The Hockey Fandom Guide to Plausible Hatesex
Someone over at Primerfest wanted a primer on NHL rivalries. This is... not exactly that primer.
With 802 active players in the NHL, there are a lot of options for pairings. Mostly, people choose to write about guys who play on the same team, which makes sense considering logistics and who the players are most likely to know. Sometimes authors pair players who have been known to interact in canon regardless of what teams they're on (e.g. Jonathan Toews and Sidney Crosby, who roomed together at the Olympics [edit: apparently they didn't actually share a room, just spent a lot of time together] and have similar personalities, so they get paired together sometimes even though the Hawks and the Pens pretty much couldn't care less about each other).
But then there are the rivalries, and those can get fun. You can go the forbidden-love route with rivalries, which I suppose most of the information here could be used for as well, but I'm selfish and I want to see more hatesex, so that's the slant I'm taking with this.
I'm not going to write about every rivalry in the NHL. Here's why:
Turns out that when you base an entire pastime on opposition, shit gets oppositional. (Graphic by me.)
That's every rivalry listed on Wikipedia's NHL rivalries page. I am told (slightly aggressively) by Tumblr that in addition to these, there are also rivalries between the Sharks and the Stars, the Bruins and the Flyers, the Bruins and the Canucks, the Coyotes and the Kings, the Coyotes and the Stars, the Coyotes and the Sharks, and the Blue Jackets and the Red Wings. I am dubious about that last one, but uh, you go ahead and aim high there, Columbus.
So I'm not covering all of them here. If you want a full rundown, check out that Wikipedia page. Actually, if you want the primer the "NHL rivalries" prompter at Primerfest was probably hoping for, check out that page. This primer, instead, will focus on the most fic-friendly rivalries, with an emphasis on pairings that have already been written, and the details I choose to include will be skewed toward the ones that seem most useful for fic authors. I will almost certainly leave out crucial tidbits by accident; feel free to rectify these mistakes in the comments.
Let's kick things off with the rivalry people seem to like writing fic about the most: Sidney Crosby/Alexander Ovechkin.
These dudes are not about to make sweet love on a bed of rose petals, mmkay.
The Penguins/Capitals rivalry has been going on for a while. The two teams have been up against each other in the playoffs eight times, and the Pens won seven of those. But the media really started wetting their pants about it in the 2005-06 season, when Crosby and Ovechkin started playing. (Ovi was drafted in 2004, but that was the year of the lockout, so he didn't start in the NHL until '05.) They were both young, talented, promising players, both picked first in the draft, and they had this yin-yang narrative going that everybody was drooling all over--the fun-loving carefree Russian versus the hardworking serious Canadian, the party boy versus the dude who's so focused on his career that he doesn't have time for girls. HBO did a 24/7 series about their Winter Classic. There were a lot of hilarious slo-mo shots of people getting off planes and shit, all set to epic THE BATTLE IS ABOUT TO COMMENCE type music, it was pretty great.
Things between these two have kind of cooled off lately, since Sid's been out with a concussion and Ovi apparently needs his mortal enemy around to be able to play hockey, since he hasn't really been tearing up the ice so much lately. Also, they might not actually hate each other, but ssshhh, no one who writes fic needs to know that. HATESEX, PEOPLE, GIVE ME IT. Here's some inspiration for you: Wants and Needs, by cominginside.
The Caps/Penguins rivalry also encompasses the relationship between Ovi and Evgeni Malkin:
I know it kind of looks like Ovi is trying to defend Malkin's honor here, fending off would-be attackers from all directions with his stick and his skate blade, but I promise this is not the case.
These two actually seemed to have legit beef at one point--Ovi was checking Malkin a lot for a while there, and was quoted as saying (translated from Russian in that article), "I just think that he was wrong in acting like he did. He said things that shouldn't have been said. I won't go into it in detail." (As an aside, my favorite part of that interview was not actually the part about Malkin, but rather the part where Ovi talked about the time he and Alex Semin ruined a hotel room in San Jose. "There were bananas everywhere." LULZ. But I digress.)
I am aware that I'm pretty much the only person ever to find Evgeni Malkin devastatingly attractive, but look at this:
Seriously. Tell me you don't want to see someone shove him to his knees and fuck that mouth.
I don't think there's any Geno/Ovi hatesex fic yet, but there seriously should be.
