fandom shit

[psocoptera]

So Patrick Kane, half of the OTP of my favorite reading fandom of the past two years, is being investigated for rape. Some people are doing the "but we don't knooow he did it" dance, but come on, I hate that I have to believe it too, but a woman went and got a rape kit done, he fucking did it, even if they can't make it stick in the legal system.

I've been meaning to write here, or maybe in SWAPA, about what it's been like to go from being someone with a lifelong contempt for professional sports and their fans to screaming and crying about the Stanley Cup Final with friends online, to be someone who tells myself "if the Blackhawks could win in triple overtime, you can do this thing" for motivational self-talk (or "Duncan Keith's ice time" or "Pacioretty can push a thousand-pound sled, I can get this fucking compost to the curb" or whatever. Finding athletes inspiring, what. the. FUCK.). When Kane scored in game six, it was this amazing, joyful moment, to see that, to be part of this community screaming "boom heartbreaker" at each other, and I'm so fucking angry to feel sick about that now.

Plus, of course, the millions of words of many hundreds of stories I've devoured over the past two years. Some of my very favorite novels of the past couple of years, the swooniest romances, the hottest porn - and, look, obviously I know this is far down the list of harms, there's a woman who's going to have to fight for justice and I honestly doubt she's going to see it. But something that mattered a lot to me, that was a source of so much enjoyment, and pride, too - after a couple of years of lurkerdom, I had started writing, recently. Had started commenting more on people's stories and trying to engage a little more in the fandom outside of reading. It has felt like the first time I've ever really come out of lurkerdom in a big fandom - I never used to post my HP stuff to the archives, I never really tried to connect with anyone in ATLA, so many of my reading fandoms have always been media fandoms where I wasn't actually watching the source and didn't feel qualified to participate. But, there I was in hockey fandom, with authors I admired kudos-ing and commenting on my dipped little toe, and now I've spent the past twenty-four hours watching the authors I love post their goodbyes, one by one. All these WIPs I was gagging for the next parts of that will never be finished or resolved, not that I could want them, the same way, that I did, but, fuck, I feel knocked off my feet. He was woven through everywhere in everything this fandom touched for me, like, part of my eye looking at Jonathan Toews was Kaner's eye. My desire to watch actual hockey was partly spurred by the Kane stickhandling video. I know about Check Please through hockey RPF fans. Etc. I don't know yet what I'll manage to keep.

I suppose to non-fandom people this all seems very silly, and non-RPF people might feel good about their choice to stick with purely fictional fandoms. But I was in love, with the fandom, with Kane/Toews as a pairing, with fictional character Patrick Kane, with the idea of being a hockey fan as something I could have in my life and be excited about that I wasn't going to lose because of my fucking failing body or social anxiety or any of that, and my heart is broken. And I guess I hope my friends who have been in RPF fandoms, at least, can get that, what an awful, jarring thing this is in a fandom way.

Comments

[une-jonquille.livejournal.com]

oh shit
I will write you more soon
I am sending you hugs.

[une-jonquille.livejournal.com]

okay the kids are temporarily occupied so --

I know I'm not in your fandom -- everything I know about hockey RPF I know through you; I went through my professional-sports love earlier and thus hit the disillusion stage earlier -- but seriously, this is my nightmare, given that the Korean entertainment industry seems to be even murkier and more misogynistic than American sports, if that's conceivable. (If stuff comes out decades from now, à la Clark Gable, I won't be surprised.)

And yeah, no celebrity owes anything to the person(s) who project an identification onto him/her, and this is a risk that comes with RPF, but that doesn't mean you haven't suffered a loss, and that the community hasn't suffered a loss. And that you haven't suffered a loss in seeing the blow to the community. (I've been relatively lucky in meeting people through my fandom, and it's still hard, even when the controversies are no greater than who's getting more chances to act in dramas.)

