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The NHL’s Seattle Kraken embraced horny BookTok and found controversy
02.08.2023 - 23:19 / polygon.com / Pedro Pascal
This past spring, during the Seattle Kraken’s first appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the 2-year-old franchise found itself with an influx of new fans: readers pouring in from the BookTok community on TikTok. How did it happen? Months earlier, in February, a hockey romance book called Icebreaker, by Hannah Grace, made the New York Times bestseller list, and it has been there since. Like Colleen Hoover’s novels, Icebreaker became a viral hit on TikTok, beloved by fans of the hockey romance subgenre that’s popular on the platform.
Then that fandom got into watching hockey, likely thanks to the timing quirk of Icebreaker’s popularity leading into the NHL playoffs. BookTok latched onto one team in particular: the Kraken.
It’s been a fun club to follow. The Kraken made a surprising playoff run in their second season, taking out last year’s Stanley Cup champions, the Colorado Avalanche, in the first round. From there, the Kraken took the Dallas Stars to an exciting Game 7 before ultimately being defeated. Everyone loves an underdog, and the Kraken are a flashy new team that’s fun to watch. That’s part of the appeal, but BookTok also latched on to several conventionally attractive players — namely, forward Alex Wennberg — and their gyrating warmup stretches. When the Kraken’s social media team realized that people were making fancams of Wennberg and other players, it started playing into the fandom, making its own fancam-esque videos of its players’ arena entrances.
BookTok’s whirlwind hockey obsession did draw positive attention to hockey as a sport, inviting fans who otherwise might not have known they’d be interested. But a handful of fans have taken things too far, treating players as if they are characters in the abstract, not actual humans. Here’s how we arrived at the controversy that’s gone viral in the past week.
@buoy caught falling for nate hawkins #BookTok #SeattleKraken #StanleyCup (: @Seattle Kraken)
Arguably, the problems began when a small minority of BookTokers started sexualizing hockey players, and relating them to their favorite romance characters. And the Kraken’s own social media team fanned the flames. It felt similar to other high-profile parasocial relationships, like when the internet thirsted for The Last of Us actor Pedro Pascal — the fixation on Pascal as “daddy” often veered into uncomfortable territory.
As TikTokers became fans of the Seattle Kraken, some BookTokers “face-claimed” — which is similar to fancasting — Wennberg and other hockey players for the character Nate Hawkins in Icebreaker, as well as characters in other hockey romances.
This sort of behavior started to spiral when the Kraken’s social media team posted a ton of thirst content about the team’s
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