Next up, hockey fandom's second-favorite dudes-who-hate-each-other pairing: Andrew Ladd and Ryan Kesler.
Is it just me, or do they look kinda bored here? Like, yawn, this guy again? *halfhearted swing*
The Blackhawks and the Canucks have not been fond of each other since, like, the mid-'70s, but shit really got nasty in 2009 when things devolved into chaos and hair-pulling on the ice. (The incident inspired Luongo to write a poem about Byfuglien's ass, because Luongo is the funniest fucking asshole in the NHL. I'm gonna have to do a Luongo primer one of these days if nobody else gets around to it first.)
Then Ladd broke Kesler's nose in the playoffs, and then after that they basically went at it every time they were on the ice at the same time.
Unf. I have no idea why hockey fandom is not full to bursting with bloodplay.
Ladd is captain of the Jets now, and I don't think he and Kesler still have this thing going, but that's okay because the best Ladd/Kesler hatesex fic is all AU anyway. There's the Mafia AU and the hooker AU and the college AU, and IMO there ought to be more. (Can you tell I have a slight ulterior motive for writing this post?)
Next, Penguins/Flyers! These dudes are not messing around with the whole rivalry business, let me tell you. They are just pissed as hell at each other for existing. Here is a summary of the total penalty minutes for the final minute of the third period of the last regular-season game they played in the 2011-12 season. That is one minute of penalties.
Look at that sneer on Sid's face. He is SO MAD that Giroux has not yet dropped dead right there on the ice, WHAT THE HELL, HATH THE UNIVERSE NO JUSTICE.
I'm pretty sure that image is from the most recent postseason, in which there was no series more entertaining than the bloody war of the sieves that was the Penguins/Flyers first-round matchup. In the third game of the series, they racked up 158 penalty minutes. That's more than two full games. Some bar in Philly named a beer Crosby's Tears that week. Dudes are not buds.
The Crosby/Giroux pairing is an obvious one I'd like to see more of; they're both excellent players, and they seem to like beating each other up. Another Pens/Flyers pairing is Marc-Andre Fleury/Max Talbot, which tends towards the angsty, since they used to be pals when Talbot played for the Penguins before defecting to Philly last summer.
Now for the Rangers/Devils rivalry, which I mention mostly as an excuse to include this motherfucking hysterical video:
See bb!Brodeur cracking up in the background, trying to hide from the cameras behind his blocker? *watches three more times* Solid fucking gold.
The Rangers and the Devils are right across the river from each other, which resulted in some highly entertaining attempts to keep each other out of home games during the Eastern Conference finals this year. My favorite story about this rivalry is the time in the 2008 playoffs when Sean Avery danced up to Martin Brodeur and started waving around his arms and blocking Brodeur's vision so he couldn't keep track of the puck. The NHL was like o.O "uh, well, we didn't think we had to put this in the playbook, but if Avery's gonna be an ass..." and made a new rule because of the incident. Brodeur refused to shake Avery's hand afterward, and Avery was quoted as saying, "Everyone talks about how classy or unclassy I am, and fatso here just forgot to shake my hand."
"Hi Martypants! What's up! Yoo-hoo! Over here! Look what a complete and utter dipshit I am!"
arc flash by 26miledrive is an excellent Brodeur/Avery fic.
And then there's the ultimate matchup in hockey [edit: I mean from an NHL perspective, obvs, I'm not trying to diss anybody else's national hockey team]: the Canadian and American Olympics teams.
In the 2010 Olympics, the hockey gods bestowed upon fandom a neat canon-based excuse to tear Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews apart, make them fight, let them angst, and then reunite them to play together once more. For this we thank thee, hockey gods. Amen.
Spoiler: Canada won. You just wait until 2014, Canada.
There's also supposedly a rivalry between the Blackhawks and the Blues, which I mention because of Tazer/Broshie, but I don't think there's really any canon indications of bad blood between them. And I kind of have to give a nod to the Bruins/Habs rivalry just because it's so goddamn epic (seriously, read the Wikipedia article, this shit goes way back). But the only notable player connection I know of between those teams is the Subban brothers, and while I would love to see someone write about PK and Malcolm dealing with the whole despising-each-other's-teams thing, I do not want hatesex or any other kind of sex to be involved.
