dekedangle_rpfanon | #24 – Not Sure If Serious or Playing Dumba

This is the twenty-fourth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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I'm the exact same. He was a good player and a good partner for Letang, seems like a good enough dude, but that's about it.

The biggest reason I started turning on him started with the Minnesota Sunshine crap and the insistent portrayal of him as this sweet, kind "Minnesota nice" (barf) team mom that stays home and knits, and it's just such a boring archetype. It also doesn't fit actual Paul Martin, who everyone in Pittsburgh knows was a huge partier and playboy.

Good teammate, nice guy, fine hockey player, but I'm more than happy to have a younger, cheaper and IMO better version of him in Brian Dumoulin.

I don't know if Dumoulin is quite on Martin's level yet, but he's also eleven years younger (I think?) and has only one full season under his belt. He's got plenty of time to grow still!

Looking very roughly at their stats (including playoffs), I'd call it in favor of Dumoulin, but in any case it's closer than some Martin fans would want to admit http://i.imgur.com/pSvzMk5.png

The amount of interest I have (or would have had) in Paul Martin just went up significantly with that last bit of information. What I wouldn't give for fics where the professional male athletes acted like actual professional male athletes. That was one thing I really enjoyed during my brief visit with baseball RPF.

AYRT

I actually agree with you; I would love it if Martin were actually portrayed that way, it would be really interesting. Even combining the team mom/playboy archetypes could be fun; he makes breakfast for last night's hookup and pitiful teammates who can't feed themselves!

But everyone who writes Paul Martin either sanitizes him or uses him as a service top for poor woobified sub Beau Bennett/James Neal, and it especially goes hand in hand with a sweet, innocent portrayal of Beau that makes no sense taken with how he acts on social media. So no thanks, fandom.

I feel like I agree with you but would also like to hear more of your thoughts. This fandom writes a fair bit about pro male athletes as bros, but that's mostly the younger players.

And it doesn't seem to deal with extravagant wealth hardly at all, which I can understand, since I think it'd be harder to make characters sympathetic in that context, and also most of us have no experience of what that'd be like. (See: someone writing Geno renting a Camry.)

I'm not sure what the balance is between acknowledging that these guys are hugely talented, hugely competitive, and all have egos the size of the moon, and keeping them sympathetic as characters. It's a tough line to walk.

I lol at anything that portrays Minnesota Nice as actually nice. Anyone who has actually lived there knows its actually Minnesota Polite and Passive-Agressive, with a heavy dose of Strong Emotions are only allowed in Private.

Now THAT is a Paul Martin I would read in a heartbeat.

sa

Actually, I'm going to expand that. I just need way more emotional constipation in this fandom, and I don't mean broning where guys are too busy being bros to notice they're in a gay relationship. I don't even really mean stuff dealing with internalized homophobia. I just have a weakness for guys who don't have feelings because Real Men Don't Do That, but then end up having them anyway in some traumatic fashion.

Six days later, I am CPing the hell out of this into my inspiration folder, because you've hit on some stuff that I am both super tired of (The Bros Who Don't Realize What's Going On) and that I want more of: guys without feelings, who actually do have them.

SO MANY of the guys I know just have this...gaping absence in their lives when it comes to talking about feelings. Particularly about their wives/significant others. They just don't do it. And women tend to share that stuff a lot more, so it shows up in fic: all these dudes talking about their feelings.

And don't get me wrong. I LOVE a good adult conversation that gets at the heart of the conflict between characters, but I'm ready to slam that Repress/Deny/Ignore button, too. Because having legitimately emotionally constipated guys HAVE to work through something that they otherwise just wouldn't would be really satisfying to read/write.

ayrt

I think part of it is that guys in hockey fic tend to pretty self-aware about their feelings, even if they don't dare talk about them, and I don't think that's always necessary or realistic characterization. Sometimes it doesn't even need to involve repress/ignore/deny on a conscious level because it's so instinctive.

Anyway, I am delighted to hear this, and I hope you find it a very inspirational line of thought! :)

I would read the shit out of Paul Martin being passive aggressive as fuck and Neal or Beau or whatever walking on eggshells whenever he says "hmm" in that particular tone of voice.

That's how it seems to me, as someone who isn't from there, but it always seems to be presented as Actually Nice in fic.

As someone who was born in Minnesota and lives in Seattle now. I absolutely think Minnesota Nice is actually nice. Or maybe a lot of the people who live in Seattle are just dicks. But every time I go home I'm struck by how much nicer/kinder/more helpful everyone is in Minnesota.

I mean, it is being helpful and kind? But it's also never trying to expand relationships with strangers past polite formalities and saying "well, that was different" meaning "I hated that with a passion" and having anything more than a single tear fall down your cheek at a relative's funeral be "making a scene".

Hahahha on the "that was different" thing. In Seattle we say "well that's interesting" which means "I want very strongly for you to never speak again"

I think probably part of me is bias since my Minnesota comes with my ridiculously outgoing family - which makes the stranger thing and the making a scene thing a moot point because we are all about a 20 minute conversation with the person who is bagging groceries and its not really dinner with my big family unless there's a fight about something and then a long discussion about the fight.

That said. If people would stop being so nice when allowing others to merge on the freeway. That'd be swell.

#24 – Not Sure If Serious or Playing Dumba

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