dekedangle_rpfanon | #26 — Vanek! with a Jurco

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

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NA I'm not sure people wanted the fall of the juggernauts, or just more variety.

I'm also not sure that the existence of big pairings necessarily lead to a sense of community across hockey fandom as a whole. The popularity of K/T or S/G is pretty irrelevant to people who wrote for different teams in the first place. And people write for the pairings they love, even though it might be only five other people into the pairing.

Within say the Pens fans it may be harder now to find someone who shares the same pairing, but it really doesn't change anything for people who never wrote Pens anyway.

This seems very right to me.

na

I think you're right that there were always people on the periphery and more likely to feel alienated than included by the juggernaut pairings, but I don't think I agree that big pairings don't lead to a sense of community. I think your observations would be right if fans tended to be segmented into groups that all share one team and read and write fic about that team and those players, but that's never been the case. A lot of fic writers who've written for a large variety of pairings have also written S/G and K/T, and a lot of people who aren't Pens or Hawks fans or who would never write those pairings themselves have read that fic nonetheless and formed fandom connections that way and have common reference to certain "big name" authors and fic. So yes, the general existence of juggernaut pairings does mean a random fan is more likely to find someone who likes the same pairings, especially because people don't choose pairings in a vacuum, they often become interested in pairings because someone else in fandom is interested, too. (Just not a particular person who doesn't care for any of those juggernaut pairings.) I think activity around juggernauts also creates a lot of general fandom growth (not just Pens and Hawks fans -- plenty of people discovered fandom that way and moved on to other teams and pairings), while activity around many rarer pairings is less likely to do that.

It's the nature of a community that some are included and some are excluded, so for people who never had anything to do with the juggernauts, I wouldn't be surprised if many feel like not much has changed. But even as someone who made a lot of effort to avoid one of those juggernaut pairings, I never felt its popularity was "irrelevant" to my fandom experience because it was everywhere, I couldn't block or mute everyone who talked about them because I would be blocking nearly everyone who wrote the fic and pairings that I was interested in. I do think there are tangible effects of the juggernauts' declining popularity that go just beyond Hawks fans and Pens fans. Or maybe I'm just mistaking causes and effects.

I do agree that juggernauts and variety aren't a zero sum game. I think some of that perception probably comes from the feeling that someone writing a pairing you aren't interested in could be expending that effort to write a pairing you like instead (see: attitudes towards oflights).

(sa

Oh geez, I'm sorry this became an essay, I hope it doesn't seem like I'm trying to be argumentative or Vehemently Disagree with you, your comment just sparked a lot of thoughts, is all. I'm not trying to declare the death of fandom because people don't write my pairing anymore, just trying to capture why I feel that something about this fandom has changed, not necessarily for the worse imo.)

AYRT - No, it's fine it's interesting to think about.

I did get into this fandom due to a juggernaut fic being recced on FFA, but I also transitioned to my own team very quickly, and some of the first stories that I read and loved and that kept me in the fandom were rare pairs for rare teams. So I think how much community you feel or felt as a result of popular ships probably varied a lot and may not have been there much at all for some rare pair shippers. For me, yeah, sure, I probably got some comments from people who also read popular teams and who were okay reading for other teams as well, but I also got negativity from popular pairing shippers and, in some cases, an epic fuck ton of OTT shit, so my whole experience in this fandom has been either not having a community, only having one anon, or wandering around trying to find people to talk to around the perimeter of things.

ayrt

That makes sense! But I think you're maybe using the word "community" differently from how I am, and it's possible that I used it differently from how others others meant it? I feel like there was more of a sense of community when the juggernauts were more popular, and that people were not as loosely dispersed. But I didn't necessarily "feel community" as something that I had. I understood the a-airt-rt as saying (amongst other things) that fandom felt more cohesive before and feels more spread out into smaller groups now, and I agree and in a lot of ways find that more pleasant to deal with.

I know a lot of people got into non-juggernaut teams and pairings and stayed attached to those pairings even though they came into fandom through juggernaut fic, but I suspect that that also happens less often when the juggernaut activity declines. But I think maybe I conflated fandom size/growth with the idea that there's a sense of fandom community.

AYRT-I suppose it does depend on how people come into the fandom and how they interact with it. I agree that many people are drawn in by the existing fic, and a large part of those fics are juggernaunt pairings. But, like you say many people move on from those fics to other teams and other pairings. Some people will be drawn in by individual teams and players instead.