SO. What'd I miss? Anyone have suggestions for other awesome hatesex pairings, or fic recs?
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/69067.html.
With 802 active players in the NHL, there are a lot of options for pairings. Mostly, people choose to write about guys who play on the same team, which makes sense considering logistics and who the players are most likely to know. Sometimes authors pair players who have been known to interact in canon regardless of what teams they're on (e.g. Jonathan Toews and Sidney Crosby, who roomed together at the Olympics [edit: apparently they didn't actually share a room, just spent a lot of time together] and have similar personalities, so they get paired together sometimes even though the Hawks and the Pens pretty much couldn't care less about each other).
But then there are the rivalries, and those can get fun. You can go the forbidden-love route with rivalries, which I suppose most of the information here could be used for as well, but I'm selfish and I want to see more hatesex, so that's the slant I'm taking with this.
I'm not going to write about every rivalry in the NHL. Here's why:
Turns out that when you base an entire pastime on opposition, shit gets oppositional. (Graphic by me.)
That's every rivalry listed on Wikipedia's NHL rivalries page. I am told (slightly aggressively) by Tumblr that in addition to these, there are also rivalries between the Sharks and the Stars, the Bruins and the Flyers, the Bruins and the Canucks, the Coyotes and the Kings, the Coyotes and the Stars, the Coyotes and the Sharks, and the Blue Jackets and the Red Wings. I am dubious about that last one, but uh, you go ahead and aim high there, Columbus.
So I'm not covering all of them here. If you want a full rundown, check out that Wikipedia page. Actually, if you want the primer the "NHL rivalries" prompter at Primerfest was probably hoping for, check out that page. This primer, instead, will focus on the most fic-friendly rivalries, with an emphasis on pairings that have already been written, and the details I choose to include will be skewed toward the ones that seem most useful for fic authors. I will almost certainly leave out crucial tidbits by accident; feel free to rectify these mistakes in the comments.
Let's kick things off with the rivalry people seem to like writing fic about the most: Sidney Crosby/Alexander Ovechkin.
These dudes are not about to make sweet love on a bed of rose petals, mmkay.
The Penguins/Capitals rivalry has been going on for a while. The two teams have been up against each other in the playoffs eight times, and the Pens won seven of those. But the media really started wetting their pants about it in the 2005-06 season, when Crosby and Ovechkin started playing. (Ovi was drafted in 2004, but that was the year of the lockout, so he didn't start in the NHL until '05.) They were both young, talented, promising players, both picked first in the draft, and they had this yin-yang narrative going that everybody was drooling all over--the fun-loving carefree Russian versus the hardworking serious Canadian, the party boy versus the dude who's so focused on his career that he doesn't have time for girls. HBO did a 24/7 series about their Winter Classic. There were a lot of hilarious slo-mo shots of people getting off planes and shit, all set to epic THE BATTLE IS ABOUT TO COMMENCE type music, it was pretty great.
Things between these two have kind of cooled off lately, since Sid's been out with a concussion and Ovi apparently needs his mortal enemy around to be able to play hockey, since he hasn't really been tearing up the ice so much lately. Also, they might not actually hate each other, but ssshhh, no one who writes fic needs to know that. HATESEX, PEOPLE, GIVE ME IT. Here's some inspiration for you: Wants and Needs, by cominginside.
The Caps/Penguins rivalry also encompasses the relationship between Ovi and Evgeni Malkin:
I know it kind of looks like Ovi is trying to defend Malkin's honor here, fending off would-be attackers from all directions with his stick and his skate blade, but I promise this is not the case.
These two actually seemed to have legit beef at one point--Ovi was checking Malkin a lot for a while there, and was quoted as saying (translated from Russian in that article), "I just think that he was wrong in acting like he did. He said things that shouldn't have been said. I won't go into it in detail." (As an aside, my favorite part of that interview was not actually the part about Malkin, but rather the part where Ovi talked about the time he and Alex Semin ruined a hotel room in San Jose. "There were bananas everywhere." LULZ. But I digress.)
I am aware that I'm pretty much the only person ever to find Evgeni Malkin devastatingly attractive, but look at this:
Seriously. Tell me you don't want to see someone shove him to his knees and fuck that mouth.
I don't think there's any Geno/Ovi hatesex fic yet, but there seriously should be.
Next up, hockey fandom's second-favorite dudes-who-hate-each-other pairing: Andrew Ladd and Ryan Kesler.
