#that’s a different dissertation I’m much sketchier on

[coffee-at-annies]

I love this. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with a lot of the early stuff and how things have changed on the rpf side of things. I wanna add that it’s not just rpf that’s changed, it’s also the wider perception of the team and the boys. We know a lot more about Sid and Geno, but also Flower and Tanger and so many of the other guys. What we know now, is so so soooo different from what we knew then that it feels like two different sets of people.

If you’d asked me when I started reading fic if fandom thought Flower and Geno were friends I’d tell you no. The French Canadian crew (Flower, Tanger, Duper) were Sid’s sounding board and and his little council of friends to wingman for him/create circumstances to make him confess to Geno. Cause again, Sid was the protagonist, Geno the love interest, and Flower was the best friend. Except the image of Geno in the custom Flower jersey as a goodbye and honor to him on the eve of the vegas draft is burned into my memory and makes me so emo about them. I wonder if some of it is stuff like marriage/long term relationships - and fatherhood for Geno - making both of them more mellow or interesting from a reporting standpoint. Both Kris and Geno used to be bad boys that took too many stupid penalties and now both of them are fathers. Even if you’re writing something with them as college students, the perception and media attention has shifted the narrative.

Sid and Geno have shifted in fandom’s minds eye, but the marketing of the team has shifted too. I have literally watched the Penguins organization rewrite the narrative from its two superstars - the two headed monster - Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, to the longest tenured trio in sports - Crosby Malkin and Letang. If you’d asked anyone in 2017 when we didn’t protect Flower from the draft if you thought the organization would resign Letang when his contract was up you’d probably get some hemming and hawing and a comment that they could probably find first pair D somewhere else for cheaper. Tanger has made himself an indispensable part of the identity of the team, but he has carved that space for himself with his high level of play and the goal of keeping Sidney Crosby happy.

I also love the comment of “it’s been 10 years in a very niche community” cause you’re right it has been 10 years. Idk if newer fans know this but if SidGeno was a big MSF pairing (thank you for introducing me to that term), one of the biggest pairings was K*ne/T*ews for the same reasons - h*wks won a bunch of cups and you had the smirking bad boy and the grumpy rule follower. Even fics that were about Sid and Geno would have them as the secondary pairing. If writers included other teams, usually Ovi, Gonch, or a random Russian player would act as Geno’s outside-the-team voice of wisdom and Tazer or maybe Price would act as Sid’s. These were the days before Mackinnon or McDavid were drafted, back when Seguin getting traded to Dallas was shiny and new and before Benn got cancelled. It was the height of the Grilled Cheesby rivalry before worlds made it into something different. Then fandom got a wake up call about k*ne and a lot of people got burned and either dropped chicago in general or hrpf in specific.

Even without controversy, the natural turnover of fandom, of time passing, of life means that people come in and write what they want and find new things to write about and leave. Even outside of writers I can list URLs I started following in 2016 that were beloved mutuals but I can’t tell you the last time I saw them in the liveblog tags if they’re even still active on tumblr. These people bring their perception of the boys and their favorite tropes with them, and sometimes they leave with that too. There are absolutely tropes in fandom that you can trace back to a single author or friend group. You shouted out sevenfists but I remember a lot of fluffy domestic sidgeno from secretsidgenowriter who has left rpf. That turnover brings changes that I wonder if people who have only been here for a season or two notice.

I have watched fandom perception and participation shift in a lot of big and small ways and embrace every fact that the boys are willing to share. We still make up stuff wholecloth sometimes but there is a richer foundation to work with that just didn’t exist 10 years ago as Sid was tight lipped and Geno didn’t want to talk and no one cared about the boys underneath The Next One or the Russian Bear or the Two Headed Monster so long as they put the team of their back and put up points. I definitely think as they’ve aged and hit milestones and become more comfortable they’ve chosen to share more of themselves with each other and with the public. We as fans benefit from that.

could you explain more about what you view as the before era and what you view as the after? i need to learn my herstory

I think this requires a more detailed and educated/researched answer than I can give after an exhausting workday and an after-hours work event, but I'm going to do my best and also open up the floor in reblogs for people to chip in their thoughts

foremost: a DISCLAIMER that this post does not aim to shit on writers from the "before" era. there are many classic fics that I love and enjoy, even if I consider their characterizations to be "less accurate"* than the ones we have in the after era.

*aside to say: accuracy is based only off of literal media accounts we have of these men; we do not know them, we should not claim to know them, and they have had different comfort levels with the media knowing selective truths about their lives [sid out of choice, geno out of media xenophobia] than they did when these early fics were being written.

