singeliskates

For some context if you don't know me: I’m blueorangecrush on AO3, she/her, usually called BOC in fannish spaces. I’m a Fandom Old (Xennial) with two kids old enough to be in fandom but we all try not to directly encroach on each other’s playgrounds. I’ve been in Hockey RPF fandom since 2014, and while I am certainly no big name fan, I might be a medium name in certain subgroups. I run a Hockey RPF exchange every year (Hockey Holidays) and write a lot of rare pairs. While my “normal” (non-RPF just sporting enthusiast) hockey fandom rests with the Islanders and Sirens, I got into Hockey RPF via the late end of the Disney movie love story days of Jeff Carter/Mike Richards, I find myself writing the Lightning quite a bit and I’ve ended up pinch hitting exchange gift fics for all kinds of “I don’t go there buuuut I’ll make it work” situations. I write in other fandoms as well, but Hockey RPF is my homebase. (Yeah, I’m that author, the one who wrote two fics in your fandom, a smattering across a lot of small fandoms, and then a whole bunch of Hockey RPF. A lot of us around here are also that author.)

Before I landed here, the closest things I had to “home base” fandoms were a semi-obscure one I still write for occasionally (Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber), and two others (one very large, one very small, neither of which I am planning to name) that I don’t interact with anymore because of the creators of the media turning out to be complete trash fires. And that kind of informs where I’m going next with all this.

People get creeped out by RPF. Fact of life. There is a layer of moral discomfort attributed to it that I understand and sympathize with but having thought about it a lot over the years I simply disagree.

Why?

Mostly because…I’ve seen a lot of “unhinged” terrible behavior a) towards creators of works that get a lot of conventional, non-RPF fan attention and b) towards the athletes we RPF about in non-RPF contexts (creepy stalker fans, creepy stalker fans of opponents, and – all too often – sports media itself).

The overwhelming majority of us in sports RPF fandoms just want to “play with our dolls” (and just as importantly, the setting!) in peace. We do get the occasional people who want to punch holes in the fourth wall, who have believed so hard in what they think they see that they’ve decided to approach the actual people involved about it. And that’s BAD. RPF fandom collectively recognize that’s inappropriate behavior. The only time I’ve ever NOT been mad about RPF containment breach was that one crossover fic about a particular athlete getting to punch a fictional character he deeply (and justifiably) hated, which both the athlete and the author of that villain apparently enjoyed seeing.

But you know what else is bad? Sending hate to screenwriters about how homophobic they must secretly be if they don’t include your specific same-gender ship in their next season. Pressuring authors to read your fanfic and then suing them for not including you as a collaborator in their next work (aka the actual reason that almost all authors will not look at fan creations based on their works, and you are not going to be an exception). Or, uh, demanding that a hockey player who had a bad night Venmo you to pay you back for your sports betting loss. (That has been a whole thing and it’s really disturbing to hear about!) Or threatening their wives and children and pets. No, we shouldn’t be asking real people about their real sexual and romantic lives as fodder for our stories, but we also shouldn’t be doing any of the rest of this. Bad “fan” behavior is not unique to RPF fandoms and should not be seen as such.

Another reason I don’t see it as inherently wrong to be an RPF creator: there is a sliding scale of RPF. There are a lot of biopics out there that definitely aren’t claiming strict accuracy, and that can sometimes be extremely jarring for those who knew the subject of the film personally. I’m thinking of how Dianne Feinstein was very pleased that the film Milk was made, but because of her close personal connections to some of the most harrowing parts of the events the film was based on, she never could bring herself to watch it. There are fake autobiographies and real “names changed to protect privacy” situations. There are works centered on original, fictional characters that make heavy use of current or historical real people as background backdrop characters. There are Chuck Tingle parody names that everyone knows “who” is “really” being referred to. There are also characters in some media that are clearly based on real-world counterparts, and sometimes the inspirations freely acknowledge their fictional versions – I’m thinking of Denis Ten and Jason Brown acknowledging in different ways on their respective social media that the Yuri!!! on Ice characters of Otabek and Leo were at least very heavily (and clearly) based on them.

Which brings me to my next point: being in sports RPF fandoms has had a lot of upside for me. It’s made me a more informed and observant enjoyer of the actual sports involved, which has in turn made certain social situations easier because in a lot of places sports can still be a semi-neutral “safe” thing to talk about. RPF also made me a better writer! I could go on about why the whole stereotypical “you know you’re in for a treat when the works page has two for your fandom and lots of Hockey RPF” thing is a thing, but I don’t want this to get too long. I’ll just lean on Fredrik Backman’s Beartown for a quote: “Why do we love hockey? Because it tells stories.” Really, that says it all. Almost.

