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
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