I love when people ask "how did you learn this skill?" I just started, there's no secret. that's it. a vast majority of the time the only thing holding you back is your trepidation to start.
is there a primer on brioux?? i feel myself slowly becoming more and more intrigued, I've only really been following hockey for the past year so I don't know a lot, but they seemed to have such a good relationship!
afaik there is no current brioux primer out there (there is however this great 2011 lj one) (eta: i forgot about this post which is a great quick intro!), and this is by no means an attempt at a full comprehensive storyline but let me put some stuff together to get you started
this will be very light on hockey facts and I made the executive decision to skip all playoff and injury stuff (sorry!) bc i did not want to spend 3 weeks on this <3 stats are easy to look up and I am already cutting this down to the bare minimum of info lol but if u wnt a really perfect in depth primer on claude alone i cannot rec this one enough
the basic facts are that danny, who is ten years older, is already a bonafide nhl star and former captain of the buffalo sabres by the time claude makes it to the league and baby claude is very awestruck at first! there is a gifset somewhere on here of him gushing about getting to play with danny but i cant find it for the life of me rn rip (eta: FOUND IT AGAIN!!!)
danny is known as an insane playoff scorer and him and claude both go the fuck off in the flyers' 2010 run. their amazing on-ice chemistry prompts danny to ask claude to move in with him, and after thinking it over during the summer claude agrees and goes to live w freshly divorced danny and his 3 sons and two dogs for the 2010-11 season.
articles from the domestic era are plentiful and a delight, even if they often are pushing a somewhat agressively early-2010s #nohomo attitude: they were road roommates! they sent out joint christmas cards! they were family! the all-star game that year in particular is a treasure trove lol
flyers pr also produced a legendary video that cant decide if the tone they want to go for is "father-son dynamic" or "married bliss" that i could ofc simply link right now but I will embed it bc it is insane enough that I need to ensure people watch it so here you go:
this video is not much different but is from actual tv instead of flyerstv so to drive the point home here u go again
after getting hounded by the media over living together all season, at some point during the summer claude presumably moved out, because he lived with newly aquired flyer brayden schenn (yes, that's the captain of the st. louis blues) for the 2011/12 season. that was also when danny took in the newest flyers rookie, one sean couturier, to live with him and the boys to establish a pattern of being the team's Big Brother who takes younger guys under his wing.
sidenote that's neither here nor there but in march 2012 claude (among others, it is truly blink-and-you-miss-it) was part of the first ever video put out by the You Can Play Project, an organisation focused on eradicating homophobia in sports that was founded in memory of openly gay hockey player brendan burke, who was the brother of flyers scout patrick burke.
2012/13 was the nhl lockout and if anyone needed proof that claude and danny were still getting along they got it: both of them sign for the same team together, the berliner eisbären, and at least at the start they also once again live together (german source). even though they both only play a handful of games before getting injured and going back to north america, they are well received and enthusiastic about getting to play together.
ofc we have this era to thank for footage of them telling each other "I love you" in german. the clip is sadly not accessible anymore but thanks to all the gif-making superstars on here proof of it survives <3 (sidenote: there are several ways of telling someone ilu in german and the one they are using is exclusively romantic. which could mean nothing.)
after the shortened 2012/13 nhl season finally gets underway and it doesnt look like last year's captain chris pronger will ever come back from IR, claude is officially named captain of the flyers and after a slow start, has a very productive last leg of the season but can't drag the flyers to the playoffs, which they miss for the first time since 2007. one other thing that happens that season is that summer, management decides to buy out the remainder of dannys 52 mil $ contract to free up cap space and not even a full month later, claude signs a fancy new 8 year extension worth 66.2 mil $. no need wondering where that money came from.
danny isn't ready to retire yet, so he signs a 2 year contract with the habs. his season starts off with a concussion but he gets a standing ovation on his return to philly. claude, too, is having a shitty start to his season but after he doesn't get nominated for canada's olympic roster ("an inexcusable snub"), he switches to another gear and ends up having a season that sees him finishing 3rd in voting for both the hart and the ted lindsay.
that summer, on june 30 2014, danny gets traded to the colorado avalanche. on july 1st, claude gets arrested for drunkenly groping a male officers ass and spends the night in jail.