I do also think that the shared knowledge that we’re already At The Devil’s Sacrament helps weed out a lot of the fears of telling a Problematic Story. It’s already “problematic” – it’s RPF! And now that that’s out of the way, we can actually tell the stories we want to tell! (And that comes back to other fandoms, because all anyone has to do is look in the works list and they’ll know that we write RPF and like it.)

That being said, if you’re going to get involved in this scene, you need to do some thinking about where your boundaries truly are. There are the basic courtesies that I believe should be followed so as not to interfere with the people inspiring us to write or with other fans, and then there are my personal lines that I don’t expect everyone to share but that help keep certain mental lines clear and avoid accidentally crossing them (I’m ADHD as all heck and don’t want to make “forgetful” mistakes that would constitute a more serious breach).

The basics: Don’t bring up RPF to the people you’re RPFing (even if they are out and/or married to each other, it’s still incredibly rude and creepy) or people adjacent to them, or to the media (even when the media seems to be inviting it e.g. the Sharks’ WillMack thing), or to mainstream sports fan settings, or to people who clearly Don’t Want to Know and will make things difficult if you aren’t able to restrain yourself. Don’t tag or caption on large public sites (X/Twitter, TikTok, Insta, Reddit, etc.) in such a way that your RPF headcanon squee or cute photo edit is likely to get picked up by the subjects, or the media, or non-RPF-enjoying fans of the players or the sport. Do tag correctly on AO3 (and you really should AO3-lock your RPF for a number of reasons). If you’re in an exchange that is RPF-based or that allows RPF, make sure you understand who and what is considered fair game for RPF writing or artwork in that exchange.

Some of my personal lines:

Blueorangescribble is my fannish sideblog – because likes on Tumblr work how they do and so do follows, you can probably figure out my main if you’re looking but I do keep RPF and most RPF-adjacent things off of my main. There’s someone I follow on other sites under my wallet name that I’m pretty sure is also following me here because of Hockey RPF fandom, I’m just not sure which Hockey RPF writer she is. And that’s fine. (I have once managed to have the “uhhhh hey so I think we are following each other in two separate spaces” conversation successfully, and we got to meet up at an Islanders game, which was amazing. Fan friends BEST FRIENDS for real.)

You might notice that I seldom to never tag real names, but I do have consistent tags for the skaters and players I talk about a lot. Sometimes they are esoteric to me – for instance, Ilia Malinin is “raspberry boy”, Casey Cizikas is “beloved sunbeam on skates”, and Anthony Beauvillier is “sunbeam 2.0”. Sometimes I’ll use a common-use fandom tag, like d10 for Denis Ten.

And sometimes the real name tags are unusable anyway. If you try to search Misha’s full name here on Tumblr right now you get a whole lot of half-dressed women who have nothing to do with Misha at all. So there’s that. The actual Shailinin tag is better for general Misha content at the moment than searching his name, which bothers me but is what it is. BTW my tag for him is just “misha my beloved” – there’s a now-former hockey player who is also extremely associated with pandas in general and Kung Fu Panda in particular and I don’t want to confuse anyone!

I can’t say I’m 100% innocent of tinhatting, but the point where I stop is “I have no idea about their actual sex life? But these specific people are clearly each other’s Person.” And even then I will keep that squee and speculation amongst friendly fannish company.

I won’t RPF as a main character anyone who is currently under 18 (though I will flashback scenes to younger than that when it makes sense) or anyone who isn’t notable enough to have an English-language Wiki page. If anyone like that is significant as a background character, I’ll mention that in author’s notes.

I will write freely about the ways in which the sports and governing bodies can be kind of bullshit and hurt people, and about sports and society and horrible media and bad sports-parents etc. As a longtime Hockey RPF person, my personal mission statement has pretty much become this: 

I hate that I love this sport so much because there is so much wrong with it! Therefore, I write fix-it fic, and I also write darker fic that follows the wrongness to a logical conclusion.

My sentiments towards the figure skating side thus far are similar.

That said, I probably won’t write super up close and personal tragedy aftermath. Which I realize is a balancing act, and kind of an I know it when I see it line. To give an example, a significant plot point in one of my older fics is the death by suicide of a former NHL player who was known to my main character but not someone particularly close. I probably would not have written the sibling, known close friend, or (actual or RPF-made-up, secret or otherwise) lover of that player.

I also realize that the people we write might…behave in disappointing ways sometimes. Often, even. Comes with the territory. My personal line for that has generally been “this person was credibly named in a mainstream media source as arrested for or convicted of domestic violence or sexual assault” means I won’t write as a main character, but if they’re unavoidable as a teammate or a coach etc. I won’t simply pretend they aren’t there (unless there is another reason to do that). If I’m writing for a collection or exchange with stricter rules, I obviously follow them. But this is another instance for me of hey, we’re already At The Devil’s Sacrament, let’s create what we want to and move on.