#empty netters

i think i speak for the choir here when i say disappointed but not surprised. i always saw their reviews as a fairly shallow grift, but i didn’t mind the grift if it also meant a very public show of support from people in the hockey-sphere, which could have a positive influence over their strictly hockey listeners/viewers. the sheer difference between their public and private words though speaks to why people are so paranoid about acceptance. people are criticized for being too on edge/digging too much into people’s acceptance and whether they really are allies, but how can you not when you have people blatantly lying about stuff like this

edit: adding these tags from @starrynet

i definitely agree and i think it’s probably the most frustrating part. i think no hockey fan is going to be surprised by this situation but non-hockey heated rivalry fans very much will be. there’s a lot of talk about “heated rivalry’s impact” but very little understanding that the degree of conservatism seen in this situation is not an outlier but absolutely the norm in hockey. to put it simply, a smutty hockey romance tv show’s mainstream success does not make the real-life players born into families that aren’t conservative, it does not make anti-individualism and conformity less valued in hockey, it does not rid peewee hockey locker rooms of homophobic language. it has a hopeful message for the people who watch it, but brock mcgillis and zach sullivan are right, a tv show portraying a beautiful fantasy of how things could be doesn’t make it so, and straight players either aren’t watching or are treating it as a joke.

further update: empty netter’s video with the texts in the context of the original text conversation. personally, none of this new information changes the context of the original messages to me, but it might if you understood the original texts differently than i did.

chris powers, i have grown quite fond of you