This is fascinating to me. I am a Colorado Avalanche fan. I love NHL hockey. And I am also a fandom girlie (gn).
I'll start by saying I hate RPF. But not people who like RPF. I hate RPF the way someone might hate tomatoes. Not for me but for ye.
And I also specifically hate Hockey RPF because I want to interface with Hockey in the way I interface with with other things I am a fan of - the same technical and analytical obsessions but divorced from the toxic masculinity and bro-iness of the broader major sports culture. (Again, hate like tomatoes - my yuck, your yum, whatever. But I - as in me, as in this single human person - hates that thing because of my own taste. Still with me? Recognise that this isn't Hockey-RPF/RPF bashing? Good.)
But something that I think both the Hockey RPF and the advent of Heated Rivalry's popularity is highlighting is a conflict internal to Hockey culture right now.
There are certain aspects of NHL hockey that make it different from other major sports. The countries with the climate to support it internationally are all in the Northern hemisphere and flirt with the arctic circle. The game has a disproportionately large number of players from Russia and Eastern Europe - traditionally more religious and more conservative places. The game has a conservative fanbase statistically speaking and a conservative player base as the entry level to playing the sport is about the highest among major competitive sports.
So there is a retrograde conservative streak in the sport. And this became most evident when the league retreated on Pride-Month related activities and LGBTQ+ outreach. A lot of this was stemming from players who are - frankly, because religion is no excuse - bigots.
Much like this dive talks about Patrick Kane and the impunity NHLers still enjoy around that kind of abhorrent behaviour, there is a different impunity around bigotries. It is most often seen with Russian players (that is specific Russian individuals, not all Russian players) who incline towards homophobia, racism, sexism, and even ethno-nationalism.
Alexander Ovechkin (Who can get fucked) shows some of this - he is supportive of Putin, of Putin's politics which inherently includes the targeted persecution of queer people, of Russia's war in Ukraine, etc.. But, because the league is seeking to be internationally 'inclusive' this goes unpunished because it is sacrificing structural inclusivity at home for market reach.
But, let's bring it home to guys being gay, and the fight for the heart of Hockey. In 2023, the NHL effectively banned Pride Nights. They extended this to banning all "themed" night in terms of prohibiting teams from having special jerseys on-ice. So, your team could no longer have a rainbow flag based logo for their Pride-Night event. They could host Pride-Nights, sell Pride related merch. But the on-ice product was sanitized. And it was clearly about Pride nights and only expanded to other events due to backlash.
And that is important - Backlash in the fan community was sufficient that they extended these rules to all such events including things like military appreciation nights. So that's part 1) There is an appetite for culture change in the Hockey community writ large that is in favour of inclusivity.
But you also had specific player responses - and here's where being an Avs fan comes in.
Asked about it, Avalanche star Defensemen Cale Makar said
"When one individual kind of goes astray, it kind of looks bad on the whole community. For us - 99% of the guys in the league - it's all about growing the game and making sure it's inclusive for every single guy. (The NHL is) trying to take out that individual thinking and helping the league in terms of not putting any solo guy in that spot.
"At the same time, we live in a world where it needs to be inclusive for everybody. As an individual, with my point of view, I'm here to make the game as inclusive as possible.
"The tough part in media is now those guys' choices reflect everything on the league. That's kind of the hard point. To have those guys do that, it's a little bit of a cheap shot for everybody else, knowing that people are like, 'We're taking a step back.' In my mind, I think we just keep moving forward.
"There are a lot more things we could be doing, but it's unfortunate that stuff is still where it's at. You see one guy take his perspective out of line, and everybody gets associated with that. It's unfortunate, but at the same time, I think a lot of heads in the league are in the right spot where we want to grow the game for good reasons."
Cale Makar isn't just some guy - He is widely considered to be the best Defenseman in the world right now.
Additionally, the Avs Captain Gabriel Landeskog has proactively participated in outreach, inclusivity, and support efforts by the NHL around queer participation in the league. This included a league initiative where one player from every team volunteered to be the guy anyone in the locker room struggling with being queer in the NHL could talk to as part of a visible support structure for players. And beyond him, the Avalanche organization is active in supporting queer inclusion.
In 2024, the official Avalanche twitter account responded to a homophobic comment by saying
"We're not shoving a Pride rainbow in your face. We're celebrating the LGBTQ+ community who have been historically excluded from the sport we all love so much.
"Perhaps it is time to educate yourself on what Pride Night actually stands for."
