My Soapboxes

You may have heard of hockey rpf and hockey smut before HR, but it was a VERY small niche until HR happened, and was basically a microscopic subculture before Covid. Going back and thinking "what was the internet like in 2013?" and assuming hockey fans would act like that... yeah, no. 2013 may have been the age of tumblr purity tests, but very few of the people applying those tests were watching hockey, and if they were, they were massively outnumbered by millions of white, straight men.

What that means is that very few people would be analysing the racial or geopolitical context of anything, and those few who did would be quickly drowned out by everyone else (and probably yelled at for "trying to bring politics into sport"). The only people paying attention to hockey would barely ever THINK about race or geopolitics. You ever read the comments on a Facebook post about a professional athlete? That's the kind of discourse you'd see: a bunch of death threats and earnest hatred for members of opposing teams, homophobic commentary, and the earnest belief in shit like The Importance of Rivalry and Fighting is Good, Actually. Tumblrfying hockey fans... I mean, you kind of miss the ENTIRE CONTEXT of why Shane, Ilya, and Scott act the way they do.

Because these fans? They're not just on social media. Every single person involved in the sport would act exactly the same way. Podcasters, commentators, officials, spectators, sports journalists... every single one of them is in this echo chamber. They're fans themselves, or former players. Sports are extremely popular, yes, but they're not ubiquitous. They get their own segment in the news, and sports headlines are usually consumed exclusively by sports fans. There are exceptions, of course, but the typical response to the performance of the Montreal Voyageurs would not come from the entire city. It would predominantly come from the fanbase, a specific portion of the city.

Shane would never have had fans calling out racism, because even his fans would have been mostly white. He wouldn't have done underwear ads and become a queer icon, because if he was, he would receive endless homophobia, and he would thus deliberately steer clear of ad campaigns that looked too sexual instead of just "LOOK AT MY BIG MUSCLES! BIGGER THAN YOURS!". Nobody would have been looking at him through an EXPLICITLY racial lens, because if he or anyone else ever even IMPLIED there was racism against him, he would have been fucking DOGPILED. He would have had commentators making weird, racially coded comments about how he's "technically so proficient" because of his ancestry, and be unable to ever call it out without being treated as a pariah. That's a REALLY important part of his character! That's why, even after so much success, Voyageurs fans are able to turn against him so easily! Because this is not the ENTIRETY of Montreal, a progressive, metropolitan, gay-friendly city, this is the whitest, malest, most homophobic and racist part! And they have been aching for an excuse to turn against him! And he is dating one of those HORRIBLE, SUBHUMAN BOSTON PLAYERS, and therefore is a TRAITOR and a LIAR and a (insert copious deep-held homophobia and racism they've had to choke down for years as he won them cups, here).

Most likely, after Shane leaves the Voyageurs, he gets brutalised in the Montreal press by sports fans, and valorised by non-sports fans who can see the racism for what it is. But the former would massively outnumber the latter, because non-sports fans would not be paying attention. MAYBE this would be a sufficiently large event to justify non-hockey fans paying attention, at which point you would get normal people saying "hey, what the fuck?? he won you three cups??". But very few things reach that stage. The majority of the response would come from within the echo chamber. (Edit: I have since been informed that this event likely would spread far beyond general sports fans due to the specific importance of the real life Habs to Quebec and Montreal culturally, and so Shane would get a lot of support, especially as a French speaker. But the same general rule would apply: the most diehard fans, which is where commentators, pundits, journalists and so on tend to be drawn from, would also be the most negative, and thus the initial response to his trip would probably be incredibly harsh, moderating over time. And this is generally a factor unique to teams which become intrinsically linked to a certain region or group, which is quite rare. I can only really think of one other example, being FC Barcelona's links to the Catalan community, so the same principle would NOT apply to Scott or Ilya, if he had been in Boston at the time.).

Within the echo chamber: sports rivalries are real and important. You don't just hate the rival team, you have a searing personal hatred of every one of their players, as well as their fans. You also have an extremely short memory: a few bad performances, and a hero suddenly becomes a universally reviled failure. Everything your team does is ok, and everything the other team does is wrong. If a team was to horrifically mistreat a player? 99% of people would support the team. Complaining about racism, homophobia, or any other kind of bigotry? Extremely unpopular. Downright despised, in fact. Would make you public enemy number 1, to every team. If you're a minority, you're "one of the good ones" to fans of your team, and face disproportionate hate from every other team's fans. If you're gay, you can add extensive hatred from your teammates and own team's fans to that list. And it's survivable because your team's fans will support you as long as you keep winning... so long as you don't rock the boat. Because if you call out the bigotry, suddenly you're the problem.

To give a real world example: In May 2013, in Australian Rules Football (a culture and fanbase which is roughly as progressive as hockey fans are, i.e. not at all) an Indigenous Australian player (Adam Goodes) was racially abused by a fan. He stopped in the middle of the game to point her out in the crowd (AFL crowds are fucking massive, incidentally, so he would NOT have had a great look at her) and later found out she was 13 years old. As a result, he never blamed her personally, but said she was the product of her racist environment. Do you know what the response to that was? Years of booing by fans, at every game, no matter who the opponent was. Racial abuse left and right, by fans, by officials, by journalists. And a whole load of concern trolling about how mean he was to the poor little girl. It was so bad he had to retire. He later won Australian of the Year, in 2016, because NORMAL PEOPLE realised he was in the right, and a few popular sports documentaries allowed his shitty treatment to reach the mainstream. But the response he faced in his day to day life, as a football player, was universally negative! The AFL did not apologise for his treatment until 2019, which follows a pretty common trend in sports: fans do something shitty, the league does nothing, and then, years AFTER all the players involved have retired, a documentary or a book or an article or an investigation comes out, proves they were in the wrong, and the league half-heartedly apologises. The AFL has had multiple racism and homophobia scandals since, and has followed this exact playbook.

Now, the NHL is not the AFL, and Australia is not Canada, but this is basically the same playbook that exists in every league sport, everywhere in the world. The NHL does the exact same thing. The NFL famously did exactly this with Colin Kaepernick. Being a minority is fine, because the racist fans highkey think certain races are better at certain sports, but you need to never complain about how you're treated, and you need to be a minority that makes you better at sport. Being gay, rather famously, is something straight people associate with being bad at sports. So not only do you face enhanced criticism as a person for being gay, but any slight deterioration in form is more than enough pretext to take you off the team. It's not because he was gay, they'll say, it's because he wasn't good enough! And though that won't be convincing to anyone with a functioning brain, it will be convincing for the target audience: this echo chamber.

This is the culture that exists amongst sports fans. Not funny edits by RPFers (who are a tiny, TINY portion of the population). Death threats because you lost a game, and a few dozen men bet their entire rent against the outcome. Death threats because you had a single bad week. Death threats because you're friends with a member of THAT AWFUL TEAM WE HATE... really just a lot of death threats, but other stuff too. Constant abuse, suggestions that maybe "foreignors" just don't GET hockey every time Shane has a mid performance, constant denigrating of his skills...

Canonically, Shane is the best hockey player in the NHL (according to RR), Ilya is second, and Scott is probably third, with all three of them being contemporaries. In the show adaptation, Scott is clearly conveyed as by far the best of HIS generation, about ten years older than the later generation of Shane and Ilya, with Shane still being the slightly better player of those two, and both probably being better than Scott (though with enough ambiguity brought on by the age difference to make this, effectively, a question that could never be answered definitively). That ambiguity matters: it means people can pick whatever version of reality they desire.

I firmly believe that until Scott comes out in 2017, there would be a universal opinion amongst sports broadcasters and fans that he is the best active hockey player (with any differences in their stats blamed on Scott being at the end stage of his career whilst Shane/Ilya are at their prime). After he comes out, and until 2021 (when Hollanov are outed) that would inexplicably and immediately shift to Ilya being the best (who, as a Russian, falls below Scott in the hierarchy when Scott is a white American, but rises above him when Scott is gay, and ALWAYS is placed above Shane). After 2021? I wouldn't be surprised if people started saying the best hockey player was Dallas Kent, and it's so sad how he's in prison. This is not a progressive culture. This is a hellish, racist, homophobic culture. And stats only say so much. "He was on the better team", "He played against weaker competition", "He only plays well in x and y circumstances"... there's always an excuse to denigrate a player's skills, and that happens much quicker if you're a minority.

Rachel Reid gets this, by the way! She understands that many Montreal fans would not let their team's success under Shane get in the way of the hate campaign they've been longing to launch! She also understands that the fact that Montreal loses in the EARLY ROUNDS OF THE PLAYOFFS in 2021, not in the final, means that the response to Shane in TLG would be predominately from within this fanbase. And thus, universally negative.

Other examples of RR getting it: in the first few moments of Game Changer, an Admirals fan recognises Scott Hunter and says he's "surprised he shows his face around town, the way he's been stinking up the ice lately". Scott hasn't done anything wrong, has been playing for years and doing extremely well, but is treated like shit by one of the few people who DOES recognise him because he's going through a slight slump in form. That is the level of discourse we're looking at here: anyone who Helps Us Win is a hero, and who is doing even a little bit badly is a monster. Look at the entire character of Fabian, and how he thinks of hockey! A lot of fans, it seems, do not understand that Fabian reflects a TRAUMA that a great many men who grow up in a sports-mad culture experience when they're BAD at sports: you are treated as lesser because of it. Constantly. By supporters of that sport (who tend to be your bullies at school) and by your own family. And you develop a hatred of the entire league.

We actually get two great contrasting examples of this in-universe, in Scott and Hollanov. Scott is a gay man. That's his only "crime". He doesn't date a hockey player, he dates someone from the same city he plays in, and Kip is probably the perfect boyfriend for insecure men to have to look at. He's bulky and Masc, so they don't have to reconsider their instinctive homophobic hatred of femme presenting men, but he's also shorter and poorer than Scott, so they can easily decide he's the Bottom, and thus, the Woman (just with a dick). Scott is also masc, monogamous, and is only ever seen with one man, who he ends up marrying. The fact that his game improves after he meets Kip, and he introduces him to the world minutes after the Admirals win their first cup in 28 years, helps too. He also has no dependents to worry about, has won everything he wanted to win, and has enough money for the rest of his life. He ONLY has to deal with the BASELINE level of homophobia of sports fans. Was coming out an EASY thing for him to do? Fuck no. Because he had no idea he was coming out to THE WORLD. He thought he was coming out to homophobic hockey fans! And they would NOT have been supportive. It took him over a decade to do it, and it basically destroyed him. He was the first to do it, because no other sane person would take that risk. Not when they could just wait until the end of their career.

Luckily, for him, he comes out in a way so public that it breaks containment, giving him a significant degree of security. Compare this to, say, Shane, who receives various threatening meetings with Crowell the moment it's even HINTED that he's gay, and you'll see the default position: even the best player in the league is still effectively told to stay in the closet. Look at the fact that the two people who came out after Scott had to leave the fucking league.

With Hollanov, you have the added factor that they play for Montreal and Boston, two teams whose fanbases hate each other so much that they burn effigies outside matches. Despite his immense success, despite Ilya not having played for Boston for years at the time they're outed, Shane still gets shredded by Montreal fans at the earliest opportunity, because he "betrayed" them by not REALLY hating the other teams. This is not a healthy environment! It is not an exaggeration to say that many sports fans would spit in the drink of a player, or even a fan of the team that is "rivaled" to theirs. This is an extremely important part of the text!

And to get meta myself, for a second... the NHL is the villain of HR, and yet so many fans seem to have come out of it deciding to join this toxic fanbase? Finding a team to support, going to games... Francois Arnaud repeatedly has spoken out about how horrifically homophobic the NHL is. He has used the platform this show has given him to call out this harmful, homophobic, racist institution. He is a French-Canadian bisexual man who couldn't skate as a kid because of a medical condition (yes, flat feet are a medical condition, i'm a severely disabled wheelchair user and my definition of disabled definitely includes this) who went to acting school, who happily uses feminine aesthetics in his fashion choices, and who knows first hand how harmful hockey culture can be. A lot like Fabian, in fact! The response from many HR fans (usually the ones who decided to become actual hockey fans after) was to brand him a "mean girl" because he broke their "boy aquarium" fantasies. Never mind the fact that has first hand experience of this toxic culture, and the harm it does: fans watched HR, saw the way this crap hurt Ilya and Shane and Scott for so many years, and decided to side with the fucking NHL. So we can already guess how the fandom will react to Fabian.

So many fans seem to be missing the point so entirely that they BECOME the villains: sending homophobic abuse to the show's best known LGBTQ+ cast member, and sending money to the NHL as they happily take money from HR whilst continuing to be homophobic AF! There's a fucking PhD thesis that could be written on how badly some people missed the ENTIRE POINT of HR, and instead substituted their own weird reality where Hockey is a super gay sport where hot guys have sex all the time, isn't that so cuuuuuuute?! But for now, I will settle on my opening point: you cannot analyse HR without understanding that the people who watch the show (mostly younger women and LGBTQ+ people) are an entirely different demographic to people who watch and support sports (mostly older white men).