Is it just me, or do they look kinda bored here? Like, yawn, this guy again? *halfhearted swing*
The Blackhawks and the Canucks have not been fond of each other since, like, the mid-'70s, but shit really got nasty in 2009 when things devolved into chaos and hair-pulling on the ice. (The incident inspired Luongo to write a poem about Byfuglien's ass, because Luongo is the funniest fucking asshole in the NHL. I'm gonna have to do a Luongo primer one of these days if nobody else gets around to it first.)
Then Ladd broke Kesler's nose in the playoffs, and then after that they basically went at it every time they were on the ice at the same time.
Unf. I have no idea why hockey fandom is not full to bursting with bloodplay.
Ladd is captain of the Jets now, and I don't think he and Kesler still have this thing going, but that's okay because the best Ladd/Kesler hatesex fic is all AU anyway. There's the Mafia AU and the hooker AU and the college AU, and IMO there ought to be more. (Can you tell I have a slight ulterior motive for writing this post?)
Next, Penguins/Flyers! These dudes are not messing around with the whole rivalry business, let me tell you. They are just pissed as hell at each other for existing. Here is a summary of the total penalty minutes for the final minute of the third period of the last regular-season game they played in the 2011-12 season. That is one minute of penalties.
Look at that sneer on Sid's face. He is SO MAD that Giroux has not yet dropped dead right there on the ice, WHAT THE HELL, HATH THE UNIVERSE NO JUSTICE.
I'm pretty sure that image is from the most recent postseason, in which there was no series more entertaining than the bloody war of the sieves that was the Penguins/Flyers first-round matchup. In the third game of the series, they racked up 158 penalty minutes. That's more than two full games. Some bar in Philly named a beer Crosby's Tears that week. Dudes are not buds.
The Crosby/Giroux pairing is an obvious one I'd like to see more of; they're both excellent players, and they seem to like beating each other up. Another Pens/Flyers pairing is Marc-Andre Fleury/Max Talbot, which tends towards the angsty, since they used to be pals when Talbot played for the Penguins before defecting to Philly last summer.
Now for the Rangers/Devils rivalry, which I mention mostly as an excuse to include this motherfucking hysterical video:
Click to view
See bb!Brodeur cracking up in the background, trying to hide from the cameras behind his blocker? *watches three more times* Solid fucking gold.
The Rangers and the Devils are right across the river from each other, which resulted in some highly entertaining attempts to keep each other out of home games during the Eastern Conference finals this year. My favorite story about this rivalry is the time in the 2008 playoffs when Sean Avery danced up to Martin Brodeur and started waving around his arms and blocking Brodeur's vision so he couldn't keep track of the puck. The NHL was like o.O "uh, well, we didn't think we had to put this in the playbook, but if Avery's gonna be an ass..." and made a new rule because of the incident. Brodeur refused to shake Avery's hand afterward, and Avery was quoted as saying, "Everyone talks about how classy or unclassy I am, and fatso here just forgot to shake my hand."
"Hi Martypants! What's up! Yoo-hoo! Over here! Look what a complete and utter dipshit I am!"
arc flash by 26miledrive is an excellent Brodeur/Avery fic.
And then there's the ultimate matchup in hockey [edit: I mean from an NHL perspective, obvs, I'm not trying to diss anybody else's national hockey team]: the Canadian and American Olympics teams.
In the 2010 Olympics, the hockey gods bestowed upon fandom a neat canon-based excuse to tear Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews apart, make them fight, let them angst, and then reunite them to play together once more. For this we thank thee, hockey gods. Amen.
Spoiler: Canada won. You just wait until 2014, Canada.
There's also supposedly a rivalry between the Blackhawks and the Blues, which I mention because of Tazer/Broshie, but I don't think there's really any canon indications of bad blood between them. And I kind of have to give a nod to the Bruins/Habs rivalry just because it's so goddamn epic (seriously, read the Wikipedia article, this shit goes way back). But the only notable player connection I know of between those teams is the Subban brothers, and while I would love to see someone write about PK and Malcolm dealing with the whole despising-each-other's-teams thing, I do not want hatesex or any other kind of sex to be involved.
SO. What'd I miss? Anyone have suggestions for other awesome hatesex pairings, or fic recs?
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/69067.html.