all over the place

chillpleasecheckplease >> hesallandmore >> omgconnorwhisk

so much of the “kent is abusive” argument rests on the fact that in one (1) argument, overheard by a biased protagonist, he talks & acts like someone in their early twenties who has been isolated, endangered, & commodified since being a young teenager. which he has. but people are mad he doesn’t talk & act like a 35-year-old faux-self-aware instagram therapist

i genuinely feel so angry & sad about kent and whiskey’s endings… i wish they had connected; i wish they had a semblance of a happy ending; i wish they were not doomed to unhappiness simply because they chose not to endanger their careers and personal well-being by coming out — without a support system! — in a virulently homophobic environment. they deserved community and acceptance, too.

also like. the fact that there were public & well-known “rumors about their rumors” re: kent and jack hooking up while in juniors is proof enough to me that jack DID love kent and jack DID envision a future with kent — one where they played side by side for their entire professional careers — it’s just that jack simply couldn’t handle the pressure of the professional career he was supposed to have. but the rumors are the clincher to me. bc jack is no fool. he’s a hockey nepo baby; he grew up utterly entrenched in the hockey industry, where there are NO openly gay hockey players. jack’s character is often played as lacking common sense for jokes but one thing he was canonically shown NOT to lack was an awareness of his public and industry image. he knew exactly what the papers and sports commentators were saying about him at all times. and after OD’ing and leaving pro sports, he still never dated guys publicly, until bitty. jack knew exactly how virulently homophobic the hockey industry is and how closely scrutinized he was. so the fact he continued to be with kent anyway, despite these rumors and the threat to their careers they posed, tells me that jack’s love for kent outweighed the dangers of these rumors. and that would have to be some love, indeed.

what kills me about everyone (freshly) calling kent abusive & manipulative is that there is absolutely a telling of this story where jack zimmerman, the rich, beloved nepo baby who hooks up with an isolated and lonely previously-unknown hockey wunderkind, starting homophobic “rumors about their rumors” which will haunt and endanger said wunderkind throughout his entire career, then develops a drug problem, ODs, and permanently ghosts the now-completely-alone boy he was hooking up with, whose only semblance of community, family, and support was jack and jack’s parents, only to later publicly come out by kissing another already-famous internet celebrity after winning the stanley cup, is the abusive, manipulative villain of this story. to paint kent as manipulative and abusive, you have to ignore how shitty knight, the one person who is a great judge of character in this story and who loves jack deeply and knows him well, calls parse a “good guy” and talks about how jack gets “scary” around him. if bitty and jack were not *the* main characters of this story, if you simply just shifted perspectives without changing a single canonical fact, every blog would be filled with people denigrating jack as abusive and manipulative.

hate it when people are like “i ship kent and therapy ❤️” I DON’T! i ship kent and peer support, kent bonding with other closeted/openly gay athletes, and kent escaping all forms of institutional surveillance (including psychiatric surveillance). i want kent getting righteously angry about how he’s been commodified and dehumanized in the public eye and within the capitalist sports industry. let kent be emotional and angry!!!