordplay that references the ship itself. you know how in old mario party games it would name the teams based on the characters?
i think we should do this. i’ll start workshopping some examples
for example
aucember day 2: mattdrai + corporate au 📈
levels of sports rpf:
players rpf
coaches/trainers rpf
mascot rpf
wags rpf
announcers/analysts rpf
…rpfer rpf?
we've all heard of fucking a teammate who's wearing your jersey during sex so now lets give it up for fucking a teammate who's wearing someone else's jersey during sex
the matsmarlenekirill corner of my brain has just reactivated like I'm a sleeper agent. sorry hi can we talk about the dynamics again. can we talk abt how she's basically kirill's age. can we talk abt how mats married a hockey player & now kirill tries to steal their children whenever he gets the chance and has a standing dinner date at their house and they take family skate pics together and do throuples halloween costumes as well apparently??????? or no
im gonna start pushing a marat/grapes agenda. it's for me. OK?
it's really like i just think marat would be a very willing participant in whatever wrestling lauks might want to do. grapes says hey im going to my fuckin mma club anyone want to come and somehow hootsy ends up going. learns a few things. hockey players are touchy but this is different body on body or whatever. Even if marat doesn't know anything. then they end up rolling around in a hotel conference room for shits and giggles and one thing leads to another.... and then they get lunch.
he will tear your city down
a marco rossi/jesper wallstedt regency fic
words: 4,262
Marielle ropes Marco into posing as her at a country ball. This is all well and good until Marco meets the Wallstedts and their younger son, Jesper.
unfortunately “we shouldn’t be doing this” sounds really hot during sex