here for a long time, not a good time

no no listen to me. listen to me. the sports is exactly the point. like, if this were a sport where you need to cut weight like MMA or something, sure, there's some calorie restriction going on. but hockey??

the main problem these guys are going to have is that eating enough calories to maintain their muscle mass is both time-consuming and exhausting. there's a reason nhl teams are constantly giving these guys food - it's a full time job to keep them fed.

the average relatively active person needs, we know, about 2000 calories a day. hockey players can burn over 1200 calories in a 90 minute game. and it's actually super complicated for them to consume enough calories that they won't actually pass out on the ice without also having to use the bathroom during a game!! that's why fat stores are so important for hockey players - that and because during a playoffs run it's actually impossible to balance calories-in-calories out and they WILL be losing weight for the duration of the playoff run, so they need weight they can lose without eating their own muscles.

within 30 minutes after a game, a 200lb/90kg pro hockey player should consume 90-120g of carbs and 20-30g of protein or else they will not be able to maintain their performance. for reference, that's a little less than half of what a reasonably active non-athlete of the same weight should be eating in an entire day.

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

If I say "I am uncomfortable with fandom's tendency to write trans men as feminine and submissive" I do not mean "I think every person who writes feminine submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I don't even mean "any cis-person who writes feminine or submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I mean "I would like writers to seriously think about why this is so common, why they write that, and if it fairly and genuinely engages with what it means to be a trans man, or if they just think it's hot when submissive people have vaginas and didn't want to write omegaverse of m/f".

Similarly, when people say "fandom is systemically less interested in black characters, less willing to give flat black characters rich fanon than flat white characters, and less interested in black characters in ships", the response is not to explain why you, personally, just happen to like popular white guy in that fanon. Your job is to look at yourself and ask if you tend to "just happen to be more interested" in the popular white guy across fandoms, be honest, and start unpacking that. Sometimes it's easier to love the flat character who's already getting 10,000 fics with headcanons and art and meta.

If somebody says "I wish there were more gluten free options at the potluck. I hate always showing up and not finding anything I can eat*", they are not asking you to throw your cake in the trash and weep. They do not want to hear your long speech about how actually this is your grandmother's recipe, and you've tried it with rice flour actually, but it just didn't work. You think about what you can do, and you listen to how they feel.

More Ilya is a giver stuff in the link - it’s AO3

HERE

if anybody asks them why they are in a fandom that makes them so miserable, or why they engage with a canon that they don't even seem to like or take any joy from, they respond with "oh so now we have to love everything like unthinking idiots? we have to accept all the garbage given to us? we have to endure the way the writer/showrunner/company mistreats us? stop forcing your toxic positivity on everybody!"

a classic and obvious example from mdzs/cql fandom are the jiang cheng antis whose entire fandom experience is defined by aggressively hating a fictional character and berating other fans as morally bankrupt and delusional, and insisting to outlandish degrees that they understand the real meaning of how terrible the character is, and therefore the themes of the book/show, better than all the rest of the foolish, unthinking fans who lack their insight.

another classic and obvious example from kpop are the akgaes/solo fans, or the subset of fans obsessed with mistreatment narratives. a big part of this is always claiming to have special knowledge about real intentions or motivations, and they will state those claims in superior or self-pitying ways that sound like "oh i wish i could mindlessly love this the way you do. i wish i could be uncritical. but i can see the truth of how bad it is so i just can't. it's so unfair that i'm not allowed to love things, but that's my burden to bear."

that's two examples but these people exist in every fandom. they are the ones who make you earnestly wonder "why are you in a fandom that makes you so unhappy?" then you see how much engagement they get, how actively and completely they submerge themselves in the echo chamber they've created, and it makes sense.

the thing is, it's easy to shame people into feeling bad by claiming to know better, even if what you are saying is nonsense. that's a foundational principle of the internet. (and religion. and politics. and the worst kinds of online activism. etc.)