And this seems like -- I don't know, for women who want to identify with a particular man, who reach parts of themselves through the fictional male-self -- I woke up this morning and thought, It's like I discovered a vehicle for my animus, and said vehicle just happens to be thirteen years younger and on the other side of the world -- to have the man commit rape is just an especially harsh blow. Like, getting busted for assault or DUI, while still evidence of extremely poor judgment and a lack of regard for other human life, wouldn't be such a nasty shock. I'm not sure how to articulate it, other than it feels like an expression not just of violence against this one poor particular woman but against women, contempt for female wholeness and female desire. It's like you were looking for greater openness and love and connection through this man's public image, and through his actions he spat upon that. Again, that's not how it is, that's how it feels, or at least how it seems like it might feel, to me; I apologize if I'm projecting.

tl;dr I am so sorry.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I knew you would have good things to say. ::hugs::

The Kane situation is complicated by the fact that fandom *has* been deliberately collectively ignoring his previous awfulness - he drunkenly assaulted a cab driver in like 2009, and may have choked a woman in a bar in a big drunken episode in 2012. Which was all before the majority of the current fandom even existed, and Kane/the Blackhawks pushed a narrative in which he was actually sorry - there was an infamous crying-on-camera interview - and, I don't know, it was easy for me to come into the fandom and be like okay, this is a part of the real person's past, but it doesn't have to define what we can do with the character. And I guess there are some authors who are still hoping to do that even with this, which - I don't want to judge people about that, when you have so much of yourself and your effort invested in your current 50K WIP or whatever, I see the attraction of writing about the AU where PKane is actually a decent human being. Someone said on Twitter last night that RPF often creates better lives for the subjects of it than they would make for themselves, and, wow, yeah, boy did that turn out to be true in this case.

It's definitely the worst that it's rape. (Well, not *the* worst, I guess, I can remember having once read an Oscar Pistorius story before he murdered his girlfriend.) There was chaste K/T romance but boy howdy was there an amazing amount of hardcore scorchingly hot porn, and all of that playfulness, exploration, interrogation of gender and sexuality - I said on tumblr that it feels like I've been eating a delicious chocolate cake for the past couple years, and I just picked up the latest slice and found maggots under it. Some people are rallying pretty hard under "at least let's not our past memories be tainted even if we can't keep going", which... honestly I sort of hope I get there eventually, there are stories it breaks my heart to think of not being able to ever reread - but on the other hand I guess that's real life for you, that sometimes you can't ever go back and things are just over.

BLARGH. I am doing pretty okay, probably going to try to make myself write *something* this weekend so I'm not just mentally stopped in the middle of the hockey story I was writing, and I'm mostly over my initial hysteria that I might not even be able to enjoy Check Please or the actual sport of hockey or any of that. But it's so fucked up. PKane Actual had everything in the world, the fandom had gotten so much out of him and all he had to do was not be unforgivable and enjoy his amazing life. He was a Lego minifig, for fuck's sake, I don't know why I keep coming back to this, maybe because that was such an innocent, simple version of the character and in so many ways so was fandom's. Sigh.

[adfamiliares.livejournal.com]

This kind of fandom is totally alien to me, but I get it. Whoever you are, whatever you like, it seems like we all have to absorb this kind of shock at some point: you grew up with the Cosby Show and it's Bill Cosby; you're a New Orleans Saints fan and it's Darren Sharper; you own a bunch of Moxy Fruvous albums and it's Jian; you're a Mennonite and it's the most famous Mennonite theologian of the 20th century. A person whose work you admired or who was part of something you really liked turns out to be a terrible person, and now you don't know what to do with your liking for that thing. Compared with the victim's experience, your feelings of loss are nothing, but in your life, your feelings are real and they matter to you.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think for me the narrative shock was worse than the moral shock in some ways; maybe Cosby if the Cosby show had immediately been cancelled in the middle of a whole bunch of cliffhangery plotlines. I'm trying to imagine how I would feel if it had been someone from one of my past RPF fandoms - Chris Kirkpatrick or Kris Allen or something - and I think I would have been horrified, but there wouldn't have been that same feeling of a whole house of fandom that I was living in crashing down around me.

[motyl.livejournal.com]

Ugh ugh ugh. I can't speak to fandoms or sports but I can empathize about role models fallen off pedestals, unfinished stories, and community lost. And to have all three happen at once with such a cause... *hugs* and sympathy, that bites on so many levels.