And to bring it all back around Drouin as my next launch point. Drouin played with the Avs for a year with his 2013 Memorial Cup winning teammate MacKinnon. And part of his landing in Denver was shaped by the fact that MacKinnon needed support as a person on ice and in the locker room, separate from as a player, in the wake of team captain Landeskog's long term injury related absence. Landeskog and MacKinnon are incredibly close as people and players. And MacKinnon has specifically helped change the discussion around mental health for players in the NHL. As a up-and-coming superstar, he suffered severely from mental anguish, self-hatred, and negative self-talk. After four seasons though, he made a change and hired a sports psychologist. But it is clear that a huge part of that was general therapy as well. MacKinnon is held up as an example of a commitment to excellence to the extent that his dietary habits are joked about because he takes such specific care. And it changed a lot of the way that elite players started talking about mental health as an aspect of their game.
And focusing in on Landeskog next, he recently returned from a three year absence where he was recovering from a potentially career ending freak-accident (a hockey skate cut a major ligament in his knee). As part of that, a docu-series was produced about his recover and return - a recovery that the organization proactively stood by him during for three years - which includes some very raw conversations about depression and anguish and how those effected him, his family, his recovery, and his life writ large.
All of this is pointing to how there is a palpable contingent of players and of fans who are valuing this healthier expression of masculinity.
And that is all preamble for this: We are watching a redefinition of masculinity. everything from Beau Travail to Fight Club examine the intersection of masculine beauty, masculine intimacy, and masculine vulnerability. And we are seeing a fight about that in the real world. In this way, the RPF and the likes of Heated Rivalry are tapping into to a very live third rail. Something that should be discussed is how making everything queer is actually agreement with the current toxic standard of masculinity - something that Claire Denis has spoken to with regard to Beau Travail - but that is a separate thought. The reason Heated Rivalry for women doesn't work, or why it isn't just about Hockey is because it is also specifically and actively about masculinity. And given that fandom/fanfiction is not actually a masculine space, that is a major part of the draw I suspect whether consciously or unconsciously. Those series which prompt fandom are not typically masculine art - they might have masculine characters or exist as a product of patriarchal social order, but that is actually distinct from being masculine art. Hockey RPF is often actually interacting with (though through limitations inherent to the fanfiction community itself) the idea of artistic expression in a masculine context and about the masculine experience.
I think the real story here - the thing to sink our teeth into - is how the gender binary has gendered universal qualities. Emotional intimacy is not seen as foreign in feminine spaces or expressions. Black Swan being "Heated Rivalry for women" (I know it's a half-joke, I promise!) ignores how much of Black Swan centers on traits which are often gendered as masculine - rage, competition, violence. In turn, Hockey RPF and Heated Rivalry are tapping into the opposite. Beauty, emotional intimacy, vulnerability, etc.
And Hockey is a fertile ground for this - NHL Hockey specifically - because it is more of a team-sport than any other major sport. It's outcomes are least predictable based on the performance of individual players. it is more romantic than its comparables. Things like the Stanley Cup build a mythos that the MLB, NBA, and NFL have no comparison for. The playoffs are described like going to war - not to battle, but to war. You hear about players putting in shifts on broken feet or with cracked ribs the way you hear about soldiers crawling through the mud and the shit for and with each other. It is a game about fraternity. A game where the most cherished achievement is having your name and the name of all your teammates immortalized forever on a trophy that has been awarded for well over a century. A game where the simple act of handing that trophy to a certain player after winning it gets lionized for what it says about the bonds - the intimate and masculine bonds - built between the men who have achieved that victory.
Hockey is more romantic than other major sports. It encompasses more of the human condition - it's the only major sport where fighting is a permitted if penalized part of the game. It has the full breadth of the human condition because it doesn't actually curtail things 'outside the game' the way other sports do.
And so it is a perfect stage for artists to engage deeply with a kind of art which is very difficult to find in the larger fandom space, and it is a sport which is currently fighting its own battle with itself for identity, and it's a sport where the way the game is played is culturally different.
I dunno - this was a long ramble. But I fucking love Hockey and I love people who love Hockey no matter why they do. Fuck Football being the 'beautiful game' - nothing captures the gamut of the human condition like Hockey. And I might hate that every Hockey tag on Tumblr is innundated with Hughes brothers non-sense and RPF, but god damn is it exciting to see that inescapable beauty capture people.
I also think focusing on the queerness of the RPF and of Heated Rivalry is missing another deeper aspect. I think the slash is in some ways incidental. It is the logical conclusion to how fanfiction and shipping culture are tied together. But the fact it is Hockey in particular feels tied specifically to a cultural dialogue about masculinity which is being under recognized because of the assumption that the dialogue is prima-facie about queerness.