#24 – Not Sure If Serious or Playing Dumba

[dekedangle_rpf_mod]

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

THE RULES

1. Mods retain the right to delete, freeze, and/or screen threads and comments.
2. Meme rules do not require warnings.
3. Respect flock. Do not repost or share information from private tumblrs, locked twitter accounts, flocked LJ posts, etc.
4. No linking fans to their real life identities.
5. No looks bashing or body shaming. This applies to players and people associated with those players and their clubs, as well as fellow fans.
6. No embedded music.
7. No embedded images.
8. No spamming the meme, whether through repeated comments or other means. 
9. No discussing trolling, individual trolls, or their efforts.





Meme rules do not require spoiler cuts. However, this layout does allow for them. Any of the following tags will create a spoiler cut when closed: <div cut>, <span cut>, <font cut>, <font color="white">

If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to The Mod Post. 

Threaded View
Flat View
Top-Level Comment View

Next post opens at 5,000 comments.

Comments

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

We're so interested in badfic-style orthorexia and gross moral judgments about food that we now need more of it imported from a completely different sport?

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Or, like, we're interested in portraying athlete's health/diet well in our own fics. Or we're just interested, period.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think this particular article would help with that. It's basically one long lecture about how if they ate better and drank less, they'd be better.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

na

Yeah, I was just going to vent today how tired I am of the fic trope where guys know they shouldn't eat dessert because it's "not in the diet plan" but indulge anyway. Seeing that kind of "ohhh I'm so bad, I shouldn't" feels like seeing the screwed up cultural messaging women get superimposed on dudes who almost certainly don't feel that way, plus I don't just want to read it.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

My team fired their nutritionist because the guys got so fed up with not being allowed to eat "bad" food that it ruined their working relationship.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Which team?

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Sabres. I didn't remember quite right; he was a "director of player performance" and slow rehab times contributed to his firing, but trying to keep a bunch of dudes in Buffalo from eating pizza and wings while the visiting team dived right in did not go over well.

http://sabres.buffalonews.com/2016/03/20/sabres-notebook-director-of-player-performance-loses-his-job/

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

but trying to keep a bunch of dudes in Buffalo from eating pizza and wings while the visiting team dived right in did not go over well.

DA who used to live in the Buffalo area is laughing because oh my GOD that would go over so so poorly. Locally iconic food forbidden to local team? HELL TO THE NO.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I'm wondering if it might be a n00b thing. Because I've read so many fucking fics featuring dressingless salads and reduced-salt cassava chips and one egg white omelets for about five years now and it's all all turned out to be directly contrary to actual articles about how hockey players (both generally and individually) eat, morally tied to players' seriousness about their sport, and (somehow! conveniently!) in line with the eating habits of a five foot tall women on a weight loss diet, all of which are things that fans here and elsewhere have pushed back on, so I can't understand how you could be around for any of that and feel like stories of an NBA player counting out each precious almond is a thing anyone ever needs in their life. How does Phil Kessel count out his ~forbidden~ hot dogs, one wonders.

Also, you make a great point about how, even if it were true, no one wants to fucking hear about it.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Hockey fandom has gone through a couple of phases on this. You don't see egg white omelettes and diet food like you used to, now that people better understand calorie requirements, but you still get the obnoxious self-shaming and "indulging." I get that it's people/women putting their own cultural programming onto their characters, plus it's just something to talk about in a fic besides "they ate a huge pile of chicken and pasta for dinner," but it's a lazy go-to for a lot of long-time writers (there was a recent offender) that's both inaccurate (dudes just eat junk or they don't IME, they don't angst about it) and also drags in all this stuff I don't want to see.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

NA It's especially frustrating because so many of these guys have given video tours of their homes. You can see the junk food in their kitchens. Johnny Gaudreau: canonically confused by produce.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, especially when they all say, "Oh, our nutritionist better not find out about that," with about as much sincerity as middle schoolers say, "Of course we didn't cheat on our take-home test."

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the Pens employ Gary Robesrt partly to do dietary stuff, right? He's a huge clean eating guy and plenty of players follow his guidelines. I agree most fics that touch on diet have excessive angst, but I don't think it's a big deal for a guy to waver on, say, ordering a pizza rather than having something nutritionist-approved.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

It might be realistic, and it might have no effect in a vacuum, but neither of those things means that it needs to be in a fic at all, much less to be tied to morality. Like, if you were writing a fic about Brooks Orpik and had him eating nothing but chia seeds or whatever, cool, he probably does that. But if you had that as a major plot point, or leaned hard on it for no reason, or had it as a direct moral contrast to Alex Ovechkin chugging a Coke before a game (a thing that is also realistic), or had every Capitals player on a 1200-calorie chia-centric diet, etc, your fic could be not only stupid but also actively gross given the intended audience. I'm sure there are plenty of players who are super into nutrition, even to great extremes, but there are also plenty of players who aren't, and the things you choose to emphasize in a fic aren't immune to criticism because nutitionists.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Plus, being aware of your calorie intake doesn't mean you're necessarily eating healthy. You can just as easily meet that calorie goal by cheerfully having a giant slice of chocolate cake as you can having that meal of chicken and broccoli.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't say they were immune to criticism. I agree that it shouldn't be tied to morality. I just don't think we should go all the way from "hockey players live on organic kale and are shocked by candy" to "hockey players live on chocolate cake and pie and wouldn't recognise a nutrient".

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I think there are both good and bad ways to handle this in a fic.

I was completely thrown out of a fic that I really wanted to love because of a couple of guys going out to eat and "this only has 600 calories!" being a thing, followed by the OMG-so-guilty! splitting of a dessert.

On the other hand, especially when you've got a guy who is known to be strict about the diet side of training, or superstitious in a way that food is part of, I think that can help with the characterization. Like, there was a thing where a bunch of his teammates were chirping John Tavares about "don't let him plan the Super Bowl party or we'll all be eating kale chips with our guac and that's it!" Doesn't mean I'd want a fic full of him obsessing about diet, but the friendly teasing or a one-off mention that's part of establishing that this is not just an Any Two Guys fic? I like that kind of detail, so YMMV.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

OP who originally vented

Yep, this is what I mean. Certain players are famous for being health nuts (Toews dragging Brad Richards to a smoothie place in Tampa) or junk food addicts (Gaudreau, Neal who can't cook?) but what I really hate is when any of the zillion guys between those extremes are finishing up dinner and doing the want-to-but-I-shouldn't dance about dessert, or similar scenes. It's shitty cultural programming anyway, but specifically feminine in the west, and I feel like I'm watching a yogurt ad or reading a mainstream romance novel, because female guilt over wanting to eat "decadent" food is often subtly tied to guilt over wanting sex but being a good girl. So it doesn't just bug me because it's factually inaccurate, but because it brings in all that baggage.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

NA

Most guys I know who are really health conscious will give themselves a day where they're like, fuck it, I want ice cream, so they get ice cream. As much ice cream as they want. And they eat it that day. But anything that's left over the next day gets given to their significant other or thrown out, so they don't have two days where they eat a ton of junk. None of that splitting dessert bullshit, unless the dessert in question is an entire cake.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Definitely this. Though variations exist, like say Crosby thinking it because he knows he will eat all of it, ever, if he doesn't stop himself--I'd buy it, if I saw that, but clearly they haven't seen casual videos where the guys just inhale food or smaller guys mainlining sugar.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, Crosby is one of the worst examples in fic. How many stories revolve around "tempting" him with cheesecake or chocolate? I was so pleased by that recent article that put it as "he doesn't deny himself"; I'd imagine his teammates tease him for having a sweet tooth, the way Toews's tease him for being borderline-orthorexic about "clean eating," but I'd imagine he gets the damn cheesecake without too much internal debate. It's yet another way so many feminine traits get put on that dude just because he has full lips and a big ass.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

But Crosby has literally said he has to be careful with eating because of his sweet tooth, particularly in the summer. There's no canon with the assumption that he only eats salad, but there is definitely canon that says he's a bit at war with himself over food.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

na

Being careful about what you eat isn't the same as being at war with oneself over food, though. I think that's where some of the discomfort is coming from. There's a big difference between controlling what you eat to maximize your athletic performance, and the associations of guilt and morality from eating "bad" food. Not to say that the two never overlap, of course they do, but having experienced both first-hand at different times, they are not the same. Crosby imo sounds like a guy who's pretty at peace with his sweet tooth even while acknowledging it's not something he wants to do all the time.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

a ayrt rt

Yeah, it's the guilting and angsting I'm really objecting to. I ran this whole debate by my husband last night, and he was like "yeah, you notice I didn't have ice cream last night and I am tonight because I don't want to have it all the time, but it's just a quick yes or no decision." Guys just don't have that "ohhhh fine I'll be BAD!" BS as a cultural model for them, probably bc they don't grow up watching their moms and other female role models do that.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, reminds me of Jeff Zatkoff saying the key to Sid's success is never turning down dessert lol