So there are many people who do have shared experience of specific works or authors but does it make a difference if K/T or S/G continues to be produced? That I'm not so sure about. I'm not really into twitter so perhaps that reduces the impact on me.

I think it'll be interesting to see if it is a shift in focus, and a new juggernaut pairing will emerge. Or if there will be a greater number of different smaller ships. I'm not sure if it's just a decline of juggernaut pairings or if it's a result of the rift in the fandom which is impacting the sense of community. There do seem to have been more team specific exchanges for example this year, but it is difficult to determine cause and effect.

I think there will be some occasions when you wish someone would write the pairing of your heart rather than a different pairing.

ayrt

That's a good point about how people engage in fandom. It would be a really different experience for someone whose fandom participation also included twitter and tumblr, versus someone who might just read and write fic for particular players they care about. I guess I was thinking more of the former than the latter.

My theory is that fewer people will be drawn in by non-juggernaut teams and players in the first place than the amount of people drawn in by juggernauts who then move on to those other teams/pairings. But that's only my perception. Like you, I'm curious to see what happens next. And that's a good point about cause and effect -- it's easy to see, for example, why something like the Kane allegations would fragment the sense of "community" and contribute to the decline of K/T as a juggernaut pairing.

Oh, I agree, and I've felt that way about my favorite pairings too! I just thought it might be one thing subconsciously influencing conflating wanting the juggernauts to decline with wanting more variety of pairings.

AYRT - I do engage a certain amount with tumblr but I limit that, because I find it too much to absorb.

Like the other anon I entered the fandom through recs on FFA and I had no idea who the people were, but there was more to read for that pairing than say a rare pair. But the players I ended up liking most and the team I follow aren't the ones from the first fic I read. I am sure if I had connected to one of the teams with a juggernaut pairing my perceptions would be different.

ayrt

Oh, I wonder if this is at least as much a question of how people engage in fandom, then. The reason I feel so strongly that fandom had a wide sense of community was how impossible it was for me to ignore the juggernaut pairing I didn't care for, not being attached to a juggernaut pairing/team. Even people I followed who weren't attached to that juggernaut-containing team frequently engaged with the players/pairing and their fans, even some who claimed not to like one of the players involved. But my problem with fandom was also the same as my general problem with tumblr, which is the impossibility of shielding yourself from certain content/people without cutting yourself off from what you want to use tumblr for in the first place. Obviously that wouldn't be the case for someone who engages less in that platform and who mainly reads and writes fic, and I hadn't thought of that.

I think some of that perception probably comes from the feeling that someone writing a pairing you aren't interested in could be expending that effort to write a pairing you like instead (see: attitudes towards oflights).

I don't know about this. To use your example, I really think a lot of the entitlement people show about oflights switching ships is that she left a juggernaut, and she switched to something that supposedly breaks the juggernaut up. I've seen people subtweeting to that effect a lot and the comments on here sometimes seem coded that way. It's not just "ew I hate that ship", it's also "poor Geno, she needs to be nicer to him."

I sometimes wonder if Sid/Nate would be bigger if someone with less fandom baggage coming from a lesser known pairing started writing it and promoting it the way she does. So many people hate Sid/Nate because they see it at the expense of Sid/Geno. And that kind of resentment doesn't build across different rare pairs IMO.

da

I'm pretty sure people who hate the juggernaut being split up will hate the splitting up even if it's coming from a NNF. There might be less sense of betrayal, though.

da

S/G fans don't virulently hate Sid/Claude, though, except maybe a small amount of Pens fans who don't like it because of the Pens/Flyers rivalry? But you'd think that Giroux being a Flyer/the pairing's most popular fic being written predominantly by Flyers fans would make the pairing less popular than Sid/Nate amongst S/G fans.

Sid/Claude taps into very different relationship dynamics, with the enemies who became lovers thing. Sid/Nate & Sid/Geno tap into somewhat similar dynamics of both Nate and Geno adoring Sid. Really, the thing that distinguishes Nate from Geno is being younger and Canadian, and I can understand what's annoying about that.

Really, the thing that distinguishes Nate from Geno is being younger and Canadian, and I can understand what's annoying about that

I... don't agree with this at all. I don't think this line of thinking is the cause of antipathy towards Sid/Nate, I think it's more likely to be the result of it...

I'm not understanding you. It sounds like you're saying Nate is younger and Canadian because people hate Sid/Nate.

An Ice Hockey RPF Anon Meme

#26 — Vanek! with a Jurco

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