these two events are not related.
danny retires from hockey after playing out his season in colorado. the kids join him as he gets a ceremonial puck drop in front of claude in philly and he eventually goes to upenn for general management but works part time in players' development for the flyers. meanwhile claude first proposes to (2016) and then eventually marries (2018) his girlfriend ryanne, and the professional paths of our guys don't really cross again until danny gets named special assistant to the general manager for the flyers during the 2021-22 season, and they once again work in the same building. (slight cheating bc the pic is from 2018 i believe)
but just as danny is returning, it is becoming increasingly clear that claude's days as a flyer are numbered. in his contribution to the video for claude's 1000th (and final) game as a flyer, danny relays congratulations from both himself "and the kids".
danny is busy scouting potential teams for him the flyers and in the end claude has to pick between getting traded to the avs, the last team danny played for, and the panthers. he picks the panthers, danny says nice things about him to the press and they go down in round two, while the 2022 avs are on an insane run and win the cup.
after getting told that neither the flyers nor the panthers are interested in re-signing him, claude instead decides to go home to ontario and signs with the ottawa senators.
he immediately gets parentified as an assistant captain before training camp has even started. (the facial journey from the contract announcement to the leadership group announcement is frankly hilarious to me. guy who thought he had escaped the cycle -> guy firmly back in the cycle. one must imagine sisyphus babysitting brady tkachuk.)
he instantly has a career high in goals and as a reward the sens miss the playoffs. danny gets promoted first to interim and then full on general manager to the flyers. claude gets his 1000th career point and in the video for the ceremony danny shows up again and says he "and the kids" are very, very proud of claude.
which brings us to (almost) today! danny is still the flyers' gm, he has quietly married again and now has a fourth son whose name starts with C bc he secretly is an insane person, the sens have finally returned to the playoffs in 2025 and after an unexpectedly harrowing negotiation period, claude eventually re-signed with a massive hometown discount and is still in ottawa, being an enthusiastic dad to his kids and a long suffering assistant captain to his monkeys.
so tl;dr: the early 2010s were crazy, we got some glimpses of possible old man yaoi during the final days of claude in orange and these days, nothing much happens except every once in a while, when one of them (mostly danny) will get quoted w a few nice words about the other but remember, kids: nobody is ever too old to be bisexual! :)
i found three of these in my drafts and then immediately got possessed by a goblin to make five more. happy wayne gretzky obliteration day or whatever xoxo
this has existed in my drafts/discord messages/meanders of my deranged psyche in one form or another for ages now, but recent discussion #onhere re:bleak boyband bingo encouraged me to clean up the list for human consumption and present it in bingo format, which immediately made it 150 times more user-friendly and thus postable. while obviously visually inspired by bbb, thematically i think it is only adjacent at best because the focus here is fundamentally about relationships, even when it comes to squares like The Weight Of Legacy or Signing With Your Hometown Team (inspired by dylan larkin and john tavares respectively, whose narratives are soooo tied to The Ghost Of Other People it's almost laughable). ideally this board could be incorporated into a larger bbb-style board that would also include broader, less shippy archetypes; but i personally am Not Good at that so what you get today is 81 squares of love&horny.
color-coded version hopefully conveys the fact that while i do believe the 3x3 cards can stand alone, there is a continuity both vertically and horizontally AND diagonally. after all, one of the characteristics of sportsrpf is the fluidity of the dynamics— linemates today, facing off tomorrow, etc.
some of these squares are so very clearly about one specific pairing to me, but depending on your hockeyfandom entry point i think it might vary drastically and i'm very curious about what people's first associations to specific Narratives(tm) are. might reblog later with examples but for now in the name of science i want this to hit the market neutrally and let it percolate
in my opinion, the question isn't "Is RPF ethical?" but rather "Are you engaging with RPF ethically?" and even more importantly, "Are you being stupid about it?"
I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.
Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.
The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.
I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.
But just have some basic decency and do not involve the real people. Don't cross the line without caring how it affects them. This is basic fandom 101 and lately we have been flying too close to the damn sun! Everyone get more normal about RPF so major news outlets and magazines stop posting articles about "Is RPF ethical?" and blowing up our spot!
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