I watch hockey for the characters

How/when did you get into hockey?

Are you a fan of any other sports?

Do/did you or anyone close to you play hockey?

Has hockey inspired you to try any new activities (e.g. learning to skate)?

If you’re a fan for a team in a city you don’t live in, how did you pick them? If you’re a fan of your local team, do you follow any non-local teams?

Do you go to games? If so, what’s your favorite part of seeing them in-person?

Are you a fan of any fictional hockey media, or just the real thing?

Do you collect merchandise or memorabilia (cards, pucks, jerseys etc)?

What is a moment from a game you’ll always remember watching live?

Do you watch games alone or with others (irl or virtual)?

If you had to add a color to your team’s color scheme, what would it be?

What’s the weirdest place you’ve watched a game?

Have you ever met any players, either by chance or at team signing–type events?

Have you gotten anyone else into hockey?

If you had to commentate a game, would you rather do play-by-play or color?

If you could change, add, or remove a rule from the game, what would it be?

Have you started using any hockey slang in other contexts?

Do you sacrifice sleep to watch games at late/early hours?

Do you have a favorite ultra-specific hockey stat?

What is your favorite jersey from a team you're not a fan of?

Should [insert league here] expand? If so, where do you want the next team?

What is your most hockey player–esque habit irl?

What is one overused question you wish you could make beat reporters stop asking?

Would you rather work for your team's social media (pitch/produce content) or general management (have a say in trades/drafting)?

Or: We should start blaming the social media people instead, I guess?

There's this trend in discussions about fandom that often point to individual fans as the problem and the need for the community to police itself. Namely, when something awful happens, there's often a trend of "we need to shame these people," or "these people aren't really part of the community (we're normaler)" and constant reminders for individuals to "be cool about it," essentially.

It's a very specific dynamic that's imagined in these discourses, specifically in hockey, where "innocent" (in this respect) players are besieged by weird, horny women who form parasocial relationships (which are always bad?) and forget how to correctly set boundaries. I feel as though this approach neglects — well, a lot, honestly. I find it interesting that this sort of behaviour is considered uniquely immoral or problematic compared to, say, the really drunk people heckling something awful during a game, or your average hockey sports betting bro sending death threats and doxxing home addresses on Twitter or Instagram. But that’s a different post. For this particular spiral, the discourse around a “feminised” approach to hockey fandom and the dynamic between fan and player neglects a particular participant — the NHL, the actual organisations/ownership, and their marketing/content teams. As a result, there’s a shifting of responsibility that can fairly easily be explained through the economics of marketing.

On a pragmatic level, yeah, none of us are ever gonna meet the real players we’re all being weird about, or know them outside of their media personas. The version of the player in my head of whom I’m writing RPF is as much my construction as it is based in the media reality. But the version of the sport, league, and players we’re presented with, whether via more traditional venues (think sports journalism or TV analysts) or social media, is intentionally constructed as well.

I promise that the people running the socials of your hockey team are like, full-time employees with benefits. I know it’s fun to insist they’re interns or underqualified, but just because you post for fun doesn’t mean the people who are paid 60-90k a year are also doing it just “for fun.” They are actively making decisions in line with the marketing and community outreach departments. These people also have responsibilities to partnerships and ownership to grow their audience and convert followers to paying costumers. When they’re posting about a player or a dynamic or (God forbid) a really shitty TV show or novel “based” in hockey, it’s with a purpose! And you, as someone they’re trying to convince to become a loyal consumer, have every right to be critical of their strategy and the rhetoric they’re using and their consequences.

In this regard, specific teams (less the broader NHL accounts, from what I’ve seen) are actively choosing to cater to this audience. There are types of fans that are really good at gaming these online systems and “rig” (for lack of a better term) the social numbers in their favour. Kpop and modern music fandom is a good example of this. (This is a longer conversation that I’m not shoving in here, feel free to ask me about it). For hockey and other more traditional media outlets, these are just numbers that look really, really good for sponsorships, and they really don’t care where they’re coming from or how it works. If this audience is giving them engagement, they’ll continue to cater to this audience because of how social media algorithms typically force accounts and user to hyper-specialise in order to maintain relevance. This is why the Seattle Kraken spiralled really hard in pandering to their romance novel audience a few years ago, and it’s why teams are trying to take advantage of Microwaved Rivalry right now. They see it as an opportunity to expand into a market that has historically been untapped and likely not seen as part of their demographics given how market research works, and you can bet that if they can convert any number of these people to buying a jersey or becoming a season ticket holder, it’s a win for them.

One of my criticisms of this approach (of which I have many, but they aren’t relevant to this argument) is that organisations don’t really have a strong grasp of the type of behaviour they’re encouraging, and they also don’t know how to control or mitigate the worst aspects. I suspect there isn’t a lot of consultation with the players or hockey ops about what the content teams are doing (and from my experience, I doubt any of them care enough), which means any consequences that pushed onto the players and ops are disconnected from what I feel is the source of the problem. Being a traditional media industry (ie not born in the mires of the Internet) also means that organisations probably don’t see these problems until they manifest in dangerous ways, or as PR disasters. The Seattle Kraken booktok strategy is my prime example of this, but whatever’s going on with the Sharks is another one. “Puck bunnies,” hrpfers, bottom-feeding gossipmongers and wannabe tabloid writers have probably always existed in the scope of the sport. They just are now enabled in different ways in the wake of social media, because the people paid to navigate this space don’t know what they should be taking seriously. I would say it’s not their fault, but if you’re a social media manager terminally online enough to clock an omegaverse joke or understand why hockey booktok is popular, I think you should also know better than to engage with it full-throttle, or at least have a conversation with your manager who probably came from local radio why it may be a little odd to capitalise on it.

All-in-all, I feel as though there are better places to point fingers when we’re talking about the worst parts of fandom, and “feminised” fandom in particular. Individuals are always going to do weird things, but how they’re enabled by existing systems, or why they may feel incentivised to act the way they do, feels like a more productive conversation to me.

We can do a case study together of an example of this, namely the Senators and the Microwaved Rivalry jerseys: