Confessions of a Recovering RPS Fangirl

I've been a hockey fan for as long as I can remember, and a slash fan from the moment I discovered porn. But for many years the two were kept carefully separate. Slashing my favorite sexy hockey players seemed so strange and wrong (but oh so good).

Okay ... the title of this post is a little misleading, because I'm not at all recovering. I'm the fucking Lindsey Lohan of RPS. Slap my naughty ankle bracelet on because I can't stay away, I can't stop. I'm plowing into official mascots in my shagging wagon and flashing the dirty parts across the internet like a teenage heiress. Even though I am horrified by the idea that one day I may write something of merit and it may become common knowledge that Isa reads and writes little porn fantasies about real people *face palm*

In fact when that happens, this will probably be the first post the tabloids find (*waves*) and I will no longer be able to have serious hockey talks with people because everyone will assume I'm only here to perv on the athletes.

That's not true! I only perv in my free time! I swear!

What people don't understand about RPS is that it has almost nothing to do with the real people in question. It's about bonding with other female hockey fans. It is the dirty equivalent of a Saturday Night Live parody: the characters are supposed to be just close enough to the real people to be recognizable but the fun is in using elements of reality to create something deliberately fake.

And oddly enough, I think FAKE is the key thing here because you don't see much RPS of celebrities who are actually gay. Nor do you see much writing on real life couples. (cue a thousand an one corrections from commenters, go ahead) RPS can be a bit like Scifi in the sense that the fun comes from the suspension of disbelief. An author showcases her talent by how far she can take the audience into things that are clearly and ridiculously untrue.

I have a RPS series I've been writing where the core pairing are two people I'm pretty sure haven't actually met. What limited contact they have had has been as far from affectionate as two people could possibly get.

But I've managed to convince the entire fandom that they are totally in love and meant to be together 4-evar <3 <3 <3 It's the weirdest and also the most addictive thing. Not just from the writing side. Reading the epic tales others create, with elaborate backstories that carefully reference real events and hundreds of interviews scoured for personal details, is just as exciting. Some of my favorite fics take pairs of normal blue collar hockey boys and recast them as WWII soldiers, trafficked brothel workers, mafia crime lords...

It's terrible to have this much fun and to have to keep it secret. Terrible! Although many would say this is probably the worst kept secret on GRs right now ... I've been pushing recs to private porn-filled communities and archives to all many friends, giggling over gifs and pic spams while playing a public line of "SLASH? WHAT SLASH? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!!! *nervous laughter*"

Terrible.

Two years ago I started writing original hockey slash stories for my friends. They quickly took off, because I suppose I'm not the only one who was craving the opportunity to embrace the fantasy in some publicly acceptable way.

Almost a year ago I had this idea for a short PWP type fic. The problem was the pairing I imagined for it had run its course in the fandom. RPS is hard on the concept of OTP, because real life so rarely follows a convenient story structure. The main characters in the hockey narrative one season are obsolete by the end of the summer. People get traded, people retire, and without fresh gossip to fuel interest what was enticing one year just seems like a ridiculous stretch the next.

So, not wanting to see the story languish with only one or two comments on the slash boards I rethought the concept and There's Cock In This Book was born.

To be honest, I never really intended to do anything with Mac and Fritzy. To me it was just a short. A light porny nothing I could give away for free and use to giggle about hockey on GR. But the GR community didn't take it that way at all. I have never got so many requests for more O.o People kept asking "What happens next?" to which I mentally responded "Next? What next?" In fanfic you don't write endings with lots of closure, you pass the banton back to the reader's fantasy and let them enjoy filling in the blanks.

But when I went back to the story I realized I was trying to import all the things that otherwise would have been unspoken in RPS (because they were obvious, because they were understood, because they had been discussed at length elsewhere in the fandom) and this had left a lot of unresolved issues. There's Cock In This Book kind of dumps Mac and Fritzy in the middle of an impossible situation. Temporarily satisfied by finding each other, but no less stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I could see why that was frustrating for some people. I could also see where there was room to go further and tell a really interesting story.

Last year Patrick Burke introduced the If You Can Play, You Can Play campaign in honor of his brother's memory and mission. Athletes coming out has been a hot topic of discussion as of late, with lots of talk about "finding" an active player willing to be the face of the cause.

Frankly, I find all of this a little disturbing because coming out publicly is such a huge risk and I feel like the various campaigns always talk about it as a goal they want to accomplish rather than someone's personal decision they want to support and enable. It's particularly unsettling in the case of hockey because the NHL is one of the most ridiculously discriminatory leagues in the world. There are still teams that are quite vocal about the fact that they will not sign/draft/play Russians. No matter how talented, or what personality, no matter how well they speak English ... the perceived flaws in their ethnicity are enough to justify who does or doesn't get a job. In any other community this would be abhorrent, yet in hockey it is accepted, tolerated, encouraged even.

So with How To Quit Playing Hockey I wanted to address some of these issues. It's not that hockey people are bigots, it's that people will mimic the behavior they feel is expected of them. And the hockey community celebrates discrimination like nothing else. This is probably one of the few industries in the world where a thirty goal scorer can be benched in favor of a journeyman grinder and experts will trip over themselves to justify it by saying oh well that other guy is small and foreign. There is almost no accountability for the decisions coaches, scouts, and GMs make and that's what these LGBT campaigns don't get. It's not the teammates that need to speak up in support, it's the people who sign the pay checks and the lineup cards.

I felt like this kind of environment deserved in a slightly different coming out story. One where there were no evil homophobic bad guys (sorry). One where coming out wasn't about acceptance and righteousness, but a shrewd, cynical, career move.

....Oh yeah, did I mention the cover is pretty hot too?