"before" fics (which I tend to refer to as "classic" fics, and had their heyday in 2012-2013 but continued up until 2016ish) tended to have more regimented roles for sid and geno. sid was usually the protagonist; geno was the love interest.

this came with a cascading set of characteristics assigned to each guy. sid was poor-little-meow-meow'd. geno was the pursuer in the relationship. sid usually bottomed. sid had the whole spacetoaster moment (he was the inspiration for the term, haha). there wasn't much a/b/o fic but sid was, like, the omega-fied one and geno was alpha-ized.

something I've been thinking about more recently is how 2012-2013 era sidgeno displayed signs of Migratory Slash Fandom. I don't think of MSF as an inherently negative/condemning thing, but I think it's a phenomenon that deserves to be mentioned/analyzed, yeah?

MSF thrives on big character differences.... like, grumpy/sunshine, sarcastic/broody, genius/empath. it's all about emphasizing disparate archetypes to create natural tension in a story. this works really well in most romance novels! I love it!

the issues arise when people try to make characters fit into these preset dynamics. and, frankly, when sidgeno first got big, we straight-up didn't know as much about sid and geno. I mean that. despite sid being EXTENSIVELY covered by media from age, like, 14, he was really tight-lipped compared to what we have now.

and geno was.... there. I don't mean that as a diss—he was INCREDIBLE, but the media totally passed him over again and again. or they helped contribute to stereotypes of him being a dumb oaf who didn't know english.

aside: ironically I think that helped in creating sidgeno and not, like.... sidflower or sidtanger. geno was so "DIFFERENT" from sid (aka: russian, characterized by media as not knowing how to speak [in comparison to sid's highly curated media soundbites]) that it meant he was the best candidate for A Ship with sid.

a lot of the really big writers who got into sidgeno were fandom veterans with lots of experience in other big fandoms. to me, that means MSF had a hand in all this. and we should be grateful, because it led to the BOOM of hockey fic, and of sidgeno fic specifically. modern hrpf wouldn't exist without it.

that being said, those template ship dynamics, plus the media's attitude then towards sid and geno in its coverage, led to those characterizations of whiny soft sensitive boy sid who needed to be rescued even though he was the best hockey player EVER, and geno as the lumbering tall strong alpha not-that-bright Love Interest Man.

this isn't to say every fic was this way, or that this is BAD. I, uh, love poor-little-meow-meow-ing sid and omegafying the hell out of him. what I'm saying is that it was a near-ubiquitous characterization across the board.

that all changed in 2016-2018. I personally wholly credit sevenfists, though I imagine it's more nuanced than that, but: my blog, I make the rules here. I don't know if sevenfists was psychic or just highly observant and absolutely excellent at reading people (and that's basically the same thing, right?), but characterization shifts began taking place in fic....

and the coolest thing happened, in that those characterizations were seemingly reinforced by more media coverage. the back to back cups brought with them TONS of interviews with and media about the team, and sid and geno in particular. the coolest part of it was that sid had loosened up a LOT and geno had gotten more comfortable (and had gotten a reporter firmly on his side).

the interviews about sid post 2016 were just SO different. so much information started coming out, and a LOT of it conflicted with Ye Olde Characterizations. as it turned out, sid was deeply one of the boys. he was funny. everyone liked him. he loved hosting. he was insanely comfortable around almost everyone, including strangers, because he's a little freak who's kind to everyone. he can make smalltalk like no one's business. he's kind of gross. he likes to giggle and be in on jokes and get into the thick of it. he isn't some blushing virgin bride sold off of mario's doorstep, yeah?

and geno, too, was finally getting the coverage he deserved. and his personality was both fortified by age and better shown to us through media. as it turns out, he isn't some happy go lucky oaf. he's mercurial and intensely aware of what others think of him (and he CARES). he's sensitive and thoughtful but also can lash out at random times. he has a wicked sense of humor that he uses as a defense mechanism and as a surefire way to get people to like him, which matters to him. and, as everyone says, he is SMART.

if you had to boil it down, I'd say that post-2016, it became clear that SID is the confident one and GENO is the insecure one. and fic caught onto that with a miraculously fast pace. also: they're more alike than they are different, but I still think romance inherently feeds off of difference and tension, so we still exaggerate things to make the stories ✨WORK✨.

I'm not going to give examples of pre- and post- era fics, because I don't want to point any fingers and say someone was doing characterization "wrong." that's not the takeaway I want anyone to have here.

fandom attitudes have changed. it's been 10 years since that first wave of fics, and while I don't think that's very long, it's a hell of a long time on the internet, and in a niche internet community. what was once the standard for fics (and what was well-read, and what people gravitated towards) was different. not worse—different.

I think it's fair to say the "after" era of fics is more "accurate" to what we know of sid and geno. it's also fair to say that this is only the case because we have a WEALTH of information, character-revealing interviews and videos and anecdotes, that Ye Old Authors could only dream of getting.

I really love the story of how everything has changed, and it's a fabulous microcosm of fandom evolution and how approaches to fanworks have changed and grown with fandom, and I think it's all so so cool.